Patreon Question: Cosmopolitanism & Gaining "Perspective" Through Travel.

got a reasonably deep and profound
letter here that I'm probably gonna have a fairly brief and she'll a response to but I appreciate all this kind of email I'm sorry if the lighting is strobing in and out I'm doing the best I can you know Morty's on vacation the regular lighting tech isn't here we got a bunch of interns from the kunming school of video production helping out at a bottle sale Broadcasting Network I don't know what it is but hey hopefully you're not here for the video quality and strobe lighting effects the letter goes as folks this is from one of my many patreon supporters thank you people who pay one dollar a month to eat this kind of content being created and by the way that one dollar a month it may not sound like much money to you if you live in a scenic southern Texas where the cost of living is very high but it is actually a lot of money to me because I live in couldn't make China where my salary is abysmal Ehlo okay so the letter goes as follows my wife is starting a vegan food stall with a view to a cafe slash diner in the future she a pretty she appreciated your remarks in the recent video on short-term versus long-term goals in veganism etc so that video I think was uploaded yesterday I'm wondering if you could offer advice on what I'd call quote the acquisition of perspective close quote a lot of your videos seem to draw heavily from past experiences and the perspective those experiences give you for some of us living in one country working in one industry knowing only one major religion in your area etc etc can really inhibit your ability to have a worldly perspective not to say that permanent vacation as' are somehow wiser lol but I hope you know what I mean I don't think it's reasonable to tell everyone to live overseas for a time so there has to be an alternative for me personally I'm acutely aware of examples where I lack perspective indigenous history and issues in Australia for example I care deeply about them but I'm not well-versed in them I can fix that and I've been working on that lately my next book my next-door neighbors are an indigenous family exclamation point deforestation in Southeast Asia though where the would I start a lot of the well-rounded useful knowledge and perspective on issues like that really can't come from Google skills he says I feel but I'm open to disagreement end of sentence thought that was the middle of the sentence that was the end of the sentence he's open to disagreement I could go on with examples but I think quote the acquisition of perspective in pursuit of improving your knowledge and reasoning on specific topics and on old topics is pretty universally important well thank you thank you for giving me a question that is so meaningful and substantive that I'm now going to embarrass myself by giving you a relatively short and catty answer and I'm wearing the worst t-shirt for this - right it's yeah yeah yeah the t-shirt um yeah so look I'm gonna be a hundred percent honest with you because that's my that's my steez um you can meet people who've been all around the world and they come back just as ignorant as they were when they started on the journey right it's depressing and soul-crushing but it's true and maybe that is one of the things you only learn by actually going out and traveling around the world in person you might assume the people who are worldly that people who have those tremendous experiences whether in business or in tourism or otherwise that they you know inevitably they become wiser or they get a more balanced and profound appreciation for what life is nothing could be further from the truth very often I mean this is one of those things where you only you only see you only see things when you're willing to see them you only tend to you know recognize what is you're looking for I mean I'll use an example that came up in a recent video in my video that was fairly popular about the use of soap there was this guy who disagree with me on that who believed in so-called natural hygiene who a man who even who refused to use soap and his evidence to support his view of the world was that when he was in India he said the the peasants in India the poor people in India they don't use soap and they're all healthy all the time they don't have any health problems now you mentioned here the contrast to Google skills you could very rapidly and easily Google skills discover exactly what health problems people have in rural India poor peasants have or poor people in general have an India right Google skills could reveal that immediately going to the library book learning could give you that kind of background very quickly and easily but you'd have to know to ask the question you'd have to know why it mattered you have to know that you were that you were interested ask the question and in the other hand somebody can go to India and do humanitarian work and leave amongst the poor and help the poor and hand out sacks of rice to the poor and never see the problem they they can just go there wanting to believe that India is paradise maybe a spiritual paradise maybe for some other reason they're attached to a glory glamorized glorified notion of of what indian society is supposed to be and they don't see it at all by the same token people can travel around Laos and not see any of the problems with drug addiction it's just a very typical example they think these people are innocent and pure because they're living in poverty and therefore they don't have a bunch of drug addicts going from downtown and they do it allows the whole country has serious problems drug addiction um not surprising they're human beings too etc etc but if you're not looking for it in a sense it's not even there to be seen I had a report quite a detailed research on hiv/aids as I recall this is from memory but at the peak of the hiv/aids epidemic in pnom Penh