Rationality Rules is ex-vegan for all the wrong reasons.

with all of this said however during the month it's taken to produce this video i further reduce my dairy and egg consumption and if the world keeps going the way it's going i'll probably be vegan within the year but it won't be because i buy the ethical vegan argument it won't be because our circle of altruism should extend to all sentient beings no it will simply be either one because my circle of altruism will extend to all sentient beings courtesy of socioeconomic and environmental privileges or two because my tribe circle will extend to all sentient beings and because my well-being is tethered to my tribe and because my well-being is tethered to my tribe i'll sing their song stephen woodford what has he done with his life between age 25 and 31 what exactly has he become learned in what is it exactly that he has experienced with a lot of people are cursed rather than blessed by commercial success early in life i've said this to personal friends many times and i've never said it on youtube before but talent is a trap i knew young people in high school who were cursed with being just a little bit too good at a sport and as a result they never got good at anything else i knew young women who were just a little bit too beautiful too early in life and they got a career something like modeling you know one path or another was made a little bit too easy and then they never developed in those other ways and these are people i knew well enough to see that they had a spark of intellectual potential they had the raw intelligence necessary to basically do anything they wanted to do with their lives but they didn't do any of those things instead they did what was made easy for them by a society that in a sense preys upon their talents if you can really throw a basketball you know if you can really hit a baseball or if you can walk down a runway sell a borrow soap sell a designer dress right talent is a trap and it's very easy from the outside to feel a sense of yearning that you wish you were one of those people for whom success was easy but what's best for all mankind is instead to struggle to distinguish yourself from the masses that you are without intellectual accomplishment indistinguishable from i used to be a scholar of buddhism and i'm not anymore i i often kind of joke and say it's just not a part of my life in any way right but it certainly was part of the sharpening of my mind that i applied to talking about philosophy on youtube today talking about politics critique of religion critique of atheism buddhist ethics so on and so forth i became a scholar of something years of incredibly hard work just a huge amount of reading research learning languages and including you know the the the most casual form of archaeology but which i mean just going out and visiting archaeological sites that other people had dug up just doing tourism if you like before i was going and looking at stone inscriptions and all these things right i'm no hero it's nothing extraordinary but it certainly is an extraordinary contrast to someone like stephen someone like cosmic skeptic someone like ask yourself someone who at a very early age got money and fame and respect on the internet and then disappeared into a narrow little oobly yet on discord these guys are all video game addicts who just listen to a chorus of like-minded opinion and even when people debate with them even when people disagree with them even when people challenge them they don't realize the extent to which those people disagreeing with them really are only disagreeing within this very narrow category of the type of video game addicted loser who would be on discord talk to them that way in the first place utilitarianism at the great universities of europe today in the 21st century all right is utilitarianism an important philosophy anywhere at the great universities of china of india of japan are these considered really important philosophical texts is there now anywhere in the world a political party for whom jeremy bentham is a major and important philosopher or theorist you know even within the tiny demi monde of vegan philosophy of vegan politics who gives a [ __ ] about utilitarianism who cares about who looks up to the philosophy of jeremy bentham a tiny number of video game addicted losers within discord precisely people like steven here rationality rules people like cosmic skeptic people like ask yourself the type of people who look up to and admire sam harris right and who disregard what sam harris's religious philosophy actually is something i have made youtube videos about in the past stephen has no pretense of being well read in vegan theory in vegan politics in vegan philosophy he does not present himself as someone who has read gary francione now who else is there to have read if we're being honest i mean if we're going to make a list of heavy hitters in in vegan politics and vegan philosophy the top five list it includes gary francione and me and there aren't a whole lot of other names to put in the list bokeh we can make a full list and include some names like casey taft you could do the full reno's you could get a sense of the variety of theories that are contending uh you know the citizenship approach the abolitionist approach you know so on and so forth could get into the founder of peta and her philosophical views and so on and so on here is stephen referring to the ethical argument for veganism the philosophy of veganism the politics of veganism as if there is only one and what he's addressing is this frankly very unpopular and fatuous and pointless theory derived from an internet nerds reading of utilitarianism that nobody outside of their narrow little subculture on the internet cares about and nobody has ever cared about right veganism it's big money there are multi-million dollar foundations in this game if you think these are the important theoretical and philosophical arguments in veganism why don't they matter to peta