Veganism: beyond ecology, consumerism & the boycott mentality.

guys this is a long thoughtful video
I've gotta warn you in case you didn't already get the sense of that from the timestamp it's a long video and it brings in a whole lot of different examples from my life and from corners of politics I care about it talks about First Nations peoples in Canada I think it probably mentions Cambodia I mean it brings up political and personal issues and it presents I think a complicated and important problem in a suitably complex way I remember the high school principal's office when you were sitting to wait to talk to the principal if you were in trouble when I was in high school there was a poster on the wall and it had like a photograph of a kitten and it said for every complex problem there was a simple solution and I so wanted to take out a pen and deface that poster by writing and it is wrong you really need to beware of people who offer you simple solutions to complex problems this is a complex problem and I presented here in all its complexity so you ain't got the time or attention span you don't want to do it now wait until you're washing dishes and then listen the video that if I got to dumb it down now in the intro or in the outro or what have you I have said this in other videos if you picture the impact you have on the environment as a sphere or a circle drawing around yourself all the negative impacts the jet fuel you use the plastics you use the fact that when you buy wheat the farming of the wheat uses of pesticides and uses of water and kills groundhogs even if you're vegan all of these negative impacts it's really counterproductive to adopt a mentality as a vegan activist where you're trying to change the world just by shrinking down that circle that's a view of the movement that's based on the assumption that you're really a passive consumer in a consumerist reductionist in this sense boycott movement right and what I'm encouraging you to do in this video to a sort of complex discussion of a whole bunch of different examples is instead to think of yourself as someone who can make a positive difference politically that's much more effective that matters much more within our lifetimes and long-term than just eliminating the amount of plastic you buy or the number of liters of jet fuel use up in your life an example I used an earlier video is what if you're running for mayor I'm sorry forget mayor what if you're writing for prime minister of the country you come from Prime Minister of Canada if you're running for government you're running for Prime Minister of Canada it doesn't even matter if you think you can win if you think you've got a message that's really worth delivering to the public you're gonna use up all the jet fuel you can flying from town to town visiting one place after another shaking people's hands giving speeches reaching out to people trying to deliver that message through the limited political platform you've got to make whatever kind of positive about you can so obviously let's say you're running for prime minister as a representative of the Green Party you probably don't have a shot at winning but maybe there are five or ten important issues you can shine a flashlight on try to spotlight on you can draw public attention see if you believe that what you're doing is worthwhile you're gonna burn the jet fuel to accomplish that end and sometimes have the most impact to have the greatest effect in peace and war in politics and your personal life whether you're writing a novel that you really believe believe in or you're pursuing a political and pick campaign you believe in or you're actually fighting a war right now to try to defeat Isis or some other objective of this kind whatever the objective is it's it's really misleading to think in terms of minimizing your negative impacts to the point where you overlook how you're gonna maximize your positive impacts in the whole this video I said it a bunch of the other considerations as to why that is one of the most fundamental being were not in a situation where vegans are just trying to become 51% of the population or ninety percent of the population to win through consumer activism alone vegans can have a huge impact on society in politics if they get organized when there are only five percent of the population but if they think of themselves as minimizing their impact through consumption only if they remain consumerist boycott individual activists in this way then the impact they can have will wait until they're such a huge part of the market that their impact on market demand is something that corporations know they're for profit seeking entities are going to respond to passively it's a passive view of the movement in this video at some length in some complexity what I'm advocating for instead is a genie politically genuinely activists through the movement where you embrace and accept the fact that you're gonna do some harm in this world you're gonna use up some jet fuel and some plastics but you're gonna do it do it in a meaningful way with the maximum positive impact the maximum positive outcomes not just minimizing your negative outcomes and why am I saying this because still to this day literally today and yesterday a bunch of people Internet we're still coming to me and talking about veganism from this perspective were they really assumed in a deep level that the logic purpose and function of the movement was merely to minimize you negative impact I can see why they arrived at that attitude I myself came to veganism out of ecology it's very easy to think that the mechanism whereby veganism is going to pursue social change is the