On Selling Out: Criticism and Personal Integrity.

in the 21st century political rhetoric
has led millions of people to think about questions of personal integrity in an overly abstract way alright question of whether or not you have freedom of speech you can't think about that in your own life you can't think about it in terms of the political commitments and decisions you make individually in the same way that you think of it on an abstract level as it pertains to the writing of a constitution that governs millions of people we do make the decision as individuals to give up or limit our freedom of speech we do make the decision to give up or limit our sense of personal integrity we do make the decision as individuals to subordinate our own sense of personal integrity to some other mandate mission purpose or cause most commonly people will sign a contract with an employer there are high school history teachers who go into work every day and these may be people who passionately care about history who research and read about history in their own time and that's what they did in university as university students and they have to go into work and teach a history course to high school students where they know the textbook is misleading dishonest false and manipulative but they have made that commitment where they have decided their own a sense of personal integrity matters less than the integrity of the institution maybe it matters less than the integrity of a government guideline that defines the syllabus defines the curriculum wherever it is that textbook comes from they answer to an authority that requires them it may or may not be written explicitly in their contract it requires them not to criticize the textbook it requires them to teach history to those students the way the textbook is decided history is the way some council or some government Minister has decided history should be taught to students and they may know that it's bad and it's wrong they may know that it's propaganda right they've made that decision right I haven't when I come here on YouTube I really have my own sense of personal integrity honesty dignity and what the exercise of freedom of speech means to me and as it happens I haven't sold out to anyone okay that doesn't mean it's inconceivable to me that doesn't mean I would never assign a contract with an employer to do that as you know it's probably the most examined case study or example there are journalists who decide that their own sense of personal integrity matters less than serving the mission or mandate of this newspaper of this TV station that there's some editorial director who gets to decide what the story is and then their role as a journalist is to serve that mission or mandate or purpose and not to exercise their own freedom of speech not to criticize it or point out how wrong it is so on and so forth and that subordination of your personal integrity it may not be limited to the hours when you're in the office working for the school as a high school teacher or when you're in the office as a journalist or working for the TV station I think it's now commonplace for high school teachers to be fired because of what they say on social media if you're a high school teacher who in the classroom says that the history textbook is good and true and accurate and then you come on YouTube and you make your own YouTube videos explaining everything that's wrong with the textbook you you may well be out of a job you may well be fired they the school may say to you we expect you to uphold the party line we expect you to preach this 24/7 we expect you to never break out of character we expect you to play the role of the good teacher who supports this curriculum who support this institution and our mandate 24 hours a day seven days a week certainly if you're a news presenter you are you will be fired if you present one version of reality when you're at work delivering the news and then you go home and have a YouTube channel where you talk about everything that's wrong with the news that way okay I've seen this from many different angles because I've lived a very peculiar life I have seen the way in which the snowball of uncritical mutual praise in a context where everyone has sold out and nobody has any personal integrity nobody has any sense that they're gonna tell the truth even if it's inconvenient for them it's inconvenient institution it's inconvenient or the authorities think of you Furman I've seen the way this becomes a dangerous snowball in humanitarian work okay you can literally have projects that were intended to alleviate starvation projects that were intended to feed the poor that end up destroying the towns and villages of the poor that end up driving them out of their homes that end up in them starving or being homeless I know real examples of this more in Laos than Cambodia but yeah I know about projects that are disasters company and how did this happen fundamentally people are going to meetings there University educated people sitting there on participating meetings and none of them are willing to stand up and say this is a failure this is a disaster all right I am not exaggerating okay there were humanitarian interventions that resulted in the complete depopulation and abandonment of the villages of for people that the charitable agency was allegedly trying to help feed clothe alleviate their poverty all right so poverty alleviation can go disastrously wrong I'm not I could make a whole video talking about that I'm not going to address that I have seen the way the snowball of mutually uncritical praise rolls down the hill in the context of academia in a discipline like anthropology I have also seen it within the very peculiar demi-monde of Buddhism both the academic study of Buddhism and Buddhism as a religion and many of these people unlike the high school teacher unlike the journalists they maybe never signed a contract they maybe never consciously intentionally signed up and decided okay my integrity matters less than this mission mandated purpose many of them just made a vague freeform commitment to be flattering to towards everyone all the time with the hope that it would pay off in future right now many people ask me why don't I do the same in each of these contexts people ask me why I didn't do this in um you know why can't you just play the game the way everyone else in the humanitarian work sector is playing the game I was asked I published articles that deeply embarrassed corrupt and immoral organizations for what they were doing in the appearance sector I was big scandal got into the European press not just the Southeast Asian press and someone there were there were major scandals where I as a you could say I as a journalist really broke the story I did research that had a big impact on very wealthy and powerful people in Southeast Asia and I I did that for the sake of the poor and downtrodden who couldn't do what I did as a researcher and journalist right I did that with a real sense of moral purpose and I'm sure I'm sure it made me unemployable in that sector or at least you could say unemployable