Activism & Ambition: Advice Nobody Wants to Hear [Ep. 002]

hey what's up I got a question from a
guy named Robert in Germany and Robert is asking me about methods of effective activism this is not the first time I've talked about this topic if you're vegan if you're arrested in political action of any kind in the 21st century this is the video for you hope you stick with me I also hope you click on the video I uploaded just two days ago that has Gandhi in the title it's called vegan activism Gandhi and direct action everywhere I think that's the video that Robert is responding to yesterday I uploaded a much more popular video that's talking about diet and exercise but really that video talking about Mohandas Gandhi the politics of the liberation struggle in India concepts of non-violence and protest that is really a more important and more meaningful video for you to see I can say that without knowing who you are in terms of talking about the issues that bring people this channel I don't think anyone comes to this channel because they think I'm good looking or for diet advice I mean no one's tuning in to watch me do yoga in revealing clothes I not a lot of special effects not a light Ament value but we are talking about some of the issues that I know are haunting for a large number of vegans and just politically sensitive engaged people on a daily basis whether you connect to animal rights ecology or maybe you're advocating for another foreign political change okay so Robert wrote to me from Germany and the first and most fundamental thing that he communicates to me in this message although I'm not quoting it directly is that during the last year he's been participating in a number of protests some of them resemble the methods used by direct action everywhere and now that group direct action everywhere are actually setting up an organization in his town and he has the feeling that these protests are not effective and are a waste of his time and he's been listening to discussions such as my own and a few other YouTube channels questioning what is effective activism anyway what are the ways we should engage with these issues and promote them and so on I never be honest with you my channel is almost unique and talked about this stuff which is sad I'm not saying that to insult anyone else but what you get is a lot of cheerleading and you don't get a lot of practical discussion of the questions of how do we actually bring about these changes in the world I made a video quite a few months ago I made some videos talking about what Western vegans have been doing in Thailand lately in Chiang Mai Thailand and then in response to questions I got from viewers I started talking in more detail in an applied way about what difference can you make what difference could these people make the people who already were living and working in Thailand who were already part of this this movement this social phenomenon of having the Thai fruit festival over here and so on and I made that video it's not just because I got the emails because I knew even though the number of people who watched my comments it wasn't a huge number of people but I know that it reached exactly the right people I knew that my commentary had actually hit the target market of the people who were in Chiang Mai who were organizing these festivals and who had the capacity to make a positive difference and since then that discussion of method even though in some ways it may be boring because it's getting into precise questions of what difference can we make and how can we make it I've heard back from people many months later who said you know what that stuff you said I still think about it it still stays with me I'm still thinking about how I can make a difference and whether I should be doing some of the things you said in that video instead of doing what I'm doing now on a really basic level Robert to address the guy who sent me this message on a basic level what I would advise you to do is to never disregard that feeling the feeling that your time is being waste the feeling that this is kind of weird the feeling that what you're doing with this group doesn't really make sense it may not be an entirely rational feeling it may just be a matter of an emotional response to what's going on around you but that is normally the beginning of a rational process that challenges the power that a group has over you I'm not saying this because I think that being an isolated individual is the best way to bring about political change it's not you want to get into organizations you want to move in a group you want to be able to organize and motivate more people and you yourself may want to receive organization and motivation by the people it's a wonderful thing but yeah that feeling you get that maybe standing in front of the airport and shouting at strangers fur is murder hands off animals 100 million cows die every year these are examples he gives in his message maybe this is not effective maybe this is kind of weird or kind of counterproductive even if it's just a feeling yeah hold on to that don't suffocate it don't silence it and then follow up the way that he's evidently doing by trying to engage in some kind of productive questioning and critique and coming to new solutions but before you come to new solutions you're going to come to new understandings of the nature of the problem what is effective activism to digress only slightly one of the reasons why I have so much contempt for the people who resort to violence and the people who glamorize violence such as terrorism such as I know trying to burn down and slaughterhouses trying to blow things up one of the reasons why I have so much contempt for that is precisely that approach fails to go through a process a dialectical process in the old-fashioned sense of really trying to understand what the situation is that I can give big examples of this and I can give small I remember being at an ecological product protest in Toronto where the protest was illegal because of where it was located by a number