Fan Mail (Q&A)

I got fan mail from a supporter on
patreon this young man writes in and says I think I should tell you a little bit about myself I am 19 years old and I'm from Belgium I've been vegan for three years now living in a family that completely rejects this idea I actually found your channel about a year ago through a teacher I had in high school who was also vegan but I never really watched your videos until about two weeks ago so somewhere in Belgium there is a high school teacher who took a sign one of his or her students and said oh I understand you're vegan I just think you have conflicts there family you should watch this crazy Canadian guy maybe hope maybe he'll help improve your English vocabulary I don't know so it's nice to imagine on the other side of the world a teacher and student commiserating and sharing the link to my channel that's cool we were in Belgium about a year ago some year year and a half whatever it's been now Belgium is not such a strange place to us I have had I have had fans tell me face-to-face and an email and by Skype and stuff that watching my channel improved their ability in the English life and some of those viewers English was their first language but they felt me use a lot of vocabulary they did they'd never heard before they didn't they didn't learn in school okay I continued quote I really connected with your opinion on different topics and your approach to them but what really got me interested is when I heard about your humanitarian work and your work on languages right now I'm thinking about what direction I want my life to take and I was hoping you could tell me a bit about how you decided on what you wanted to do with your life and how you ended up doing humanitarian work etc okay so I'll finish reading the letter in a minute but this is obviously the big question it's true of done humanitarian work but I am NOT the kind of person who goes around telling other people that they should repeat my mistakes in life it's true that I've spent a lot of time learning a lot of languages and I don't encourage others to repeat my mistakes in life um how did I end up with such a focus on humanitarian work it was primarily through rejecting the approach to political reality presented to me by my parents my parents were communists they were real sincere no joke Communists and they were very directly disciples of Karl Marx and Karl Marx teaches that all social progress occurs through violence now yeah that's that's the one clause one sentence version of Karl Marx's theory of social change it's true Karl Marx also talks about economic systems of production changes in technology changes in the organization of labour but what it boils down to is for true belief in communists the only type of social change they can participate in is violence and from a very early age there was this conflict between me and my parents because I was always asking about humanitarian work like from my perspective okay you guys claim you care about the poor but you don't actually care about the you basically just propound the notion that one day you're gonna have this incredibly violent revolution in the name of the poor and then in theory like the Soviet Union and like China things will be quote unquote better for the poor which is again even then it was debatable back in the 1980s it was really debatable whether the poor were better off in Western democracies or in communist dictatorships okay but all that all that aside it's like well gee you know gee mom gee dad there were other kids at my school and their parents actually do some kind of charity work like they actually give bowls of soup to homeless people or they do fundraisers they're involved in some kind of charity of measuring average and I noticed that you and you're kind of self-selected clan of political extremists you all have nothing do with that you reject all those ideas and your idea of political activism is on the one hand a commitment to extreme violence and let's be clear both of my parents I can remember my mother directly saying that she approved of the government of China massacring people in Tibet and exterminating Buddhism I can remember my father directly saying that he approved of Joseph Stalin killing millions of people for for reasons that are actually much more difficult to summarize Josef sometimes sometimes Stalin killed people just because too many of his purges it's very hard to ascribe a rational motive to um you know they really approved of mass murder not just say during the French Revolution not just in a slave revolt revolt a rebellion they they really bought into the violence of the ideology and then on the other hand like a lot of leftists there were these strange ideas that really valorized the arts so you see that you see that even with people like contra points even with kind of current generation of watered-down wishy-washy socialists you know what is it you think is so special about the arts and now on YouTube it's like what is it you think is special about doing like art criticism like you know why is it why okay a Slavic he has hours and hours discussing the Batman films here on YouTube yeah culture left-wing cultural criticism of bad angles hey you know I'm not I'm not against it but you can see when the left wingers do it when Communists do it they think there's some greater significance there so I had a friend back in Canada years and years ago and his parents were fundamentalist Christians in brief they were they were sincere serious Christians and they did humanitarian work and I said too many times said if I had been born in your family I would have found it much more difficult to challenge my parents beliefs just because of the humanitarian work like even though everything else about Christianity may be everything else may be false oh you guys are part of an ideology where you actually help people where you actually feed the poor or give clothes to the needy they went to Africa they help people in various his particular family um now of course and I think it'd be inevitable that I'd reject the Bible and so on but that probably would have had a much bigger grip on me so the point is this in my case I stumbled into humanitarian work via negativa it was through the negation of the other paths presented to me at a young age I was involved with theatre with acting and playwriting and I don't know if I've ever really done a video talking about how that affected my life but didn't a lot of ways and it affected the way I perceived myself and the way I perceived relationships with women they should you know shallow issues that that haunt people feel otherwise issues of beauty and appearance and stuff and you know and it changed the way I viewed Canadian society a lot of things like that came out of my my early involved in the theater when you look at that you say okay this is not for me when I looked at other arts like painting okay I'm interested in like the most political 1% of painting but like you know most of the stuff that the pursuit of the aesthetic or something is of absolutely notice to me so negative these things then negating the kind of path of violent revolution one of the main things left was hey humanitarian work now of course partly I chose humanitarian work for the wrong reasons that's what I'm emphasizing here impart lighted sort of ignorance and I did so to my own destruction so to speak however what I was correct about or what I was not wrong about was that I looked at humanitarian work also