How to be my critic: a call for applicants.

let me just answer this question before
before I tell you what it is um in the whole history of this channel on only two occasions just twice did someone collaborate in a video with me by reading a book or even let's let's lower the bar to entry a little bit even reading a single page of a book so one of those two collaborations and I use the word collaboration as you go to see tremendously generously here one of those just concerned my interpretation of a single passage of Aristotle that you could define as a single page or less and I appreciated that there was one guy who took the time to disagree with me in detail he read the passage he cited he told me why his interpretation was the way it was and we looked at it together we looked at the passage in Aristotle we looked at the passage in Herodotus these are ancient Greek sources and you know what I still think his interpretation is wrong I think his interpretation is so wrong that even if I'm incorrect he would still be incorrect but nevertheless there was material there for me to go on and make another video discussing Aristotle and the political implications of a few things that he had say he contributed to my intellectual life to have that person in this sense collaborating just by reading something I read and sharing their thoughts sharing their perspective sharing them tradition the only other time that's happened in the hoist to this channel was with another youtuber called Maude vegan to read the same book I read and we collaborated doing a book review discussion video I think it's still an excellent video on this channel okay so I've given you the answer the question and now I'm going to tell you what the question is people write in to me from time to time sometimes asking in a really friendly way how can they join the discussion how can they debate something with me how can they collaborate with me they're unlikely to use the word collab right but they want to have some kind of intellectual discussion with me on or off this channel whether it's by email or by Skype or whatever it is they too have money how can they do that and you know what sometimes people write in with a little bit more hostility with a little bit more of a challenge where they say they want to criticize my views or what-have-you and they said what is the way to do that and the answer is read the same book I've read make your own video state your own views state your own interpretations and I will respect you even if I completely utterly disagree with your opinion it's I will have a basis for respecting you in the fact that you did the same work that I did you read the same source and you brought your own perspective to bear on it okay I mentioned that question of interpreting Aristotle I think the other guy is a hundred percent wrong but I also think he took the time to do the reading and even to explain to me what his interpretation of the reading was and that I can respect even right I mean but in some sense disrespect him or disrespect his opinion or what have you okay the various people who have wanted to quote debate unquote Marxism with me do you remember even one of them reading a single page of Karl Marx that I read a single chapter of that book can you remember anyone who responded to my book review of rules for radicals by Saul Alinsky still a great video give you the give you the link in the description well this is this video I did a book review on that the only response I got from anywhere on the political spectrum to my numerous forays into discussing politics is people trying to prove their moral superiority over me people trying to express their dismissive contempt towards me and never once taking the time to go to the source to read the book themselves to offer their own reviewed off their own perspective and you know there are two different things at one I may be wrong too even if I'm not wrong I may really benefit from hearing someone else's perspective imagine if someone else did the active research and offered their own opinion on Aristotle Plato Saul Alinsky's rules for radicals on any one of these topics that might make my life better if I make your life more meaningful just so for the audience and for the people doing the reading you know we can kind of collaborate in our own education and challenge one another's assumptions even if it just is that you read the book you read the same book I read and there was something else in that book that you felt was really important that I felt was trivial and overlooks like in my critique of the book I maybe emphasized one element you found another there are ways in which you know we may be confined some value some educational value in the conflict in the clash in the exchange of opinions but it has to begin with active research okay so let me just say there is one extraordinary critic of this channel there is one extraordinary critic who was kicked out of my discord forum after many years of my warmly inviting him to share his opinions he appeared on the channel I invited him to do Skype calls with me and right into expressive miniature I promoted his channel he has known each of you for years we had positive and friendly relations and then this deteriorated into his bitterly hating me because he feels that his perspective on syn Jiang China is morally superior to my own I am NOT interested in any debate concerning who has the moral high ground nothing could interest me less than being morally superior to a member of my audience except perhaps hearing a member of my audience expressed to me how a morally superior they feel they are to me of no educational value and it's tragic that right now a great deal of politics revolves around this kind of posture right I have one book right here and there are two more books coming in the mail on the history of sin Jiang and Central Asia in a relationship between China and Central Asia 1864 to present if you want to challenge my view on the history and politics of sin check you've got to do the research if you do the research and you're wrong you'll be delighted to discover you're wrong you think well how delightful there's a whole lot here I didn't know there's a whole new perspective maybe on the history of China maybe on the history of India maybe the history of Iran the history of Russia and Central Asia involves all these Wow there were a lot of things I was wrong about and by studying this chapter of history of really challenged my own assumptions I've learned something new when you do the research and you're wrong you get to be delighted to discover that you're wrong and if you do the research and you're right then that will only you know deepen your awareness of how important it is to be right about something on the basis of real empirical knowledge and not just on a smug sense of moral superiority over others who disagree with you ok guys so in the past if you can watch the channel for many many years I used to make a big effort to inform my audience and inform our patron subscribers but what I was currently reading what I was currently working on in my limited time whether that you know were ancient Greek or Chinese or you know books on politics in history in English and I really made a big effort to try to invite people to collaborate positively whether through Skype conversations and I gave up I failed or we could turn around and say my audience let me down let me know sometimes but recently a few people have asked me how can they cross sword with me all right and this is my answer whether your motivation is that you want to be my friend you want to be my colleague or in some sense maybe you want to be my enemy that's fine too here on YouTube I could use more meaningful conflict with other people who are doing research whether by philosophy politics history languages I would be delighted to have a meaningful contrast of opinion with someone who despises me all right but we're not gonna debate your moral superiority over me that is of absolutely no substance and absolutely no interest we have to have a discourse about politics that begins from the