Hatred: Neither Moderation nor Minimalism, BUT HATRED.

have you ever talked about alcohol with
someone who just fundamentally could not apprehend could not sympathize with could not relate to your reasons for sobriety the last time i had a conversation like this it was with a spanish guy born and raised in spain spanish is a first language and you know i wasn't preaching i was sitting around with a whole kind of circle of tourists and all kind of chit-chatting as equals it was one of the nice things about living in thailand laos and cambodia had some face-to-face discussions that kind of those days that uh i don't know now that the internet has devoured the real world maybe it's become scarce and i remember you know he asked me for whatever reason he said oh when did you when did you stop drinking i think you might have asked just because he noticed i was the only person at the table who wasn't freaking alcohol and i said look man you know my days of drinking alcohol is like 16 17 18 you know basically my whole adult life i haven't drank alcohol and his whole way of responding to that he had this deep-seated conviction that alcohol is good being drunk all the time is good or enjoying being tipsy as often as possible is good and the only possible reason the only possible explanation for why i'm refusing to drink alcohol now is that i enjoy it too much and that i can't let myself drink alcohol right and you know i wasn't preaching to this guy you know it was just it's just one of those funny things that happens life frankly i think if i were a less intimidating person people would try to push me around and get me to drink alcohol more often i mean and it's like how can i communicate to you that i do not perceive alcohol as delicious i do not perceive drinking alcohol as enjoyable i do not perceive that altered state of mind as something i yearn for or something i can barely restrain myself from indulging in to excess what you describe as the most desirable thing in your day in your week in your month in your vacation because we're having this conversation while he was on vacation and he was getting drunk every day that is as appealing to me as a pile of seasoned with human vomit it's actually disgusting to me it's actually repugnant what you enjoy drinking is something i hate in the same way that you might refuse to drink camel urine nothing of anything has camels and you know most people in your life they will just never get it they will just never be able to examine the extent to which the things they find desirable are from another person's perspective repugnant and it's for real reasons you know there are really substantive meaningful reasons why what you find delicious delightful entertaining rewarding about drinking alcohol and the drunkenness that ensues why it is that i find that repugnant some of you might have had that experience with a with a grandmother someone like that maybe when you go to christmas there oh oh come now have a drink oh join in the singing join in the dancing and you know you're not going to preach to your own grandmother or maybe you're only going to preach to her a little bit you got you've got some brothers you're not going to tell your grandmother no no grandma this this thing that's been giving you brain damage your whole life this thing that's been giving you liver damage and maybe this thing that actually put several of your blood relatives into the hospital into an early grave oh oh yeah i actually hate and despise that and i kind of look down my nose at you because you haven't figured it out you know yeah grandma yeah you know what actually i have contempt for this drug habit you've got and i kind of have contempt for you as a drug addict um well no you're probably not gonna explain it to your grandmother that way and i've been to family events where various people were in various stages of mourning for people whose lives had been ended by alcohol whether that was the combination of alcohol and driving a car or just direct death you know caused by alcohol you have a sort of cultural discourse that's based on the presumption that something is desirable and then we're just gonna debate the extent to which we will discipline ourselves to minimize how much of it we're gonna indulge in or we're gonna be moderate we're gonna moderate our indulgence right and i'm radically overturning that by really saying no what's desirable to you is repugnant to me i don't have to discipline myself i don't have to limit myself right i'm revolted by what you desire so i got an email from a long time viewer of the channel and this guy i think he's been watching my videos for five years maybe more he's been writing to me asking for advice for many years sometimes practical advice um specific decisions he's making his own life sometimes more profound general advice and in this video a lot of aspects of my philosophy that have come up in passing things i've commented on obliquely and sometimes even implicitly will here instead be made tremendously blunt and direct and a lot of kind of little fragments will be brought together into one corpus and if you've never seen the channel before you don't need any of that background from your scumbag but the reason i mentioned that this guy watched so many of my videos over so many years is that i wonder if in writing to me this way i wonder if he knows you know on a gut level if there's some level of which he knows what i'm going to say to him or if he has no idea maybe he won't see