Culture as Tyranny, Multiculturalism as Tragedy: a Sequel.

ladies and gentlemen of the audience
ladies and gentlemen of the jury i might say i made a broadcast just a few days ago talking about multiculturalism and it occurred to me now to make another following up on some of the unresolved points questions and contentions now um i i love the livestream format i love the spontaneity it brings to what would otherwise be incredibly dry and difficult topics of contention such as this one it's an imperfect medium and there are stakes i would say that i'm open to the possibility that this particular live stream will end up being shared only to patreon subscribers or only to people who are interested in hearing it now i'm saying that you may imagine that i've haven't have had an avalanche of uh criticisms or questions or even hate mail in response to my earlier video that's not the case at all uh it's interesting what my audience is shocked by what my audience chooses to take the time and spend the effort to disagree with me about and what they do not so i've had innumerable emails sent to me in the past about video games and quitting video games i've had innumerable emails sent to me about the ethics of pet ownership and of uh how to treat wild animals and what to do about rat infestations so there sometimes quite particular uh ethical problems of this kind sometimes involving people's direct lives i do get a lot of a lot of people i've also had a lot of email and frankly hate mail about some completely abstract philosophical questions that couldn't possibly change anyone's life but where people's own ego people's own sense of intellectual superiority over others is attached to those abstract ideas now perhaps i'm speculating wildly here perhaps people in the audience will write in it and let me know how wrong i am but i would say that this particular issue um really just astonishes people it really is just that people in response to my position on multiculturalism don't know what to say don't know what question to ask don't know what objection to offer and they find themselves questioning very very fundamental presuppositions of their own political perspective now sometimes our prejudices are revealed through the word associations in our language if i say to you cultural what's the next word in the sentence cultural heritage cultural tradition cultural preservation right when we use words like culture and cultural there's a very deep-seated assumption that our role and our responsibility is to unquestioningly promote promulgate perpetuate preserve this culture that our relationship to culture is one of preservation um we don't even have linguistically the concept of cultural destruction cultural renovation cultural recycling right that culture might be something you have to demolish in order to replace it with something better you know now you know my way of talking about these subjects is normally to first and foremost uh put a human face on the issue to give you a sense of um what the cost and consequences of our you know political beliefs would be um on a one-to-one human scale and i think it's quite easy once you've established that understanding with the audience to then scale up and talk about issues on the level of millions of people um the implications over indeed over millions of years may sound ridiculous but we're not just dealing with decades or centuries here we're dealing with millions of people and in millions of years that's the scale on which culture you know exists and uh influences human life that's the scale on which it makes some things thinkable and some things unthinkable you know right now in a country like canada there are some people for whom it is completely unthinkable to be married and pregnant at the age of 16. and there are some people for whom anything other than being married and pregnant at the age of 16 is unthinkable right and then what that entails in terms of career and education and everything else for the life of that woman and for the life of the children she's raising is tremendously profound how can we have two populations living within one in the same country participating in the same democracy one one culture based on let's let's specify a little further let's say there's a culture that's based on arranged marriage that parents arrange when the child is 14 15 years old they arrange for them to be married at 16 and then at 16 the marriage happens which by the way all over the world i think 16 is pretty much the legal age of marriage it's kind of amazing what a what a vestige that is of an earlier time if you look into it where you're living it may be that with the parents permission people can get married as young as 14 and so on it's it's these kind of medieval assumptions about marriage you know still exist now just just to put this in contrast can you get a tattoo at the age of 14 can you get a tattoo at the age of 15 or 16. most jurisdictions around the world the answer is no you have to wait until you're 18 or some other agent majority to get a tattoo why because getting a tattoo is a decision that will affect you for the rest of your life the question of which university you're going to go to and what subject you're going to study and whether or not you joined the army these are also decisions that affect your life the decision to get married or to get pregnant and have children this is also a decision that affects everyone but you know conveniently we pretend that these are quite different from getting a tattoo we preserve this kind of uh you know the the private scope for the individual to make these decisions recklessly on their own behalf or indeed for their parents to make these decisions recklessly on their path um we don't want to question the extent to which this might be much more much more important much more fateful a decision than getting a tattoo much more faithful even getting a tattoo on your face at the age of 16 is the decision to get married and have children with an age and all the doors that closes for you and then just the one door it leaves open for yourself and then the extent to which a young woman who makes that decision is very likely to justify her decision by inculcating the same cultural values into her children by insisting on the necessity and moral superiority of this one path alone now just to be fair going to medical school is miserable becoming a medical doctor is miserable going to law school is miserable becoming a lawyer is miserable and all my life i have seen how parents who made those sacrifices and those commitments likewise try to inculcate into their children the superiority of the path of going to medical school at the path of going to law school i admit this is something that is it's a critique or an analysis you know is not uh only the um the religious fundamentalist among us who are uh susceptible um on that human scale of one person that you're meeting getting to know face to face you know isn't it a terrible thing to dismiss this one person you may know and say well it's fine for you to be a member of this church to be a member of this religion it's time for you to devote yourself to these abstractions to these prayers to this chanting let's say it's very common thing it's fine for you to believe in these these fictional fabulous things it's fine for you to drop out of school get married and raise children in addition to never know anything else to never have have any other potential in your life you know to never even have a period of questioning and trying your limits and finding out what you could do or or might do and it's fine for you why because of your culture this leads to a view that is very similar to racism but it could be called culturism right yeah so again growing up in downtown toronto i knew orthodox jews i'm ethnically jewish myself by the way in case you hadn't guessed i'm not a member of the religion i'm not a religious jew i'm a nihilistic atheist you who knows i knew orthodox jews who were making these kinds of decisions on what basis oh because that's their culture that's their tradition because they're beholden to preserving and perpetuating that tradition and they didn't feel that others were beholden to that tradition no judaism's unusually clear-cut that way judaism is a religion with a very very small role for converting outsiders you know uh most other religions instead are are more interested in proving to the whole world that their particular set of beliefs are true and valid for all mankind for the world but within uh judaism for the most part people are quite content to just feel that their tradition is superior for them that they personally should live by these ethical rules and whether or not whether or not anyone else does is immaterial because they're they're outside of that tradition now you know okay i could tell quite a few quite a few uh stories of this kind i remember a young woman so this is before i got married this is before i met melissa no this wasn't me wasn't me cheating with anyone i remember a young woman who met me at a party and the first hint that she was uh orthodox jewish fanatic in this sense was her style of dress and her hair and the cues aren't that obvious by the way i just mentioned uh with women's dress anyway in judaism and i remember how she was talking remember she was making eye contact with me and you know her whole manner of kind of flirting with me or coming onto me had shifted because at first she was suspecting that i was jewish just based on my face and then when she knew for a fact she was even more forward you know um you know this this young woman so we were both in university i don't know we're both 20 people 21 or 22 i i don't know but you know um you know do you feel i mean when you meet someone that's face to face you get to know them even for just a few minutes of conversation do you feel that they should be sort of cast aside from the progress of history and devote their lives to the museum of the beliefs of their ancestors you know that they should spend their time tending the fire that was lit by their parents and grandparents and indeed justifying and making excuses for that tradition instead of frankly demolishing that tradition disbelieving that tradition being at least open to you know adopting and taking on new new perspectives so i just mentioned uh we have 31 people in the audience which is great it's a totally unannounced unplanned live stream if you guys want to take a moment to hit the thumbs up button it'll help more people discover the live stream enjoy the conversation this is very unusual i normally have a whole bunch of comments uh rolling in i have no comments visible at my end at the moment it could be that you're all just flabbergasted by what i had to say but i wonder if it's just a technical problem at uh at google right now because i'm actually not seeing any of your any of your comments pop up but i dare not interrupt or restart the live stream uh for this reason so anyway um look sorry so i warned you at the beginning of the video that i was going to take some time just to put a human face on it and to to give it this this sense of the sense of scale the sense of immediacy you