Who I really am; why I became vegan.

I am recording this at the absolute
worst time of day in terms of natural lighting the Sun is just setting setting slowly in the West outside my window so hope my coloring is gonna change from the minute they're gonna be deep craggy shadows on my face and all the rest of it but this is what I want to record this video so let's roll that hopefully ain't none of you here for the quality of the lighting shut it - Road microphone I hope you guys are appreciating the better quality of the sound and my new camera new video video quality should improve I think as early as tomorrow alright I got a question from tiny polka dot tiny polka dot writes in and asks for how long have you been vegan question mark it's off topic for the video which posted the question but that's okay and what made you go vegan she then goes on to say I'm very sorry if this is the wrong place to ask this or if you've already answered this question fairly often so wow I have answered the question before but it's I think it's about four years ago on this channel about four years ago I answered this question the last time so it has been a while and today I think I can maybe answer it from a little bit more of a meaning form profound perspective especially given the subject matter that's been covered in my most recent series of videos I think I can I can use that as a bridge and approach this from from a different angle from what people have already heard before um I'm sorry if you if you get tired of hearing it she that says PS I wanted to say that I like the way you look at things in a very philosophical meaningful way you come up with very good arguments and I think as a minor without much life experience most people in general can learn a lot from them so thanks I appreciate the compliment and I do get feedback from different people at all different stages of life you know teenagers through retirement about the ways in which my channel has influenced their lives sometimes influences their use of language especially if English is their second language but I remember one longtime viewer my channel he'd seen every single video on my channel up to that point so we'd seen hundreds of videos even though English was his first language and the only language he spoke he said he kept a list of the new words the new vocabulary he learnt he learned from my channel so a different way of talking about problems a different way of solving problems a different kind of practical philosophy I know that's what a lot of people get exposed to on this channel and my girlfriend my current real-life girlfriend said to me many times that before she met me in person you know my youtube channel was really this one window on to you know what would life be like if we were to take things seriously it's really easy to grow up in circumstances where you know all the people around you act like everything is a joke everything's to be scoffed at it's like wait wait wait well you know how would we live our lives if we if we took these problems seriously if we if we really let ourselves worry and and and live in a more earnest and concerned manner so I know my my channel meant a lot to her and raised her political philosophical personal and ethical questions that she thought about alone but it never had anyone to talk to about him in terms of her friends and family I think a lot of us are in that situation that's that's that's the marvelous glittering window that the internet opens on to the world for so many of us and of course if you look around at the way people actually use the Internet well there's there's a darker side to the use most people put it to okay so let's let's actually answer this question how and why did I become vegan what made me go vegan so recent videos have talked about the fact that I really did have a very peculiar childhood and this is partly of course my parents fault and it's partly the way I responded to it you know the inferences I made the conclusions I drew and the next steps I took in terms of my own moral reasoning I suppose so it's worthwhile to mention my father had nine children and probably none of them I think I could say that safely none of them really took the family religion as seriously as I did and then none of them also were disillusioned as seriously as I was and the family religion as I've mentioned was communism not modern communism not socialism extreme hardcore communism my parents were the types of Communists who actively and openly said that Mao Zedong slaughtering 1 million people in Tibet was a good thing they would also say that slaughtering 1 million people was nothing that this was only a drop of blood in a bucket compared to the progress of communism and this sort of thing so these were people who justified mass murder all around the world there were other peculiarities in terms of their particular version of communism but when many other videos have talked about basically what a negative opinion I have of communism is a philosophy it is very easy for me to see that communism did give me although communism as an economic doctrine collapsed and became worthless to me communism is a social and political philosophy collapsed and became worthless me even communism as a critique of capitalism I soon enough at debunked as you know I made Pro as I became more mature and more intelligent myself growing up so you might think there was absolutely nothing politics came into communism well two things one of which I've mentioned recently one of which I haven't one of the most fundamental things that comes at a growing up communist is the general awareness that philosophy can change the world communism especially communism was taught to children teaches you to think that one man can write a pamphlet with some new ideas and that results in the collapse of civilizations and the rise of new empires and millions of people dying and tens of thousands of people all over the world intellectuals and what-have-you debating and researching those ideas and the progress of science taking on a new direction and so on and so forth and I mean to some extent a a child who grew up in a family really fascinated with the history and philosophy of science might have that feeling I think that's quite rare I think it's quite rare to grow up in a family that really teaches you to revere an historical figure like Copernicus or Galileo or even Sir Isaac Newton but probably a few do the difference is of course Karl Marx didn't discover anything and even for a child if you pick up and read the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx if you pick up and read something written by Lenin or Stalin there is indeed nothing impressive about it there's nothing that makes you there is nothing about that type of book that makes you think I could never write something like this myself and by contrast if you as a child read about the discovery of