Ethics: Vegans, Vasectomies, Flexitarians… questions of good and evil.
26 March 2016 [link youtube]
This could have been split into two separate videos, but I tried to make a "unified" point about both (1) anti-natalism (i.e., vegans refusing to have kids, and claiming that others should follow their example, and (2) the vaguely pro-flexitarian attitude that Unnatural Vegan and Tobias Leenaert have proposed (incoherently, in my opinion). As is stated in the first few seconds of this video, I think the underlying problem is one of dealing with questions of ethics in our (21st century) culture, and of stating subjective claims in contrast to "global" (or even cosmological) claims about right and wrong.
And, yes, this video does (INEVITABLY) digress into examples from Laos and Cambodia. I could challenge myself to go for a month without mentioning either one. A month is a long time. ;-)
Youtube Automatic Transcription
in a really fundamental way I think a
lot of people in the 21st century are unprepared to talk about ethics in making ethical claims we are often making subjective claims we're talking about who we are how we feel and our judgments that ultimately involve deciding to what extent other people are good or bad definitely in my lifetime the fashion has been to try to pretend pretend that ethical differences don't exist that religious differences don't exist the model of the multi cultural melting pot Western society was not a model built on debate it wasn't built on a Socratic ideal or even an Aristotelian ideal of a society where people come together and debate and decide in a democratic forum what the future their society was going to be no no especially with the legacy of the British parliamentary system and the legacy of ultimately it's rooted in England's own history of religious warfare of the Catholics trying to kill the Protestants and the Protestants trying to kill the Catholics etc that the way to have a multicultural society was to banish these topics from public discourse was to say who are you to judge me judgey not lest ye be judged nobody has an opinion people pretend that religion is a private matter and of course makes sense in some contexts at the office you may not want your co-workers to know what religion you are and then want to keep it secret or what have you you know is a certain set of historical circumstances that produced boundaries to public discourse and of course with a really new idea like veganism and for most of us it is new I mean yes if you grew up a giant in India if you grew up in Taiwan connected to veganism as a minority movement within Buddhism or something ok yes there are some ancient roots for veganism in ancient Greece to some of the ancient Greek philosophers ignored for many centuries but for the most part on 21st century earth veganism is a new idea it's a new challenge to receive wisdom it's a challenge to all of the assumptions about our lifestyle for the vast majority of us it is a challenge to exactly what our grandmothers told us was good in life yeah I've said before like learning that alcohol is bad for you is a shock in this same way to a lot of our culturally preconceived deeply held notions so we get into this realm of making ethical claims and have ethical debates other people that are judgmental that do involve the questions of who is good and who is bad who is sane and who is insane who is right and who is wrong and I see vegans kind of prevaricated between the humility of having an opinion and saying look this is just my opinion I'm entitled to an opinion but this is only my opinion and making global claims that I would call cosmological claims I'm gonna deal with a few examples in this video for one right off the bat you know I do not drive a car I never have driven a car but I do not make the claim that nobody should drive a car and I do not take the next step of saying anyone who does drive a car is bad now whether or not I would prefer to live in a society where nobody drives a car is an interesting debate to have it's not really attainable or it's just not sailing into the real world as we live in it so I think it's a lot more meaningful to talk in percentage terms would I like to live in a society where there was 20% less traffic or 50% less traffic and again I'm saying this is relevant to veganism terms of what's attainable living in a 100 percent vegan society is not an option for most of us but what our options really are what our goals really are in the next few years are even more important to talk about for that reason everything I eat makes its way to the store on a truck everything indirectly everything I own everything I need in my life has been on and off of a truck so in a sense it would be absurd for me to take my combination of ethical and other concerns that make me an t car cuz I am you know it's fair to say of me I'm basically someone who is against the car culture and against car ownership in German car as I'm trying to indicate I'm not a maniac about it but those are my values those have that fit in my life but it would be ridiculous for me to say nobody should own a car and I want to add further here so currently I live in a city even though it's a small city I live in Victoria in the west coast of Canada but back when I was studying First Nations languages out in Saskatchewan I completely accepted that if I was gonna stick with that program and get a PhD and become a specialist in first nations languages criative way those languages possibly including east screen not just plain screen I'd need a I need a truck I will just see a car I would need a pretty heavy-duty vehicle that could get on to logging paths and forest roads and rural roads in Canada I would need to change my lifestyle quite fundamentally because the people who still speak those languages those languages are all in danger of going extinct