know now look continue with the same example this this young woman um if i could tell you various things about her it's just someone i met and spoke to you once but still i i remember it um you know with anyone like this what if they tell you these are the kinds of conversations i had what if they tell you that oh they are interested in buddhist philosophy and they really wanted to study that uh but they dare not do so because of their parents or their grandparents wishes or their status and in the church the religion what if they tell you that they were interested sorry that sort of conversation i would have i was a scholar of buddhism at the time you know what if they tell you oh that they are interested in this or that um political theory political ideology i come out of a political science background they were interested in more radical uh political ideas and different approaches to economics but they dare not look into it because of who their parents and grandparents are because of their status and this religion and this tradition that they're devoted to perpetuating and indeed for women especially i mean this is honestly it's true of men also it's true of men also it's just less viscerally obvious that they're going to devote their lives to reproducing the same cultural values the same myths the same legends the same misconceptions in the next generations that men do within any one of these religious identities also and even if the men are out earning money in the market and the women are housewives that's still why the men earning money that's still why they're devoting their time to business is to come home and and devote themselves to tending this fire as i've put to uh keeping the lives of the per and the next generation inside this museum of ossified cultural values um you know and someone like this might say to you that they had some particular um aspiration in life maybe it was to go into the sciences and conduct research to find a cure for cancer let's do something a bit corny uh maybe it was to read and write about the philosophy of aristotle do something you know and maybe maybe the person we're talking to was quite shallow and really what they wanted to do was become a fitness instructor at a gym and have an instagram profile and be adored for their appearance you know you know that's probably statistically it's more likely that that's what they're fantasizing about rather than finding a cure for cancer or studying and publishing articles about the philosopher's stuff just just talking about the common man here they might have had some dreams for some other some of us maybe they wanted to join the army and see the world you know but all of those dreams are inaccessible forever they'll never even get to dabble in them enough to become disillusioned with them and find better dreams you know what i mean because of their commitment to that cultural tradition because of this extent to which they feel the whole end to it now let me just ask where do the excuses stop if we say it's okay for you to live in ignorance it's okay for you to never have this kind of education never have this kind of experience never enter the workforce it's okay for you to never do this because you come from this culture and you see how you see how fine the difference there it's because you're born into this culture it's almost racism you know okay well that's that's fine for you and in the so-called mosaic of our multicultural society that's fine for you and you and you and you it's fine for all these people who fit into these different boxes to live a life of pious self-righteous ignorance do we extend that to medicine do we feel that there's one set of scientific conclusions about medicine about health that apply to all humanity equally or not and what does what does or not mean what is the alternative there now this critique actually applies to a great many people who think that they're atheists think that they're secular think that they have modern values that they aren't a member of any cult just as much as it applies to people who you know wear the costume of an orthodox religion every day um i think in the 21st century we're at a sort of transitional period of not really wanting to admit to ourselves how little freedom of belief there is how little freedom of religion there is when it's applied to medicine health and nutrition and when it's then applied to everything else at least as a matter of allegory if not directly in and of its in and for its its own sake um we all seem to be willing to pretend that it's perfectly fine and healthy and normal for a muslim family to circumcise their son for a jewish family to circumcise their son now there's absolutely nothing normal or healthy about circumcision what we're really saying and offering this justification or excuse is that belief personal belief trumps supersedes is is superior in priority to the facts of science now at the other end of the of the spectrum pretty much every week if not every month i see people uploading youtube videos talking about their decision to take stimulants like adderall to take mood-altering mind-altering drugs whether they are called antidepressants or antipsychotics or some other form of prescription medication pardon me prescription medication i see people also justifying their decision to use illicit illegal drugs recreational drugs which may if they're not legal they may be tolerated things like marijuana and they appeal to the same fundamental logic it is really a kind of multiculturalism and it's culture in our context hippies are in effect another culture under themselves there are these people who live with excuses for smoking marijuana that are passed down to them by their parents and grandparents and many of them will tell you that i've met people who will say openly that they smoke marijuana with their parents if not their grandparents that they have been assured that they believe that this is harmless or even that this is good for their health there are women who will tell you in the same terms that they smoked marijuana during pregnancy there are women who will tell you that they smoked cigarettes during pregnancy there are women who will tell you that they drank alcohol during pregnancy and that their parents did before them and this is this has the power of a continuous cultural tradition and how dare you question it how dare you insult them and their whole lineage their whole cultural tradition needless to say this is applied also to the minutia of the human diet where somehow the notion that something is traditionally considered healthy has superior priority to any mere facts of science you may introduce into the discussion uh to disrupt it now let's let's be honest here too um the facts of science for the vast majority of normal people are unknowable uh babe could you grab your your book um off the top doesn't matter just gonna give an example so this is a book that's actually mentioned on the channel many times over over many years this is called anatomy of an epidemic by robert whittaker so this this is primarily about the evils of mind-altering prescription drugs primarily but it's also a story of how people justify their addiction to these drugs all kinds of people the the doctors who make the prescriptions the marketing companies that make money out of it the corporations that that profit from you know ordinary people you know like you and i i do not mean in a shallow or caddy sense that this is fundamentally similar to the world's religions there is a kind of religiosity involved there is a kind of um self righteous ignorance involved and there's an assertion of your cultural identity in feeling that you're entitled to your own facts in the same way that the christians are and the muslims are and the jews are and somehow external facts presented by unbelievers they don't they don't intersect with they don't interfere with your view of reality or they ought not that it's it's a fundamentally you know immoral thing um when i was living in saskatchewan so if you guys don't know the geography of canada saskatchewan is a large underpopulated part of canada where land is cheap and where there are many many religious cult groups that have colonies so still today if you wanted to start a cult if you want to start this a separate community for people of your own beliefs it's this kind of place you you might go by a farm by some wasteland or something and start living there but obviously a hundred years ago and 200 years ago was it was even cheaper this is related to our history of genocide in case you haven't guessed um [Music] you know i had face-to-face discussions with attractive young women there and these young women i think were talking to me and were in a very repressed way flirting with me precisely because i represented the outside world that they had been forbidden to have any kind of meaningful contact with now everyone in my classes was really kind of older than you than you quote unquote should be to be a university student like you know if you've gone straight from high school into into university and there are different reasons for this but the main one being that the the university i was at and the particular classes i was in they were predominantly for people who were unsuccessful in uh the conventional educational track like you know people who had finished high school in the correct number of years with high grades they would go to some other university let's put i had a lot of people in my classes who were 25 but a lot of people classes who were 35. i had a lot of older students but even the people who were relatively young they tended to be 22 or 23 and to say that they'd had a few years as an alcoholic or something uh in between high school and college they you know they didn't really graduate high school in the right number of years there was a lot of that there was a lot of that in regina saskatchewan so the actual women i'm thinking of they were not they were not 19 years old or something they were they were into their they were into their 20s and you know had a number of a number of conversations with these with these young women and you know you can imagine in that context where they are for the first time in their lives having a little bit of independence a little bit of freedom of thought and action from the religious colony that had dominated their lives the religious colony that probably selected their husband or at least put them in the room with their choice of like four men you know like well there are four guys you can choose between get to know them you take your it might not be as simple as as a ranged marriage but where they'd live their lives um really with all of the meaningful decisions made for them and then they meet and talk to someone like me and there are different things about them that might uh it's frightening there are different things about me that might interest them that might excite their their curiosity you know they would know that i was somebody born and raised in canada but who had made a mercurial decision made a sudden decision one opponent's life to quit his job and run away and move to cambodia and again they wouldn't know all