insulin almost any advanced scientific discovery it's very easy to feel this is something I could never do myself new breakthroughs in theoretical physics putting a man on the moon it's very easy to feel daunted and set back but on the contrary most of what you see in communist philosophy is really just complaining I mean you know it's it's so simple a child can relate to it a child can understand it a child can even look at it and say hey I could do better a child can look at it and say oh the basic concept here is that the poor are too poor why are they too poor while they blame the rich they blame the landlords they blame the people who owned the farms who aren't paying the farmers enough really it's about that simple is not a lot of math in des Capital written by Karl Marx that's gonna take your breath away so you you get the sense that in generation of generation people basically stand someone stands up and takes a moral stand makes a moral commitment start publishing it starts publishing new ideas and then the outcome is a revolution a struggle for a social change so that was a value that was encoded into me basically from birth and indeed it was gonna make a separate video with us it was even in the name that I was given by my parents a name that I rejected along with communism my name was a coded reference to revolution I think in in a video in the near future I'm gonna talk a little bit about that the name I had the name I rejected how that was linked to their peculiar form of communist revolutionary ideology so this very much what it was raised with but in its most general form this already arms child with the notion of the Assumption ideas change the world even that ideas are dangerous may I remember my mother would be nervous when I was reading the communist manifesto something written by Lenin something written by Stalin or Karl Marx there was this sense that these books contain power and the type of power of course historically I mean unlike the belief in a magical power in the Bible or a religious text in a sense they knew what that power was because the power was just that people killed each other over these ideas there was just the body-count that was attached to this this philosophy so the second idea which I talked about briefly in an earlier video this week the other idea is just the level of personal commitment and sacrifice expected of you expected of me and that I expected myself in order to make the world a better place so this was within the Communist philosophy but of course it could be applied to to other things you know what does Moses do to free the slaves what does Martin Luther King jr. do to you know improve the situation for black people in America there are all kinds of non-communist figures and exemplars around you that once you're raised communists once that's your frame of reference for the world that one's if their religion you're born into you can then interpret in much the same way so in looking around the world that way and growing up again it was not extraordinary or difficult for me to imagine that I myself would one day be living in the jungle or living in a cave or living in a desert with nothing but an ak-47 you know fighting and surviving in the kind of terrible conditions that various revolutionary leaders had lived in it at various times in history so during my childhood one of the big political struggles that was in the news was the fate of South Africa and I can remember being a small child and speaking with complete disgust about white people in South Africa who didn't simply take up arms against their own government who didn't simply join or lead a revolution that it was completely clear this was in terms of the psychology and once this only happened once my parents took me to a kind of dinner party so I was a small child a miserable situation I mean you shouldn't really take small children to dinner parties where middle-aged people are gonna chitchat about politics unhappy it's not really appropriate but anyway I was except I was expected to sort of mope around in silence while my parents hobnobbed with some middle-aged people and there was a couple there who had just arrived in Canada from South Africa and of course they presented their own story entirely positively that they were allegedly white people who sympathized with the black liberation struggle didn't sound like that I should have done anything for it but that they were white people who disliked the political conditions in apartheid South Africa and they'd us run over to Canada and I did not say this in front of them but after we got to the the car my mother said something slightly positive about these people that they were somehow heroic or positive or sympathetic that they had kind of resisted the regime in South Africa and then run away to Canada and again I was a child and I remember I just said they're wimps and my mother was shocked at this and my father smiled I smile and you know my mother got quite upset and there was a debate that unfolded in the drive home in the car but I just took the position that I've been raised to believe I was applying it to real world situations know when these are your conditions you have to be willing to endure extreme privation and poverty live in a cave live in a hut live in the jungle sleep whoever it is sleep under a tarp in the desert why would we expect anything less these people and my mother and arguably against me all she could say is well these are middle-class people who were accustomed to leaving a there were customed to a comfortable middle-class life and they felt they couldn't have that in South Africa so they came here to have that in in Canada instead and so how could you possibly expect me to sympathize with this when indeed as I say everything about my my childhood being raised was to look at almost the definition of adulthood as being preparation for war preparation for revolution and preparation for civil war and all the privations that entails so by the same token when I was first starting to read philosophy as a child I would look at something like Buddhist philosophy I remember very clearly my first encounters in the Buddhist philosophy long before I got serious leaders didn't my first encounters with sort of the philosophy of ancient Rome and ancient Greece and the mean thing I could relate to was the stoicism of it and I don't really hear mean stoicism in a in terms of the specific school of philosophy but the broad tendency of the the machismo the rejection of worldly pleasures just this view that life was about suffering and living in a state of constant military preparedness a lot of the ancient Greek nation room philosophers are like that they had this this martial spirit which is lacking in modern philosophy and that basically the pleasures of life are contemptible when are something to be sneered at and that really the indulgence of the senses is