Beauty is Meaningless.

hey what up um something I've had to
think about just lately but I don't know what we something I thought it but a lot more I guess when I was a teenager is the meaning and meaninglessness of human beauty itself there are certainly some people who say I am not good-looking enough to be talking about vegan as my boy I don't know man you put me in a lineup with Peter singer you put me next to um I don't know Noam Chomsky put me next any of the guys I've disputed with on this channel uh I think I think human beauty and fitness is actually pretty meaningless to these questions and I think you can you can have a heart surgeon who's an excellent surgeon but who is himself ugly and in bad shape and overweight and is maybe not practicing you could have a heart surgeon who's a chain-smoker but he's the best surgeon for the job when you're choosing the man to be the surgeon and so on and that's that's the simple side of it but look I mean on the one hand growing up I was an intensely aware of the extent to which beauty was in the eye of the beholder not everyone is as a kid or as an adult some people struggle with that their whole lives the idea of objective beauty as opposed to the subjective experience of beauty already that reminds me of a whole bunch of funny stories and anecdotes to tell but anyway for me personally that was a difference I notice to myself and other guys um and of course I met women who were really emotionally distraught over exactly that issue social standards of beauty as opposed to personal idiosyncratic and other stands of beauty and then the other hand is the question of health the objective senses in which someone can be beautiful or ugly by factors beyond their control factors they're born with diseases they catch malnutrition and so on I've mentioned several times on this channel that I had a peculiar experience doing humanitarian work in northern Laos near the border with me our Golden Triangle in villages that were designated as the poorest villages in an already poor country and there were villages that had malnutrition and especially what is called seasonal starvation and you know so in those towns generally people were very lean but I wasn't even aware of it because I was there all the time staring but those people the time you know the overall malnutrition the overall poor diet because it wasn't they weren't living in an absolute calorie deficit what they chose to eat was was mostly meat and they definitely did not eat any fruit or vegetables out of season and while I was there there were absolutely no fruit in season and it was very little vegetable content much of anyone's diet people were they were eating meat and and rice they're reading red meat and white rice including eating pythons and God I'll always remember the corpse of a small mountain lion that were cutting up and you know pigs and cows too but jungle meat anyway um so in many ways that no graciously unhealthy diet I remember them eating deep fried potatoes at one point to a potato growing in the middle of the jungle tastes much different from potato growing on a farm when they were potatoes they dug up from the forest as opposed to farm potatoes uh when I made the transition from being in that part of Laos to being in China right next door I remember it seemed to me that everyone was beautiful all of a sudden and I recognized that what I was responding to was the transition between an environment where everyone was malnourished and you know a place where fundamentally people had access to nutrition including fruits and vegetables including vitamin pills they wanted them running water electricity that part of China is also not rich that's considered one of the poorest parts of China but you know everyone there had shoes and almost everyone was living in a house made at a concrete war as you know in Laos where I just been people were living in a hut made out of bamboo and people really were too poor to have shoes and to pour tea properly in someone but you know as a kid to in Toronto Toronto I live basically downtown Toronto what everyone said wasn't in the suburbs we had every ethnic group living close to there almost every I mean you know it's not possible to have every single ethical but most of the ethnic groups from all around the world we're living together in one place so no growing up for me nobody really seemed exotic everyone seemed familiar you know in terms of all the different ethnicities and I grew up with a lot of exposure to the entertainment industry people aspiring to become actors and actresses people going to auditions including you know ugly people because ugly people get work as models and actors you know as a character actors would have you was a guy who was the the security guard at my high school not every high school has a security guard but you know if a fist fight broke up or something he that was his job was to try to calm people down and I think I think they had him mopped the floor when there was nothing to do but that guy I remember he he got movie roles both as a gangster and as a cop it was not a good looking guy he he was of mixed African canadian heritage and from the east coast of Canada we have a really old population of black people from the east coast of Canada I've been there for hundreds of hundreds years and anyway he could get cast as black white or Hispanic and he went to all these auditions you don't say Hispanic gangster needed or you know and he got you got roles and you know I mean you meet young women I just grew up never having the feeling that that good-looking women were scarce or good-looking men for that matter and on the other hand I never had the illusion that good-looking people were the most successful people you could meet people who are absolutely gorgeous but who never got a break as an actor or an actress and you could meet people who were really kind of playing or kind of ugly who were tremendously successful in the theater or in television or in movies and all the funny contradictions in between some people were very talented but bad looking some people were good-looking enough you know it's funny but I mean I ended up just being very comfortable with the arbitrary nature of beauty both as socially constructed and just as personally perceived obviously one guy thinks you know very fat women are attractive and other guy likes thin women somebody else like something in between and all the funny paradoxes surrounding these things and it's said in making a video I made just now just just five minutes ago I filmed this video about freelee and durianrider what's sad to me is that I see in the vegan community this this atavistic clinging for beauty to be attached to virtue the idea that beautiful people are the virtuous people that the leaders are the tall and the strong and the brawny and the beautiful uh um you know the man with the biggest muscles can give me the best advice and so on it's such a fundamental delusion or earlier this semester a couple of a couple of weeks ago I was doing reading about the politics of Tonga remote islands in South Pacific like Tonga and in their literature you know up till quite recently they not only had the the delusion the very deep cultural belief that beautiful people were more intelligent they really believed that if you were a handsome man you were smarter than ugly men they really believed that in their culture but but also that being beautiful and smart simply meant that you were one of the gods and have a unique religious and political vocabulary that they're community leaders regarded as gods and so on and you know within Europe when you read some of the ancient stuff about Hercules and all the rest of it you know we have our own we have our own peculiar delusions about strength and beauty making you a great leader or making you a good person and you know it doesn't make you good or bad it doesn't make you smart or stupid it doesn't make you right or wrong because you know being wrong is something that happens to human beings you can be brilliant and beautiful and athletic and have the best of intentions and have no bad intentions and you can still be wrong you know I say so oft on this channel that I sympathize but I really can sympathize with sort of the series of delusions people get into nutritionally culturally and otherwise but I mean look if I don't talk about this stuff who's going to I for me one of the craziest complaints about this channel is and people say well even if what you're saying is true why are you saying it why aren't you just uncritically praising your fellow your fellow vegans well i how would that sound I'm friends with the vegan brunette shadow to the vegan brunette she lives the same city here in Canada relevant if I made a video saying hey good work I'm so glad you lost weight I made a video saying hey you're good-looking you're attractive thumbs up I think it would sound kind of vaguely offensive I think a lot of people will respond I don't think she'd be offensive but people respond saying why are you congratulating her on losing weight like you know how is that your job that's ridiculous and you know on the other hand yeah um it is my job and it's everyone's job to scrutinize political claims that don't quite make sense to ask these questions of how can I make a positive difference socially politically and otherwise in the world and I mean health and beauty and so on it's really not what I want to talk about on this channel at all but sometimes these things get so far off the rails get so absurd that yeah I've ended up making some of these comments and reflections hey every video I've made on that topic I've ended by hoping it was the last one