That's just who she is: "mental health" is misleading.

i am hesitant to use the word paradigm paradigm is one of those painfully overused words especially in newspapers in our time but mental illness is really a very misleading paradigm you know and people are drawn to it and people like to speak about themselves in terms of mental health and mental illness and like to speak about others in terms of mental health and mental illness because it brings with it the pleasing illusion that the behavior you're exhibiting right now or the behavior you're exhibiting in the depths of your despair that's not who you really are that's just an apparition that's just an illusion it's just a misleading set of behaviors created by these short-term circumstances and once you recover your so-called mental health right once you recover from this imaginary injury then then people will see who you really are and that's that's somebody else now there's always a crisis in your life there's always some short-term excuse for why your mental health is impaired why you're not acting as as yourself as your true self as this other person you think you are but it's so much more useful and it's so much more honest to instead look at how you cope with those crises and say this is who you really are you know and there isn't a contrast between mental health and mental illness now i think you guys are aware i've made a few different youtube videos speaking at length and speaking in depth about my old colleague and my old adversary aaron janus now let me ask you i do not think aaron janus is insane i do not think aaron janus has any of the currently fashionable uh diagnosable conditions and if you really look at the history of the concept of being in a manic state in a fugue state in the videos that have emerged of her ranting in this way i would not describe that as mania i would not uh describe it as a feud state i don't think she's in a disassociative state so on and so forth you know how i look at aaron i look at her behaving this way and i know how she's behaved i know she's talked to me directly over many years and i say yeah that's who she really is you know that's who she is and i don't mean that it's some kind of negative judgment like this is who you're always going to be and you can't grow or you can't change i needed the positive sense of that's who she is like maybe you can love her maybe you can work with her maybe you can be her friend or her colleague whatever your situation is right and maybe you can't but you've got to accept this is who she is these aren't extreme or aberrant behaviors caused by some kind of short-term illness that she's going to recover from it's not the case that she's been poisoned it's not the case that she's hallucinating because of some kind of drug she doesn't have a concussion that's who she really is now i used to be married i'm now happily divorced let me tell you i saw this and how other people treated my ex-wife how they perceived her and how they refused to let themselves perceive her for who she really is how they were kind of disregarding the evidence of who she was all the time and there's always a short-term excuse i mean give a good example uh max wife got pregnant had a baby so i shouldn't say got pregnant we quite intentionally had a baby it was a planned an intentional pregnancy english language is funny that way i got pregnant it's a little bit too vague anyway and you know uh i remember how she was behaving right after she she had the baby and there were people that said oh oh oh this is postpartum depression and like i can't i can't remember fighting with someone about like i don't remember it ever really being a conflict or anything but i'm already saying people what do you mean this is who she really is like she's like this all the time i'm being real i'm not complaining i'm not like like after she had the baby her behavior how she act now it was the same as during the pregnancy and before she had the baby this is the same person i've known for all these years we had a long very close relationship so we lived together and worked together some couples they spent time this is someone i really live with and work with very closely for many years i knew who she was and i felt like when other people were making these excuses for her one they were demonstrating that they don't know who she really is and two they were demonstrating why they would never know who she really is like she's showing you again and again who she is and you're telling yourself like oh this is just a mental health problem you know and think about the dichotomy that's there you're imagining there are two different people one is the person as she behaves when she's mentally healthy and the other is the person that she behaves when she's mentally impaired now in the real world if you get bitten by a venomous snake many many types of snake venom will miraculously bring out a totally different character totally different set of behaviors in you when your body is fighting the venom you're in this sort of altered state of mind i can see when i was on malaria medication medication for malaria probably changed my personality a little bit there can be short-term circumstances don't come out that really do impair your cognitive function or change your character change your babe there are uh i'm not making this as some kind of universal claim that under no circumstances can we talk about a contrast between being ill and being healthy oh look you know i used to live in the tropics i've lived in cambodia laos thailand and so on you can have a tropical fever and just the fever itself i mean you'd be amazed you can hallucinate due to fever you can really be in this sense you can have a mental health problem because you got a fever you know so you're not yourself this is not your real character structural paper okay it exists but what we've done is as a culture on a massive scale we've adopted this unexamined preconception that lets us go around discounting the evidence before our eyes when people are telling us who they really are when people are showing us who they really are again and again and again now i had a whole bunch of emails from someone named daniel i'm just