this video coming so to speak um and he's writing me about issues that have come up amongst my viewers again and again and i say that with no contempt for any of you i think there's a reason why the type of person who wrestles with these issues would be watching my channel and donating to support me on patreon and asking me these uh kinds of questions okay um so i'm gonna start in the middle of the email and i'll go back and read the part of the beginning in just just a moment it's not too long an email but he says that he worries about unnecessary spending on activities such as eating out in restaurants and buying fancy clothes i've made so many videos talking for so many hours do i ever use that comment kind of terminology that kind of verbiage do i talk about necessary and unnecessary you might not have noticed that or you might have picked out that sometimes i i really do target these kinds of claims the same way i talk about the distinction between natural and unnatural and good and evil you know what's necessary and unnecessary that's a decision made up in your own mind right there is no definition of what's necessary you can survive on nothing but white rice yellow lentils and a vitamin pill every day take a multivitamin pill white rice yellow lentils your total food cost will be about 300 per annum you know what is necessary you know i would never talk about eating in a restaurant this way in terms of decision made about necessity now it's i'm just pointing out there's something implicit there right and and now i'm wondering why is he writing to me about this what is it he's wanting to hear from me or maybe what is it what is it that he's kind of apprehensive about you know what i mean like maybe he's worried about what i'm going to tell him about this maybe he's writing to me and he's worried i'm going to tell him to stop making excuses and never eat a restaurant again in his life no i'm not that's not hawaii it's not our response right so he says he's worried about unnecessary spending such as eating out in restaurants and buying fancy clothes he asks how can he reconcile using money in this sort of unnecessary way when so many people in the world have so little okay so look it's a sincere well-intended question you know what i mean but the most fundamental part of my answer is there's more to talk about in this email you know i don't want to go skiing right it's not something i want to do with my money it's not something i want to do with my time i don't have to i don't have to restrain myself prevent myself from going skiing i don't want to go gambling at a casino when i was in las vegas nevada with my girlfriend you know we were basically there to save money on airplane tickets this is a long story short i i found it really kind of emotionally upsetting and disturbing to walk through the casinos and see the reality of what was going on there just to witness it for a few moments you know we walked through pretty quick but we did walk through the gambling halls of several of these um casinos okay i'm not restraining myself i'm not disciplining myself i'm not minimizing my indulgence and not seeking out a moderate path and i'm not questioning you know to what extent is it necessary for me to go gambling or go skiing to indulge in this way i'm not counterposing that to the fate of the poor people of the world as if by gambling or by going skiing i'm actually stealing something from someone else that i'm depriving someone else of a meal so that i can go gambling or go skiing right i actually hate gambling and i hate many other things about the casino you guys know i'm not a conventional feminist but i am an unconventional feminist i find the treatment of women and those casinos denigrating and disturbing the half-naked women who are in all kinds of peculiar jobs in and around the casinos and promoting events in las vegas and by the way you can see my videos i have a very nuanced position on pornography and prostitution and all these things i'm not some simplistic sex negative person but there are a lot of things aside from the gambling i find immoral and disturbing about the casinos okay i i actively reject i actively repudiate gambling i actively repudiate skiing all right to me this is a pizza all right now i don't know when i will next go back to france i don't know uh a huge percentage of all the money i earned in the last 10 years was spent visiting my daughter in france and it's possible this will happen again within the next year within the next two years maybe not for another five years we don't know i'm employing a lawyer right now if you want to talk about necessary you want to talk about necessary versus unnecessary how what would be how is this even a meaningful term to apply you see and you see why i don't reason things through this way is it a necessary expense for me to fly before it initially was to fly from china to paris and then take a train from paris to the cote d'azur to spend just a few days with my daughter is that necessary an unbelievable amount of money if you add up all four trips just the trains and planes and so on right you know what i i suggested to my mother that the next time we go to france at some point in the future we go to a unique museum that exists in france that's devoted to the history of the french revolution okay i know a lot about the french revolution that particular history i don't know if this could be combined with visiting my daughter or not i don't know okay i'm using this museum