Veganism: When Efficiency Means Tyranny.

we are living through the brief but
memorable era of the coronavirus this video is recorded on April 3rd 2020 at a time when the people of France have been deprived of such basic civil liberties as the right to walk in the park and the peculiar truth is that for some people it would be completely harmless to take a walk in the park people like myself for example who already had the coronavirus and have already completely recovered from it who can neither transmit it to other people nor they at risk of transmitting it themselves so you have a complex question here of civil liberties constitutionality why these concepts exist if we can't actually exercise these civil rights the moment it becomes a convenient for the government for us to have them now very briefly a couple of years ago I was in France with my girlfriend and my small daughter and our trip there was made much more difficult but much more worrying a much more harrowing by a labor strike amongst railroad workers you can imagine how tempting it was for the government given that the government controls the police and controls the military to just order all the railroad workers back to work you just force them to end the strike do you have the right to go on strike or not now obviously you're gonna mess up the vacations of millions of tourists you're gonna mess up the ability of working people to go to work what why do you have a constitution why do you have civil rights why do these things exist why do you have these freedoms in these liberties at all times except precisely when you need them why do people say you have the freedom to make this decision for yourself except when there are actually consequences when there's risk no this type of question it's quite a bit more ethically surreal for someone like myself because I'm vegan because I live always with these ongoing debates in which meat eaters begin and end their train of thought with the claim that this is just a personal choice that they have the right they have the freedom they have the civil liberty to make this decision for themselves and they do but of course they can't be responsible for the consequences what if we were to do the calculations just whip out a blank sheet of paper and try to calculate how many lives will be saved this year by depriving everyone in France of their civil liberties and let's be specific depriving them of the ability to take a walk in the park all right how many lives are saved by specifically the restrictions on your ability to walk outdoors there are many other restrictions are making other interventions that might save more lives like closing down all the restaurants it's transmitted the same way the common cold is transmitted so buying food at a restaurant is a much more high-risk activity than taking a walk in the park you didn't see the person who prepared or handled your food they may have coronavirus they may have it and they may not know that they have it so you can get sick by eating packaged food at a takeout food from restaurant or packaged food from a grocery store any kind of prepared foods anything that's been handled by human hands right um what if we were to try to estimate how many lives were sold what if we were to try to estimate how many lives were saved by taking away the civil liberty from you that you could walk in the park compared to compelling the whole population to strictly adhere to a vegan diet if saving lives justifies taking away your civil liberties if saving lives justifies snuffing out your Constitution your democracy and replacing it with dictatorship then the case for veganism would justify the worst tyranny and the worst dictatorship in the history of the world a hundred times over right veganism you're going to be calculating saving lives not only in terms of heart disease heart attacks cancer right these kinds of direct health effects on the body through diet you're also gonna be saving lives but reducing the number of people who are getting parasites bacteria and viruses from handling raw meat eating raw meat as you know whether it's raw beef raw chicken raw fish all these things carry disease so you could pretty quickly come up with calculations for just the amount of human life span of human misery that would be improved saved alleviated through compulsory veganism this is without even calculating the unbelievable consequences for animal misery right suffering torture and death of animals calculating air pollution water pollution knock-on consequences for the planet which are mind-blowing and astronomical okay so if you want a justification for dictatorship if you want to justification for taking away people's civil liberties we have two really strange examples before eyes right now one being the ongoing history of hysteria over coronavirus and the other being the specter of the vegan totalitarianism I had a question come in from member of the audience who was asking me I mean you know this person is well-intentioned let's face it it's it's a stupid question it's quote oh great this girl's way what do you think is the most effective and fastest strategy to create a vegan society that includes the the abolition of the whole of animal farming animal slaughter animal agriculture the the legal exclusion of all animal exploitation and at the same time ends racism and sexism okay ah at different times in the history of the world eccentric people become dictators and tyrants still happens to this day and often enough those people are still nominally elected they still have some claim on paper to being part of a parliamentary system or a democracy okay this is going to continue to happen in the future and if you just try to do a google search right now and ask the question of Google how many countries around the world are dictatorships right now how many countries are ruled by a dictator it's actually quite difficult to answer very quickly you get into questions of well how do you define a dictatorship um but it is inevitable now say looking ahead of the next 300 years that somewhere sooner or later there will be a dictator whether it's in Africa or South America or in Asia who happens to be vegan probably somewhere sooner or later there will be an experiment in the government coercing people to be vegan and when we think about this it puts it into a very different less comedic perspective suddenly we get into a really bleak questions such as I've just been asking about the corona virus what do civil liberties mean what is the significance of someone becoming vegan if they're doing it just because they're forced to by authoritarian regime is that still the outcome you want or are you someone who values democracy and the process of public education so highly that you'd rather have maybe a decades-long very inefficient process of trying to mobilize and motivate people to do the right things for the right reason trying to engage with people and motivate them to be vegan for the right reason as opposed to seeing what happens when you have a tyrannical dictatorship and the tyrant in charge happens to be vegan very brief example this by the way one of the things that is least remembered about Adolf Hitler was that he was opposed to cigarette smoke so his regime it was especially interested in preventing women from smoking cigarettes it was especially interested in preventing pregnant women from smoking cigarettes he had his own bizarre pseudo evolutionary social Darwinist reasons for why he was so opposed to