of meters and when I said to the organizers basically the loudest and most obnoxious people there who considered themselves the leaders although nobody there right now their leadership I said to them look you know where you're protesting it blocks traffic and at least hypothetically it actually blocks an ambulance lane it's not worth describing but in that part of Toronto there are several hospitals clustered together and there's more than one way for the ambulances to get in behind the hospitals and so when one way already has an ambulance in it they come in another way so it's not it's not every five minutes the nebulas past there but it was if you just looked at the signs and looked at where thought that was obvious so you're having an illegal protest that the police have to confront you're forcing the police to kick you out and if we had the porters just over there was not even walking it a few metres you know there's a big concrete area over there where this protest would be a hundred percent legal and where the police would be on your side oh and the response to that this is really Canadian this is really downtown Toronto this is what english-speaking white Anglo people in Canada like the response to that was for them to insult me yell at me and tell me that I was a cop that I must be an undercover cop to be saying this my suggestions were hockey percent practical this may seem like an absurd question of efficacy in activism but in some ways it's typical it's showing the difference between people who just think of activism as an emotional outpouring who maybe have an image of street protests from newsreel footage from the 1970s maybe it's from watching movies I don't know that glamorizes the act of standing and screaming on street corner as if it were the apogee of I don't as if it were the fulcrum on which the world turned and as if this is the way great changes in the world's history are brought about and it almost never is that kind of protest really unless it's bringing together people of other aspirations other ways to cooperate other ways to achieve things is almost a complete waste of your time the main effect of street protest is really just to reward the interest of the people who are participating it almost never reaches an audience outside of itself outside of the participants so in that sense we have a separate word for that really what you're doing is holding a rally and in a lot of ways having a rally on a street corner is less effective than having a conference in a building where people can really talk really start to set up other forms of cooperation and so on if you really want do something on the street I'm gonna use an example from South Korea but this is true of many many countries in Europe too you know in South Korea the government actually has designated areas on the street where you can reserve time once a month I think you could do it once a week or something but it's it's limited you're not supposed to be there every day you can reserve time once a month every month and then you're allowed on that street corner to sell things like you know someone might set up a used book stand or a food stand you're allowed to preach your religion you're allowed to play musical instruments you're allowed to play music and try to raise money or promote your band and part of the point is you know the government doesn't want you to be a constant nuisance but for a certain number of hours of the day once a month you can have that spot in Seoul Korea and the government gives you the permission to do that so in contrast to screaming at people this is just one example to get you to illustrate the the types of strategic issues I'm talking about imagine if you had just five vegans to cooperate who set up a stand selling pancakes I'm not even talking about free pancakes and you know why I say five people so there's one guy is gonna be mixing the ingredients in a bowl he's probably gonna have to come back and forth to the site to bring pancake batter there may be two people working at a grill of actually making the pancakes there's gonna be one person handling the money and talking to people you could make vegan pancakes and you can include with it the information look I know you think that pancakes have to be made with eggs and milk but they don't there's another way to live and we can make fabulous pancakes Kevin with you and they're vegan now what information you include with that I mean the ultimate way of imparting information is a cereal box you know boxed cereal when you were a kid you would read everything on the back of the cereal box and what did you know that have cartoons or information when I was growing up if there was health information if there was historical information in the back of a cereal box I'd read it all you know the packaging you use to give people takeaway pancakes you could probably provide a hell of a lot of information about Venus in there but apart from the guilt trip like apart from showing people imagery or communicating how terrible the egg industry is apart from communicating a terrible the dairy industry is that stuff is important but what you really need to communicate our aspirations what you really need to communicate our ambitions about what you're trying to accomplish this is one of the greatest failings of street protests because the aspiration of a street protest is just have a street protest the aspiration of disruption and DX's method is disruption look I am simplifying you can click on my channel I've had a series of in-depth videos talking about DXE gyration everywhere their methodology history of the musician so please do not say I'm oversimplifying of more than half an hour of video already really talking in depth about that organization the theory and method of what they're doing ambition is the crucial difference between a group of hippies just throwing a party in Thailand and wasting their time and the beginnings of meaningful political or if you were getting together with that group of five people to make vegan pancakes your ultimate