and any kind of charity work or any kind of positive work to make a difference involving First Nations would require me to own a car or truck of some kind so my point is this is an example of an opinion of an ethical and ecological argument I have it's one that's part of my life and yet I'm not expanding it into this kind of global claim that anyone who disagrees with me is evil or a scumbag or that the whole world ought to play by my rules and I'm even recognizing that in my life there are exceptions to the rules so to two examples I want to deal with in this video I think it's very telling to see the way vegans are struggling with what I would call the anti-natal list chic the sort of fad for people now proudly proclaiming that they've decided to have a vasectomy if they're male that they've decided to never have kids and I mean there are two very different ways to approach that right it's one thing to say with all due humility that's subjectively and personally this is my opinion I'm entitled to an opinion but to say that you yourself do not think you have what it takes to raise kids that you don't think you could be a good parent that's incredibly humbling like really when you think about it I think for many people it's it's probably emotionally very hard to just say that out loud to say I to say they don't have what it takes to be a parent I think I do by the way I have a daughter who lives in France in Germany and part of I open this channel is my divorce and going to visit my daughter and still an important part of my life but it is one thing to say with all due humility that you don't have what it takes this is not for you and it's another thing entirely to make a claim on a global cosmological scale to try to say nobody should have kids or anybody who has kids is a bad person to make this into a claim about how the world is how the world works and about what everybody should do and of course to extend that into an ethical judgment because if you decide that you yourself cannot be a parent that is an ethical judgment you're making on yourself and you may be entirely right I have one friend from way back in the day and he had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals when he was younger you know he got his act together as an older man and you know he appears to be mentally stable maybe I'm wrong maybe if maybe if he was my roommate I think he wasn't that mentally stable but at a distance you know he seems to have his life together but you know at a pretty early age he knew he would never have kids he could never foster with the apparent because he's someone who struggled with mental health issues okay that's one thing but if that guy now turns around and says the things that so many vegans are saying that you are a bad person because you you can have kids because you would or you do it's a tremendous ethical difference that I think people slide into without realizing they're making the change and say to me this is part of the breakdown of what is it root a democratic ideal of a society where people actually do express and debate their ethical differences that will involve questions about the Catholic Church is it acceptable for the Catholic Church to control a separate school board that teaches children the delusions of Catholic doctrine from the moment they're born is that okay or not still in Canada we haven't settled this debate is it acceptable in the 21st century to have a separate school system for atheists and Jews and Catholics and Protestants and one where they're mixed together is it acceptable to have a separate school for rich people and poor people this is not a minor or trivial thing this is one that has profound implications for society but say lifting in Canada I live in a society that cannot handle these debates at all where there is no culture that can engage these things where people instead grow up being told don't don't ask about that don't mention it and of course don't judge so again I see people then playing these games and maybe not realizing how much is at stake maybe not realizing how dangerous it is like here on YouTube maybe not realizing that you're alienating 90 percent of your audience by buying into this this anti-natal list chic this fad of proclaiming a proud you out you got a vasectomy or something without thinking about who the rest of your audience is and your audience will include people who've made terrible sacrifices so they can have a child and raise a child and people who will regard you as basically selfish and self-indulgent for you know proclaiming your lifestyle this way if your reason for not having kids is because you want to live in luxury and not have to plan what you're doing this coming weekend and to be able to just spontaneously pick up a bicycle or swimming or go to the beach or go on vacation and tile anytime it's not like you're a doctor trying to find the cure for cancer homeboy I've met people like that too you can meet people who are so devoted to their research or to their charity work or to helping others and making the world a better place that that is the reason why they don't want to have kids it's not so common not so common as the other reasons for not having kids but you know for those who are just promoting the permanent vacation yeah a life of self-indulgence is not all that impressive a reason for not having kids so look the other big issue I want to apply this framework of doubts to is something that's literally been kicked around by unnatural vegan and oh boy Tobias Tobias lee in art I've responded to bias on this channel before if you if you search within this channel you'll find some videos with his name in them um [Music] the overall question of should we be cool with flexitarians there I've made it sound tremendously intellectual refined about putting that way what is the advantage of having an