the details but you know at some point in the classroom they'd heard this about me some part of them again i'm not saying i'm not saying these women if if they were not part of a traditional culture they were not part of one of these subcultures in our multicultural side i'm not saying they would have devoted themselves to finding the cure for cancer or even philosophy of aristotle but yeah you know what it probably crossed their mind it probably crossed their mind at least what if there were a better life out there somewhere what if for just a couple years or for a couple of months they could run away to cambodia or on a way to thailand or run away to china or run away to japan or something if if they could get out of the rusted cage of the culture they've been born into and think new thoughts and have new experiences and in some sense see the world i don't think that's attributing you know too vivid a fancy life you know to them so they were meeting me and they were aware that i was someone who in this way had had lived you know with with particular women i talked to this way you know i could add in particular details about what their own struggles in life were and how they how they perceive me now by the way so we're choosing a selection here where there is in our in our culture in our politics there's no um there's no racial distinction between them and i we're all considered white people in canada but by the way that's obviously that's also endlessly debatable you know in what sense is a ukrainian person the same race as a scottish person well it's all it's all i mean it's all just ideology it's all culture it's all politics you know and me as someone who is perceived as an exotic jew uh my my very judaism am i really the same way says as any of these people who self-identify as white you know but i'm just pointing out this is a this is a context in which we can really talk about culturism very separately from from racism uh i'd have to go back more years uh to talk about an example of a muslim woman who who rejected me this way when i was still in toronto again this comes down to my appearance there were muslim women women born and raised in muslim families and they they perceived me and again judaism ethnically the difference between someone being jewish and someone being arab is a rounding error in the in the mathematics of dna but you know they maybe perceive me as someone who might be arab or who might be iranian and there may be drawn interesting way i'm remembering just two uh women who were who were born and raised muslim and where they had these kinds of conversations with me so again you could imagine you can imagine intellectually and politically and in terms of life experience how i might represent to them the path they hadn't taken or the path they hadn't taken yet because here they were as university students with this freedom from their family with these possibilities but obviously just visualizing things if you're thinking about me being in saskatchewan and talking to young women who in a sense have their whole life ahead of them right who are born and raised as white christians of some kind but some of these christian groups these are really crazy cult like isolated christian groups right you know okay so that's one scenario and then think about also i'm in toronto and talking to someone who is of some kind born to a traditional muslim family who ethnically in their appearance appears to some extent you know arab or you know or pakistani or what have you who ethnically appears to be non-white and who in their style of dress and so on may be distinguishing themselves from the white western uh macro culture or colonial european culture you know in a different way all right now you know in those conversations what if i had the attitude oh no no no you shouldn't question what your parents and grandparents and religious tradition have decided is best for you oh no no you shouldn't think about any of these things you're asking me about at all oh no no and why because you've been born into that culture because you've been born into that race oh no no no these are good questions these are good options for me to consider but not for you some things are just off limits to you because of the circumstances of your birth that would be a dismissive and contemptuous attitude really quite similar to racism really quite shockingly similar to racism and we're all supposed to indulge in it for the sake of multiculturalism for the sake of this greater whole that we're supposed to comprise with each tribe with each confessional unit of their religion you know comprising a separate uh a separate piece in the mosaic with invidious you know distinctions between each of them um now each of these people would have had different intellectual potential different yearnings different desires different interests and it's not for me to know them it's not for me to know who has the potential in them to find a cure for cancer or to spend their life at least researching it you know who has it in them to go to cambodia and do humanitarian work who has it in them to become a great writer or a great political leader but you know free thinking freedom of thought you know it's crucial to all of them whether their dreams be uh pathetic and narrow and vain and shallow you know whether they want to be another instagram influencer that wanted to fitness or whether it be something you know profound something of tremendous meaning for them in their lives for society as a whole or for the cluster of 50 or 500 people they managed to to directly you know influence you know it's very easy to say and you'll see why i'm saying about a young woman specifically it's very easy to say about a young woman oh you have your whole life ahead of you you can do anything okay not if you get married at 16 not if you're pregnant and having children at age 16 17 right right you don't have your whole life ahead of you you have this one thing that you're allowed to do that's set down for you by your religion by your cultural tradition and then you're never gonna have the opportunity to do anything else you're never gonna have the opportunity to go to cambodia you never have the opportunity to see the world you never get the opportunity even to join the army or anything you're never going to have i mean again let's put in some shallow examples here maybe they wanted to work in fashion maybe they wanted to try their hand at designing and making clothes being a creative person that way i'm just i'm just trying to use some examples that aren't so much in my you know my own uh area of of expertise or inclination you know what whatever it is they might have done or could have done maybe they wanted to be an artist maybe they wanted to be a comedian it's a great example actually you know um whatever potential they could have had all of it all of it is suffocated all of it is destroyed by culture and there is a kind of racism if you walk through the university halls and you see a young woman who is wearing the full orthodox muslim uniform or the full orthodox jewish uniform and again it's it's more subtle but there are cues about women who are members of fundamental fundamentalist christian organizations a certain kind of dress i don't know if it's this certain kind of flower print dress and maybe a cross around their neck you can meet women who are part of you know forms of forms of christianity they're just as just as repressive you know why those for you to walk through the halls and think oh there's no potential being wasted here there's nothing being squandered there's no tragedy there's nothing being lost at all there's no positive contribution she could have made to the world that's being lost because of what this culture has done to her and the best thing for us as a society is to allow all of these subcultures to exist side by side unchallenged each one ruining the lives of its of its members each one enforcing you know the self-righteous ignorance of generations of the past on the present and the future in this in this terrible matter um we lack the vocabulary to even speak in terms of the destruction of culture the demolition of culture and it's precisely the demolition of culture the demolition of false cultural assumptions beliefs attitudes that is the government's responsibility that is the role of democracy to open the way to any and every possible future right i do not believe in destroying one specific culture in order to replace it with another no in the same sense i can think of any of these particular young women i spoke to my point is not oh oh no no you should quit uh christianity and instead join mormonism no you should you should instead have an arranged marriage and be part of a different oppressive particular religion you know my point is not that people should leave islam in order to join the hutterites hutterites are a particular form of christian no no no no no you know and my point is not even that they should give up their beliefs their cultural uh tradition in order to adopt mine my particular set of atheists open-minded my my particular set of cultural values if you want because it's inescapable no matter how much you reject cultural values there are some that continue to you continue to live by or espouse just in the same sense that uh no matter how much you may reject one set of aesthetic standards or another there's still a set of aesthetic standards you're living by you one has to wear clothes of one kind or another no matter how much you may reject or revile the fashions of any particular religious or cultural tradition um uh you're still going to settle on some set of cultural values that you live by even if it's with with no such uh ideological or religious commitment to any of them at all you know my point is not to demolish one thing in order to build another the point is precisely to demolish the culture that constrains and oppresses you so that you have the freedom the freedom of thought the freedom of action the freedom to sit and look at the future of your life like a blank sheet of paper and come up with any number of possibilities many of which you may try and quickly become disillusioned with and then find new possibilities you know to put on this piece of paper now it is conspicuous and it is quite intentional that i've been talking about young women as the examples of this let's let's briefly talk about old men by by contrast okay what's different when we talk about old men what's different is precisely the extent to which older men will insist that they are not oppressed but that they are the oppressor right the extent to which old men wants us no no no nobody has forced me into this nobody has cornered me into living by these beliefs nobody has forced me to close the door on these other options in my life they will describe themselves and think of themselves and present themselves as if they have boldly and heroically taken on these cultural values themselves and and chose them and that they go around making that choice for other people whom they frankly dominate terrify and oppress it's very very difficult to get a 45 year old man to think of himself as a victim of the culture