ambition your aspiration is not just to make pancakes if you do that once a month just 12 times a year for one thing you're gonna create tremendous coherence with a group of five people who are actually making the pancakes can be a really meaningful thing it takes only a certain amount of time out of their lives but you've got to have some ambitions what might those ambitions be it's gonna be different for different types of people I don't know what kind of person Robert is if he's someone who's you know basically into writing and publishing maybe you want to produce an annual magazine right why does the magazine exist not really for outreach but at a minimum you publish something once a year maybe when you're older you get to look back on that and say okay you know this magazine really brought together the people who are interested in I don't know veganism animal rights ecology whatever the list of issues are that that activate you maybe it's something in that direction if you were into the theater I mean theatre can lead to activism a difference you're into filmmaking can lead to activism of different kinds if you really have the level of education and organization and just durable engagement with the local scene there's so much you can do legally through City Hall politically this is also why again I have so much contempt for the the terrorist approach to animal rights there are always these kind of weak points in the legal system that allow you to challenge profound issues through trivial violations of the law so you know the trucks that carry the cows to the slaughter you can figure out that those trucks are going over bridges and the bridges are actually it's not legal for that truck to go over that bridge because the truck is too heavy or too wide or something okay that may sound trivial if you're in a country like Germany that has a good quality of rule of law good legal system so on that gives you something you can challenge you can bring to court and of course it can have a devastating effect short term on the local industry where you're saying look this industry is breaking the law and it's not legal for them to be shipping the animals and the way they're doing it now you're not challenging that in court or in Parliament or whatever your system is you're not challenging that because you want the industry to use smaller trucks that's not the point at all of course the point is ultimately veganism animal rights ecology etc etc there are all these other issues I used this not because it's an especially moving example it's an especially meaningless example but those really are the opportunities if you have people you can work with who are lawyers if you have people you work with who really understand local political processes you can take advantage of the democratic aspects of local government to challenge the norms of how the meat industry operates and yes that'll be covered in the newspapers and yes that'll bring public attention to you but moreover the public attention it brings will be people who respect you people say oh these are intelligent organized people it won't be the kind of attention you get by looking like a maniac standing on the street corner just screaming slogans alright I mean not all attention is equal direct action everywhere every plant are very proud of themselves every time they get into the newspapers look at what the newspapers say the newspapers say these people are a bunch of idiots well you got attention you can feel proud of that but that's not the same attention you gave say oh you know this group of organized people they're bringing a legal challenge on these grounds etc I remember there were some legal cases like that in Ireland pertaining to the bombing of Iraq where they found you know technical things that were illegal about Ireland's participation in the war basically because Ireland had not gone through the democratic process of actually declaring war like their government the parliaments hadn't had a proper debate and you know they hadn't democratically declared war in Iraq and so it was technical things like when a truck was moving bombs between two different Air Force bases within Ireland in order to bomb Iraq it was like well this actually violates Irish law and your opinion in law because you know you guys didn't really have a democratic process it was something like them so that's it that's a vague memory but I got to tell you beginning middle and end that sort of thing can really be a very meaningful form of activism in terms of how it motivates and organized the people around you uh now all of these examples actually are assuming a pretty positive situation like even that example I said work in Korea working Europe having five people cooperating to make pancakes but then you're making the pancakes and you're communicating aspiration and ambition not just self-indulgence not just a vacation in Thailand that you have other ambitions in mind and you've got to decide as a group what those are it cetera a lot of us are not in a position where we even have five people we can trust to cooperate with right people who are competent people who are containing five people like that even for something like a magazine so it's not that high pressure it's hard I think if things are hard all over um when I lived in Saskatchewan I thought I did a lot of research what kind of activism I could do there what kind of political activity I could be involved with at that time in that place and my conclusion was that the only form of activism really opened to me was actually prison activism was to get involved with education within the jail system and I didn't know what idiom to use you want to talk about that as a weak link in the chain it was an opportunity an opportunity to do something positive and again what that leads you into I met with and talked with people who already were prison activists there I was figuring out how how the whole mechanism of government worked what the opportunities were and you know the last time I lived in England that was