uncompromising more militant attitude to war people who are softcore vegans semi vegan flexitarian as opposed to basically saying flexitarians are on our side and embracing them at cetera and a natural vegan has said some sort of incoherent things about that lately things I happen to disagree with and again things I things I do think are incoherent things that they're incoherent in the sense of they're not worked out into a program of action they're not stated in a way that's systematic or that thinks about the implications for how we live and for what veganism does in the next 10 years as a movement or as a bunch of isolated individuals I just mean they're they're incoherent in that sense don't mean she's she's stuttering or or speaking poorly um now this comes back to sort of the exact 180 degrees opposite side of what I was just saying about antinatalism the antinatalism I was encouraging people to really think about what it means to have an opinion or for it to just be your own opinion in contrast to making a cosmological claim about this is what the world is this is how the world works and this is how my ethical standards apply to everyone at the same time we've got to be really confident in the first part of that equation which is yeah you know what this is my opinion these are my ethical values and even though it's just me it really matters to me and I'm not gonna be mosy about you know being honest about that I'm not gonna pretend if I go to a party and I meet five people and three of them are vegan and two of them are flexitarian I don't regard you equally I don't oh I may be polite to all of you because I'm meeting you all for the first time but you're not equal to me you're not there's a real ethical difference between people were living a life of principle and making that sacrifice and who are committed and people who are not for whatever combination of reasons I may sympathize the reason I met someone here in Victoria I'd say we're friends we don't know each other that well but I'd say we're friends so I have a friend here and we we talk about animal rights and what-have-you but she believes she is too disorganized to be vegan and you know um in the time I know her I've known her she's she's lost the keys to her apartment like twice she she lost she's told me she lost her ID card like seven times in the last two years used the ID card to to ride the bus and to do daily transactions here it's like well you know like there are some hints like she seems to me to be really sincere when she's saying what you're saying about animal rights and I don't know I don't know about her excuses I've got an open mind right now I'm listening but yeah you know again my position it's not that I'm a complete jerk to her or something but I judge and I have my opinion and I have my ethics and I'm willing to be to be upfront with you about it when I was involved with humanitarian work in Southeast Asia there would be different categories of people doing humanitarian work sometimes even when the work was exactly the same work when it was the same job you could have people who were profoundly different coming from Europe to Asia to do these things so break down what I'm saying for you real quick like it was a guy like me I was earning a local wage and in many ways living in local poverty I think I mentioned here before like when I lived in the capital city of Laos I earned $300 per month u.s. dollars three hundred dollars per month and even though Laos is a third world country it ain't that cheap you know you're you're on the edge of poverty and if anything goes wrong if you if I had to actually go to the hospital or deal with an emergency I had to take an airplane flight you know taking a flight cost the same for me as anyone else so $300 a month is this is truly a charity level salary and I'm living there locally and I'm buying my mangos at the local market with local people and meeting local farmers and even like like the room I was renting I wasn't living with rich Westerners I was really living amongst local people another category of people you'd have people signed up with with multinational conglomerates or multinational charity sometimes corporations so the charities who you know we're receiving huge amounts of money flying in and out looked like they would fly back and forth between Europe and and said these days you repeatedly stay in a five-star hotel live in luxury and be completely cut off from the reality of daily life sometimes including they'll be cut off from reality in the communities they were supposedly trying to help and the third category was you would get vacation volunteers people doing charity work but like they fly over they basically do this as part of a holiday and they would literally like go from like get an advantage like a village in Cambodia where there were a ton of people dying of AIDS and they're raising orphans because the parents died of AIDS and then the kids are still alive so you got AIDS orphans and poverty in a village and these people they fly in they spend a couple hours of the day playing with orphans you know doing this kind of phony charity work and then they they go to the discotheque at night you know they're doing other tourist stuff and this cinemas would be asking the organizers of the charity like oh look you know can you organise the day so that you know we need a bus to take us to the disco and like you know the other stuff they're doing so again even though they're there even though they're physically there in that village for a few hours obviously they don't speak the language in many ways they're totally disconnected from the reality and in many ways they're still trying to go to the beach to go to the disco do tourist crap now when I was living in those circumstance that was my social circle those are the people around me who could speak English other