facts proceeds from the facts to the facts and concludes with the facts anything else I see as merely an exercise in ego and self-indulgence and let's face it whether we're talking about far-off cynjohn China or you know Vietnam to an extent that is frankly terrifying to me what I see is white Western people with comfortable lives looking out the history of the world to find symbols for their own frustrated ambitions I see white Western middle class people looking at the Syrian civil war for some kind of symbol of their own frustrated ideals to have an anarchist revolution and they managed to find a bunch of Kurds members of the Kurdish ethnic minority who in some the sense call themselves socialists or feminists or anarchists well at the same time remaining devout Muslims and they cling on to this as a symbol of their own aspirations and as soon as you have that emotional attachment I think there's then a great reluctance to learn truth from facts because the more you learn about you know empirical reality on the ground the more the human reality with the dirt under the fingernails warts and all as we used to say in English you know the more it ceases to be a symbol of an ideal the more it becomes just another sad reflection of human nature in all its imperfections all right there is no anarchist utopia in rojava Syria all right the Kurds are no more a perfect emblem for anarchism than they are for socialism than they are for Islam itself frankly they're you know genuinely pathetic nationalist independence movement who have now been losing a war for a remarkable number of years and you have been all too willing to work as agents for any foreign power in any foreign intelligence agency that was going to support them in their war against the government of Syria the government of Turkey so on and so forth it's a truly tragic and and pathetic tale and you know what the people of Vietnam were no more a symbol of anti-americanism or anti imperialism or of a better alternative to capitalism many the people of Vietnam had their own tragic historical struggle first against the French and then against the Americans that in case you haven't heard failed to produce a utopia after the American army packed up and went home alright I said on this YouTube channel many years ago that steel sharpens steel if we can take the time to come on YouTube and really be honest with one another really be real with one another if we can share what it is we've read what is we're researching what it is we care about and if we can share our doubts as well then you know we're all going to be made sharper by this interchange like steel sharpening steel I really had the hope that YouTube could be the sort of meeting of the minds that I find Western academic colloquia always fail to be because you know nobody here is trying to flatter the professor nobody's trying to line up research funding and there aren't these other factors militating against real honesty and you know it's not the case that the author of this book is gonna be supervising my PhD thesis so I have to flatter him if I'm unimpressed with this book about the history of San Jang of China I can come here and say to you well I started reading this and this really let me down if I'm disciplined at a flatter Polybius an ancient author let alone a living author right and by the way brief brief digression had a professor in here in University of Victoria and I paid quite a lot of money for his book was then a new publication and when I told him as politely as well this this book is really not very impressive I could repeat exactly what I said but I said very politely that the book was a disappointment hmm he was devastated he got angry he got upset and he never spoke to me again he's never even replied to an email and it's to me that's very very alien but it's completely endemic to the the hothouse of Western academia look why did you publish this book if you didn't want anyone to dare to criticize it you could have locked it in a desk drawer or said it should only be published after your deceased you published this book it's a book about politics you know what and other experts and other interested people feel they're gonna read it and gonna find fault with it and your book criticizes other people for their political views too so why should you be above reproach why should you know be criticized I mean there was a time when I thought Wow what we've invented here on YouTube with the ability to pause and the ability to edit and you know like if you embarrass yourself you can just hit delete and record a second version of the same monologue there are all these advantages over standing and presenting a paper at a conference in an academic context and what you want to talk about anarchist ideal how about the total lack of any authoritarian structure here right when when people present their views in an active and an academic context they fear the authority of their professors they fear hey this guy can give me a b-minus if I don't repeat exactly his opinions about politics if I challenge him or if I say his book was poorly written or was disappointing there in theory it could end your academic career but it could at least damage you and so on it's amazing how the authority of the academic hierarchy manages to pervert and silenced kind of every possible discussion of politics on a university campus all right I had hope that YouTube could be for you and me for us for my generation a new kind of colloquium where we could share our readings share our research share our real emotions share our real experiences and also share our doubts because the one thing I resented most about being in formal academic presentations conferences in colloquial was that everyone was terrified to say those three words I don't know and all the research worth doing in the beginning and middle and end is guided by what we call research questions to have a real research question you've got to have the honesty to say to yourself and say to others I don't know this remains unknown I'm trying to take something unknown and try and couldn't even get people to it you couldn't even get people to but they hadn't read a book when they hadn't read a book you have a whole situation graduate students fronting on knowing things they don't know and I've been read books they haven't read people pretending they've been places they haven't been people pretending they speak languages they don't speak endemic to academia all right I used to believe that YouTube could really be something better for you and me here and now with a cost of tuition it's $0 and it can be the only thing lacking is you hate you and you and you have to step up you don't get you don't get any reward for reading Polybius all right you don't get any reward for reading Cicero you don't get any reward for reading Aristotle except you get to wake up in the morning and be that person you aspire to be that you made the decision to stop playing video games hit the books and take responsibility to do active research so you can have an informed opinion that you decided you know what I'm tired of basing my opinions on what they say on Fox News or what it says in The Guardian newspaper or the knee-jerk reaction of the left-wing attacking Fox News or the knee-jerk reaction of the right-wing attacking The Guardian I actually decided to learn truth from facts so I can become the kind of person whose opinions are really substantive and nuanced based on empirical experience research okay that's what you get you know what you can do it alone or you can do it with me right here on YouTube through this wonderful 21st century para social experience at your own pace at your own time you can hit pause you could hit rewind you can hit delete and you can record it all over again you get to be your own editor okay if you go into ten conferences in person you don't and as I said in more than five years only one person ever read a book in response to my invitation to participate and what it is I'm trying to do here intellectually and politically there's an open spot on the list for person number two it could be you [Music]