Jordan Peterson says Veganism is a Religion without a Philosophy.

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how many vague ins do you know you know their clue they are clueless religious because what they have is ritual without without without philosophy fundamentally I really believe that diet is the primary way that we need to change things people thought that I was going to be the first tennis pro or the first african-american but I'm actually the first vegan to be president of the American College of Cardiology and there really is a relationship between diet everyone knows that the question is what are going to do about it and how far you personally willing to go because what they have is ritual without without without philosophy fundamentally so what's happened in many cases is that as the sophisticated religion so to speak have collapsed what emerges from their ashes are rituals and rituals are sort of the ground out of which our religion emerges vague ins vegetarianism vegetarians environmentalists anybody who is an ideologue if you donate $100 I'll make an exclusive video just for you where I'll threaten anyone you want with a vegetable of your choice so if you want me to make a video threatening your mom with an avocado then I'll make a video threatening your mom with an avocado and I'll just post it unlisted on my channel and send it directly to you if you're into that sort of thing then yeah you know and the reason the reason that I would consider those in the religious domain is because their systems of value and they're predicated on fundamental assumptions that you have to take on faith more than a year ago one of my fellow vegans asked me a question about how we as vegans were being portrayed received and perceived in mainstream movies mainstream TV shows etc and at that time my feeling really was look as a movement and just as a minority within the modern Western world we're going through a period of time where most of the attention we get from the mainstream is mockery most of the attention we get from the establishment including university professors and lecture halls at this one most of the attention we get is mockery and yet that mockery still is in its way an important form of representation and shows the extent to which we are climbing up the ladder of public awareness as a pressing issue to be addressed even if it's an issue to be addressed by one or two percent of the population there was a time when the public was really eagerly receiving each and every depiction of homosexuality in mainstream cinema there was a TV show called soap it was both a soap opera and parody of soap operas and it was in large part responsible for launching the career of Billy Crystal is now very famous comedian and that TV show simply had a gay character and at that time it was a cause for celebration even though that character you know was a comedy the character was in many ways making a mockery of gay people in general or of a stereotypical gay character in many ways but still at that stage there were so few films and so few mainstream TV shows recognizing that gay people exist just that they exist at all that it was really received as an important step in the right direction just that just that recognition even if the form of recognition is mockery so guys as V paid and vacuous and foolish and pointless as this little monologue from professor Jordan Peterson maybe I'd encourage you to see it in that light it's significant in its way that in these examples throwing out with very little thought and certainly zero research he throws out the name of veganism a few minutes later he's talking about Buddhism just as casually I'm absolutely convinced he has never done any meaningful research on veganism or Buddhism and believe me I'm aware I mispronounce a few words here and there but his pronunciation of veganism alone stands out as a little bit of a hint how many vague ins do you know as to how rarely he says the word or how rarely he hears it spoken by others and so on how many vague ins do you know it's easy you know it's it's cheap and it's easy to do what he does here with the name of veganism it's easy to try to get a few laughs out of your audience by pointing the finger at vegans and I think there was a time when hostility against homosexuals was so high that it was easy for university professors to point the finger and laugh and get the same kind of laughs out of ridiculing homosexuals or those who defended them what have you now the specific argument that he's offering here it's surreal even to summarize it but what he tries to construe is the view that all human beings are religious that religion is universal that's the question that's put two elements of that nature and that vegans are an example of people who are all the more religious and all the more diluted because we're unaware of the extent to which we're true believers or true believers in a system of values hello guys I am a vegan and I openly identify as a nihilist I reject belief itself the only thing I believe is that there is nothing to be believed in there are certainly many prominent vegans who reject the ethical arguments for veganism who describe themselves in purely scientific terms in purely dietary terms some of them are doing it just for the sake of vanity just to be thin and beautiful some just for the sake of you know the health of their part of their brain to avoid getting cancer so on and so forth but what Peterson's unaware of because he takes no interest you speaks out of sheer ignorance is the extent to which veganism really is one practice not just one diet but quite a complex political practice with many different competing ideologies attached to it and each of those ideologies really does compete with the others we have a fantastic array of debates everywhere from YouTube to the formal peer-reviewed academic literature on veganism and frankly those are debates that someone like Jordan Peterson probably would respect if you took a look at them probably if you looked at the difference between the abolitionist approach and the citizenship approach probably if you looked at the debates on philosophy as well as principle and practice between Geary Franchione and direct action everywhere probably if he looked at a synopsis of any of the major debates about vegan ethics and vegan politics he would have to eat his words here when he claims incoherently enough that veganism is nothing but ritual lacking any philosophy on the contrary what you find soon enough is that maybe we have too much philosophy for a very simple practice now I think those debates rather than veganism are really worthwhile and I'm really glad that we're having them now at the start of the movement when everything is still in its nascent stages I've seen so much change in progress just in the last couple of years I think what I first got involved with veganism it seemed like the consensus view in veganism was the following line of reasoning that I do reject although not because it's superstitious and not because it's religious dogs are cute human beings should naturally love and domesticate big arrow dogs point to pigs and baby chickens are also cute it's really just baby pigs they show you they don't show you adult wild boars and those arguments are simply that therefore humans should have the same feeling towards the same master to domesticate a relationship towards those was also in effect the whole world should be turned into a petting zoo and that cows and pigs their rightful place in a human controlled world is on the carpet next to dogs and cats now I should find that a deeply flawed argument philosophically ethically and politically in terms of praxis in terms of pragmatic pragmatics is favorite word in terms of pragmatism I would say that much more rarely you encounter people to come out of a self-aware conscious religious background who argue that each animal has a soul and where they believe in some kind of cosmology in which animals have souls and their moral actions and choices are dictated by this this whole range though that you know fairly enough Peterson here makes mock of he's making a mockery of veganism for the purposes of advancing his own argument I think the truth is that someone like Peterson if he would just take a look you would actually find a whole lots of respect there I do not know him well enough to say whether his respect would more be attached to someone like respectable career cardiologists oncologists experts hidden heart surgery cancer etc or if you would gravitate more towards some of the political radicals some of the ethical philosophers some of the people who obsessively hash of the details of the morality of when we can and cannot justify using a medicine that is ultimately extracted from an animal's body or where the research to discover that medicine relied on torturing animals to death and laboratories those are ethical and philosophical issues that vegans I think to universally at least take seriously even though there is this tremendous intellectual diversity within veganism tremendous ideological diversity tremendous political diversity guys if I had a choice to either be part of a philosophy that had no praxis a philosophy that you had no way to implement in the real world or during part of a praxis that had no philosophy you know which one I would choose vegans know the change they want to make in the world they know how they want to accomplishment for the most part they know the goals they're working towards and then there's this tremendous lively intellectual discourse about the meaning of that practice about the meaning of the struggle even though we're all engaged in the struggle already whether we conceptualize it in terms of the supernatural the soul or conceptualize it in terms of a complex moral system of opposing speciesism the abolitionist approach the citizens you've approached so many different paradigms right I would certainly much rather be part of a working and thriving political praxis that's still in search of an ideology that has many competing ideologies in many worthwhile philosophical debates rather than be in an academic scenario we have a philosophical debate with no practice with no chance of really changing the world and as I say with confidence even someone like Jordan Peterson who here is just speaking out of ignorance he's just mocking us but he's money instead of immigrants I'm a hundred percent confident that if he takes the time to open that door and take a look at what's going on within veganism he will find something to respect about that struggle something to respect in those debates even though I don't know which side of the debate he would respect ah Luo Yin