than that like in Laos I would speak to local people and the Lao language the most part and you know I knew a couple of interesting Lao people rebelling go but I mean this this is really this is not a community these are just the other people around me in this society that I interact with um I don't start from a globalizing claim about who's good and who's evil I really don't on a case-by-case basis you meet people and some people are good some people are bad most people are a mixture of the two some people are doing the right things for the wrong reasons some people are doing the wrong things for the right reasons and you could meet people and learn what their motivations were what their misconceptions were before they came over what they're trying to do and whether they're failing to achieve their I learned a lot by talking to people in all three categories talking to the the deluded millionaire executives guys living in poverty as I was and again I was living in poverty but of course there are local people who are vastly more poor than I am but still my own circumstances were real poverty that's no joke but yeah of course I can recognize my situation is different from a guy who's actually living his whole life on the rice farm farming rice although the hey I wish I owned the rice farm let me tell you they have some advantages do they their lives are not with their pleasure but sure you could learn a lot from talking to all of those people and I don't start from any cosmological claim there's division doing good and evil all these people on this side all those people on the other side but on the other hand I have to say look I have an opinion I'm here living this life I'm doing the research I know what's going on I am entitled to my opinion my opinion counts at least for me and it's good at count on this human level of me dealing with you and me dealing with this circle of 50 people or hundred people yeah I'm not gonna pretend we're all equal I'm not gonna pretend I don't see the difference between you know a guy who goes to the whorehouse and a guy who doesn't but among the guys who don't are you know the crazy Christian missionaries so again it's not simple it's like well you're doing charity work I'm someone who I drank zero alcohol I did zero drugs I did not sleep with prostitutes but the other guys in that category I don't have much in common with em because most of them are either Christian or Muslim you know like that you know the the moral scruples that I apply to my life beyond veganism put me in very strange company in those circumstances one of the simple precepts from Russia and nihilism identifies an historical nihilist not as a Russian nihilist but one of those simple concepts was go to the poor be the poor this is within Russia in terms of social change and their point wasn't saying don't have a protest in the streets of the capital city and live in luxury don't live as an intellectual cut off from the reality of poverty actually go to the poor be the poor live among if you won't understand the poor and to some extent my own methodology in life did that embrace that and to some extent of course I was always separate from those people partly for these same reasons the poor drink alcohol the poor Gorder whorehouses the poor or eat meat they do all kinds of things I don't do and most of the poor if they got money would live in a totally different way from when I was living they wouldn't work in a charity they'd buy a fancy motorcycle and live in luxury and do something else their lives so it's not that I do this out of some delusion of solidarity with the poor or any any kind of left-wing delusion but no I am NOT mosy about the fact that there is a real difference between me and a flexitarian and who I spend my time with who I care about who I respect who I organize with yes it's possible I mean as with all these funny contradictions it's possible you meet a flexitarian and you end up really respecting them I met a guy here and he was one of my professors he had been vegetarian in different times of his life but then he became pescetarian and the mercury content of the fish he was eating in a pretty short span of time totally destroyed his health totally he had unbelievably horrible life-altering permanent health damage because he went from vegetarian to pescetarian no joke and now he's on a crazy diet that includes beef because his doctor was giving them all these really specific instructions and how to deal with his his mercury poisoning you know it's nothing it's the long-term consequence of the mercury poisoning so you know you mean a guy like that he was involved in ecological and animal rights issues but he eats meat of course I can recognize there are some really unique problems here and maybe you know maybe he's a wonderful guy and what-have-you I'm not just gonna sit there and judge him in a shallow and catty way and I don't know enough about the science of his situation it sounds like he's in a really tight situation where you know he may not have any better options than eating meat and some extent my heart goes out to him but on the other hand no I do not agree with this approach that Tobias and a natural vegan endorsed I've never heard her say it just recently a natural vegan has been has been endorsing Tobias on this of pretending that there's any kind of moral equivalence between someone who is vegan and someone who's flexitarian no this is a this is a hard line and again I would say the same thing you need someone who doesn't drink milk just because they have an allergy well you know it's quite common you meet people who eat no dairy products just because they have a health problem of course that is different from someone who's made the ethical decision of looking at the horror of what the dairy industry is and saying I will not compromise I don't want this to be part of my life I don't want this to be part of the society I live in and I want to get organized other people to bring about some kind of social change so that this ceases to be a daily reality on the shelves of the grocery store next to where I live and the farms just out of sight just out of the reach of your ears of cows living their whole lives on a concrete floor inside a metal fence being exploited from the moment they're born until the moment they die in this unconscionable way