same mechanism whereby you go around and try to convince people to take fewer showers so they don't waste water but it's not the mechanism whereby we're gonna pursue social change is actually the same as the gay rights movement if gay rights had to wait until 51% of the population was gay to bring about gay rights it never would have made progress a much smaller percentage whether it's five percentage will have you can bring about fundamental political and social change especially in a democracy through lobbying through public education through pressing for that change but not you passive consumer centered action that's merely trying to mitigate or minimize your negative impact a bonus Yin BA Liu Yin hey guys one of the most important issues ever dealt with on my channel is the fundamental concept that when I engage in veganism as an ecological and political movement I am NOT trying to minimize my negative impact on the world I'm trying to maximize my positive impact in the world as simple and even stupid as that may say it's a really fundamental issue because of begin again things that are misleading but true are much more dangerous than lies and I see a lot of vegans like literally even today but this week I've talked to a lot of vegans who are really stuck on the notion that their role as an ISIL consumer minimizing the impact they have in the world ecologically is of preeminent importance they think of veganism as a boycott and as a boycott only they think of veganism as a form of economic efficiency and by thinking in those terms they come to bizarre and self contradictory positions that are logical but unethical for example they argue to me that there will be a net positive impact in the world if they use leather shoes or if they eat roadkill they eat meat that wasn't specifically killed in north to eat because this will indirectly cause them to buy less broccoli and serve them now there were a lot of things that are wrong with this mentality but I'm saying here I'm just drawing attention back to the caviar it made the problem is not that these things are absolutely and categorically false things that are absolutely false are relatively easy for people to shrug off to discard to move past the reason why these notions are so dangerous within veganism is that they're just true enough to warp with the movement will have to keep not buying these products and buying the other products for them to realize that we need to stop class a lot of products get wasted along the way and that's quite hard to deal with and we can use that as a justification to keep eating animals but you know 500 people stopped buying the regular milk and start buying the soy milk they put like two less crates of that in the supermarket very slowly we start to see a less demand for the farmers so they stopped breeding as many animals and and then there will suddenly start to realize there's less profit in the business and then think okay so as you got from even those few seconds this view of the world he's describing is one of consumer centered activism the idea that gradually a larger and larger percentage of people are refusing to drink cow milk and thus as he says stores stop buying cow milk and then cows stop being bred to live their whole lives in captivity to produce cow milk etc and that view basically entails that we only achieve a vegan world or a vegan society or even a vegan town when we get way past 51% of the population being vegan so as a matter of fact my view my really explicitly view of veganism is much more optimistic because I think that 5% of people can have a dynamic impact on society and I've seen that again and again it is not the case that homosexuals needed to become 51% of society to get their changes to the laws passed it is not the case that activists who were against cigarette smoking had to become 51% of the population to get their changes to our society passed and they're quite dramatic these are success stories there are also tragic failures I think I think we can look at you know the status of First Nations people in Canada or indigenous people of minority groups that failed to put together the aspects necessary to succeed as lobbyists to bring about the political changes they wanted my view of veganism is that we can win with 5% his view of veganism is we could only win with something like 90% and that's why he's so depressed he actually is thinking of this short term and long term as a kind of consumer boycott and again we could just come back to a simple example like cigarette smoking the anti-smoking movement is not just a boycott movement they're not just trying to boycott cigarettes it's also a public education movement it's a public policy movement because they're trying to stop everyone from smoking cigarettes it so it's oppressive we're all pressing the cigarette smokers I admit it but this is part of a grander design for social change that we're engaged in pursuing what percentage of Canadians were ever a part of that movement wherever part of an actual organized political movement to bring about social change to gradually eliminate cigarette smoking and do not so gradually at all stigmatize cigarette smoke ease that's what is is a stigma I don't even think 5% of Canadians ever got organized or ever got engaged but we managed to achieve that social change I I doubt I really doubt 10% of people were really active and organized in gay rights movements it's probably if you could get a realistic estimates probably much smaller than that but I do think that the boycott mentality within veganism is actually problematic the boycott mentality takes us so far but only so far and no further and we have