of circumcision right and whether they are a member of a religion that forbids drinking alcohol or that basically encourages it and requires it at regular religious festivals you know again you can be a devout christian and you're drinking alcohol and all these all these events whatever you know um when you talk to older men they will insist that this wasn't something enforced upon them but it's something that they embrace that they espouse and that they enforce on others whether that's that they force others to not drink alcohol or that you know every year they go to this ceremony and they're the guy and forcing others to go hey you know this is our tradition you know get drunk enjoy enjoy whatever it is that they they take on the role you know of of the oppressor now obviously this is a delusion you know you could say to any one of these men i've i've engaged in this kind of socratic dialogue all the time oh okay so if you hadn't been born in the into the particular family you were born into and the family of course has cultural as well as racial and economic connotations do you do you think you would have come up with this idea of circumcision all by yourself hypothetically if you were raised as an orphan by a robot in a government orphanage so there's a sense in which you have no culture at all you're making it up as you go along you know if you were raised do you think one day you would have thought yourself you know what i need to pay a surgeon to cut off part of my dick you know what i should force my sons and grandsons to also cut off part of their death as a sign of their commitment to the judeo-christian god i just you've never read the bible you've never been told or taught it's never been inculcated into you that this is virtuous by your parents of course it's ridiculous and of course the very men who think of themselves as the oppressors are themselves oppressed in a in an ongoing cycle that that is what we call culture and culture is precisely what trains you to regard your oppression as something you are not ashamed of but something you're proud of right and you know down to you know the the smallest details of religious tradition uh give you an example many religions have this by the way i could use irish catholics as an example of this or i could use uh muslims from the you know from saudi arabia you the idea that walking in a circle around an object circumambulation is something profound and holy that it's an act of introspection and so on you know did you did you make that up who taught you to walk in a circle this was mentioned it's a form of religious devotion it's quite widespread we have we have things similar to it in buddhism but this idea of walking in a circle around an object often you know having your hands clashed together perhaps mumbling you know mumbling and prayer or chanting you know a textbook you know the idea of circumambulation of walking in a circle was if you were raised in an orphan you know if you were raised in an orphanage by a robot do you think you would have been there do you think it could be that you saw your grandfather doing this and you asked him why he was doing he explained to you that this was the most divine and holy and wonderful thing that you you know that every man is part of your manhood you know so that oh perhaps this grandfather also said you well you know a lot of young people these days can't appreciate it there are a lot of teenagers who just think it's stupid but they're not like you you're special you're smarter than the other teenagers you're more more profound you can appreciate our tradition you have to carry it on you have to be this stuff gets to you man i mean this that you don't you don't think you're having this burden place your oh oh no no this is precisely what makes you better than your friends your friends they laugh and jeer at some of us who are carrying on the traditions of our grandparents but not you you're special sorry to come back to the female example it's not the case it's not the case that every girl raised in that colony will remain a virgin until marriage and get married at 16 and and so on and be having a raising a chubby thing oh no no the girls who carry on they think they're special they think they're superior to the other girls i swear i mean obviously this is to my knowledge but if you know people from those small towns there are always a few girls there are a few girls who ran away to los angeles or ran away to vancouver and maybe they even got a job in a strip club or something that even if that's not true that the people in the small town say right like oh you know i remember a guy told me at death it was a small town and there was there was one girl who was officially the prettiest girl in the the small town and she did she ran away to become a stripper but you know in every one of those religious communities there are stories about the fallen the castaways the rebels the people who went elsewhere to live a different life oh but but you're not like them you're better than them this is the tremendous power that culture has in our lives and we take up the oppression of ourselves and others not with the sense that we are the victims but that we are the victors that it's something we can and should be be proud of and tell me in the in the 21st century you know who is going to break this cycle who is going to challenge it it has to be the government and it has to be a democratic government it has to be through democracy you know this is the year 2021. people are still questioning people are still questioning the morality of the government forcing cultural minorities to accept vaccines this is not a trivial aspect of democracy okay this is not something um peripheral to democracy right this is the beating heart of democracy okay we had a meeting we let the public speak down at the panics we made a decision and now you have to live with the consequences or else be exiled all right uh just digress slightly here you may know my preference is for direct democracy rather than directly if you want to if you want to jump in melissa is uh participating in her way off camera here uh one of the best recorded examples of how democracy worked in ancient athens is the peloponnesian war it's basically the history of wars between athens and sparta and to some extent by the way persia is involved in all these wars now you may not know this if you have another reading okay it is not the case that everyone in athens supported the athenian side in those wars and it's kind of several overlapping and inter-mexican wars there there were people there were people born and raised in athens who sympathized more with sparta there were people born and raised in athens who went and fought for the spartan army there were people born and raised in athens who went to fight for persia for the persian army for the medies okay there's some of them but there's some of the most famous okay there was there was free thinking you had a choice right so there's a there's a debate down at the panx pnyx if you don't know the meaning of the word there's a debate down in the peninsula and you know there are different options athens can be at peace with sparta like at different times athens can be in an alliance with sparta against the persians athens could be in alliance with the persians against the spartans that happened repeatedly even though we think of the persians as if they were the constitution and you know what there's a debate there's a discussion there's a vote and once that vote is taken either you accept the decision that's been made democratically and you fight on the same side as everyone else or you are exiled or you are killed now uh i don't have it with a big could you grab machiavelli it could be uh oh no no no no it'll be it'll be there mickey village discourses if you can't get it you can't get it there we go okay just mentioned this machiavelli is mostly famous for a book called the prince which i don't recommend reading frankly it's really overrated the prince but he has a much longer and more substantive book called the discourses and actually the parts of this book that are worth reading it's not the whole length you can kind of read it there's some sections you can flip through and there's others where you really want to slow down and read intensely so you're saying it's not not really a cover to cover a great book but worth reading and some sections of it tremendously worth reading tremendously inspirational you know that machiavelli's an interesting character he is pro-democracy anti-air anti-oligarchy anti-uh monarchy anti-aristocracy he is very fundamentally a pro-democracy writer which many people don't know because they only read the prince so his philosophy says here it's quite interesting machiavelli is the most brutally honest guy about the extent to which democracy requires violence and to sustain a republic to rest to sustain even a mixed republic a republic that is partly democratic because that's mostly what he talks about because in real life you you very rarely have direct democracy or any society even as democratic as athens athens was not a perfect democracy we can list off its imperfections but we rarely even approach the level of democracy that was that happened but you know the level of violence required against your own people to have a democracy um it's terrifying and machiavelli is one of the guys saying hey i'm not terrified machiavelli is living through an unbelievably dismal violent period in the history of europe and he's saying we'd be better off going back to that kind of violence the kind of violence they had in ancient rome the kind of violence they had in ancient athens instead of the violence we're stuck with now in the dark ages you know instead of the kind of violence that's necessary to maintain a monarchy or an oligarchic aristocratic system he'd rather have that democratic kind of violence right um know you are not allowed to decide whether or not drinking alcohol during pregnancy is safe or healthy you're not right now just just with this one example i mean any of these examples talk about circumcision talk about drinking alcohol during pregnancy um and by the way guys just just another one because i've seen this my whole life i remember seeing this in france remember seeing this in scotland um smoking cigarettes during pregnancy will more than double the chances that your child will be diagnosed with adhd attention deficit hyperactivity now adhd is not a biologically real condition it's not it's a set of behaviors it's all it is it's a stereotype really okay but there are children who are diagnosed with attention deficit disorder so that they can get some kind of help so they can get some kind of special education and in many cases so that they can be put onto drugs like adderall so that they can participate in normal classroom life i do not reify attention deficit hypertension i'm not here to tell you this is a biologically real condition isn't it interesting that smoking cigarettes during pregnancy would double the chances that your child has something wrong with them has some kind of limited cognitive function that would get diagnosed as adhd result in them