gonna use his first name i assumed he wanted to remain anonymous and this guy was writing to me at on the internet you don't know what's true and what's false i have no way to verify this but he was writing to me claiming to be a personal friend of aaron janus and a personal supporter and it sounds like some kind of counselor or he's somehow trying to help her with i only know what he tells me and i'm not saying any of this to ridicule by the way there's someone who and but on the internet you don't know what's real you know so i have no way to verify this and he says that he really thinks it would be for the best for aaron janus if i were to delete these videos of her showing how she behaves how she acts and again from my perspective i don't believe aaron janice was bitten by a venomous snake i don't believe she had a fever and i've known aaron for a lot of years daniel i've fetched this to you an email all right i know aaron aaron knows me you can debate whether or not i know her well maybe maybe i'm wrong you know but i'm telling you you know this is who aaron really is now he threw a lot of hypotheticals at me don't worry this is this is a brief i'm not gonna i'm not gonna rehash the whole email correspondence i'm not going to try to summarize and uh and reiterate everything on both sides but you know one of his tactics was to say to me that if the positions were reversed i would want someone else to delete a video that criticized me in this way or that showed footage of me in this way the totally reasonable tactic from views like whether you think of this as socratic method or something whatever method you want to call this alkabiati's method thucydides method why is it always going to be socratic method aren't there some other names from ancient athens we could use all right whatever pretentious ancient greek name you want to use this as a method that's totally fine but i think he wasn't willing to really hear my answer because i answer i took that as a sincere question or a sincere challenge and i i you know i answered sincerely no i would have valued this kind of criticism so much in my life i would have valued this so i still today i would but when i was younger it could have made an even bigger difference in my life positively to hear this kind of thing like no no what you're like it's fine for you to ask this question how would i feel someone christmas but i'm saying no i i crave this kind of criticism this kind of cross-examination this this kind of challenge and guys i was born stupid okay i was born ignorant all right what you see on camera right now i built it up brick by brick over years of hard work i did not come out of the womb gifted this way i didn't and i was born with terrible religious preconceptions about the world that i had to destroy supernatural preconceptual and terrible economic and political preconceptions about the world that i had to destroy so it's not just that i had to learn things i had to also unlearn things challenged my instructions as a complete coincidence you know i went over to catherine klein's channel so if you guys don't know these names nobody you can understand this video without knowing the names of any of the people catherine klein i hadn't seen her youtube channel for a while and one of my fans sent me a message and said hey look you should criticize with kevin clanston i sent katherine klein and i shared this on patreon from my perspective these are 100 positive 100 friendly messages but no matter how positive and how friendly you try to be the reality is i'm communicating her the point that she's talking about economics and she very fundamentally does not understand the science of economics not at a high school level not at a university 101 textbook level like and i as nicely as i could i tried to say to her look you're actually taking political hyperbole and propaganda and you're repeating it like as if it's scientific fact like that's what's that's what's going on here i said as nice as you could now someone like daniel could say to me it's totally reasonable like whether you think this is socratic method or not totally reasonable to challenge me and say hey you wouldn't like it if someone said that to you but you're wrong i would value that so much still today today it would have to be in a pretty high level of every edition for someone to challenge me whether it's on economics or ancient greece or wrong but when i was younger i mean i was just stupid when i was 17 that was as stupid as every other 17 year old i was 19 i was as stupid as every other 19 year old when i was 22 starting to get ahead but trust me like i i i'm cursed with a very accurate memory of how stupid i was i know the extent to which some of the stupid things catherine klein is saying today i said in the past you know the distant past some of these misconceptions were inculcated into me and i was raised with them and i had to challenge them and it would have meant so much to me positively if someone else anyone else had challenged my ignorance to challenge my preconception if they had helped me even if from an outside perspective maybe someone would see they're helping me as a kind of cruelty because some people they regard all criticism as cruelty all criticism is having bad intentions but i don't that that's i don't see the world that way i don't see my myself that way you know um this guy daniel has written to me uh demanding that i delete those videos of aaron janus and he's conceded the point this is i think significant that my monologue so me speaking on camera what i'm saying is actually useful and is helpful that there isn't something that needs to be censored or deleted there he just wants me to delete the portions of the video that show aaron herself shall we say ranting on camera okay but what's so important of that right i'm gonna tell you several things that are so important about that the first thing i'd tell you that's so important for that is that's who she really is daniel and i think that's very hard for you to accept and that's why you don't feel comfortable watching that i'm not saying that to insult you you want to think who she really is is another person right it's like if you have an uncle who's an