to move past that and I did I'm sorry maybe I should dig up that podcast and actually upload part of it to YouTube because really good discussion and a lot of people said to me response to that wow I never thought about that before but it's true veganism it partly is a boycott movement and it partly is not so I have a couple of videos talking about this but I noticed when I look back at those earlier videos I mentioned in them that the mean place I covered this issue was in a podcast that previously was not available on YouTube if you search for the word boycott on this channel oh I think it's on this channel but I also did a whole podcast on the boycott mentality within veganism and I think that's a patreon only podcast so I'm sorry I forget to what extent it's on YouTube nor descends on patreon and to be honest I think even the vast majority of my patreon supporters have never heard this podcast it was recorded while I was in an airport in response to a picture of you er now there's a lot of folksy autobiographical window dressing for this podcast it talks about what's going on in my life it talks about how I came to these conclusions but I urge you to stick with it because there is actually a really important methodological philosophical and political point here which is that it seems salutary to vegans it seems useful to many of us within the movement it seems as if it's a really positive thing to preach this movement in terms of reducing the amount of plastic use to zero reducing the amount of jet fuel use to zero reducing the negative impact you have in the world through buying even things like wheat and broccoli to zero and this is a sort of phony consequentialism a sort of phony utilitarianism that is both based upon and reinforces the idea of the vegan as an isolated consumer of course there's some truth to that this again my point it's not that it's entirely wrong the problem is that there's a little bit of truth to it and it's misleading to some extent we all rise lately consumers to some extent veganism is a boycott and to some extent it's worthwhile to talk about veganism in terms of a strictly consumerist boycott mentality but it is also misleading dangerous and self-defeating and I think in this podcast you'll hear me spell out why the way we need to think we need to think ambitiously we need to think about the future that in a way that we're willing to burn jet fuel and waste plastic we're willing to make the sacrifices necessary to have the maximum positive impact change the world not the minimum negative impact hey what's up this is being recorded not on my usual iconic white sphere of a mic but on a portable device that I expect they'll be using more in China actually while I'm in Thailand if I were to interview some people face-to-face this would be the device I would use I could conduct interviews with it if I meet people on the street or what have you so hopefully the sound quality turns out okay I'm gonna respond in this short podcast to a question from Jake Eames jake has been mentioned in my youtube channel before Jake asks a question that's simple but deep and that matters to his own life and for me it calls up philosophical problems that I dealt with at such an early age that it is difficult for me to remember how I responded to these problems although I can remember discussing it with friends of mine who were teenagers or what have you years later people who went through these these issues and debates relatively late in life Jake asked me about basically the problem of justifying waste and harm in one's own life the same logic that has made him a vegan has led him to question increasingly the use of things like plastic disposable items disposable packaging or a disposable pen and how one can justify doing this kind of harm doing this kind of waste in life or conversely how one draws the line the same kind of ethical principles that bring you to despise the waste and harm done by animal agriculture can very easily lead you to hate the wasted harm done by the plastic industry although in many ways they are starkly different as a pointed out in my channel a long time ago people quit smoking for many reasons but nobody quit smoking because they want to reduce the suffering of the tobacco plant I think it's also fair to say that nobody is trying to reduce their use of plastic for the sake of the plastic itself whereas you know with pigs and cows there is a real sense of the welfare and suffering of the animals themselves so it is in a different category of questions but nevertheless these are these are important questions that many people struggle with and as I've said I deal with at a very very very early age now there are advantages and disadvantages to the way I live my life I am really aware that the solutions I have to these problems are not solutions that work for everyone and I'm very honest with myself about the disadvantages that I endure as a result of seeing the world the way I do for me these problems really come under the heading of what you are living your life for positively the objectives you're pursuing the justification for the harm you do is relative to the positive outcomes you're pursuing I don't start from the assumption that my life is merely a matter of self-indulgence consumption wasting time on this mortal plane of existence until I die I very much assume that I'm an active protagonist trying to accomplish real and meaningful things and the harm I do in this world is then evaluated next to that standard I have met a few people in my life only a few who absolutely do not think of themselves this way who really do think of themselves as passive and as spending up