getting special help uh special classes hello guys you know nicotine what are what are the effects of nicotine on a developing umbrella yeah that's an interesting question something that smoking cigarettes and smoking marijuana has in common with drinking alcohol will just be the effects on how much how much oxygen the developing fetus or embryo is is getting all right there are issues here with the circulation of blood with how much oxygen is being carried in the blood um do you want to live in a society where everyone gets to have their own science don't you want to live in a society where um everyone gets to have their own beliefs go unchallenged and trump i'm sorry to use trump as a as a verb not using his proper name here but sort of where your cultural identity your beliefs your traditions even what your grandparents told you what you hold to be sacred where that trumps that exceeds importance the facts of science for the very real and measurable consequences for yourself for your children frankly for the for the future of humanity all right in the same way that the stupidity of the mother in drinking alcohol during pregnancy or smoking cigarettes during pregnancy is inculcated upon the child the child will be raised with justifications and excuses for that stupidity they'll be molded to repeat that stupidity this is the same way in which culture reproduces self across generations and [Music] i've never had anyone debate this with me i've never had anyone dispute it with me i've never had anyone like whether by email or face to face i have never had anyone who was actually motivated to try to convince me that there is a point to the perpetuation of culture when they are asked simply what is the point culture is tragic you know you can justify the mistakes made by your parents you can justify the decisions made by your grandparents you can sort of try to glorify the self-righteous ignorance of your cultural tradition whether it's the immediate generation or or many before but when you turn around and look forward when you look to the future you know what would be the point of having these same mistakes or having these same beliefs perpetuated into the future whether we think of those in terms of the aesthetic details a cultural tradition of how pottery is made how pottery is supposed to or we're thinking about these things that are so easily and verifiably wrong medical facts you know medical facts that relate to your your physical mental and emotional health you know now um i just want to say you know i sympathize with religious people i sympathize with religious people more than you can know because i think that the religions of the world great and small lead people to ask really important questions the problem is that they raise people to presume that the answers to those questions were already discovered by their grandparents or great-grandparents that they're not here to be asked and answered by ourselves multiple times within one generation that they're they're unsettled that the door remains open that the page remains blank you know again and again forever that there isn't one answer i'll give we'll give an example that many of you may be surprised for me to choose you know religious people grow up with a concept of humility i think is actually very interesting and and profound you know i and by and large people who are not religious have no concept of humility my parents were both communists i'm an anti-communist but you know they they had no concept of humility none shockingly some way and so you know for me as a young man it was really interesting as a kind of foreign concept to explore and understand humility and another religious idea i could i could list up a whole bunch the idea of detachment you know um there all kinds of ideas i got from religion there were important questions now you know i can ask you a total point what does humility mean in your life what does it mean to be humble what is the significance of it you know what is the positive advantage of cultivating humility and then what are the disadvantages right perhaps it's better in some ways at least to be a recklessly narcissistic uh instagram model or something you know to be beautiful and know that you're beautiful or handsome another handsome into you know to play that advantage you know to the fore you know i don't think humility is something that has value in in and of itself right you know so religion can can lead people to ask meaningful questions that have meaningful answers in their lives but nothing could be more mentally deadening nothing could be more destructive than to live with the assumption that the meaning of humility what it requires and what it entails in your life is something already written down in this book that the answer was something already established when your grandparents joined this religion and that it's obligatory on you to follow exactly the same the same steps you know of of what it means to be a to be a humble person you know now um humility is not meaningless it's not i heard an interview with a medical doctor a few weeks ago uh and i think it is relevant to mention he is a very good looking man he apart from being born good looking he takes a lot of care with his parents and as a medical doctor in the united states of america he probably gets a lot of attention from from women because he's wealthy and successful and good looking and yeah so and he talked about his recognition of his own prejudice against clients sick people who come into his office for help who are fat ugly unkempt in english who are not making an effort with their with their appearance um who may smell bad uh he mentioned just a detail a guy who came in wearing blue jeans and there was mud around the cuffs at the bottom of the blue there was some mud you know near his nearest boots at the bottom of his blue jeans that you know people who don't and aesthetics okay there's humility in being a medical doctor right and the way in which humility really matters as a doctor as a teacher as an authority figure as in whatever position you have in your life you know okay just you know i used to do humanitarian work all right and i i was very different from other people doing humanitarian work many of the people doing humanitarian work really had a deep-seated attitude that they were wealthy and they represented a superior level of scientific education and they were coming to do humanitarian work to to bring truth to the conquered you know well here are these poor third world people and they just don't know and don't understand the things that we wealthy highly educated people know and we're bringing to them this civilization you know my attitude was much more like an anthropologist doing research i was really interested in what these people had to teach me um i mean that totally unpretentiously i mean that with a sense of humility uh i give numerous examples but you know i thought that someone who had survived the indochina wars someone who had survived uh the americans dropping this enormous number of bombs on their village who had survived the rise and fall of communism who had a mixed background obviously in agriculture and you know guerrilla warfare you know in this extreme poverty and disease and in solving problems with their hands even if these people were illiterate that they actually had a great deal to teach me they knew many things about life i would never know um [Music] now you know also at that time i was a scholar of buddhism i felt correctly that these people knew something about buddhism i didn't know i to some extent i'm a de facto scholar of communism i'm an anti-communist i think these people knew something about communism you know i didn't know you know where i'm going there with a kind of humility that really makes me open to learning from these people now of course you're also going to learn about their foolishness you're also going to learn about all the things that are wrong but oh great example coming back to the comparison with with medicine you know so where i was in northern laos southeast asia poverty-stricken war-torn you know people where i was doing humanitarian work uh people drank nail polish remover they specifically mixed nail polish remover with sugar cane juice culturally that was normal now how can anyone be unaware that they're basically drinking paint thinner you know um there were a number of cultural practices that are just totally ruminous to people's health and i have no you know no sympathy or patience as well sorry i'm not gonna i'm not gonna sit there and say well you people have your own way of doing things no this is this is completely horrifying uh but you know nevertheless i am suggesting to you that humility which is a religious uh concept really has profound significance in our lives and you know i got to see the difference i could see i could see the difference between myself and other people doing humanitarian work actually the difference between myself and other people doing buddhist research and buddhist scholarship oh did you think you came here to preach unto others or do you think you came here to learn from others do you think these people really have really something to teach you and you know i do live my life with that with that kind of humility i meet the kind of ignorant rednecks um when i talk to them i mean you know whatever they may be a plumber or they may be doing whatever kind of job they do i actually really do have those conversations with the assumption they have a great deal to teach with me about life they they have things to teach me about areas of life that i have not researched i don't begin the conversation thinking you know this is this person knows more about aristotle than i do i don't believe that but they will know things about about life in other areas and other provinces they will have other experiences they can share with me that i really do value or i really have the humility to recognize what they have to bring into my life even if it's on this on this small scale okay so i just say um [Music] as an atheist as a radical nihilistic dissident intellectual who openly talks about destroying christianity you know i still sympathize with religious people and their attitudes more than you could know because i sympathize with the extent to which religion raises really important and meaningful questions in their lives what i don't sympathize with is the way in which religion provides answers i have never once had a single atheist or so-called skeptical youtube channel cooperate or collaborate with me in any positive way whatsoever several of them if you've watched the channel a long time you may know several of them have attacked and announced me and insulted me in crude terms um i have never once had any positive collaboration with anyone who considers themselves to be part of atheism as a movement all right i think just pause to clarify that's because of multiculturalism it is absolutely part of the multicultural mentality in the same way that we encourage one another by saying oh well i personally wouldn't drink alcohol i know that alcohol causes brain damage i personally wouldn't take adderall i know that's an it's