alcoholic and when he's drunk you tell yourself oh this isn't who he really is he's really a nice guy he's really a good guy he just happens to be drunk all the time no that's who he really is you don't have two separate people there right you know he's your uncle chose to get drunk now he's drunk he's a drunk that's your uncle you know that's that's who he is you have to accept that right so one important factor is just that quality of getting people to face up to this and look let me just say reflecting back on my marriage reflecting back on the numerous conversations i had with my ex-wife where she was screaming at me and being totally irrational and totally abusive you know nothing could have helped her more than if i had videotaped that even if only one other person ever saw the videotape even if just the next day or the next week i'd sat down with her and played the videotape so she could see it and she could see hey this is who i really am and in her case sir telling my ex-wife this is how you treat your husband this is how you treat a man who has loved you and supported you and has tolerated endured a huge amount of this kind of abuse for years and he's sacrificed so much for you and this is how you treat him now because i think there's a very real sense in which my ex-wife like couldn't remember that or couldn't see it with detachment or couldn't accept like those were really her words those were really her deeds this is who she really is and this is what i'm really this is what her husband is really coping with right seeing that on camera for the person themselves daniel you may feel that that's only hurtful you may feel that that's only harmful i'm telling you i don't see it that way okay i have wept on camera keep watching my youtube channel you can see me breakdown weeping okay uh my girlfriend and i have broken down weeping together on camera actually at least once maybe twice i forget you know and you know again like it's fine if it's on a kind of socratic dialogue level of challenging me it's fine for you to challenge me it's fine for you to ask me like oh well wouldn't you feel terrible if there was something like you about this but my answer is no i think that's something that would be really helpful for me i think it's something that's really helpful for my ex-wife i think it's helpful for basically everyone i've known who could go through frankly sorry uh i could talk about my own father here also my father is now deceased but it would have been helpful for him to see himself on video and to be in my father's case one of the main things to do is confront him with the extent to which he's lying it's very hard someone who's a liar a habitual liar to sh to prove their dishonesty to them is very difficult they'll insist you and my father excuse me he didn't sit you know i never said that or i said this instead i had my father i'm sure one of the times my father broke down weeping i remember he always insisted me that he'd never broken down like he never cried in front of me it's psychotic what can i do let me say that's who he really is [Laughter] my father didn't have a mental health problem okay that that's who he really was you know um he's someone who would lie to your face and say that he'd never broken down weeping and he really you know he lied about everything and you know it would be so valuable with someone like that if you could have videotape and then go back oh no but look this is what you said five years ago this is what you said five months ago whatever it is and look what you're saying now look how different your memory of it is or what you're saying now can you see the problem can you admit yourself what's going on [Music] you know we've got to scale this up so far i've been talking about one-on-one face-to-face relationships you know my relationship with my ex-wife my relationship with my father and i don't know anything about your relationship with aaron daniel i just don't know uh i assume daniel wanted this all to be private so i've been treated as private he now tells me that he is quote the king of social media that he is quote a multi-preneur that he's hired by big companies i don't know what he does on the internet but apparently he he says he's a big famous person on social media interesting to hear so and he's invited me he's encouraged me to share all of our email correspondence publicly which i'm not gonna do uh because i think that could be harmful to you daniel and i think it could be harmful to aaron janus also just being wrong with you and also i don't even know what's true and what's false and what should be me i know what's true in the emails i write i can share my emails because i know i'm telling the truth you know no offense but anyone can write to me on the internet and claim they know aaron janus i can't uh i can't verify that way okay so so far i've just talked about one-on-one relationships including the unknown relationship between daniel and aaron but we're assuming daniel is some guy who is somehow trying to counsel or help aaron as a friend aaron janus is a political leader and she's been a political leader in several different movements so daniel i don't know if you're aware of aaron's period of trying to be a political leader in the atheist movement specifically in the anti-christian atheist movement [Music] not just the vegan movement we also have this example of the of the atheism now you also have you know her career and involvement in in music you know just digress to say here you know i remember talking to erin years ago and she told me that she really regards prince the recording artist prince the artist formerly known as prince that she regarded prince as a kind of uh hero as someone she compared herself to so much she felt she had a lot in common with you know um and i didn't say this to her at the time but i thought wow i wonder if she's like aware that prince was this extremely eccentric guy but and you know also prince was very messed up about religion by the way and you know but he managed to be successful and should really get ahead of music despite these eccentricities i remember wondering did she choose prince as a kind of role model as an example someone who was a