a life that's just not worth living so you see this across the board you know I can remember reading one one epictetus I think it was a philosopher who had actually formerly been a slave and the other hand I read a philosopher from ancient Rome who was an emperor Marcus Aurelius but it seemed to me whether I was reading the the philosophy of slaves or Emperor's from those ancient civilizations I was reading this kind of world-weary philosophy that showed total indifference towards both the indulgence of the senses and this total commitment to fighting for what's right at any given time whether that's a slave rebellion or frankly the emperor persecuting Christians that were called Marcus Aurelius did he put Christians to death he had Christians fed to the Lions and and all these other stereotypes both about Roman emperors that so be it that whatever it was that was supposed to be right supposed to be fought for that was what you lived in preparation for so how could I possibly feel any sympathy for these South African immigrants or refugees who would run away from you know the the struggle of the oppressed against the oppressors in their own country just to live a quiet middle-class life in Canada probably like the middle-class life that and South Africa from my perspective as a child they were wimps now of course the reality is my own parents did not live up to their own philosophy in any way they were not only wimps they were very much slaves to the sensory pleasures they lived lives of total self-indulgence and it wasn't long before I came to regard my parents as really quite childish people quite dangerously childish people and you know there's maybe a standard psychological pattern there where maybe people some people may tend to idealize the virtues that are most inaccessible to them its virtues that are from their own perspective exotic unattainable hard to achieve or maintain and some other set of virtues you know that are easier for them to practice they may be less likely to put on a pedestal so some of that was was going on with who my parents were in terms of the gap between the precepts they believed in and and the the life that actually lived so this is a big part of the background to my feeling that vegetarianism and then veganism were completely inevitable in my life I've talked in other videos when I've answered this question before you know about my interest in ecology in terms of where I grew up and my engagement these other things there are many many other angles I could use you know to reflect on this but I mean I I do think this is a really short answer to why I ended up vegan in terms of the fundamental values that I chose to take forward from like my communist upbringing into my post communist by the way ante communist I'm not just not kind an active critic I'm someone who really were Jack's communism knowing it from the inside but in my anti-communist adulthood those are values that were consistent in my life and again there's nothing inevitable to some extent of the values I I fished out or selected out of my other brothers and sisters my father and I kids have a lot of other examples to look at nobody else seems to have learned quite the same lessons that I did I'll just say it still is a challenge for me to say to people that I have had a wonderful life or that I currently am having a wonderful life it's difficult for me well it's it's gotten easier just in the last few years I remember I had kind of a job interview situation in Kunming it was a job I didn't take I took a different job instead yeah and a Hong is there's both two places in China but I had a sort of job interview situation and I was talking to the president of a small college and she kept saying these things as if she she felt sorry for me her English wasn't that good but like oh she would say I'm sorry you had to do that I'm sorry that didn't work out for you and you know a situation may you know I had a wonderful life I was like haven't you read my CV haven't you read my resume and actually she hadn't but she was talking to me as if I had ended up on her doorstep applying for this job you know because my my ship had crashed into the rocks and sank and I remember I told her just a few things about what a wonderful life I'd had and because her English wasn't very good I had to tell it in very blunt very simple English so that might be I mean for any of you watching this video imagine yourself in that situation what if you had to in very simple very clear English explained to a complete stranger how wonderful your life is pinned but you know I said to her you know I've lived all over the world I just listed off a few of the places that lived in France I lived in Cambodia you know I I've been everywhere I ever wanted to go you know I sort of briefly talked about the fact that I did all the things I wanted to do I studied all these languages and literature and politics and history so I know you know I've had an extraordinary and wonderful life so I've gotten better at doing that in just the last couple of years and I really made it a point actually after we got back from France on this trip that's he'll tell people a couple people a couple friends in my life you know how wonderful my one month trip to France was you know spending time with my daughter and so on and not to describe that in some kind of self-sacrificing Man of Sorrows way but it is true it is still really deep inside me this sense of wake up every morning do 200 push-ups on your knuckles be ready for World War 3 all the time I mean you know I still don't own a couch we've set up this apartment as a place to work it's all desks and chairs it's a place for me to study languages for me to hit the books for me to do push-ups for me to get work done for us to bake bread it's just part of studying for a next career you know that there's no doubt that there's still that unshakable sense in me that the you know the unexamined life is not worth living that the pleasures this world has to offer are just something to be scoffed at by any man of substance and a kind of you know sincere in comprehension when I look around me at the other members of my generation and see how they waste their lives waste their time waste their brains with their money drinking alcohol smoking marijuana watching football on television playing video games whatever that they live in a state of constant dissipation constant distraction and then they act surprised when ten years have gone by and they've accomplished nothing so that is in a very real sense why I'm vegan I have a lot of contempt for the things that other people value in life and I have a kind of driving ambition an ambition that's not for earning money and ambition to pursue the things that I think are meaningful that I think are most valuable and that keep me in a constant state of tense preparation for a war that we all know is never going to come