an addictive drug that causes brain damage you know i know that the medical benefits are largely illusory and the disadvantages are all too scientifical i i personally wouldn't smoke marijuana oh oh oh oh but here's the motto of 21st century multiculturalism but you do you i i personally wouldn't want to be 200 pounds overweight [Music] but if it makes you happy you you do you right this is the tapestry of our tolerant society this is the mosaic right it's not just narrowly defined religious and cultural beliefs that are supposed to be uh justified and passed unquestioned and be permitted it's any belief whatsoever right that's what these things that's what these things extend the so-called atheist activists the so-called skeptics what they want is only to have one more tile in the mosaic one little square that will sit next to the vietnamese subculture and the saudi arabian subculture and the hutterite subculture and the devout catholic subculture they just want to have their own little square in the multicultural mosaic and to feel that they're superior to everyone else in exactly the same way that the catholics feel superior to them in exactly the same way that the devout muslims feel superior to them they want that derision to be mutual and they want to have a fundamentally mutually derisive society in which the invidious distinctions between each tile comprising the mosaic are smoothed over with this attitude already alluded to of hey hey you do you right yeah yeah um i i remember a woman who was not jewish um shall we say a witness to the jewish holocaust uh describing passionately how she had tried to get food provided to jewish children it's not worth describing the whole scenario in world war ii this is kind of a refugee scenario and um she was saying to the people in charge of the christian charity that was handing out food only to christians i said she said don't you realize their stomach doesn't know the difference like whether they eat or starve has nothing to do with their you know ideological commitment to christianity you know versus judaism and she she described just the hard hateful reactions of these women some of whom were nuns but others were just you know true believing christians involved in this charitable practice of you know starving some children and feeding others you know on this basis you know your stomach doesn't know the difference you know your lungs your brain your body chemistry doesn't know the difference right we're using these drugs or any of these examples right either it is right or it is wrong and if it's wrong then it's equally wrong for everyone of course it's very convenient that we're living through a period of time in which there is almost zero democracy you know in the in the western world um could you imagine living in a society where you had a debate and the final conclusion was that um circumcision should be illegal for everyone except the people who believe in it does that make sense that seemed like something the panics or like some kind of really authentic direct democracy oh well you know um nobody should cut off part of their dick unless you believe in it unless it's part of your religion unless it's part of your culture that's exactly the contradiction we're all we're all living with right and the ridiculous position of the other atheist youtubers the other secular activist viewers is that they they continue this to perpetuate this pattern you know they continue to perpetuate the fact oh no no no uh christmas should continue to be celebrated by the people who believe in it circumcision could continue to be celebrated by the but by the people who believe in every imaginable you know cultural tradition that muslims should carry on being muslims just not us atheists that we should have our own you know our own place in the panoply of uh of minority traditions i don't think uh this is what all atheists believe but i think it's interesting that the people who become activists who become voices for and representatives for the movement and have youtube channels the people who end up in those positions and end up being supported with considerable amounts of money as far as i know by the way you know in terms of donations i think it's it's significant that that's that that's the pattern you know um all right i'm gonna close this part of the video i'm going to address kind of one more category and then then i'm going to wrap it up i have not been able to read uh your comments in the audience i assume that's just an error on youtube's part again if you want to take a moment hit the thumbs up button might help a few more people discover the video but no big deal either way i make about 200 a month out of this hobby and obviously if i had been motivated by money i would not have said i would not have said half of the things in this video that i've said um this is no way to earn earn a living on social media um i do this because i think it's the right thing to do i do this for all the reasons i've already talked about earlier in this video i do this to have a positive impact you know on the lives of the 15 or 50 people i can really meaningfully uh change through my own influence through my own example however when i put it you know i do this to make the world a better place to change society to change the future of the society i live in and so on to the extent that i can but you know what most of all i do this to change myself the most fundamental choice i gotta make is who i'm gonna be and who i'm gonna become and it changes right it changes year by year and many in the audience you may not feel this or may not feel it yet if in watching my youtube videos you know some of your attitudes have changed if you've become unwilling to make some of the compromises you lived with before i think you'll be amazed how within the passage of time with it within the passage of a few years how who you are changes also without you even making a decision without you making any sacrifice you know um you'll become a different person frankly just because you've thought some of these things through thoroughly that maybe you didn't think through before before they were animated shall we say you know here on my youtube channel the way in which we change is not always voluntary although it's always intellectual have you ever reflected about a relationship in your life that um you never made the decision to forgive someone but you discovered with the passage of time that you had forgiven them you don't always choose to forgive people sometimes you just forgive people you know you don't always choose the way in which your own character changes and you know what why why forgive someone and that is it there are many reasons but one scenario that's common enough that many of you probably felt this way if you're past the age of 30 you know one of the reasons why we forgive people is that we realize that the reason we resented them before was looking back at it now my reason for being so angry my reason you know what i know okay in the same way without you making any decision at all to change without you making any sacrifices that you make any commitment who you are will change simply through the realization and recognition that things you made excuses for before are um i say this again and again in writing and in my youtube videos i'm i'm currently producing the final draft of my book you know um the excuses are harder to quit than the thing itself you know to quit making excuses for something to quit making excuses for your own culture to quit making excuses for your own religion right to quit making excuses for the decisions your parents made your grandparents mad that's much harder that's much harder than changing your own behaviors changing your own habits of life there are there are so many people raised muslim who start drinking alcohol and eating pork you know they just start living a modern life when the once they're in their own apartment and have their own job right like when they go back and visit their parents they don't do those things right but what they can't quit is making excuses for the cultural identity they want to perpetuate it's much harder right and of course you can quit making the excuses and you you could continue living the lifestyle so you could continue refusing to drink alcohol if you need pork you know that's really the deeper challenge and change and just admitting to yourself you might not choose you might not decide you might not sacrifice just admitting to yourself this is with the pasture of time it changes have you ever known you ever known a young woman who was passionate about fashion about designer clothes they they may not choose they may not make a choice they may not sacrifice you know they may reach a point in their lives where they start regarding fashion and designer clothes as my point this is not unique to there's not unique to religion i say in your personal relationships you know you resent that person so much for something they did to harm you in the past whatever it is and then you regard that as as and you find that you've forgiven them you know um okay wrapping up the first half of this video um or the first nine tenths i don't have that much more to say [Laughter] you know in what sense is culture a tragedy in what sense am i presenting multiculturalism therefore is something tragic you know um you have to have a clear sense of human potential that's counter posed to culture as soon as we recognize that as soon as we recognize the humanity of people who are members of these rival religions and rival cultures then we can recognize the extent to which each and every culture really is bad and evil and wrong right now some of you may feel i had a great advantage in life in being raised in a free-thinking quote-unquote free-thinking atheist household okay my parents were communists my parents made excuses for joseph stalin from mao zedong for lenin and that's what i grew up with that's what i had to challenge and i don't return okay um people who make excuses for saying a prayer before they eat dinner another very visceral example children who are taught to say a prayer before they write a test in class before they write the math test before they write the science test so they'll get a higher grade because these are the ways in which we live with you know beliefs and traditions each and every one of us had something to challenge in the culture we were raised had something to to overturn right um you know it's possible you've known someone what i'm going to say now is kind of parallel to my critique of video games you know it's possible you've known someone who was so mentally disabled who was so severely limited in their cognitive ability that you just think you know what there's no point in trying to convince this guy to stop praying there's no point in convincing this guy that when he talks to god he's just talking to himself this guy is so mentally disabled he's so mentally limited that we're just going to step back and let him keep living his life that way so i i say this is parallel to some of the questions i've raised with video game addiction and video game playing it is possible you know some young man