successful musician while coping with you know um eccentricities uh shall we say you know if you take the view that there aren't two different people called aaron janus one of whom is mentally healthy and one of whom millionaire if you just accept all of this behavior as one of the same person and say that's who she really is footnote she can change if if you knew me when i was 18 all right i had a lot of aberrant behavior 18 it's disappeared from my life but that's who i really was i was an 18 year old struggling with all the problems i had and i i did progress i did change but it wasn't wasn't there were two different people there one of whom was traumatized or bitten by a snake or in some kind of altered state of mind i'm almost was the real me you know it's it's all the real me okay if you take all this behavior together all this evidence together you accept this is who she really is you know what maybe she can be a successful musician maybe she can be a successful artist and maybe you daniel maybe you can love her and support her in that and you know in a completely non-medical sense of the word crazy there were a lot of crazy people in the recording recorded music industry you can be pretty crazy and and you know you can be very eccentric or a little bit crazy and you can do fine in in the music industry i i had one friend i'm just gonna choose to not say who this is and he was actually getting into radio broadcasting long story he had a history of being a drug addict and i remember saying to him positively to to encourage him i said well you know you've chosen to go into one of the few industries where a huge percentage of people have a history with cocaine like a huge your co-worker and your boss whether or not they call themselves an addict or a recovered addict those people are not afraid of cocaine and they won't be afraid to work with you so he was getting into uh radio production radio broadcasting whatever you want to say didn't last [Laughter] it's another long story what actually what actually happened that guy um but you know of course there are plenty of lines of work where instead being a little bit eccentric being a little bit crazy or having a history with cocaine and that guy's good well that would be a huge insuperable problem okay but whatever you guys are gonna do together you know what i mean it has to start from that acceptance of this is who you really are and i think even that notion that that you can change it doesn't make sense without first that that acceptance um [Music] aaron janus has been one of the most famous the most highly funded the most influential leaders in the vegan movement in the last 10 years you use a round number okay now people have worked with aaron people have started projects with aaron people have donated money to support aaron people have received update emails from her talking about film projects and music projects and political projects things related to veganism and by the way i assume i could repeat all this again with her involvement in the atheist movement or anti-christian movement you know uh you know but that side of it i don't know as much about but uh i have had emails from people who tried to work with aaron janis and try to support her and were disappointed because of her unreliability and her eccentricity so okay so daniel i know you don't sympathize with my point of view but within the vegan movement it is really important that people see aaron for who she really is you know maybe she could have a wonderful future as a recording artist you know as a creative artist you know whether or not she's a musician i mean it's not the only role he can have in the in the music world you know maybe she can have a great career that way you know maybe the world would be a better place if donald trump had become a game show host and had just continued working as a game show host okay maybe the world would be a better place if people had known who donald trump really was and he had never made the transition from reality tv game show host to politician so i i'm of the opinion that donald trump is morally a bad person and to say he's eccentric or unreliable donald trump how crazy is donald trump on a scale of one to ten okay i don't think it's a problem for donald trump to be a game show host for him to work in entertainment i'm not trying to to get him fired from that job we're trying to get him banned from being a game show host right when donald trump made the transition to a role of political leadership people really needed to know who he was intellectually ethically and emotionally okay so daniel i know fat email back forth i know you don't sympathize my point of view what i'm saying here but part of what i do on my youtube channel is to look at people like donald trump and to look at people who are less famous but within veganism much more important like dr greger neil bernard dr neil bernard those are just two examples i'm choosing and they say look this is who this guy really is i've found examples of dr greger lying about what is in peer-reviewed medical research and i take that it's not to hurt dr greger personally it's not it's not for some emotional or psychological reason and i show my audience look if he's willing to lie about this how do you know when this guy's telling the truth really think about it really think about who this person is neil bernard same story i wish i could sit here and tell you i have a ton of intellectual respect for neil bernard i don't and i've caught him lying i've caught him being really dishonest now he may tell the truth nine times out of ten but i don't i don't know and when you know someone's unreliable that way you know someone's dishonest that way that matters politically it matters then veganism and i would say what if you were part of the catalan independence movement you were part of the political movement to make catalonia into a separate country these kinds of questions may be about people who have fewer views on youtube than aaron janus like maybe people who just have a few thousand views it may really matter to examine who the political leaders are who the political voices are intellectually ethically emotionally say look this is who this person