rather than some of the examples you've heard on my channel before someone's talking about going to visit the pyramids i don't know if you want to go visit some ancient buddhist temple or something okay but this is this is a very explicitly educational experience it's a museum in france dedicated to the history of the french revolution and i actually went there with my mother when i was almost a toddler i could walk but barely i was a little a little tight and i have memories from that journey even though i was so young i don't think i'd started kindergarten yet and we could figure out exactly what year that was when i was a little tiny kid i went there so that's it's something meaningful linking me to my mother and linking me to my childhood and the history and political philosophy of the french revolution has been with me my my whole life is it necessary for me to go and see that museum and see it with my mother and learn something and you know partly i'll learn something new but obviously going to the museum mostly i will be rehearsing knowledge i've already learned i've already read a lot about the history of the french but you know probably reinforcing and illustrating things are you know adding detail to things nobody's even going to question it because we're not talking about something evil right we only think in this way about moderation and necessity we're talking about necessary evil we're talking about a moderate amount of people moderate drinking of alcohol moderate brain damage moderate gambling right that's what the discourse is implicitly about like on a deep level i feel like there's a an asymmetry between the two sides here that's the same as that asymmetry i described to myself and the spanish guy who i met there's actually in northwestern laos in the middle of nowhere sitting around talking with these with these tourists it's like i don't think i can get you to understand what alcohol means to me and it doesn't mean to me what it what it what it means to you right um [Music] and this strange sense of meaninglessness of necessity buying a book isn't necessary reading a book isn't necessary right why would necessity be the criterion we hold up to any of these questions what we're talking about is good and evil right is it good to go gambling in las vegas nevada is it good to spend a moderate amount of money gambling in las vegas nevada i believe the answer to that question is in no way reciprocal with the question of whether or not you would take the money and give it to a charity to feed starving people if you did not go gambling like the question of whether gambling or skiing or drinking alcohol is a good use of your time and money that has to be settled in and of itself you have to take up your own position you have to come up with your own conclusions on that and it is neither going to be justified nor condemned because hypothetically the money that could be spent gambling could be spent drinking alcohol could be spent eating a fancy restaurant that instead that hypothetically could feed a poor starving person right we're making judgments about good and evil and as i've said in numerous videos from numerous angles the ultimate question is of what kind of person you want to become right now you know it's very painful but yeah i was deeply committed to wanting to be you know a meaningful part of my own daughter's life i spent so much money it was one trip where i only saw her for i think two hours it was one hour i flew from canada to germany i saw this is the video of it i honestly forget it was one hour or two hours this very short visit that i crossed the ocean for i spent i spent all the money i had in the world and it's been at that time i very very little money to my name um you know you're making this enormous sacrifice and you don't even know if this kid is gonna remember it you know what i mean um okay you know that's who i want to be i want to do the right thing just because it's the right thing to do and by the way in making that trip my ex-wife lied to me and attempted to blackmail me and she lied to me and said she was going to report me to the police and i actually went to the police station she didn't even she said she reported me to the police and i went and talked to the police and it wasn't true there was all this you know unbelievable drama and what what she was trying to blackmail me into she wanted me to sign paperwork giving up the right to spend time with my own daughter i was like blackmail doesn't work this way you can't anyway you can't force me to sign a paper giving up exactly the thing i want to get like you have to give up one thing in order to get another thing it can't be it can't be that you promise me that you'll let me see my daughter if i sign this paper giving up my legal right to say my daughter black male doesn't worthwhile really nasty terrible situation okay all right but you know what we get into a lot of other more difficult questions about good and evil good and bad and what kind of person you want to become was it necessary for me to go to cambodia was it necessary for me to go to a house no there's no necessity and you know you what are you going say the the money i spent on an airplane ticket for me to go to cambodia and pursue humanitarian work and try to make the world a better place humanitarian work research learning languages all this stuff oh well in theory that could have provided so many sacks of rice for so many starving people no there are questions here of