lot of people in the 21st century are unprepared to talk about ethics in making ethical claims we are often making subjective claims we're talking about who we are how we feel and our judgments that ultimately involve deciding to what extent other people are good or bad definitely in my lifetime the fashion has been to try to pretend pretend that ethical differences don't exist that religious differences don't exist the model of the multi cultural melting pot Western society was not a model built on debate it wasn't built on a Socratic ideal or even an Aristotelian ideal of a society where people come together and debate and decide in a democratic forum what the future their society was going to be no no especially with the legacy of the British parliamentary system and the legacy of ultimately it's rooted in England's own history of religious warfare of the Catholics trying to kill the Protestants and the Protestants trying to kill the Catholics etc that the way to have a multicultural society was to banish these topics from public discourse was to say who are you to judge me judgey not lest ye be judged nobody has an opinion people pretend that religion is a private matter and of course makes sense in some contexts at the office you may not want your co-workers to know what religion you are and then want to keep it secret or what have you you know is a certain set of historical circumstances that produced boundaries to public discourse and of course with a really new idea like veganism and for most of us it is new I mean yes if you grew up a giant in India if you grew up in Taiwan connected to veganism as a minority movement within Buddhism or something ok yes there are some ancient roots for veganism in ancient Greece to some of the ancient Greek philosophers ignored for many centuries but for the most part on 21st century earth veganism is a new idea it's a new challenge to receive wisdom it's a challenge to all of the assumptions about our lifestyle for the vast majority of us it is a challenge to exactly what our grandmothers told us was good in life yeah I've said before like learning that alcohol is bad for you is a shock in this same way to a lot of our culturally preconceived deeply held notions so we get into this realm of making ethical claims and have ethical debates other people that are judgmental that do involve the questions of who is good and who is bad who is sane and who is insane who is right and who is wrong and I see vegans kind of prevaricated between the humility of having an opinion and saying look this is just my opinion I'm entitled to an opinion but this is only my opinion and making global claims that I would call cosmological claims I'm gonna deal with a few examples in this video for one right off the bat you know I do not drive a car I never have driven a car but I do not make the claim that nobody should drive a car and I do not take the next step of saying anyone who does drive a car is bad now whether or not I would prefer to live in a society where nobody drives a car is an interesting debate to have it's not really attainable or it's just not sailing into the real world as we live in it so I think it's a lot more meaningful to talk in percentage terms would I like to live in a society where there was 20% less traffic or 50% less traffic and again I'm saying this is relevant to veganism terms of what's attainable living in a 100 percent vegan society is not an option for most of us but what our options really are what our goals really are in the next few years are even more important to talk about for that reason everything I eat makes its way to the store on a truck everything indirectly everything I own everything I need in my life has been on and off of a truck so in a sense it would be absurd for me to take my combination of ethical and other concerns that make me an t car cuz I am you know it's fair to say of me I'm basically someone who is against the car culture and against car ownership in German car as I'm trying to indicate I'm not a maniac about it but those are my values those have that fit in my life but it would be ridiculous for me to say nobody should own a car and I want to add further here so currently I live in a city even though it's a small city I live in Victoria in the west coast of Canada but back when I was studying First Nations languages out in Saskatchewan I completely accepted that if I was gonna stick with that program and get a PhD and become a specialist in first nations languages criative way those languages possibly including east screen not just plain screen I'd need a I need a truck I will just see a car I would need a pretty heavy-duty vehicle that could get on to logging paths and forest roads and rural roads in Canada I would need to change my lifestyle quite fundamentally because the people who still speak those languages those languages are all in danger of going extinct and any kind of charity work or any kind of positive work to make a difference involving First Nations would require me to own a car or truck of some kind so my point is this is an example of an opinion of an ethical and ecological argument I have it's one that's part of my life and yet I'm not expanding it into this kind of global claim that anyone who disagrees with me is evil or a scumbag or that the whole world ought to play by my rules and I'm even recognizing that in my