Cambodia the capital city of Cambodia one out of four police officers contracted HIV AIDS it was quite a short period of time but this office is decimated the police force everyone in the police force at that time right wanted a job in government they would have known somebody that would have met somebody who contracted AIDS and died of AIDS right now I'm sorry that statistic is from memory I could tell you the report that I got that from this detailed research very interesting um obviously you can go there and see none of this and on the other hand you can go there and only see a bad stereotype of what's going on you could go to Cambodia and think it's all violence and all poverty and all oppression you can go there and see none of these things so I mean what you're really getting at with this question is what is the relationship between empirical experience and research and learning and adapting your own perspective in the world now really the other ending that I have to tell here is one that I mentioned in passing a very long time ago but I do remember making the video and I remember actually sending the the link to my parents because it was one of my few videos in which I said something nice about my father overall I did not have very positive relation with my parents but one of the few things really wise things my father said to me when I was growing up he discussed with me his theory it's just his own little pet philosophy of the difference between attitudinal learning and factual learning learning and attitude towards the world and attitude towards facts and attitude towards experience as opposed to learning particular facts or having particular experiences these are two fundamentally different things and my father asked the question broadly how do we actually approach attitudinal learning right now the example he chose is an example that means a lot to me if you guys don't know I'm a former student of Cree in a jib way involved with First Nations politics languages it's the way I care about I'm not an expert but it's something I enrolled in a university program to study something I care about and it means a lot to me the example my father actually used at that time was Native Americans aka American Indians First Nations he said you know you can take someone and show them an archeological site you know the remains of a destroyed indigenous civilization do they learn particular facts do they learn what year this was built or what year it was destroyed or when the Europeans showed up and killed everybody is that what matters maybe what really matters is a shift in attitude of trying to get across the people these people lived here thousands of years ago their history matters they have their own history they have their own story to tell and it's important and meaningful in its own way right maybe what you're trying to that that's not even a fact you're just trying to get an attitudinal shift so that people who maybe showed up just with the stereotyped image that they had from cartoons or from primary school from their school education where they just imagine native people are sitting around a campfire with no civilization of their own to have a shift in attitude towards appreciating these people did have their own civilization and then again that can lead to people asking questions that can lead to people doing original research I guess I'll throw in a third anecdote that I think I've never told here before I remember exactly who it was who said that said I'm choosing not to say his name but I went to a lecture on a university campus and this guy I appreciated his his honesty and at least this this regard this anecdote many other things he said were dishonest but anyway this guy gave a long lecture and then there were questions in the audience at the end and in response to one of the questions the audience he said look when I was a kid I was a snob and he said I went up to a an elite Jesuit priest to ask this question because I didn't want to ask my local parish priest I didn't want to ask some local lowly representative the Catholic Church or one of this elite Jesuit highly respected and he had a PhD or something some celebrated scholars Bible and I asked very simply he was a child at the time he said how can I find God and the Jesuits answer was - laughs you know I assumed it was a very contented and happy laughter he laughed he put his hand on the child's shoulder and replied the fact that you are looking means that he has already found you now you guys know I'm not just an atheist I am a nihilistic atheist and I'm a nihilistic atheist that does not have much patience for the Catholic Church and its history of atrocities etc etc however I think it's very interesting that we could actually take that reflection and apply it to this question but deleting God from equation the fact that you're searching the fact that you're looking for God the fact that you're searching but it's not God we're talking about here that already is actually the most fundamental thing right that's exactly what you can't teach people that's what people can't learn when they buy the airplane ticket and they can't learn on the airplane and they can't learn when they get off the airplane and after they get off the airplane it doesn't matter if they go to the beach or they go to the Buddhist monastery if they didn't already have the question in a sense also to be honest if they didn't already have the methodology for how to find the answer how to search then they're gonna get nothing out of it all right so here's an answer that I'm absolutely certain I've never told the internet before um I got an email once from a guy and he was talking to me because he was interested in Buddhism and Buddhist philosophy and he had just made an extensive tour an extensive trip around Buddhist monasteries of Thailand and in his tour he asked one Buddhist monk after another at highly esteemed but foreign