by other people who have no sense of personal integrity but of course there were people in that sector who saw what I was doing and admired it and respected it and said wow this is a guy who's doing real research he's doing real things this is someone I they were sure they're people who said I was someone they admired um anyway I got I got I was appreciated by the right people and despised if you like despised by the right people that's what happens when you have personal integrity within the world of Buddhist studies and scholarship I know there were examples of people who broke down weeping because of the the criticism I offered their their published work and it's partly because they were not used to that that whole field was just you know completely uncritical mutual praise and here comes the one guy in the field who's willing to say no the author of this book there was a major book on Buddhism in Cambodia the author of the book can't read Cambodian he has no ability in the Cambodian language he can't read Pali which is the ancient language relevant to the situation the way Latin and ancient Greek irrelevant to Europe he can't read Cambodian he can't read poly this guy apparently had some knowledge of French and he wrote this book is a complete outsider an amateur with no expertise and no local experience and I had more expertise than him and I'm not the world's greatest expert in Cambodia and the book was full of outrageous laughable errors the book was garbage and there all these people who were part of the you know snowball rolling downhill of mutual praise and I'm the one guy who's willing to stand up and indeed write a book review you know write articles and really talk about know this book is bad and evil and wrong and the author of that book never spoke to me again and I think it's fair to say in the tiny world because it's a tiny world of English language scholarship on Cambodia you know nobody would nobody would talk to me there's another whole story the French language world of scholarship and Cambodia they also wouldn't talk to me because I was too harsh a critic of the French Empire those people were still Pro Empire and I was writing I was doing research that really showed how bad and evil the French Empire was so that was a whole lot of different mind-blowing contexts so here on YouTube right now there are people who say to me in effect who asked me why don't I sell out why don't I subordinate my sense of personal integrity to the purpose of being flattering towards others with the expectation that this will be good for my career in future that's what almost everyone else does not everybody but that's what almost everyone else does okay in any of these contexts whether it's vegan activism making YouTube videos Buddhist academia or even some like signing up to join the military or working as a journalist all these contacts real-life and otherwise you have to challenge yourself with this counterfactual question if I did write a flattering and dishonest book review and we can use examples from here on YouTube I made a book review of a book about vegan politics by Casey Taft it's a very harsh negative book review but I did the research I read the book I quote the book I have you know quoted text on screen I have a carefully footnoted analytical approach explaining to you what's wrong with that okay if your point is that I would be better off today if instead I presented uncritical positive praise for the book the author of that book Casey Taft he's a vegan activist he's some kind of career academic I think he has a PhD and he also owns a publishing company and it publishes children's books I have an interest in writing and publishing children's books talked about for many years so you could say cynically that it would be in my interest to sell out it would be in my interest to praise and flatter this guy the way everybody else does and you say oh your book was wonderful your book was so great in the hope that some positive collaboration and cooperation commitment so again keep in mind the high school history teacher signs a contract and gets paid he sells out explicitly consciously intentionally other people sleepwalk into situations where they're selling out their integrity with no contract with no payment it's just in the hope that in future it's somehow gonna pay off for them right instead of a journalist who's now being employed by a major news network think about a young aspiring journalist who's just working for free doing local community radio maybe local public broadcasting on TV and uploading articles to internet but they already have the mentality of selling out and praising everyone in the hope that in future it's gonna lead to that kind of employment certainly what happens here on YouTube what happens in Buddhist academia most of these people never consciously entered into a contract they sold out without anyone ever paying the price without ever any commitment being made to them they decided that their personal integrity matters less than something that's merely hypothetical and possible in the future that may never pay off this one interesting okay there's a there's an important counterfactual possibility here right what if I offer sincere criticism what if I do a book review what if I write a book review or make a book review video here on YouTube it's the same either way what if I write that poker and then the author I'm criticizing he responds positively he respects me for the work I did he recognizes that this is meaningful incisive analytical criticism he recognizes this observe and then we're friends on that basis you have to recognize the possibility of that no matter how rare and then in that context as soon as you have that possibility in mind you have to ask yourself would I want to be friends with this person would I want to be colleagues with this person on the basis of a lie on the basis of flattery deception and manipulation because if I write a book review where I'm saying this is a great and wonderful book when I know it's not where I'm covering up the errors the inadequacies thought if I'm doing that and then this person says wow that was a great book review thank you so much for promoting me in my career or whatever whatever the situation is right even if a friendship results in that even if cooperation or collaboration results with that that's an outcome I don't want because then I am in the position of being the liar and the manipulator right I am not just destroying my own integrity I'm actually destroying the other person's integrity I'm destroying the integrity of the system as a whole I'm destroying the integrity of the larger project that were a part of as a whole whether you think of that project as being journalism you know the investigation and reporting on political affairs whether that project is humanitarian work in a third world country whether that project is vegan activism or whether that project is just making YouTube videos for us to sit down reflect on the meaning of our lives try to gather together our thoughts and intentions and resolve on how to be better people tomorrow