life there are exceptions to the rules so to two examples I want to deal with in this video I think it's very telling to see the way vegans are struggling with what I would call the anti-natal list chic the sort of fad for people now proudly proclaiming that they've decided to have a vasectomy if they're male that they've decided to never have kids and I mean there are two very different ways to approach that right it's one thing to say with all due humility that's subjectively and personally this is my opinion I'm entitled to an opinion but to say that you yourself do not think you have what it takes to raise kids that you don't think you could be a good parent that's incredibly humbling like really when you think about it I think for many people it's it's probably emotionally very hard to just say that out loud to say I to say they don't have what it takes to be a parent I think I do by the way I have a daughter who lives in France in Germany and part of I open this channel is my divorce and going to visit my daughter and still an important part of my life but it is one thing to say with all due humility that you don't have what it takes this is not for you and it's another thing entirely to make a claim on a global cosmological scale to try to say nobody should have kids or anybody who has kids is a bad person to make this into a claim about how the world is how the world works and about what everybody should do and of course to extend that into an ethical judgment because if you decide that you yourself cannot be a parent that is an ethical judgment you're making on yourself and you may be entirely right I have one friend from way back in the day and he had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals when he was younger you know he got his act together as an older man and you know he appears to be mentally stable maybe I'm wrong maybe if maybe if he was my roommate I think he wasn't that mentally stable but at a distance you know he seems to have his life together but you know at a pretty early age he knew he would never have kids he could never foster with the apparent because he's someone who struggled with mental health issues okay that's one thing but if that guy now turns around and says the things that so many vegans are saying that you are a bad person because you you can have kids because you would or you do it's a tremendous ethical difference that I think people slide into without realizing they're making the change and say to me this is part of the breakdown of what is it root a democratic ideal of a society where people actually do express and debate their ethical differences that will involve questions about the Catholic Church is it acceptable for the Catholic Church to control a separate school board that teaches children the delusions of Catholic doctrine from the moment they're born is that okay or not still in Canada we haven't settled this debate is it acceptable in the 21st century to have a separate school system for atheists and Jews and Catholics and Protestants and one where they're mixed together is it acceptable to have a separate school for rich people and poor people this is not a minor or trivial thing this is one that has profound implications for society but say lifting in Canada I live in a society that cannot handle these debates at all where there is no culture that can engage these things where people instead grow up being told don't don't ask about that don't mention it and of course don't judge so again I see people then playing these games and maybe not realizing how much is at stake maybe not realizing how dangerous it is like here on YouTube maybe not realizing that you're alienating 90 percent of your audience by buying into this this anti-natal list chic this fad of proclaiming a proud you out you got a vasectomy or something without thinking about who the rest of your audience is and your audience will include people who've made terrible sacrifices so they can have a child and raise a child and people who will regard you as basically selfish and self-indulgent for you know proclaiming your lifestyle this way if your reason for not having kids is because you want to live in luxury and not have to plan what you're doing this coming weekend and to be able to just spontaneously pick up a bicycle or swimming or go to the beach or go on vacation and tile anytime it's not like you're a doctor trying to find the cure for cancer homeboy I've met people like that too you can meet people who are so devoted to their research or to their charity work or to helping others and making the world a better place that that is the reason why they don't want to have kids it's not so common not so common as the other reasons for not having kids but you know for those who are just promoting the permanent vacation yeah a life of self-indulgence is not all that impressive a reason for not having kids so look the other big issue I want to apply this framework of doubts to is something that's literally been kicked around by unnatural vegan and oh boy Tobias Tobias lee in art I've responded to bias on this channel before if you if you search within this channel you'll find some videos with his name in them um [Music] the overall question of should we be cool with flexitarians there I've made it sound tremendously intellectual refined about putting that way what is the advantage of having an uncompromising more militant attitude to war people who are softcore vegans semi vegan flexitarian as opposed to basically saying flexitarians are on our side and embracing them at cetera and a natural vegan has said some sort of incoherent things about that lately things I happen to disagree with and again things I things I do think are incoherent things that they're incoherent in the sense of they're not worked out into a program of action they're not stated in a way that's systematic