The Nihilistic Approach to Humanitarian & Political Engagement.

I'm the last person to claim that my
YouTube content in any way reflects the desires or interests of my eyes however i do get intelligent questions from my supporters on patreon people who pay the one dollar a month to keep a valid CL Broadcasting Corporation rolling thank you I can genuinely say if it wasn't for 200 people giving the two hundred dollars this video right now would not be happening um and if you join patreon you get to talk to me and I reply via to hear back from me the only way to do that now because I've closed down the comments on this channel so I've got a question coming in here I've had a couple of really good philosophical questions coming in lately it opens by asking but framing the question in terms of the relationship between moral responsibility and work I'll come back to that so quote the guy writing is me it's named McGregor I just use first names and he gives that as his first name so McGregor showed it to you quote with regard to the problems of poverty for example you seem to be engaged at direct approach but having immerse yourself in a language and culture in order to understand the roots of poverty in that particular culture and helping to alleviate some of the problems directly by for example delivering food ly two right hands on humanitarian work etc likewise with veganism you advocate for a direct approach of building a political movement rather than a passive approach is simply choosing to be vegan close quote so interesting he is drawing a link between my approach to humanitarian work humanitarian research etc in the past and my current approach to the future of vegan activist interesting intelligent observation I think you can draw some dotted lines between the two but I think they're much more different than they are similar actually I think it's really a contrast in my life the way I now talk about engagement veganism and how I engage with humanitarian were in research in the Amana tarian sector too by the way in Laos Cambodia Thailand I tried to get involved in Myanmar never could for years trying to volunteer in the refugee camps on the Myanmar border by the way never worked out you spend a lot more time seeking and applying for that kind of work than you do actually doing it unless you have the money in the bank to start your own foundation to be your own CEO of a charity on a tiny scale um alright continuing here quote so my question is do you think that more passive approaches satisfy our responsibilities for example somebody has a particular career may decide that they can do more good by living frugally and donating money to the right causes do you think that this is right ? should somebody who's starting from the ground up consider this kind of stretch strategy which charities in particular do you think of the highest cost benefit ratio okay so this is an interesting question to me because it approaches these problems that we all face all of us has vegan sites all of us ask ourselves every day what kind of you make the world a better place whether you think of that in terms of the future of the vegan movement or you think of it in terms of helping particular animals or working with in particular institutions whatever your perspective on maybe we ask ourselves short term and long term tactically and strategically what can I do right and he is framing this in terms of the relationship between moral responsibility and work and I actually do not see it that way okay so the next part was questioned he raises this issue of that when I was interested in poverty when I was dressed in alleviating poverty in Laos or in Cambodia I went there I lived there I learned the language I studied the history the politics the culture you know a lot of stuff you learn from books you're not going to learn by talking to a farmer face-to-face but in the other hand what you learn from the books then that enrich a--'s that conversation of the farmer you get a lot more out of those interactions because you have the scholarly background and soon as I was studying ancient history as well as modern history and yeah when I was talking to farmers I was getting a lot more out of it than some other guy who may be with the American Peace Corps who just got off the airplane was no connection to the language history politics said okay however none of that fits into this framework of moral responsibility and work it doesn't even fit into the framework of outcomes you ask to go in the last sentence here in terms of cost-benefit ratio right cost-benefit ratio you can just have an airplane fly over Laos and dump food on them dump sacks of rice on you can just have an airplane favorite you can dump money on them you can drop gold coins out of an airplane not even land not even slow down and poor people will get less poor right you can do outcome evaluation research right if those are the only things that matter you can do fly by drive by charity with zero engagement personally like in terms of what I've just been describing my engage place and zero engagement institutionally you can remain completely alien and in many many cases there may be an argument that that's the most effective if the only thing that matters is taking a sack of rice and getting into the hands of starving people fly by a charity drive by anthropologie you know car window engagement with local people maybe that's going to win if you're just thinking about in terms of what we discharging your moral responsibility and in terms of outcomes measurable outcome evaluation right for me the ultimate product that I question and that I encourage you the viewer to question when you look in the mirror when you look at what you did with the last five years life and what you do it next let's join the ultimate product is not the sack of rice that you're handing out the product is you the question is who do you want to be who are you going to become and for a period of my life I was fashioning myself step by step to be a scholar and I guess a human rights activist and a humanitarian agent humanitarian worker who had a really meaningful engagement with reality in rural laos in modern cambodia both urban and rural right and you get to see those differences i mean it's not just speaking the language and it's not just hearing the language how you listen to the people it's how you understand