really is okay uh i've never gotten like a lot of email defending aaron janus i've got to tell you i i haven't i've gotten emails from people saying hey thanks i really appreciate that you stood up and said what you said about aaron after they had their own negative experiences with her um but i know a few people have written to me basically just expressing incredulity that they can't believe this is who aaron really is they can't take my word for it or they can't take my my critique of her seriously i understand that okay there's a sense in which i think my ex-wife will never be able to believe how abusive she was toward me because she hasn't seen it on tape i think my father was never able to believe how much he lied to me because he didn't see anything people lie to themselves about their behavior people lie to themselves i think it's very powerful and very meaningful to be able to show someone the recording and say look this is what you really said this year or anything they see the tone they hear the tone of their voice and see the look in their eyes they see how angry they are they see whatever whatever the situation might be okay so daniel um i know it's inconvenient for you and uh you know i don't really even believe you disagree with me i don't think you perceive me as crazy you've made this guy has accused me of being a coward wrong answer then he accuses me of not having any empathy and wrong answer there's a lot of empathy in all these videos i have empathy for all these people i have empathy for my ex-wife terrible human being i loved her i supported her for years terrible human being i got empathy for her my parents are both terrible human beings i got empathy for them i do i know what's wrong with them i know what's right with them you know we can talk about it with total detachment i can say this doesn't mean i don't have i don't have empathy right um daniel i don't think you actually perceive me as a coward or as a psychopath or someone with no empathy or anything else i think you don't even disagree with the argument i'm presenting here i think it's just inconvenient for you and you're willing to say anything to try to twist my arm into deleting those videos and i can empathize with your position too but by the same token whereby i'm here saying um it would be so meaningful for any of these people themselves to see the videotape it'd be meaningful for aaron herself to watch the video and so on on some level you know my audience would never believe me if i just gave a description of aaron janice's behavior there is no way i could describe this in poetry or prose that would ever get across what can be communicated so effectively so efficiently in just a few minutes of primary source videotape of this person showing you who they really are and daniel based on your messages you're not vegan if i'm wrong i'm wrong but based on what you bring to me you seem to be telling me that you're not vegan you don't care about the vegan moment you probably don't care about politics in cambodia you probably don't care about politics in laos you probably don't care about politics in uh catalonia a lot of places around the world right i just want you to take a moment to imagine veganism as if it's a foreign country it's a small poor powerless foreign country but the future of veganism means so much to me i care about it so much and i actually think it's important for the whole world on the larger scale and i think it's important for the quality of life and for the meaning of life for the meaning in life of individual people like i think it matters on the largest scale and on the smallest scale you know so profoundly that yeah i think it's genuinely worthwhile to come here on camera and say look this is who you think james aspie is but here's who he really is okay this is who you think freely is this you think durianrider is this is who they really are let's face up to who the leaders of this movement have been people like malcolm x you know they weren't always famous other people made them famous people donated money to support them and invited them to sit on stage you know today the process is much more transparent on social media you can see the process whereby someone like aaron janus is plucked up from obscurity and someone donated a lot of money to have a billboard campaign and all across los angeles on huge billboards was aaron janice's face promoting her youtube channel and her youtube video you tell me the cost estimate of that one advertisement came in how aaron janus rose to a position of power and authority is actually much easier to say than the step-by-step process whereby malcolm x became a major influential political leader in the united states okay think about how different life in the united states of america today would be if it had been someone other than malcolm x who'd played that same role who'd taken on the same position i'm not going to digress here into the critique of malcolm x if you don't know it's dark mohandas gandhi some people call him mahatma what if it had been some other lawyer geez god he was a terrible person i'm sorry both regarding a religious sense who he was a religious eccentric ethically terrible human being unbelievably awful influence on the political history of india both these cases i know you may not have even read the wikipedia article let alone done research into exactly the kind of shocking and horrifying things about these people that are not in the wikipedia article well i you know even looking at gandhi's sex life you know it's not i'm not condemning him or cancelling him just for that reason that'll start to tell you something i'll start to show you some of the cracks in the facade okay um i know in the short term daniel and you're you're probably upset by this too because if your email is telling the truth you're involved with aaron you're actually spending time sitting with her and so i know i empathize i do you know i don't think history is made by abstract ideas i think that history is made by women and men and visibly or invisibly we choose who those people are we place our trust in them and the vegan movement has accomplished nothing in the last five years because we trusted the wrong people