who is so disabled that you think well like this guy maybe he can never read a book maybe he's really that disabled he's so mentally limited well then in that context maybe there's no harm in stepping back and letting him play video games because he can never read a book he can never have a job he can never have a career and never make progress you know in other ways if you really know someone who's that severely mentally disabled i've mentioned this before one of my own brothers is so severely mentally disabled he has never spoken a single sentence in the english language he can't speak he can basically eat you know um it has been claimed to me about that brother i don't know this that if you go back and visit him several times he won't recognize you he just sees you as a person he can't remember a distinguished individual people that's been claimed to be about him but i mean this is really severe severe uh mental disability you know what is the judgment you're making about someone let's just say you had a twin brother or sorry if you're a female you have a twin sister let's say you had a twin brother or twin sister who has exactly the same intellectual potential you do the same capacity for moral responsibility the same capacity to make the world a better place would you look at that twin brother and say you know what it's fine for you to spend the rest of your life smoking marijuana drinking alcohol playing video games like it's fine for you to do that because hey you do you but not me i'm gonna hold myself to a higher standard would it be fine for you to look at your own twin brother your own twin sister and make the judgment you know what it's fine for you to join this cult to join this religion where you're going to get married and pregnant at age 16 or if it's a guy you're going to get married and start raising raising a kid with a girl at age 16 and for you to live your whole life spending all your energy and efforts justifying and continuing and perpetuating the elements of this culture in your style of dress in your household in the fastidious habits that define every meal right and your calendar full of religious occasions in the prayers you say morning noon and night in the songs you sing and in all the songs you refuse to listen to you can't listen to the radio you can't watch movies you have to live your whole life in this very narrow culturally defined space rigorously devoted just to just to living out this these religious ideals would you look at your own twin brother or twin sister someone who is your equal intellectually in every way would you look at them and say you know what that's fine for someone like you but not me i want to live my life answerable to some kind of higher stance i want to hold myself to a higher standard i want to pursue some kind of excellence even if i have no idea what it is even if it is not something as specific as finding the cure for cancer or writing a book about the folks of aristotle you have me you may have no particular ambitions in life and yet you have ambition you have some sense of some feeling for your own human potential that there must be something better for you to do in your life even if it's just that you're turning away from these other things that would that would limit it right so this is ultimately an argument about human potential and if we can see if we can sense if we can feel if we can appreciate that human potential in others right then we must see it as a tragedy that they have wrapped their faces and wrapped their bodies in the symbols of these religious traditions that they have devoted themselves to the perpetuation of culture now throughout this video just to be brief i've mostly been talking about judaism christianity and islam i've drawn on examples people have known face to face obviously we could have talked about mormonism we could have talked about scientology and i said in the earlier video i made on the same topic the earlier video that has multicultural is another title i said there very clearly that even though it is more subtle to perceive this same critique can and should be applied to buddhism it can and should be applied to hinduism i know a great deal i was a former expert in buddhism i know great deal of buddhism and hinduism i could talk about jainism the problem is the video would be much longer because i really have to explain a lot of things about these religions to you just people in the audience will not come here with the level of familiarity uh and i just mentioned i said i've been unable to cooperate with other atheist channels when i started this channel i completely assumed my main purpose would be the critique of buddhism would be talking about buddhism from an atheist perspective as a former scholar of buddhism i never found anyone i could i could work with i never had encouragement i only had had discouragement and what you hear instead again from the so-called atheists the so-called secular activists all of them want to perpetuate these cultural traditions all of them want to believe that meditation and yoga and ayurvedic medicine oh there's a great example of pseudoscience oh do you think do you think different cultures are allowed to have different medicines do you believe eating mercury eating the liquid metal mercury do you think that's that's justifiable by religion do you think that's okay for a culture other than own um all this stuff and forcing yourself to vomit putting a towel down your throat all unbelievably horrendous you know yogic traditions and i heard traditions and stuff oh you you believe in uh believe in multiculturalism applying that to medicine in india oh i got scary quick anyway i just say i would i would really have to make a much longer video to talk about buddhist traditions plural or any particular uh buddhist religion this way so i just say um when you were walking down that hall or when you were walking on the street if you dismiss the human potential the intellectual potential the political potential the creative potential of these other people just creativity again you're not necessarily finding the cure for cancer maybe you're going to be a painter maybe you're going to be a poet maybe you're going to write you know write manuscripts like shakespeare whatever you're going to do maybe you're going to be a journalist write something meaningful as a journalist if you are walking past people who wrap themselves in the symbols of religion whether that be judaism christianity or islam who are living their lives in this narrow way being beholden to the errors and self-righteous ignorance of their own ancestors their parents their grandparents going back to time and memorial or possibly just their own parents converted to islam could you be just one generation ago this essentially if you think nothing is lost there then you are making a judgment on them you are in effect saying you are not my twin brother or my twin sister you are not my equal in intellectual potential there nothing lost with you making the wrong decision that you're willing to dismiss and diminish everything they could do in their lives right you're making the decision that basically they are as cognitively impaired as someone from nothing better is possible anyway so why not let them continue talking to their imaginary friend why not let them continue living their lives in this in this terrible hopeless dead-ended way right so on the video by responding to a comment that was in the uh in the comment section with my with my last video um [Music] this challenge is the whole multicultural paradigm from a different perspective um someone commented and it's completely understandable someone commented that they they still think we should have multiculturalism as far as cuisine is concerned as far as restaurants are concerned that's obviously it's a very it's sympathetic sympathetic counter right um so the point is here in the year 2021 almost every corner of the world has chinese restaurants indian restaurants remarkably i everywhere i go in the world i see ethiopian restaurants a very specific culture of cuisine that there should be french restaurants and so on it's um fair to say that one of the distinctions between a major city and a small town of no importance is the extent to which there is this kind of cultural diversity in cuisine what does it mean though really when you presume or assert that indian food should be or has to be cooked by indian people that chinese cuisine should be or has to be cooked by chinese people there's a very strange trivial pardon me there's a very strange trivialization of precisely the cultures that we're supposedly trying to preserve or uphold under the heading of multiculturalism this comes back to the question of the government structure of education and and the extent to which multiculturalism really has been a kind of conspiracy to recruit low-wage labor into our societies uh and this is not at all been a government policy of actually bringing in cultural leaders to to represent their culture to share their culture to teach our culture to do to benefit us to enrich our culture with their own um you know if the chinese language is worth learning it cannot possibly be that it is only worth learning only worth studying only worth teaching to people who are ethnically chinese that makes no sense at all that makes no sense at all why would you create chinese language classes that are only by and for ethnically chinese people now i am ethnically jewish i have to bear persecution and racism my whole life because this it's always been an issue it still is if you think i'm joking i'm not you know anti-semitism is very real in the 21st century and i have to you know prepare my daughter to also deal with that her whole life long i've had youtube videos talking about this so i live under this peculiar kind of scrutiny all right what would it mean if you said that it was only significant that it was only culturally important for jewish people to learn and study hebrew not non-jewish people the most important thing of all is to have people who are not jewish learning hebrew precisely so that they can cross-examine criticize from a detached outsider's perspective from an atheist perspective from a nihilist perspective what is written in hebrew not just in the bible of course that's important of course it's important to have secular free thinking outside eyes the eyes of people who are free thinking secular outsiders cross-examining and criticizing what's in the bible what's going on in religious studies basically to debunk the the beliefs of people we need people who can read the newspapers in modern hebrew and who can basically say what it is what's going on we need people who can really in a a liberal way in this sense criticize and cross-examine what's going on within israeli politics that's tremendously important suddenly it seems as if the outsider's perspective and again it's not really because you're from the outside it's because you're an atheist it's because you're annihilus because you have detachment it's because you have these different motivations suddenly that seems much more valuable than people within the culture perpetuating the culture right