multi-million dollar organization why don't they matter to dxe direct action everywhere i've done lengthy in-depth critiques of the political philosophy of dxe originally written and published by wayne syong i've read their material again stephen hasn't he doesn't know about this stuff he doesn't know about the debate going on within veganism over the last five years or less ten years the things he has been debating and pontificating on here right they're neither true nor false they're frankly irrelevant to the political and philosophical discourse within veganism and the saddest thing of all is he doesn't even know that yet i said many times when i first started this channel there were going to be no footnotes and there are going to be none of the niceties and conventions of academic writing i was already very familiar with academic writing and very frustrated with it one of the biggest taboos in academic writing is to offer ad hominem arguments is to ask the question who is this guy what has he done with his life between age 25 and age 31 aside from sitting on his ass on the internet and as they say fairly effortlessly becoming famous do you think stephen is well read do you think he has a wealth of real world experience of of research of activism of being involved in any kind of political or historical struggle did he go to syria did he go to iraq i mean it can't be cambodia for everyone has he gone anywhere and done anything how about rachel oates how about any of the colleagues he's come up with in this way or is it fair to say that they are as the old idiom goes hothouse flowers who've really been living their lives under glass in circumstances where some people have to struggle some people have to work very hard to achieve the level of fame they've achieved but some don't some people like stephen and rachel oates pretty much have that fame handed to them effortlessly and to be fair there is some kind of talent involved here but as i cautioned before talent is a trap it becomes tremendously corrupting for people of all ages because they stop challenging themselves they stop learning they stop really developing through what i call active research what stephen is presenting us with is not an informed opinion it's important to include the ad hominem component here and it doesn't mean being cruel or being catty it's important to reflect on our own personal experiences our own personal biases even if that's just what we have read and what we haven't read in life talking about other people what are their opinions based on what are their conclusions based on and it may come out of ignorance or it may come out of some very specific experience in life that shapes the way they think about these topics what their conclusions and recommendations are but to say this is who i am this is what i know this is what i care about and therefore this is my philosophy this is my political practice whatever it may be long story short my response to stephen is this you are making the error of disregarding the positive difference you can make in the world by focusing needlessly on the difference you cannot there are creatures like gophers there are creatures that burrow in the ground that are killed by vegan forms of agriculture there are creatures like rabbits there are creatures like rats and there are innumerable forms of insects that are killed by vegan farming both actually and you could say hypothetically like if you're thinking about a future civilization a hypothetical science fiction civilization where 100 of people are vegan there's still going to be some rats some moles some gophers some growing animals some insects that are killed for our production of food but if you think of that as the difference you cannot make why would that in any way diminish the significance of the difference you can now stephen i think the reason why you're so mind-blowingly stupid about this is your lack of hands-on real world experience if you go to cambodia and you want to work in education you want to help one of the most backward ignorant post-communist post-war disasters of a country have higher and higher levels of education you might go there with the stated mission of saying you're gonna you're gonna educate the poor you're gonna educate the poor and disadvantaged and bad and you get there and you set up the school and you have a really good school you have a really excellent school and guess what the richest and most powerful people in the country they want their kids to go to your school and they're going to make it happen and now you find yourself struggling just to reserve 10 of the seats in your school for the poor and disadvantaged because you've ended up helping the people who need the help the least you've ended up helping the economic elite and the political elite give their kids a better education right so you're one man and let's say you have 10 employees you have a small school you're one man with nine other teachers plus one secretary that's the school you know and you know you can become overwrought with the thought of the difference you can't make you can become consumed by the awareness that there are illiterate rice farmers in the countryside and you are not reaching them you are not helping there are people when i was there still some people in conditions like refugee camps displaced people we'll say uh not necessarily refugee camps foreign but anyway different times there are people living in these you know terrible conditions we still had tribal people living in the mountains and frankly tribal conditions in world two you know okay do you want to become consumed by the awareness of the difference you cannot make or do you want to focus positively and pragmatically on the difference you can that the situation is you can help some people oh you can educate some people or yes you can throw up your hands and offer some kind of bizarre utilitarian rationale about how this is not strictly logically consistent and that therefore you're going to help nobody