good and evil and if you are doing something good you actually positively think it's good these questions wouldn't even arise in your mind's eye right you say oh yeah no this is something really meaningful and positive i want to do in cambodia and it's good for me like i'm going to become a better person cambodia is going to become a better place the world's going to become a better place um and then you know there are pragmatic costs there are probably questions of to what extent the cost can be justified by um by how much good you're gonna you're gonna get out of it right so you already have a hint that you're asking the wrong questions or you're evaluating the problem in the wrong way when you're thinking in terms of moderation and minimization because whatever you're talking about moderating whatever you're talking about minimizing is evil okay and on a deeper level we're about to hear it just the next paragraph this email his assumption is that whatever you are doing with your money kind of exists in the shadow of this potential you have to give away your money to charity and the charity is going to do something with that money far better than anything you could do for yourself or others and that is a delusion and it's one i think my whole philosophy has been perhaps too subtly uh set against so far on this youtube channel i do see your questions coming in guys but as you can see i am i am trying to answer this question from supporter on patreon if you have a second hit the thumbs up button it'll help more people discover the stream uh while this is still ongoing yes uh we have a question of what does isil think of marijuana and several people in the audience already know i just say you know um you can look up the list of my videos in the past you just hit control f on your keyboard hit find on your keyboard and uh you can look at the different videos i've made specifically about marijuana obviously that's an example of a keyword that's very very easy to search for in that list some other topics it's a bit more nuanced because there's more than one way to say it what have you um okay so he says that when he looked up this issue on the internet all the results were people talking about their anxiety over their personal poverty whereas i might add his anxiety seems to be about his personal wealth going to fancy restaurants and buying fancy clothes apparently he says this this is of course a thought experiment but i still ponder on it myself even though i will continue to eat out at fancy restaurants and buy fancy clothes period moderation is perhaps the way setting aside a moderate amount for charity is good and buying some nice stuff is too period so i really just wonder why is he saying this to me i think if he said the same thing to his mother to his father to his work colleagues to friends there are such a huge percentage of people you would say this to would just unthinkingly nod and agree with you in our culture or in our century but i wonder if on some level he apprehends or anticipates that i am that incredibly rare person who is going to disagree with him root and branch i'm going to reject this quite fundamentally all right now i just point out in a subtle way you may not have noticed this on my channel i have been constantly undermining this concept of charity i have been constantly challenging it i have been constantly invalidating it um i talk a lot about charity i talk a lot about charity work i talk a lot about the aspiration to make the world a better place i talk about the way in which personal altruism can be educational for the altruists that you can gain a lot you can learn a lot by going out and making the world a better place and have contrasted charity of this kind of very hands-on personally involved charity to the unbelievable lives of passivity and self-indulgence of many of my fellow youtubers who are addicted to video games and and what have you but have you ever once heard me say hey guys giving money to this charity is a great idea there have been so many different charities analyzed on this channel including charities that claim to represent causes or that actually do represent causes that i sympathize with vegan charities we went through a detailed discussion of quite a few different vegan charities asked the question where does your money go what difference does it make i have never once said to you donating money to this charity is a good idea okay you can remember also my discussion repeated discussions of the black lives matter movement i've heard a lot of people uh just this week um saying that they're so glad they never gave money to black lives matter i've been listening to the latest round of kind of recrimination and analysis of where did the money go 90 million dollars why is there so little to show for it why did some of the leaders of the movement become wealthy and so little was accomplished in so many years so many millions of dollars and i've heard a bunch of different black americans saying they're so glad they never gave a dime to this organization black lives matter i've never heard anyone say that they regret that they missed the opportunity to donate money gee i i sure wish my 5 000 were added onto that pile of of millions of dollars that have in this way um disappeared so you know i've offered you guys a critique of charity again and again and again from many different angles um you have never heard me once say anything like what are you saying here quote setting aside a moderate