friendly monasteries what exactly does the Buddha say about emptiness what exactly is the Buddhist philosophy of no soul I think that was the whole question I think it was the whole question was what what exactly is the Buddhist teaching on this fundamental issue and nobody could give him an answer and he summarized for me discussed the the evasive answers that the different Buddhist monks gave him and some of the Buddhist monks or I guess many ultimately they've referred him to other Buddhist monks they said okay well I can't answer your question you can go to this other Buddhist monastery and ask this other Buddhist monk so in some ways this guy had a delightful vacation he went from one Buddhist monastery to another in Thailand asking the same philosophical question again and again what actually is the Buddha's teaching on emptiness and on no soul ie that there is no soul but another sense he had a very dissatisfactory vacation because nobody could answer his question and not even remotely cuz I'd like to gave the wrong answer none of the Buddhist monks felt confident to even do the google searching to put it that way and presented with something now given the whole context of the conversation how Ithaca by email I am actually hundred percent confident that he was really being honest with me he was describing ie was me he was naming the monasteries he went to and everything and his story in many ways it was entirely believable to me and I remember when I told this to a former Buddhist monk or retired but his monk because to me it was indicative of the level of textual ignorance ignorance of Scripture even in these supposedly elite Buddhist monasteries in Thailand I remember this this Buddhist ex Buddhist monk retired Buddhist monk said to me he said I don't believe it he said I don't believe the story he said there are so many Buddhist monks who know about you know that kind of but his philosophy and talk about it all the time and no it's not labeled me as I don't wrong because he didn't ask for the monks opinion he asked what is the Buddha's teaching on this he didn't ask for a sermon he didn't say can you improvise a lecture on philosophy to me the same way you would for a bunch of peasants in Thailand right he said I want to know what the Buddha actually said or what the Buddha actually taught on this issue and he asked in English he also wasn't asking in Thai which is probably in some ways more intimidating right that this guy actor has to go and get like a you know like a Bible score he's got to get the page number he's got to actually find out and none of them can do that that's what they can't do it's not that they can't you it's not that they can't improvise a lecture right so to me again this I'm sorry this may seem like a viewer very far off from the original question but in terms of this you know most fundamental matter of how do we gain perspective on things in this case you have to understand the question you have to understand who you're asking how you're asking where the information comes from and even the sets of methodology that are related to the answer now I recognize this is not the answer you were probably expecting from me I think most people would approach a question of this kind with a set notion that they had since childhood of what cultural sophistication means and most of us whether you grew up rich or poor or middle-class you probably had parents or grandparents or somebody inculcate into you this is what it means to be cosmopolitan this is what it means to be well-educated this is what it means to be sophisticated and maybe that involved listening to classical music or going to the ballet or reading Shakespeare or maybe it included traveling to France and Italy maybe it included traveling to Japan there was some list of places of things you should do maybe included seeing the pyramids in Egypt but maybe it just included going to some famous Museum in London or Paris maybe there was some schedule of things inculcated into you where you were told if you do this or if someone has done these things they are to be respected and esteemed as worldly and cosmopolitan and as having these kinds of attitudes but I think on a very deep level the whole direction I've taken in this answer reflects the fact I'm a nihilist I'm not just nihilistic in relation to organized religion it's not just that I reject the existence of the you know the judeo-christian God I reject all of these cultural assumptions to me that whole line of thinking is and it's poison and it's ultimately based on you know nationalism and I think it holds a lot of people back and I think every year people buy airplane tickets and buy books and buy library cards and I think they try to act out that kind of cultural programming they've received of what it means to be a refined person or a sophisticated person what it means to have that kind of perspective on the world but there is no such simple formula there is no such simple answer and in the same way that you know you can drive past the of poverty in your own neighborhood without ever noticing them the way you can ignore the epidemic of drug addicts in your own neighborhood you can also go to Thailand go to Laos go to Myanmar and ignore all the current social problems and you can go to really an ancient archaeological site and totally miss not just the significance of those remains regarded in isolation into themselves you can miss what the lesson is for you now living in the 21st century those are very very hard things to construe and very very hard things for me to speak about prescriptively but in your case for the guy asking this question you know he gives the example of deforestation in Southeast Asia I can be like that Jesuit priest and say hey the fact that you're asking the question means that you already have the most fundamental of answers the fact that you're searching means that you know the truth has already found you