what they're leaving unsaid what it is they're not comfortable admitting to you sensitivities for maybe what the real problem is you can go into a poverty-stricken village and they're telling you about every problem except the real problem that's that's breathing down the next that they're most terrified of that they can't admit to an outsider and if you stick around you know how to write the ask the right questions you notice your shut up and listen when it's time to be someone you can figure out what that is right i mean cultural sensitivity is not an end in itself right cultural sensitivity is a research tool ultimately and research is not in itself ultimately we do research not to understand the world but to change it no doubt right but I was becoming another person I was educating myself I was training myself I was preparing myself to play a much more effective role than for example and one of my enemies in Laos I wrote a report scathing scathing series of reports dealing with sexual abuse of poverty stricken and teenagers in small towns that experience seasonal starvation when visited that town 2 by the way the people there were not ethnically loud they were akka fascinating case study I can give the the links below this video I were two articles in that as ever call and those articles got picked up by the press in Europe it went all over the world it was a big scandal and I really was a crucial part of making it a big scandal of shining a spotlight on exactly what these charities were doing one of them was a Christian charity getting teenage girls pregnant and and so on and questions of statutory rape the girls are underage and even when it's not statutory rape if these people are starving and dependent on you in terms of your role as an officer and a charity and you're literally providing aid to people who are still poor enough for their experiencing seasonal starvation and so on isn't there an abuse of power dynamic here that you know between the foot of this way isn't this on humanitarian what's going on in situation so I remember when I was there that agency they were deeply embarrassed by the articles I wrote so they fired the guy who was in charge the agency they didn't fire they reassigned him to another office elsewhere and they installed a new guy as the head of the agency and he was a white Frenchman spoke French the first language he spoke a little bit of English he spoke zero lotion 0 ty had no ability in any local language and he had just been reassigned from his prestige posting in the Darfur region of Sudan so those of you who are old enough to remember for years and years that area of Sudan was always in the newspapers I think not so much in the last couple of years as an area of civil role war and looting and atrocities and human rights violations for many years in a row the Darfur region of Sudan Sudan is the country the news this guy just been doing humanitarian work in Sudan in Africa hey he's reassigned from Africa to Laos which is in Southeast Asia zerocool appreciation for the culture zero appreciation for political history zero engagement issues and look I'm not going to tell you did a bad job I'm sure he did a better job than the guy who was there before him who were what who you were placed but yeah no you know what actually I would like to tell you that he did a bad job actually i feel i do have precisely does information of what that situation was and his role in it and that scandal and how he tried to cover it up and the lies he spread no actually there are several really important ways you can say you did do a bad job he could have done the morally right thing and you chose to do the immoral thing so yeah but my judgments are immaterial the point is i did not want to play that role i did not want to be a technical expert who was an outsider which is plenty of in the humanitarian game there guys were they come in all they know although is water quality and they show up and they're going to work in some poverty-stricken village and help them improve the quality the dream water that's all they do they don't speak the language there anything with the politics that are that was not the role i was looking to play the expertise i wanted well we did what I wanted was not to bring in technical expertise from Canada and sell it to the lao people at bargain-basement prices what I wanted precisely was to gain expertise in Laos in the lao people in their politics history language culture etc and in that way to have a meaningful engagement okay so the point is here from my perspective there's a totally separate question from moral responsibility from the nature of work from cost-benefit ratios analysis of outcomes and charity and my point is here if you're gauging if you are engaging in humanitarian work if you're engaging in political work political lobbying political process try to change the world the ultimate product is you you can't control the other outcomes you can do your best but what you have to worry about is are you going to end up like Gary Yourofsky are you going to end up a ranting raving world hating was were misanthropic you know in his own terms he says he drove himself crazy he went crazy and fluid is that what's going to happen to you are you going to get end up as a kind of technical expert who just works in a narrow but deep area of expertise there's no meaningful engagement with the culture and politics around you or do you want to become for want of a better word a kind of Renaissance man that's a term I never here anymore someone who has a meaningful engagement under all these different categories and who can not only do good but in a sense can really avoid doing harm because of having that profound meaningful engagement with politics of the place and that's a choice you don't just make once in your life I think it's a choice most of us have to make again and again and again and the answer is not always going to be yes so again keeping it all the way real when I lived in Hong Kong I had to make that choice and no I did not anyway want to commit to the culture politics history etc of hong kong in hong kong i was happy to just be an outside i did think about i did do enough research to really make that decision I was an outsider I was going to remain an outsider for me Hong Kong was just a place that I lived in between one airplane ticket and another and now living in