amount of your income for charity is good okay i have never said charity is good as that's ridiculous and i never would say anything like that i've challenged you again and again to think about what charity really means now you know [Music] some people are so mentally disabled that they can't help anyone not even themselves okay some people are so totally lacking in their own judgment their own ability to do research their own ability to have initiative that they have to pay someone else to go out and make the world a better place is that your situation really like whatever the cause is we're talking about you really think you should hand your money over to someone else who should go and do that instead of you rolling up your sleeves to make that difference and i've got to tell you something i don't believe you all right like the fact that you're capable of writing this email to me means i don't believe you whatever this guy's situation is i have no idea how much your little money has okay you know syria has been going on since 2011 or so syrian civil war i'm not saying you can go every year i'm not saying you can uh you know devote your whole life to it or you know in the space of the last 10 years you could have made two or three trips to syria you could have used your own money you could have started your own foundation or your own agency you could have as one single individual made a difference in people's lives with no intermediary organization no bureaucracy so on and so forth it would have meant more to you it would have meant more to the people you helped you know what have you got you got five thousand bucks ten thousand bucks fifty thousand i want you to be got however much or how little you know even with an example as daunting as the syrian civil war all right the difference you could make directly it'll mean more to you it'll mean more to others and you'll stand to learn a great deal more as opposed to taking that money putting in an envelope and handing it to what's basically a faceless corporation from one of the better term handing it to a charity and there are you know on my channel again and again and again there has been this critique of the charity sector of the charity industry of what's wrong with it what's wrong with peta what's wrong with people for the ethical treatment of animals it's wrong with 99 of charities like i'm tempted to just say it's 100 of charities but there's a different criterion to bring to bear here even if there are one percent of charities that will make really excellent use of your money that aren't like capeta what if instead of comparing the charity to you wasting your money gambling or you wasting your money skiing etc what if instead we're comparing you paying someone else to do something virtuous to you doing it yourself all right what kind of belief do you have about yourself you see what i'm saying here what kind of belief do you lack or what kind of belief do you want to put it what is your judgment on your own character are you such a worthless person are you such a stupid person are you such a weak person that you can't help anyone that you can't make any difference in the world with your own two hands and apparently your your thousands of dollars again it's not going to be every day it's not going to be every month maybe during the span of 10 years in syria [Music] however any given decade for any given conflict or any given crisis maybe there are just one or two points at which you personally can get involved but trust me whether you went for two weeks or two months you'd remember that for the rest of your life you know and you might you know you might be able to help people that you would then have uh some kind of meaningful connection with for the rest of your life and maybe not maybe you you'd hate and resent all the people you worked with maybe you'd come back um with a much darker view of human nature after having terrible experiences being in the charity industry which i had myself um but at least that would be a learning experience that you that you did indeed uh have yourself that would be something invaluable you would have bought yourself something of great worth uh with your donations to charity in that sense all right um okay so i think i'm now going to read this uh sort of from start to start to finish so you'll see the contacts going back to the start of the email he introduces himself i remember him blah blah blah he then says regarding human capacity for example one could live an intellectual life which has no impact on anyone else financially which would limit their ability to have a positive impact on the world but it would still be an enriching life researching and writing research papers how would how would one reconcile having this life knowing that a high paid job would include higher tax revenue for the country's benefit and a higher possibility of using your own money to do good in the world also so that's the first part of his question before what i what i read you before okay so do you know anyone who's ever had to make this decision do you know anyone who was working as a dentist and said to you well they earn a lot of money working as a dentist but they really feel they're stifling their own ability to make the world a better place to what they could accomplish writing research papers what they could accomplish as an intellectual that's your that's your example is writing research papers so that's why i'm sticking with that example in your whole life do