at all now that world that demi monde of humanitarian work it brings you into a lot of moral compromises you thought you'd never make so let's say you're running this small school and again maybe you've reserved 10 of the seats for for orphans frankly but for poor and disadvantaged people and your original plan was for 100 of the seats to disadvantage people but it didn't didn't work out that way you were out there doing this what kind of people are you going to employ who are your colleagues going to be who are you going to work with i'm an atheist i'm a nihilistic atheist probably the only employees you can get and probably the best employees you can get will be christian fundamentalists they will be pious christians who want to help the disadvantaged and the poor people who are committed to a life of sobriety and self-discipline coming out of a spiritual background of some kind if you're lucky maybe you can find some buddhist fanatics maybe you can find some hindu finex maybe you've got to work with muslims i met people doing charity to help uh people in cambodia and laos and that out of a muslim uh cultural background right but if you think you're gonna be able to work with the type of hippie who is doing ecstasy and meth at the full moon party in co-pp or kopanyang or whatever like the the type of tattooed hippie bon vivo atheist who goes to cambodia town those are the people who are going to buckle down and do the excruciating work of learning the language who are going to live in really tough conditions a life of frankly worse than monastic self-sacrifice because you can have a very comfortable life as a monk whether it's a christian monk or a buddhist one um the people with those qualities and those characteristics it's going to be a real challenge to your atheism when you look around and find that you've now surrounded yourself with people who ideologically and philosophically really disagree with you when you have problems running your school like maybe there's a corrupt government official who's trying to extort money from you maybe a corrupt police officer maybe you're just having problems doing the paperwork that you need to keep your operation running who do you turn to who do you talk to over time you may find yourself being drawn into a web of intrigue at the american embassy at the australian embassy where you are in fact informing the cia or people who are proxies for the cia working for shadowy agencies like the u.s state department it's remarkable how many businessmen including small businessmen are connected to what we might call the intelligence community in places like cambodian laos and where every so often the intelligence community or someone who has a seemingly respectable job at the embassy actually asks you for a favor ask you to talk to somebody ask you to tell them something ask you to go and have a look around asks you to give someone a guided tour ask you to provide a cover story for someone you might find that there is somebody who is overtly or covertly a cia operative and someone whether it's from the australian embassy or the american embassy they ask you to do the paperwork to make it appear that this person is a teacher at your school but they're not really going to teach they're going to be out somewhere else doing something and they may tell you that this person is an agricultural engineer going out to work in the rice industry that was the old that's that's real 1970s 1980s cover story that was the old style there would be a suspiciously large number of uh of you know agricultural experts working to improve the quality of rice in cambodia and laos you may find yourself making moral compromises just to keep that little school going and just to provide that education and opportunity to a small number of people where you won't be helping the poor and disadvantaged rise up in society you will be helping the elite become even more elite you will be helping to exacerbate inequality to make people more unequal not less this is the kind of perspective of the harm that must be done in the pursuit of doing good that you only get from real world experience neither from the reading of books [Music] nor from the playing of video games and sharpening your claws through these kinds of very artificial internet debates whether that be on discord or on youtube or whatever the latest streaming platform is whatever's whatever is fashionable these days all right my conclusion is not to say to you go out and be a hypocrite my point is to say that real vegans are not people who proceed from a chalkboard equation of what would be logically consistent with the utilitarian theories set down by jeremy bentham real vegans the people who are changing the movement now and who will make a difference in the future are precisely the ones who understand whether cerebrally or intuitively and through experience they understand that harm must be done in the pursuit of some good there are people who understand that if you want to stand for office and run for government you cannot morally object the amount of jet fuel you're going to burn going from town to town to give your lectures to make your make your bid try to get yourself elected into government you can't say oh no no i couldn't possibly ruin the world's atmosphere by taking a whole bunch of needless flights as part of my election campaign and they are going to be the people who are going to sit down and solicit donations from frankly the most evil corporations in the world you can be uncompromising in the pursuit of the good and in so doing you recognize that you in your way will also do tremendous harm reality does not now fit into and never has fit into jeremy bentham's utilitarian formula life is fundamentally not about the maximum amount of pleasure with the minimum amount of pain people who change the world are the ones who are willing to endure unspeakable sorrow tremendous suffering and who are even willing to inflict pain on others in the pursuit of what they know to be good