Doha it's a very very painful decision we make literally today just a couple of hours ago today I met with a humanitarian charity here that would like to recur me I don't think they can pay me a dime they'll be volunteering unpaid volunteer in through a sense and they do outreach to they're benefiting the ethnic minorities in a small village here and they assured me because I talk to them but you know well how far is this village and the show am this village it's real extreme poverty a lot of the people don't don't wear shoes they go barefoot that's a definite sign of poverty so no no this is this is real this is a real poverty-stricken village and it's we talk about the ethnic breakdown that more than one I think minority here living in that village and they're doing basically educational outreach and I'm incredibly tempted to get involved I'm in trade incredibly tempted to commit my time and my money but above all this emotional and intellectual engagement with those languages history politics having a deep and meaningful engagement with the context and their elements of risk involved Mike humanitarian gagement in Laos ended with people threatening to kill me and me getting kicked out of the country if I have a humanitarian gagement here in China in some ways you roll the dice right no matter how politically correct you may be no matter how harmless or in defense of your form of charity as all political activism entails a certain element of risk and you know if you're doing it in a country other than the one you were born into us understand the nature of those risk too so yes I am tempted but I'm sitting there and telling them look these are my options in life now I have a four-year-old daughter I can't take the same risks I did the 20 years ago I can't you know I can't even risk my own time the same way I did I mean I already speak low shut up to a certain level because I wouldn't allows for two and a half years one of the major indigenous minority languages here dehong die is closely related to northern dialects of lao like thi nghia i already speak chinese at a certain level it's incredibly tempting for me to commit to this place go home the edge of the myanmar myanmar you land border area with the same zeal and same engagement and it's tempting partly because it gives me the opportunity to do good yes but it's tempting because of who I can become what I can learn from it the way i'm going to i know i would transform myself to that positive engagement all right and in closing this look guys if you don't know identify openly as a nihilist as an historical nihilist and i actually do not believe there is any question of moral responsibility here all of this stuff we're talking about is completely in the optional category do i feel some moral responsibility toward the Kree in the aegean canada yes and I'm from part of Canada with a Cree in the Egypt and the og curry and the Soto ornated some from Ontario originally yes then I think there's some question of moral responsibility that's your government and your taxpayers dollars in your history yes I do think I have a moral responsibility to first nations of Canada which I may be the only white person ever met who took that seriously very very few people seem to feel that load again do I have any more responsibility whatsoever to poverty stricken people in northern Laos zero do I have any moral responsibility worse people of Cambodia zero charitable engagement the nature of the beast is you can only give because you have it in you to give I don't think you can approach these questions at all in terms of a guilt trip or imagining that you have to give that you have to intervene because if you don't you will be more reliever mess I don't think a painter can sit down at a blank canvas and start painting because he feels beholden to the blank canvas because he's trying to do justice to you know the inherent injustice of leaving that canvas blank all right I don't think a sculptor can sit down with a rock and say he's got to do justice to what this rocks inner potential is or that he feels guilty to leave this rock unbeautiful all right there is a philosophical sense in which you have to approach these problems political problems as a blank canvas that you're going to try to create something beautiful of us right going to a meeting whether it's the Green Party or the Liberal Party and sitting down at that boardroom table with those people and looking around you think you're not trying to make something out of nothing man I mean it's cold it's cold middle-aged is chilling you deal with middle-aged people in middle-aged politics this ain't like the first day of high school this ain't like your first day of class meeting a whole bunch of funds nobody's there to be your friend whether you're doing that at Parliament provincial Parliament federal or local city hall or local caucus of some green party whoa you sit down and you're going to feel the chill in the room and if anything you have to get yourself stoked up and motivated to see this as positively as up on canvas I'm going to sit down with a bunch of people who don't give a damn about ecology who don't give a damn balloon animal rights who think that veganism is a crazy extremist idea i'm going to start from this blank canvas and i'm going to make something beautiful out of this picture it's a huge creative challenge even at the level of the handshake and the aight aight conversations you're going to have those people over years to build constituency to build credibility to make something positive out of that situation you are making something out of nothing in its way it's more of an art than people think yeah there is no moral responsibility there's an artistic challenge of looking at an inherently meaningless cold cruel implacable world stands in front of you like a blank canvas and trying to make something positive out of whatever materials you've got to paint life of course not everybody could change the world not everybody can say can change themselves and for me now just with the obligations i had towards mountain dog I can't look at that charity I met with today I can't offer to do for them what I would have done maybe 15 years ago I can only give one I have it in me to give I could only offer to change if I can take on those changes I can only offer to get engaged if I have the capacity to take on that engagement