you think you'll meet even one person for whom that's a choice for whom that's a conflict and even if you did meet that one person if you met someone who told you that do you think you would suspect that they're delusional like this guy's a dentist and he has this delusion that he's a great intellectual who could really make a difference in the world through his research papers through writing research okay the value of that intellectual life for the tiny minority of people who have the option to live it is so extraordinary that nobody would trade it to work as a dentist and nobody would justify being a dentist because they would have the opportunity to pay a higher rate of taxes right for the tiny tiny minority of people who have that choice to make right those are precisely the people who cannot be bought who cannot be bribed because they know the value of their unique intellectual potential whether they think of that in terms of research in terms of creative writing and whatever form of intellectual activity it is could never be compared to this model you have of a life of drudgery earning money and donating to charity now again these delusions are linked and reciprocal your vision that earning money is meaningful is in this way linked to your deep-seated assumptions about charity as a positive part of your meaningful life and what you're describing as charity i see instead as a saddening sickening judgment that you're passing on yourself that you are someone who is so intellectually disabled that you have to hand that money over to someone else who can make those decisions for you who can do that research for you who can make that difference in the world for you now sorry i was using syria off the top of my head as an example and i've talked about cambodia i alluded to cambodia and laos briefly but you guys all know the vast majority of charity work it's it's in your own country you know it's in your own language there are opportunities all the time to make the world a better place right that rely on your initiative your ingenuity your intelligence your honesty your integrity right and you can even ask other people for donations you can say oh yeah you know right now there's a hurricane there's a disaster and some people need help and oh yeah so i've got a few thousand bucks i'm gonna go down in my truck and you know what if i need to buy some other stuff i'm gonna take photographs of how much it costs i'll post the receipt on instagram and hey if you 10 guys if you guys can all throw in a couple thousand bucks i can buy a few more tents and mattresses or whatever it is right there are there's a way for you to make a difference and you know what you might get ripped off you might get swindled you might get lied to big big corporate charities do also in case you didn't know all the time you just wouldn't learn anything from it you wouldn't hear anything back about it right you know you might try to help someone and you know you end up learning a harsh lesson about human nature instead right um and the other thing that's interesting it's built into this question is you say for example one could live an intellectual life which has no impact on anyone else financially i [Laughter] i don't think anyone is measuring the value of their intellectual life in terms of its financial impact on others right if you are going to be the person who does research revealing that the water coming out of everyone's taps is poisonous you don't measure the value of that research financially right whether it's a book you publish a research paper whether it's you know um there are all kinds of intellectual things people do that are either creative or destructive either implicitly or explicitly political some kind of attempt to change the world to challenge yourself to grow to challenge other people to grow you know you know sorry in a lot of these countries too at the united states one of the saddest kind of um one of the one of the most pathetic forms of charity of course is raising money for court cases okay you want to go fight about the future of circumcision in the supreme court you know you want to put the money together and hire lawyers and dispute whether or not parents have the right to you know cut off part of a newborn infant's body you know and change his life forever and so on and so forth you know does anyone evaluate that in terms of its financial uh impact on others okay so then caught up to where i was before in reading his question he says this is of course uh just a thought experiment but he still ponders on it himself even though he continues to eat out in fancy restaurants and buy fancy clothes moderation is perhaps the way setting aside a moderate amount for charity is good and buying some nice stuff is too if one wants to dedicate their life to study and education without much financial freedom then it is an individual's right to pursue happiness and ignore the fact that they could do this or that but i'm afraid to say this question over personal spending has been a prolonged thought that i'm not expecting to go away my life has been in flux as has ever once due to the conditions the year 2020 and 2021 which is maybe why i think deeply about such things in between the fog and the desolation so you can see this is a sincere well-intentioned uh message right the beloved is some pardon me the above is something only rich nations have to contend with although most people probably ignore such thoughts as much as possible as they see that