relatively brief I was living in Cambridge England likewise there I met and talked with one guy he was a prison activist slash prison educator and I was looking at doing that there but at that time so I now I have no religion identify as an atheist as a nihilistic atheist I openly describe myself as an X bonus and a nihilist um but back when I was living in England I was looking at prison education partly because I still identified as a Buddhist back then and there was this opportunity for talking about non-violence and providing reading materials and getting into the prison system through Buddhism so again these are not best-case scenarios life in Saskatchewan is really difficult and depressing in many different ways but when I was looking at the range of issues I cared about and how I could make a difference that was what I discovered at that time that was what seemed viable to me and I had to make that decision as someone working alone because I realized there was nobody there was not even one other person I could cooperate with or rely on I had to work totally alone in Saskatchewan it was like well the prison system is an opportunity for me as one isolated intellectual to make a pause the difference is still today here I'm living in Victoria west coast of Canada I'm still totally alone my options are still very very limited but in some ways situation here is less bleak than Saskatchewan now again I'm veganism is not the only issue I'm talking about here when I was living in Saskatchewan I cared a lot about First Nations First Nations is our way of saying our indigenous people in Canada and in the United States they say American Indians I was interested specifically in First Nations languages so trying to prevent the languages from going extinct language education I was interested in politics connected to those issues so veganism is not the only thing that motivates me in life whoever you are watching this video you have to be aware of what your issues and motivations are what range of things would organize people around you or that you would engage with in organizing others so the original question from Robert it kind of wraps up by saying how do I find out what the right activism is for me I've just described in a whole bunch of examples the type of complex research and decision-making process that I think we all have to engage in and you have to engage in it again again every time you move to a new city it doesn't end there isn't one set of answers even for you as an individual that's gonna last for your whole life if I just move within Canada to another city the answers are difficult for me and if you've watched this channel you know in the past I lived in Hong Kong I lived in Cambodia I lived in Laos the type of political activism I could do in each of those places was totally different when I was in Laos I cared a lot about ecology Laos is a communist dictatorship there's no democratic rights for anyone nobody has the right to have a street protest in Laos and you you really will be put in prison if you have a street protest that was a situation then but one type of activism I could engage in was actually writing articles one article I wrote was translated into Thais as publishing ability in English and it was intentionally written in a way so that it could reach the audience of communist government officials of people in power because those are the people I wanted to influence you know other things I did in Laos involved working for an NGO that handed out sacks of rice to starving people you can call that activism or not it is what it is so I just say in the old-fashioned sense this is dialectic you could say peripatetic to use another philosophy term these are questions you're gonna ask again and again just walking around talking to people and collecting conflicting pieces of information to put together a bigger picture and understand the situation you're in the ultimate constraints are time and manpower I mentioned you know getting together with friends and cooking pancakes once a month do you really have the time for that some people do some people don't what about manpower do you actually have four or five friends who can collaborate you that's such a simple project right but now start thinking through in your mind all the requirements there are financial acquirements you probably need one of those portable tent setups that Street vendors have you're gonna somebody's going to need to invest in either renting or owning a grill is whole checklist things probably if you live in a western country you've got to learn about the health and hygiene standards because you can't make and sell food without complying with public safety standards so the time and energy to get set up is considerable right and now right away through our relations of hierarchy if it's one guy who invests all the money in that and to invest the time in learning the the procedures and who maybe buys all the packaging and prints up the leaflets or the text on the packaging talking about veganism or whatever issues they are so is that guy now self-appointed dictator for the project how the other people feel about that and cut this is not I'm critical of flaws mon coeur this is not a problem I have I'm really aware of relationships of authority even when they're informal but we have vegan groups here in Victoria and exactly the people in charge are the people who are most deceived who are most unaware who are the most sleepwalking about the fact they are running a little miniature dictatorship and that like one guy and his girlfriend make all the decisions for what that vegan group is gonna do and nobody else you know even when the the questions are purely meant to be helpful purely meant to be trying to make an effective use of time where that can't creep in so but you know in this case in a sense it's justified if one person has put all the money and so how is that going to be organized how is that going to work even though that's such a simple example these are all the complexities they'll into it and all the