and as i say you know what i'm challenging here is the assumption that what each of us ought to do morally is devote ourselves to maintaining a museum to the cultural values of our our forefathers our ancestors right instead i'm presenting a view of society that's dynamic and forward-looking that is constantly engaged in the demolition of its cultural traditions and in the generation of new as yet unknown cultural conditions right um obviously if it is worthwhile if it is meaningful enough for someone to make the sacrifice to learn chinese it is more worthwhile it is more rewarding it's more important for all of us that non-chinese people and the people who don't believe in china or chinese necessary don't believe in this culture that don't value the culture who don't value their village you don't value the tradition it is much more important that detached outsiders learn chinese and bring that critical perspective and they've got to bring that critical perspective to ancient texts that are the chinese equivalent to the bible chinese doesn't have a bible but it has ancient texts like sunza lord shan confucius there are these ancient hallowed texts that they that they bring a critical outsider's perspective to communism in china and that they even bring a critical outsider's perspective to to the bible right and then if it's not worth doing it's not what we're doing for anyone now in case you hadn't guessed i had to make these arguments about learning pali for buddhism learning the ancient scriptural language for buddhism i had to make these arguments about people learning cree and ojibwe who are neither cree nor ojibwe what's the significance of knowing the kree language or the object language is it just so that people who happen to be born in that ethnic group can endlessly repeat the same rituals live as if they're in a museum devoted to their ancestral past no there has to be something productive there has to be something forward-looking i'll always remember the shock that was on the face of one of my professors when i talked to him about writing the first chemistry textbook in korea i said when are we going to start working on high school textbooks for chemistry and biology and like explaining the theory of evolution you know in cree in ojibwe he had never thought of this he didn't have a forward-looking view of the use of the language either we're going to do that or or not at all i had so many people do digress briefly they got so excited and inspired when i told them the research project i was going to ask for um research funding for i said well you know the the the so-called elders in these tribal groups you know people talk about them as if they're from 500 years ago you know sorry but human lifespan is what it is so well the main thing they lived through was the cold war with the soviet union and many of their these remote first nations uh reservations really their experience of history had to do with military bases and missile silos and the threat of the russians invading that was really and most of what they heard about on the radio and saw on tv living in terminators so i was going to do a research project based on you know the history of just the last 50 years that was the kind of people got so excited and they didn't think of the language that way they didn't think of talking to the tribal others that way they thought you went to the tribal elders and you asked them questions about what life was like 500 years ago and then you just worshiped and preserved this idea of being a hunter who you know rides in a canoe yeah well you know what i want to know about is you know what did the atom bomb mean to you like if you you are maybe old enough to remember when you were a child first learning about the atom bomb being dropped on japan then you moved into this long period of history of being terrified that your own country would be destroyed by the atom bomb and you live near this military base and nothing else because it's remote areas of rural canada okay um you know so again i think this comes back to us at the very start of the video where just the words we associate with culture we think of cultural preservation we don't think about cultural production okay and cultural production absolutely entails cultural demolition we destroy when we create we destroy in order to create um so the notion that you're going to comprise a society of separate little tiles forming a mosaic in which chinese people arrive and cook and prepare chinese food and they maybe raise their children going to a chinese school where they learn to speak chinese and then grow up and work in the same chinese restaurant this is wrong in a sense that's kind of profound and hard to perceive okay if french cuisine really matters if i'm going to just narrow it down a bit partly because my own experience in life probably because my own expertise probably because i'm vegan let's be more specific in the french theme french baking probably everyone in this audience knows if you go to paris the quality of a croissant the quality of a loaf of bread is much higher than anywhere in canada or the united states i remember when i was in england i was in cambridge england and you could get french bread and croissants that were imported from paris you could pay and i remember the one of the reasons i noticed they had a sign up at the bakery saying look you know try to tell us two days in advance because they they said they're sent over by airplane they were airlifting yeah so in england england is adjacent to to france they couldn't make bread and croissant they couldn't make banquets as well as the french okay now look hey maybe it doesn't matter maybe we're going to trivialize and dismiss and say you know what bread who cares you know and i was asked this is why before i was saying look reading chinese being able to read understand chinese politics or chinese philosophy or chinese history obviously it matters so obviously there's people like me who can engage in it from an outside perspective with with bread you know there's a debate to be had here if it matters to have bread and croissants baked at the same high standards as the french then you need people learning how to do it in universities in canada in universities in ireland right you need the training facilities to educate your own people in the cuisine of the french you do not need a multicultural society in which you treat this as a birthright that makes no sense at all now we don't ask this partly just because it's trivial what is the future of baking in canada what is the future of chinese cuisine in canada what is the future of indian food indian restaurants in canada it cannot be that you are perpetually importing immigrants who devote their lives to reproducing their own culture within yours right why don't we instead and again i think this comes back to you with my earlier video talk the hierarchical and oppressive aspects of multiculturalism why wouldn't you go to india or go to china and say hey you know what i'm not looking for people who will work for minimum wage and if we're being honest a lot of what goes on with multiculturalism and immigration it's about paying people less than minimum wage oh you know what i'm not looking for someone who's willing to take a minimum wage job at the back of a kitchen making indian food or chinese food and can you know what i've come here to china or i've come here to india to recruit the most elite chefs you've got i'm here to pay someone more than 100 000 a year to come to canada and run a training and education program so we can educate the next generation of canadians to do world-class indian food world-class chinese food so that we can make chinese food just as well as the chinese of course that's what ireland should do of course that's what can't do of course it's the right thing to do it's the right thing to do in every way including morally right and of course that's what's starting to happen with french cuisine french cuisine only because we don't have the option of recruiting french people to work for minimum wage in the back of the kitchen anymore they won't do it it's just hard to do it's hard to get the french to leave behind the level of pay the level of benefits the quality of life they have in france to take up the sort of minimum wage back of the you know back of the restaurant jobs that we presume we can get infinite numbers of people to do from the philippines from china from india right isn't it different to have people who are the leaders in your society representing those other cultures and teaching whatever is really valuable about those cultures to your own that that would be real multiculturalism to say hey you know what in canada we're not proud that we have immigrants working for minimum wage making chinese food what we're proud of is that we have a bunch of people who are experts in chinese cuisine and we pay them more than a hundred thousand dollars a year to teach us how to cook chinese food and now we can do it also now we have actually gained something from their culture now chinese language is obvious nobody can even debate whether or not it's worthwhile to import people who are experts to teach chinese language we've got to do it we're way better it's an emergency right what else what else is culture it gets debatable quick chinese opera does it matter or not if you think chinese opera matters it's the same thing we've got to import some people who are the best of the best to teach us how to sing chinese opera to teach us how to perform chinese opera and then chinese opera will become part of canadian culture it will become part of irish culture it will be something we appropriate and that we do for them ourselves in the same way that american rock and roll music has been appropriated by the chinese the japanese the koreans they do it themselves they don't just import people at minimum wage to play american music for them they've mastered the art they've made it their own and they've of course produced new genres of music that partly reflect the american tradition that rock and roll music is based on or blues music or rap music by the way black american rap music has been appropriated by the japanese the chinese even the cambodians everyone they've got their own rap music now and it partly reflects something unique something original you've made in the process of cultural production this could happen with chinese cuisine this could happen with chinese opera this can happen with chinese language we can start producing our own literature and our own politics that reflects what we've taken from those traditions we can start producing new philosophies that reflect the mastery of the old ultimately the critique of the old ultimately the demolition of the old okay that in brief is my vision of the future it can only be achieved by the negation of everything we have come to presuppose as sacred but in fact is bad and evil and wrong what we call culture is tyranny the model of a 21st century society built on multiculturalism is counterproductive and in the lives of individual people as well as when scaled up to look at us in our masses in the millions the outcomes are in a word tragic