or that thinks about the implications for how we live and for what veganism does in the next 10 years as a movement or as a bunch of isolated individuals I just mean they're they're incoherent in that sense don't mean she's she's stuttering or or speaking poorly um now this comes back to sort of the exact 180 degrees opposite side of what I was just saying about antinatalism the antinatalism I was encouraging people to really think about what it means to have an opinion or for it to just be your own opinion in contrast to making a cosmological claim about this is what the world is this is how the world works and this is how my ethical standards apply to everyone at the same time we've got to be really confident in the first part of that equation which is yeah you know what this is my opinion these are my ethical values and even though it's just me it really matters to me and I'm not gonna be mosy about you know being honest about that I'm not gonna pretend if I go to a party and I meet five people and three of them are vegan and two of them are flexitarian I don't regard you equally I don't oh I may be polite to all of you because I'm meeting you all for the first time but you're not equal to me you're not there's a real ethical difference between people were living a life of principle and making that sacrifice and who are committed and people who are not for whatever combination of reasons I may sympathize the reason I met someone here in Victoria I'd say we're friends we don't know each other that well but I'd say we're friends so I have a friend here and we we talk about animal rights and what-have-you but she believes she is too disorganized to be vegan and you know um in the time I know her I've known her she's she's lost the keys to her apartment like twice she she lost she's told me she lost her ID card like seven times in the last two years used the ID card to to ride the bus and to do daily transactions here it's like well you know like there are some hints like she seems to me to be really sincere when she's saying what you're saying about animal rights and I don't know I don't know about her excuses I've got an open mind right now I'm listening but yeah you know again my position it's not that I'm a complete jerk to her or something but I judge and I have my opinion and I have my ethics and I'm willing to be to be upfront with you about it when I was involved with humanitarian work in Southeast Asia there would be different categories of people doing humanitarian work sometimes even when the work was exactly the same work when it was the same job you could have people who were profoundly different coming from Europe to Asia to do these things so break down what I'm saying for you real quick like it was a guy like me I was earning a local wage and in many ways living in local poverty I think I mentioned here before like when I lived in the capital city of Laos I earned $300 per month u.s. dollars three hundred dollars per month and even though Laos is a third world country it ain't that cheap you know you're you're on the edge of poverty and if anything goes wrong if you if I had to actually go to the hospital or deal with an emergency I had to take an airplane flight you know taking a flight cost the same for me as anyone else so $300 a month is this is truly a charity level salary and I'm living there locally and I'm buying my mangos at the local market with local people and meeting local farmers and even like like the room I was renting I wasn't living with rich Westerners I was really living amongst local people another category of people you'd have people signed up with with multinational conglomerates or multinational charity sometimes corporations so the charities who you know we're receiving huge amounts of money flying in and out looked like they would fly back and forth between Europe and and said these days you repeatedly stay in a five-star hotel live in luxury and be completely cut off from the reality of daily life sometimes including they'll be cut off from reality in the communities they were supposedly trying to help and the third category was you would get vacation volunteers people doing charity work but like they fly over they basically do this as part of a holiday and they would literally like go from like get an advantage like a village in Cambodia where there were a ton of people dying of AIDS and they're raising orphans because the parents died of AIDS and then the kids are still alive so you got AIDS orphans and poverty in a village and these people they fly in they spend a couple hours of the day playing with orphans you know doing this kind of phony charity work and then they they go to the discotheque at night you know they're doing other tourist stuff and this cinemas would be asking the organizers of the charity like oh look you know can you organise the day so that you know we need a bus to take us to the disco and like you know the other stuff they're doing so again even though they're there even though they're physically there in that village for a few hours obviously they don't speak the language in many ways they're totally disconnected from the reality and in many ways they're still trying to go to the beach to go to the disco do tourist crap now when I was living in those circumstance that was my social circle those are the people around me who could speak English other than that like in Laos I would speak to local people and the Lao language the most part and you know I knew a couple of interesting Lao people rebelling go but I mean this this is really this is not a community these are just the other people around me in this society that I interact with um I don't start from a globalizing claim about who's good and who's evil I really don't on a case-by-case basis you meet people and some people are good some people are bad most people are a