questions that cannot have been again there's a whole other category of questions here that I have I have addressed in relatively old videos and videos from like more than a year ago do you have it in your heart to really cooperate with people who have deep differences from you if you're left-wing can you cooperate with someone who's conservative they're conservative but they agree with you about vivisection veganism there are right-wing people who care a lot about you know forest preservation wood habitats if you're if you're little movement is mostly about preserving the forest you're gonna have a mix of left-wing people and right-wing people I'm an atheist can I cooperate with Christians will Christians cooperate with me you know even at the level of organizing just five people together all of these things come to the floor and again this is why I don't have sympathy for the violent protesters because they are they are basically avoiding all these questions and I also really don't have sympathy for just standing on the street street and screaming at people this kind of disruptive activism because really you're creating the illusion of solidarity you're creating the illusion of a massive well-organized movement but the reality is you have ten different people who are all holding a sign and and do you really have a sense do you really appreciate how deeply divided those people are ones left-wing ones right-wing ones Hindu ones Christian whatever you know the meaninglessness of that formal protest the masks that people wear sometimes a literal mask but sometimes the figurative mask and making herself into an anonymous automaton standing and screaming at people in the street I think that's really very misleading and instead what I want is both to meaningfully engage with the other people who make up my movement even if it's just five people making pancakes five people making a magazine but maybe it's five people organizing to get a lawyer and bring a legal challenge of some kind and I also want to engage in a meaningful way with the general public and if you're doing something respectable whether it's the legal challenge or the pancakes you'll find that members of the public people who are not vegan are people who don't care about your issues or people who don't think they care about issues they are going to respect you and engage with you in a much more meaningful way than if you're just someone who's disrupting traffic someone who's disrupting their dinner someone who's just making their life uncomfortable at the airport for 15 minutes for no good reason so finally I've said this this type of analysis of your situation ultimately you're looking for opportunities that will be unique I live on an island it's called Vancouver Island but it's not part of the City of Vancouver Vancouver City and Vancouver Island are two separate things on this island there's an opportunity because this is one of the last parts of Canada where cows are still slaughtered using a shotgun we don't have slaughterhouses here and for local economic reasons we can't well we don't the meat industry does not ship cows back and forth between the island and the mainland on the mainland there are big industrialized slaughterhouses but here the slaughter of animals is not industrialized so from my perspective that's a huge opportunity for activism you could do friendly activism you could just get out and interview these guys these guys who literally shoot animals in the head with a shotgun you could film the process but you know I mean unlike an enclosed industrialized slaughterhouse the fact that here it's out in the middle of a field and it's still kind of amateur and so on for a filmmaker for an activist even if you're not confrontational but at all to just get out there and interview these guys and say hey from your perspective what's the meaning of life I think that's a huge opportunity and wherever you're living based on the legal circumstances the geographical circumstance situation the meat industry there are going to be unique opportunities that you can take advantage of - and if not you got to be honest to yourself I've said in the past and I still say now what I'm doing on YouTube is not activism at best you can call this digital activism what I'm doing right now I think of as the same as going to a coffee shop and having a conversation with a bunch of strangers I'm reaching many more strangers this way than I would at any local coffee shop but to me this is not activism but right now in my life this is all that's possible for me I have pressure on me to finish this University diploma to start earning money to start supporting my daughter I have family pressure economic pressure or educational pressure I have I have a really limited scope of options but still when I first moved here I really did try to meet up with cooperate with and collaborate with the local vegans the local vegan organizations and so on but the reality for me living in my circumstances is that it's really a complete waste of my time to take 3 hours and go to a picnic with the local vegan folks here even though I've done that I've wasted the 3 hours doing that I'm not gonna do it again and this comes back to the late motif of ambition I'm not even going to tell you that the local vegans here are bad people it's not the point it's not my perspective but whatever if they don't have the ambition to make something happen then I can't work with them even if they're the greatest people in the world and I'm really limited in the time money and effort I can devote to it so right now taking these circumstances all together the human circumstances legal circumstances the best I can do is sit here on YouTube and talk to you but as I say at every stage of my life wherever I was living whatever my job was whatever my situation was I was always trying to analyze that situation to figure out what is the answer for me now in terms of how I can be effective in political activism forget the word activism what's the way I can be effective in terms of political action