a certain amount of money and getting a certain amount of joy menteur the world before they die there are people who not accidentally whose self consciously assert a totally different view of the world there are many many different views of how we live our lives in the world now among the disadvantages of my approach to this life is that what I'm separated from the goals I'm pursuing of course I suffer when I moved to Saskatchewan Canada a part of Canada that is not famous and I'm sure many of you would have never heard of before if you come to my YouTube channel when I moved to this you know somewhat ugly frozen horrible part of Canada I moved there to work on First Nations languages First Nations politics etc I had a whole career path in mind and those were highly morally motivated goals I was pursuing okay wasn't about money wasn't about enjoying myself wasn't on vacation wasn't having a good time now the minute that became impossible let me know for quite some time for more than a year I was actually very much engaged in exactly that work the work of studying the languages learning about the history getting involved in the political discourse of the political struggle whatever you want to say that was my life for more than one year although not that much more than a 12-month year I forget how long it lasted now it could have been a year and a half but I forget offhand but anyway for a relatively short intense period that was the objective I was working towards and it justified not only the harm I do to this world in terms of ecological damage it justified the suffering I was enduring because I suffered a lot in many many different ways that was another long period of my life where I never had a desk never had never really had you know a place of my own and what-have-you in in god the food is terrible being a vegan in Saskatchewan a whole misery in many different levels now this is only one example from one period of my life my point here was to say that the minute I was cut off from that goal then suddenly you know it's emotionally devastating to me I've sacrificed everything I've given up many other things I could have been doing my life and things that I really was doing in my life I've cut off all my other research projects my other careers from other directions to devote myself to this and now all that is for nothing now I've had that kind of shattering devastating experience many times in my life but my point here in replying to the question from Jake and advising him is to say look I'm not telling you I have the best solution of this problem I'm telling you that I have one solution to this problem among many and it has both advantages and disadvantages now I'll use an extreme example before coming back to a moderate example let's talk about a war and a war you want to fight is there gonna be wastes in the war yes waste beyond belief if you just look at gasoline use in warfare it is horrifying the amount of casts any any large of military wastes I mean that sincerely now obviously things like plastic are not even thought about the dumping of incredibly damaging chemicals into the ground including chemicals that are developed for chemical warfare by by military groups is you know again astounding in general ecological impacts of military interventions are on another scale from merely industrial impacts I could mention why that sick both it was some of the most notorious of course are things like the use of Agent Orange of chemical agents in Vietnam and so on but actually whenever you study any particular war in detail there are these crummy little episodes that reveal how how utterly ecology was was devastated for sake of the war but now I'm saying this to challenge myself here's a war I believe I would support given my current level of knowledge and my current level of ignorance from my perspective Mexico is falling apart you can look up the Freedom House report on Mexico democracy in Mexico has failed there are large areas of Mexico where literally you know drug dealers control the government where you know police can't do the normal work police do and so on where armed gangs and cartels have a kind of powwow over people's lives in the land that's terrifying there's been a disintegration of basic social order in Mexico and Mexico is not a far-off and exotic place it really impacts our in both Canada in the United States very directly would I support a military intervention in Mexico not to conquer Mexico and I want Mexico to become part of Canada but to try to restore law and order to try to impose you know that local level from village to village you know mayors and police forces and working government and to get rid of profound corruption that they have in their government there to put in place some set of transitional authorities and to avoid an even worse humanitarian disaster as Mexico currently is falling apart and all this of course is a fringe benefit you would be reducing you know human trafficking drug trafficking and many other problems I've got to tell you with Mexico my answer is yes and I mean that is a real-world example right now in 2016 so in many contexts I'm anti-war or I'm skeptical of war I'm trying to minimize war but there are other contexts in which I look at the facts and I am NOT an expert on Mexico don't get me wrong I'm very far from Mexico but very far from an expert on Mexico but based on the facts as I know them in my considerable that ignorance I look at Mexico and I think this is a disaster and I can't believe there isn't some kind of United Nations intervention or some kind of NATO intervention or a few to stabilize this country now if that goal is worth pursuing