mixture of the two some people are doing the right things for the wrong reasons some people are doing the wrong things for the right reasons and you could meet people and learn what their motivations were what their misconceptions were before they came over what they're trying to do and whether they're failing to achieve their I learned a lot by talking to people in all three categories talking to the the deluded millionaire executives guys living in poverty as I was and again I was living in poverty but of course there are local people who are vastly more poor than I am but still my own circumstances were real poverty that's no joke but yeah of course I can recognize my situation is different from a guy who's actually living his whole life on the rice farm farming rice although the hey I wish I owned the rice farm let me tell you they have some advantages do they their lives are not with their pleasure but sure you could learn a lot from talking to all of those people and I don't start from any cosmological claim there's division doing good and evil all these people on this side all those people on the other side but on the other hand I have to say look I have an opinion I'm here living this life I'm doing the research I know what's going on I am entitled to my opinion my opinion counts at least for me and it's good at count on this human level of me dealing with you and me dealing with this circle of 50 people or hundred people yeah I'm not gonna pretend we're all equal I'm not gonna pretend I don't see the difference between you know a guy who goes to the whorehouse and a guy who doesn't but among the guys who don't are you know the crazy Christian missionaries so again it's not simple it's like well you're doing charity work I'm someone who I drank zero alcohol I did zero drugs I did not sleep with prostitutes but the other guys in that category I don't have much in common with em because most of them are either Christian or Muslim you know like that you know the the moral scruples that I apply to my life beyond veganism put me in very strange company in those circumstances one of the simple precepts from Russia and nihilism identifies an historical nihilist not as a Russian nihilist but one of those simple concepts was go to the poor be the poor this is within Russia in terms of social change and their point wasn't saying don't have a protest in the streets of the capital city and live in luxury don't live as an intellectual cut off from the reality of poverty actually go to the poor be the poor live among if you won't understand the poor and to some extent my own methodology in life did that embrace that and to some extent of course I was always separate from those people partly for these same reasons the poor drink alcohol the poor Gorder whorehouses the poor or eat meat they do all kinds of things I don't do and most of the poor if they got money would live in a totally different way from when I was living they wouldn't work in a charity they'd buy a fancy motorcycle and live in luxury and do something else their lives so it's not that I do this out of some delusion of solidarity with the poor or any any kind of left-wing delusion but no I am NOT mosy about the fact that there is a real difference between me and a flexitarian and who I spend my time with who I care about who I respect who I organize with yes it's possible I mean as with all these funny contradictions it's possible you meet a flexitarian and you end up really respecting them I met a guy here and he was one of my professors he had been vegetarian in different times of his life but then he became pescetarian and the mercury content of the fish he was eating in a pretty short span of time totally destroyed his health totally he had unbelievably horrible life-altering permanent health damage because he went from vegetarian to pescetarian no joke and now he's on a crazy diet that includes beef because his doctor was giving them all these really specific instructions and how to deal with his his mercury poisoning you know it's nothing it's the long-term consequence of the mercury poisoning so you know you mean a guy like that he was involved in ecological and animal rights issues but he eats meat of course I can recognize there are some really unique problems here and maybe you know maybe he's a wonderful guy and what-have-you I'm not just gonna sit there and judge him in a shallow and catty way and I don't know enough about the science of his situation it sounds like he's in a really tight situation where you know he may not have any better options than eating meat and some extent my heart goes out to him but on the other hand no I do not agree with this approach that Tobias and a natural vegan endorsed I've never heard her say it just recently a natural vegan has been has been endorsing Tobias on this of pretending that there's any kind of moral equivalence between someone who is vegan and someone who's flexitarian no this is a this is a hard line and again I would say the same thing you need someone who doesn't drink milk just because they have an allergy well you know it's quite common you meet people who eat no dairy products just because they have a health problem of course that is different from someone who's made the ethical decision of looking at the horror of what the dairy industry is and saying I will not compromise I don't want this to be part of my life I don't want this to be part of the society I live in and I want to get organized other people to bring about some kind of social change so that this ceases to be a daily reality on the shelves of the grocery store next to where I live and the farms just out of sight just out of the reach of your ears of cows living their whole lives on a concrete floor inside a metal fence being exploited from the moment they're born until the moment they die in this unconscionable way