cigarette smoking he didn't want this to lead to the degeneration of the German people use your imagination a bit here um you can imagine you could imagine the rhetoric I think in case and as soon as West Germany was conquered by the Americans they instead celebrated their return libery Liberty by handing out packs of cigarettes everyone right so under the American model for one thing the American government wanted to actively promote the idea of Germans becoming consumers buying tobacco exported from America to Germany there was a straight-up profit motive involved but this was also a symbol of the type of civil liberty that allegedly the American style of government enshrined that even if there was very clearly just one correct answer to a question like it's not the case that for some people smoking cigarettes is the right decision and for some people throwing decision for absolutely everybody it's a terrible decision to smoke cigarettes the right decision for each and every one of us individually is to quit smoking or never smoke at all and the right decision for our society as a whole is to absolutely abolish smoking but nevertheless we value this matter of personal choice and personal responsibilities so highly that we would prefer to engage in a decades-long slow-motion struggle of public education and democratically try to motivate people to make the right choice including by the way pregnant mothers right pregnant mothers still have the civil right they have the civil liberty to smoke during pregnancy they still even have the right to drink alcohol during pregnancy right we don't compel them not to we don't use the powers of the state we don't use the military and the police to prevent it I mean think about how high the stakes are there think about how terrible the consequences are for allowing a woman to drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes during pregnancy but we allow it meanwhile if I were in France right now I literally would not have the civil right to take a walk in the park that's been stripped away what does their constitution mean what is their whole tradition of so-called freedom and democracy going back to the French Revolution mean if I can't take a walk in the park more than one kilometer from my house I can't drive my car on the highway talk about social distancing I mean you just the act of driving inside a car the idea that this is a risk and again let's repeat the risk is not the same for everyone this isn't like smoking cigarettes this is like drinking during pregnancy right for me personally there may be no risk at all walking in the park I can't transmit the disease I don't have the disease I already had it and recover it I'm immune to the disease for someone else who's an elderly person the risk might be more or considerable so that you could say that this isn't something that in a simple way reflects one answer for everyone it's convenient for the state it's convenient for the government to pretend that there's only one answer one to enforce 1-iron rule on everyone right but there's actually a really good argument here with coronavirus that morally the right thing to do is to allow each individual to make an informed choice for his or her for itself to say hey look we're gonna do a public education campaign and I tell you what the right choice is but then we're gonna let you decide the same way we let you decide to smoke cigarettes the same way we would like you decide to eat meat we value you making the right decision and if some people make the wrong decision that's gonna have negative consequences for others right and yet we tolerate this on a massive scale day after day after day with tens of millions of cows being fed bred raised in captivity and slaughtered with disastrous consequences not only for ecology not only for the suffering and misery of the animals themselves but also with a body count in human lives okay so what is the meaning of freedom why is it that you always have your freedom except when you need it what is the meaning of civil liberties if you can't make these decisions for yourself when there are some risks when there are some actual consequences I think the people of France if they're not asleep I think they need to blow the dust off their constitution and really ask themselves some very hard questions after coronavirus because whether they value their civil liberties or not whether they value their human rights or not they just experience what it's like to have all of them taken away and if you'll do it over a disease that is transmitted in the same way as the common cold do you think the government won't do it over striking railroad workers or any other example you can possibly think of all right I'm 41 years old I'm a lot less optimistic about human nature than I was at 21 years old and I thought of myself as having a tremendously cynical nihilistic and ashen perspective on human nature when I was 21 but I had a lot more disappointments coming to me okay I'm currently reading the autobiography of Napoleon's younger brother I'm halfway through the book allegedly Napoleon's younger brother supported his career up to a certain point and then broke away and rebelled against him when it was clear that Napoleon was no longer leading a democracy he was no longer the first console in a somewhat democratic electoral parliamentary system that Napoleon was becoming an outright dictator that Napoleon's younger brother had more fealty to the idea of a constitutional republic or democracy or if you want to put it then he had to his own brother that this crossed the line that he wouldn't support Napoleon as Napoleon became an emperor okay allegedly I'm reading the book because I want us I want to fight if this is really true I don't know maybe this is a mythology other people made up but the younger brother maybe that's not really what happened we'll see okay I've got to ask myself at age 41 how deep is my commitment to democracy when the vast majority of people are wrong when it's a simple matter and we know I mean coronavirus I've just said is not that simple you could write really complex legislation and say okay people already had the disease recovered or in this category people were elderly and infirm or in this category maybe there are some people who get to make this decision you could you could write something much more nuanced right but coronavirus is not as simple as cigarette smoking cigarette smoking is bad for everyone it's not as simple as gambling gambling is bad for everyone all right it's not as simple as eating meat drinking dairy production of leather etc etc right there's some of these questions that are so ethically simple that the implications are horrifying and as I say sooner or later whether it's in Sri Lanka or Vietnam or some province of India or in South America sooner or later some dictator somewhere is going to take the open question of how to efficiently create a vegan society and they're gonna they're gonna try to do it with brutal efficiency okay we all have to ask ourselves how much do we value democracy when the majority of people are wrong how much do we value civil liberties the right of the individual to make their own choices to make their own decisions when we know the vast majority of those people will make a decision that's clearly wrong when we know that individual is going to make a choice that is not just going to harm themselves it's going to harm others it's gonna have terrible consequences for that society as a whole