then waste terrible unfathomable waste waste far beyond you know a disposable plastic pen is going to be justified in pursuit of that goal so I as an individual I think in the same way that political organizations think in that I am goal-oriented yes there will be decisions about how much waste is is made along the way but ultimately you're talking about wasting human lives also you're talking about a cost in killing human beings with wasting resources and again gasoline alone unfathomable even in very small wars because you have airplanes you know an airplane that can transfer or a tank burns a lot of gas you know and even the boats they use to transport heavy heavy equipment and logistics unbelievable use of resources for even very minor conflicts now again I'm not saying this to try to make your use of a disposable plastic pen seem insignificant I'm not my point is not that there's larger waste in the world therefore don't worry about your waste my point is to say you have to evaluate the waste and the harm that you're responsible for relative to your goals in life and that's why fermi goals and objectives are so important when I was talking to Leah recently Leah pram stroller young woman interviewed on my my youtube channel we talked a little bit about the Joe best scandal and the other the other sex scandals involving vegans in Thailand and I said you were honestly something I would say again now you know after we had talked about it for some time I said look you know I've got to tell you these guys were talking about I wouldn't care if they lived in complete celibacy to me they would still be scumbags you know for me I'm not I am NOT sex-negative I am sex-positive I do not demonize sex I really don't but from my perspective these guys who are living on permanent vacation these guys who are living lives of self-indulgence and so on in Chiang Mai or elsewhere to me they are despicable fundamentally for that reason the life they're living the goal they're pursuing to me makes what they're doing despicable now those guys probably use about the same amount of plastic I do and throw away the same amount of plastic pens that I do and what have you you know maybe there's some difference I don't know I'm pretty abstemious my environmental impacts are pretty negligible which is not a post my life as very few luxuries but that's that's not my point my point is not conserving in these small ways when I was living in Thailand I was doing something I really believed was tremendously one important for the short-term of the long-term you guys already know I was pursuing a combination of humanitarian work original research learning languages learning history I think that is really worthwhile and yes I did use you know plastic pens I still use plastic pens right now some of my pens are refillable some of them are disposable actually I have one youtube video but the Pens I use you can check that out if you're really interested but the alternative to this mentality ultimately of guilt which is fine and it's fine to feel guilt you know it's fine it's fine to feel guilt when you're responsible for something but if feeling guilt about the harm done the waste done and looking just at minimizing out minimizing outcomes minimizing waste minimizing harm oh well what about the positive side of outcomes you know you've got to look at input and output you're expending these things you're using these things up but you're using them up to accomplish something I hope you know that is the difference between me and Joe best or some white guy who's just on vacation in Thailand I didn't look much different from the white man who on vacation town but what I was actually doing was different and for me morally that changes the nature of the waste of the harm of anything else going on in my life I don't know I mean you know look maybe my perspective is psychologically abnormal like I honestly don't know maybe most people do not think that way as I've said the disadvantage is when you're then separated from those goals when those goals become unattainable or when you you are forced to stop pursuing them then that's you know you suffer tremendously I can remember having to give up my textbooks for the Lao language and you know weeping I went very briefly but I had a couple of tears fall from my eyes because I knew I was never gonna be able to study that language again and I'd put in so many hours of tremendously hard work to learn the language pardon me to learn the language now it's not just a language for me it's not just about language research to give you an example I remember interviewing a woman who is survive the war the the war with the Americans by you know running through the countryside and hiding in a cave with the bombs falling all around her and she had anecdotes from that period of her life you know went on for years it's not one day she went hid in the cave one of the caves she lived in they had a chalkboard and a schoolteacher and the children tried to learn how to read and write living in a cave I really wanted to write a short book recording her life story you know to translate it and have you know Lao in English and publish a book with this this chapter of history to me that's tremendously meaningful and it's not just research its moral its ethical it's it's the meaning of life in some sense I think I'm making the world a better place by writing that down and publishing that book and you know this obviously has parallels to the type of work I wanted to do with with First Nations with indigenous people in Canada for me writing that book justifies using the plastic pen and putting that plastic pen into a landfill and those are