as the kind of educational experience I've courted this before there is an old nihilist slogan Russian nihilism go to the poor be the poor go to the people be the people the idea that you know if you go to do humanitarian work in Cambodia or Laos you're not going there to teach them you're not going there to teach them how to farm rice you're going there to learn you know you're going there to learn how they live how they survive whether you're talking with people who literally survive in the jungle she was still had her people who survived as rice farmers you know whatever that is you're there to kind of learn from that culture and I did not think of that as as anthropology and I was always very so it's a kind of traditional ism it's a kind of inter traditionalism saying okay I can go into humanitarian work I can make life better in some way providing something and then in return I can kind of be a student of everything that's right and everything that's wrong with this culture because believe me I'm not glorifying it nobody does when was the last time you heard someone glorify in Cambodian culture okay myths it's a brutal terrible awful culture it's so many ways but nevertheless you know the point is you go there not to preach and not to teach but you go to learn and that I was right about and in that sense maybe in that sense alone I still recommend humanitarian works that this person writing in his nineteen you've got a lot to learn and you could learn a lot from Unitarian work the problem is humanitarian work is a rich man's game if you are not a donor if you are not a fundraiser what are you doing the economic reality of humanitarian work even for someone who's a medical doctor or a dentist you might think oh it's easy for them they have the credentials no no it's not humanitarian work is easy for Bill Gates it's easy for multimillionaires it's easy for incredibly wealthy people and for everyone else it's a very dark very dishonest field and it's a bit of a running gag in the mainstream press in journalism every couple of years people do an article specifically about quitting the humanitarian nonprofit sector and going over to the the business world and interviewing people have done that and they all say oh wow things are so much more honest and upstanding difference before profit sector and I know why I know why when you're on the inside figuring it out you can figure out why this is not to say that you know everyone in business is honest and upstanding but that as I say it's almost a running joke in in Western culture and you know it's worth examining it's worth understanding but it's a little bit like asking you know why does the Catholic Church have such a bad track record you know in terms of everything rape and impregnating students and you know a couple cultural genocide should mention makes you know all these terrible things if you kind of make a flowchart and say okay well what is the Catholic Church doing with this humanitarian project then why does it turn out so badly I would just say other charity organizations have more in common with the Catholic Church that you might like to assume including even left-wing and secular and communist organizations so yeah that the question was how you decided on what you wanted to do with your life and how you ended up doing humanitarian work so briefly Melissa's heard me say this before just in the last week when I was at the University of Toronto I met professors of Asian Studies who'd never been to Asia I met white men who had devoted decades of their life to working on language history politics culture of different countries in Asia and never got in an airplane and what they're never gotten a boat wasn't just at the University of Toronto as time went on I met other professors who lived in a totally white Western bubble and had no real experience these places so when they talk about Cambodia they're talking about a word on a piece of paper they're talking about a series of lines and their lines written in English too they don't learn the local language and their knowledge of local language would still just be words under fear they don't have a sense of the people and their struggle in their culture and the contradictions and the brutality and everything else they don't know what it's like to struggle to get a good night's sleep because of the dogs barking outside your window and the mosquito is buzzing outside your mosquito net all the other things that are packaged into that experience of really living out on those frontiers and they may know what it's like to read an ancient Pali or ancient Sanskrit text you know that's been photocopied or reproduced from a book a copy of a copy of a copy but they maybe don't know what it's like to be out in that jungle and see it itched onto a piece of stone and then to not just see the history because you're not seeing the historical context to see the reality of the village sir today what society and the political situation is today sir in that piece of snow so you get a sense of okay this is what things were like five hundred years ago and this is well thanks felt like today sometimes those ancient snow today could be in a parking lot full of you know full of jeepneys and motorcycles and stuff you know what I'm just saying reality of living out there can be educational all those ways to the shock of contrasting the ancien in the modern so yeah I met those professors who spent their whole lives with a chalkboard in a white Western setting and I decided that's not for me I've got to live like a young man when I'm young most these professors they're over 60 was clear they never did it they're never gonna do it is it okay so while I'm in my 20s I got to go out and risk stepping on a landmine I got to have this combination of humanitarian got to do it now and I I made that decision and in some ways I'm left with regrets that will haunt me for the rest of my life but whenever I talk to you and interact with those guys the guys who stayed in western academia whether Canadian academia British academia French academia I won't whenever I talk to any of them I think all of them envied me and this is not psychology on my part this is not like an analysis amine like they have sent me emails saying wow I really envy you or you know even they don't think of it at first they sit down with me and start talking to me and they mention some stone inscription it's like oh yeah I've been there and I've seen it you know they mentioned some you know Buddhist temple any sense like oh no I've been there and talked to the monks or I you know I'd really had those experiences whether to deal with wealth and poverty whether to do with farming you might be talking about the reality of Agriculture and the economy or whether to do with Buddhism in ancient history in languages and you know oh no no that's you know that's not what that dialect sounds like in the Northeast they say it this way and I know because I've been there whenever I've talked to those people who stayed in the classroom with the chalkboard I honest I can't think of a single exception I think all of them have said to me pretty much in those words that they that they envy me that they wish they had those experiences instead of taking the path they did or in addition to taking the path so look I think that's it for this video he says I also want to have a positive impact on the world in any way I can I may not have all the right answers but kid at age 19 you're asking a lot of the right questions