capitalism is generally working there's an incredible expansion of wealth across the world the people in former ages like the roman empire would never have dreamed of and he says nobody even talks about the incredible progress of human welfare over the last 50 years or even the last 20 years um many years ago on this channel i talked about these issues from a very different perspective from a very different point of view because i had a lot of viewers in the channel now five years ago more than five years ago i remember talking about in the airport when i was leaving to go to thailand from victoria canada i had a lot of care viewers who were really attached to this notion of uh minimalism where they saw themselves as subtracting from the planet's welfare that anything they do anything they eat anything they buy anything they own anything they use is you know being stolen being subtracted from some greater some sum of the world's welfare that this was a harm they had to apologize for or had to justify and what i tried to point out again and again is no your life is something positive your ambitions your aspirations are something positive that you don't have to justify this sense of subtraction and of having to minimize the harm done only makes sense when we're talking about harm it only makes sense when we're talking about something you're ashamed of it only makes sense when we're talking about something bad and evil and wrong now if you are going to las vegas to go gambling and drink alcohol and use drugs and sleep with prostitutes i understand why you might take a harm reduction view of this say well you're going to try to minimize the amount of time you lose minimize the amount of money you lose why you might be minimizing something that you are ashamed of why you might look at all of these habits whether it's the alcohol the gambling the prostitution or what have you said oh well these are things you have to struggle to do in in moderation right this is why i want to come back to the concept of charity right nobody talks about charity in moderation nobody talks about charity as something you have to minimize right nobody has ever said to me don't you feel bad about the airplane fuel that was burned when you were flying to cambodia to do a combination of humanitarian work and research you know no of course i don't feel bad now i said this many years ago said very briefly now maybe you've heard that maybe this is familiar to some of you if you heard it all those years ago on my my youtube channel you know if you believe that a war is worth fighting and a war is worth winning you would not trouble yourself about how much gasoline is being burned being wasted being used up in order to transport soldiers across the ocean to fight that war it's precisely when the war is something you're ashamed of something evil something you're morally opposed to that you then talk in this way about minimizing or moderating the impacts or the waste you know caused by the war if you believe that the united states of america should put 110 percent of its effort into defeating the nazis in germany whatever example you want to use of course of course you would see the burning of fossil fuels the use of jet fuel of of airplanes as justified for that purpose toward that end it would just seem laughably ridiculous to to question in the sense the efficiency of the war or how to minimize the war it would be ridiculous to say well couldn't we save a lot of jet fuel if we fought the war half as hard for twice as many years this is a notion of efficiency that's irrelevant to war and it's irrelevant to charity it's irrelevant to anything you're you're undertaking so when i look at these kinds of questions what i see is a complex struggle of someone who doesn't want to face up to the extent to which really what they're doing is making judgments about good and evil right so now we have a four-way grid there are things that are good that i perceive as good and i feel good about there are things that are evil that i perceive as evil and i therefore find repulsive and repellent and i'm not tempted by right so for me that's alcohol who said the start of this video i've known i don't yearn for alcohol i don't restrain myself i don't discipline myself i don't moderate it i perceive alcohol as something bad and therefore i want absolutely none of it in my life right i just don't want to be a part of my life in any way okay there are things that are good but i have to admit to myself i can't perceive them as good i can't feel good about them i can't feel positively motivated to do them and that's complicated okay and then there are things that are bad and i know them to be bad i know them to be evil but i can't perceive them to be bad i can't perceive them to be evil i can't feel repulsed by them i can't feel revolted by them right i still feel drawn to them you still feel tempted you still feel this is something for whatever reason you want to do okay um [Music] these judgments will absolutely never uh be based on the notion that you could substitute one thing for another right because moral judgments aren't aren't substitutable right i don't i don't want to gross you guys out uh with examples um [Music] there are circumstances in which you may make the decision that you will refuse to do an evil act knowing full well that another man will do that act instead of you after you next to you and many people will look at that and say well you you might as well do it anyway no because