hard questions of personal values objectives etc and this is why I mentioned war it's it's very hard to know if you're in a good war or bad war it's very hard to know if you're on the right side or the wrong side when history is happening all around you it's much easier a hundred years later to go back and do research and look at the facts yeah so I mean I have sympathy for that too most people make those decisions with none of the kind of information and intellectual reflection that I've put into it they just they just sign on the dotted line join the army and start fighting and before you know it they're only thinking about how they can win and are interested in winning at any cost and in the same way I'm sure many people pursue their objectives and their private lives in their personal lives even if those objectives are just self-indulgence luxury and enjoyment with no other concern and they are doing it at any cost and they don't care how many plastic containers they put into a landfill etc what's our status vegans what's it gonna be for us are we gonna be a bunch of losers with yoga mats selling weight-loss dreams is that the future of veganism your choice you decide are we gonna be as my good friend Charles Marlow say are we gonna be a bunch of degenerates selling fad diet books oh are we gonna put ourselves into the hippy ghetto or the left-wing ghetto or the anti-capitalist ghetto or are we gonna be in the in a sense the pro capitalist ghetto are we gonna be just another consumerist fad hobby selling you you know all the different ways you can make money out of vegan cheese or whatever what's it gonna be I think we can look at the groups that lobbied for change on cigarettes on alcohol on drunk driving the groups that lobby for gay rights I think we can do better I think as you we have a lot of advantages over groups that are really oppressed that are really marginalized some vegans are rich some vegans are poor but actually there's no excuse for what pathetic failures you've been so far I think with far fewer than 5% of people becoming vegan we can actually start lobbying for dynamic social change and yes some of that is from the grassroots is from the bottom up but some of it if we're being honest is from the top down the view that I'm opposed to in this video I've criticized in the past under many different headings sometimes it's presented within veganism in terms of minimalism sometimes it's presented in terms of lifestyle activism it's branded and conceptualized in many different ways but all of these things seem to come down to leading by example which I've said in the past is not leading at all simply reforming your own lifestyle your own attitudes your own consumer habits and hoping that you're leading others until you reach some critical mass whether it's 51 percent or 90 percent and then magically the slaughterhouses start closing down milk production meat production and lobster production start being unprofitable okay that's not just incorrect it's really wrong it's really a dangerous delusion in the movement it wasn't enough for gay rights to be able to just say oh I'm just gonna change my own lifestyle I'm just personally not gonna be homophobic I'm just gonna change my own mentality in the way I'm living I'm gonna lead by example and hope or imagine that others will follow my example and at some point we get 51% of the population and 90% of the population and things get better for gay people no the gay rights movement it really consisted of small groups of people getting involved in advocacy getting a lawyer going to City Hall and saying hey you're firing schoolteachers because of their private sex lives we've got to make the case we've got to prove to you in the government we've got to prove to the public we've got to prove to the media we've got to prove to everyone that it's possible to be a homosexual man and be a schoolteacher that there's difference to me a homosexual and being a pedophile that it's not a danger to the children that schools can and should employ homosexuals as equals and believe me during the 1980s that was a very hard case to make it's much easier today for a small group of vegans to get together and say hey guess what leather is obsolete leather releases a noxious gas known as chromium hexane that has terrible health impacts on you and your family the Faculty of a leather couch in your house right now is doing harm to you it's bad for the workers who produce the leather of course it's terrible for the animals it's terrible for we call it for ecology we can put together that argument and we can press forward with it with an active overtly political conception of veganism but we're never going to get there just by saying oh well I'm gonna throw my own leather couch in the garbage I'm gonna get rid of you know I'm gonna make my own lifestyle changes and lead by example again whether that's packaged as minimalism lifestyle activism or by any other name as I said much earlier in this video again a broad ranging very miscellaneous video the talks of my personal politics in my personal psychology and its self critical in addition to being critical of the movement I don't pretend in this video that I have all the answers but something I've said again and again is we have to learn we have to get organized and we have to learn how to make the maximum positive impact not to be focused on minimizing our negative impacts the maximum possible positive impact when we're only 5% of the population 2% of the population or less that is going to be the art of the pursuit of political change for veganism it's not in fact going to be a passive consumer centered boycott mode ibonus yen