Vegan Clown College: Earthling Ed's School for Saviors.

Vernis yen the Sun will one day set on
this world and a new dawn will rise out of the ashes of violence hope will rise [Music] can you feel it as it transmutes from something that we only used to be able to dream up to something that exists in front of us something we can see something that is tangible change and change that is coming [Music] Clown College I'm not going to enroll in that Clown College there advertisement had no effect on me whatsoever now we as a movement exists in the millions of individuals but together we move as one and these industries the ones who exploit others they feel what we feel and they fear it and they fear us and they should fear us for every single day our numbers grow stronger our conviction grows harder and that change becomes ever more inevitable that it was the day previous and they fear us because they know that we will not stop fighting that we will never take a days rest and we will never take a days break until the animals are liberated from the shackles and our species has imprisoned them within [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hey the section you're supposed to be monitoring is on fire clowns are funny the world that we want stops even wou exist out there in front of us in the palm of our hands all we have to do is do people have stood in my way long enough I'm going to Clown College now what lies ahead of us will not always be easy we will feel pain will feel anguish will feel despair and we may even feel hopelessness these industries will spread lies they will try to some people they will try to deceive us they will question our integrity they will question our individual characteristics and our motives and they will try and drag our image through the mud to try and make us no longer credible but we have one thing the truth and that is all the real needs [Applause] baddest yen long before I got involved with vegan activism I was an Orthodox tera vaada Buddhist and I wasn't just a little bit involved in that religion I was a scholar of their religion I took the religion very seriously the types of Buddhist religious practices that James ASPI and other mainstream vegans engage in like he passed and meditation I regarded as decadent and corrupt I read the original Canon the ancient philosophy I knew the whole history of Buddhism and I knew when I cared about was going on in the contemporary politics their religion Buddhism as it was in the 21st century also and every so often this question came up at one Buddhist monastery or another whether that was in the United States in Sri Lanka in Taiwan in Thailand or places in between the the question of the authoritarian aesthetic you might even say the aesthetics of fascism replacing the aesthetics of democracy now it was one very successful Buddhist leader in Thailand one Buddhist monk who admitted openly that he had sat down and watched the the Nazi propaganda films showing things like the Nuremberg rallies showing off certain style of architecture grandiose nationalistic architecture crowds marching in lockstep cheering in unison and this monk in Thailand I could name him I could give a link to websites and articles about this phenomena he openly admitted that he had tried to imitate that in how he set up his own I don't know how to says rituals celebrations festivals and indeed even the architecture around the new temples that he built it was very rare to have someone say that openly but implicitly it's very common to go to a Buddhist monastery for example in Taiwan so this is ethnically and culturally Chinese Buddhism and to see that they are imitating military discipline a military aesthetic and certainly at least in the architecture a kind of nationalistic grandeur you know and I was in a position to really sit with the Buddhist monks sit with the authority figures and say to them you know this is not what the Buddha wanted this is very explicitly not what's written in the Pali Canon to a very large extent this is everything that was forbidden and warned against in the ancient texts now aside from the rules based morality of the ancient texts which you know ultimately is neither here nor there the ancient texts basically say that Buddhist monks are never allowed to wear shoes and things like that almost everyone seems to ignore this you meet a few very serious monks going around barefoot but there were a lot of ideas in the the rule-based side of the morality nobody cares about but on this genuinely philosophical side of things I would say things like look both in the ancient texts and in these pamphlets are handing out this propaganda the modern propaganda you're creating based on and inspired by the ancient texts you present Buddhism as the philosophy of the mind as a religion that's built on detachments and compassion and these open-ended philosophical dialogues and of course by the way there's some cherry-picking going on and going through the ancient texts and choosing those dialogues choosing those examples that are kind of the most philosophical the most appealing to a modern reader and the most kind of genuinely Socratic are open-ended people engaging in philosophical discussion about both philosophy and I'd say nothing like that ever happens at this monastery nobody ever sits down and has a philosophical debate visitors don't come here and ask questions the way we have in these ancient dialogues like VAT regatta and other Buddhist monks coming up and really questioning and cross-examining the Buddha and disagreeing with the Buddha and by the way even at the end of the dialogue they don't always agree with the Buddha they don't leave convinced sometimes they leave angry they're not satisfied with the the debate they had at all like okay so you're claiming this is a religion built on these philosophical debates but when people come here and see this what do they really see militarism military style self-discipline one voice speaks the crowd cheers marching marching in uniform marching in lockstep theme is playing the architectural statements even the decorative arts on all of it organized to make this frankly authoritarian declaration to the onlookers and the participants the part that we walk down together does not last forever and at the end of that path is total salvation and liberation so never look back never look forwards and defiantly much as fast as you can are you with me the yearning for that authoritarian aesthetic comes from a very crude belief in the same thing that earthling IDI says to you at the end of this video well we have one thing the truth quote we have the truth not that we have the questions that we have the answers that we have the truth and every pathetic cult group and religious movement and fringe political ideology in the history of the human race has believed that and they have all been wrong it's ultimately threatening to the viability of the movement to hear earthling heed warning you that we ought not to question the credibility of our leaders that the enemies of the movement will lead us to question the credibility of our leaders and our methods what we're doing and my point is the exact opposite I think that even a well running business is asking those questions all the time is what we're doing effective is what we're doing credible is everything you know even whether you're running a restaurant or a factory whatever humanitarian agency handing out rice to starving people you should be constantly doing outcome evaluation you should be constantly questioning the uncertainty and doubt and self-examination questioning credibility of your own assumptions um that should never stop and I think as soon as you take that step into authoritarianism well it's certainly a step the vegan movement doesn't need to take this is not a military operation guys I said recently and criticizing Paul Bashir cube of truth there's no justification for these hierarchical relationships not in the vegan movement not in a movement that's based on personal consumer choice boycott getting organized public outreach and education etc etc ultimately lobbying for changes in government policy there's no real justification for this aesthetic that these these people are embracing there's no justification except fundraising they'll question our integrity they will question our individual characteristics and our motives those are questions that big organizations and even big corporations are asking all the time and they don't start off with a delusion we have the truth they start off instead with the procedure of saying hey let's ask all the right questions and maybe half of the time we can come up with half the right answers and later on we engage in self-examination and even satire we're gonna figure out where we went wrong we're gonna discover what our mistakes were and then we can do better next time you don't learn by making mistakes you learn by noticing them and part of what I'm engaged in in satire and critique on this channel is indeed helping some of my fellow vegans to wake up and notice the mistakes that have maybe receded into the background as baseline assumptions for what veganism is but there's no one simple answer for what the vegan movement is supposed to be and if we're gonna make progress I don't want to make progress blindly I want to make it with my eyes wide open [Music] evolution