one man can't be substituted for another man one decision can't be substituted for another decision not when it's questions of of right and wrong all right if you have made the decision and by the same token you're never going to be able to minimize something good or something bad you can't exaggerate the good or minimize the bad you can't change the significance or scale of these things by pointing out what you could have done with the same time which you could have done with the same money anyway ethical decisions are only and always directed towards things that are actual not uh hypothetical okay so look you know if you want to write a book these are questions we really deal with in our real lives okay you may be a parent who is looking at the reality of the fact that you will neglect your own son you will neglect your own daughter if you take the time to write a book and you have to make a hard choice is it worth it i've got to tell you something if i was in a situation where i was raising my own daughter i know my own values i wouldn't be writing this book the book i'm writing right now is 100 a product of the french legal system the french the slowness of the french divorce courts etc etc you know what i'm saying um but you know i do understand that i mean he was talking about a research project i do understand there are some people who are working on the cure for cancer or whatever it is and they say okay you know there's something positive about raising my own child and there's something about writing this book getting this research done you know uh so on and so forth you know where they feel committed to to pursuing that outcome um but wouldn't it be ridiculous to try to judge the value of that book by comparing it to the neglected role of parenting how much it would have mattered how much it would have meant for the writer to instead spend time raising his own son raising his own daughter or vice versa to judge your own child to judge the value of the parenting you've done saying just think of the book i could have written all right now people do torment themselves with these notions they do i think people drive themselves insane with them but these are really strictly speaking in principle insane okay there are different reasons for eating in a fancy restaurant i don't know yours you know i don't know okay some men eat in a fancy restaurant in order to impress a woman or the fancy restaurant you know for all kinds of frankly cruel and venal reasons there i know it's going to sound ridiculous there are bad reasons to use in fancy restaurants you know what i mean this this could be something that in your case it's really quite dark and it could be i mean one of the times i eat in restaurants is when i'm in airports it could be look if i'm going to make this journey i've got to go find the vegan option and eat in these restaurants i've got to scrape by this way i just bought a bunch of vegan power bars because i was assuming i was going to classes on university campus didn't work out i've got to make those decisions where it's like you know i can't eat a proper meal i've got to do i've got to do this for that reason is it worth it you've got it you've got to make those you've got to make those decisions but i think you know if you really thought it was bad to eat in this restaurant you wouldn't enjoy it any more than i would enjoy drinking alcohol or i would enjoy gambling if you really think this is bad and evil and wrong don't kid yourself you would find this repugnant and there's all kinds of self-indulgence it's all kinds of you know wastes of time and waste of money that i do find repugnant that i do find repellent so again most people don't think skiing is a big deal i really do you know what i mean i don't think i don't think it's suitable for for an adult to spend their time or money or energy even going skiing even that i'm i'm willing to look down my nose at you know what i mean um i i think that very simply this complexity you've brought to this question and you're struggling why it is you're writing to me um asking for an answer it's all going to disappear if you can just admit to yourself um what the role of good and evil is in these decisions that you're making um [Music] if you think that it is good to be a dentist to become a dentist and earn a lot of money and have no time and maybe snuff out your intellectual potential vaguely alluded to here do something more more positive in the world if you really think that's good you wouldn't be asking me this question and on the other hand if you really thought you had the potential to make a difference in this world intellectually if you thought that you had the potential to make a difference in this world through charity charity of any kind charity with your own hands with your own intelligence with your own ingenuity with your own initiative you wouldn't be asking me this question the reality is that you're asking me this question because you're not living a life that's devoted to any kind of intellectual activity you're not living a life that's devoted to any kind of charity you're not living a life that you believe is making the world a better place or that's making you a better person you behold yourself as someone who's spending all of your time and money or too much of your time and money on fancy clothes and fancy restaurants and you're asking yourself how was that that with these seemingly good intentions it all could have gone so terribly wrong not entirely