The Future of the Community (Brainstorming for a Better Vegan Movement)
24 January 2017 [link youtube]
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Youtube Automatic Transcription
I'm honest yen well okay so I think you
raised two interesting questions here you know the third point you made is really just the difference between early adopters versus who will be the adopters when it's a mature movement but part of omens we don't we don't know who else will adopt it I mean you know maybe because again I'm open to this I just made this video saying I am NOT left-wing but once were past the early adopters phase maybe veganism is going to be even more left-wing like maybe because I mean historically veganism and animal rights have been received very poorly by traditional the traditional labor left it has been very hostile to become an animal Rises add no buzzing but okay maybe in the year twenty forty veganism has taken that over and vice versa because I mean the labor unions are falling apart anyway maybe so like maybe and maybe the left wing of the Democrat Party in the US and in Canada the NDP maybe those have really become Majority vegan like that's one possible future so I can talk about the difference between early adopters and one it's a robust movement but i don't really know like you know it would also be a false assumption for me to assume that veganism is going to cluster around the middle of the political spectrum it could just continue to grow to the left and matt new yen hey guys just a short clarification this is actually the third video on this channel of myself speaking with a lawyer based in washington DC called Stephen fight the first video is over an hour long you can still go back and see that one great discussion worth seeing the second video I just wept uploaded a few days ago he's an excerpt from a podcast that's one hour and 40 minutes long you can get that podcast from patreon click on the link below this channel and pay one dollar per month to support the creation of content of this kind and support my survival oh here engine and China on the border with Myanmar but look just to avoid any confusion this is actually the third video in total that have uploaded dialogue to me in this particular fellow and it is the second and final excerpt that I'm uploading to youtube but if you click on patreon get here the whole conversation in all its unedited glory you know it's terrifying and I mean you know this comes back to the reckless optimism you're talking about earlier that you use on cv gan's expressing that some of the whole world is going to become vegan I'm familiar with that kind of misplaced optimism because it happened it happened actually both with Buddhism in the Western world so the Western adoption of Buddhism and it happened just before that with the Western adoption of Hinduism you know there was a time back when the Beatles so this is the rock band the top ten rocked them back when the Beatles briefly became Hindu you know there was this wave of optimism that suddenly a certain form of dumb down westernized translated in english hinduism was going to become massively influential in the Western world and not without reason like if you just look at the percentage growth per year you know year-on-year you had a couple of years in a row there where these can do foundations in California and in New York were growing very rapidly and their number of adherents and they were being on you know the cover of newspapers and magazines and much talked about they suddenly had a high profile and they also suddenly had a lot of money and in many ways Buddhism tera vaada Buddhism is mostly when I'm talking about here no I'm not a Zen Buddhism is a slightly different history but you know tera vaada Buddhism especially very much tried to reproduce this this way is and there's done you can look at some you can even look at Buddhist publications in the 1980s that are really optimistically talking about Buddhism is exploding in America and in Canada that suddenly like millions of white people are going to be practicing Buddhist now it never happened it's not just possible that veganism will similarly collapse that way that it'll have its day being on the front page of the newspaper and then fade we're in much greater danger of that because among other things we don't have the money you know those Hindu foundations a lot of them are shameful but they got millions of dollars and they built universities within the United States and around the world they built Brixton order big institutions they built temples but you know the there was real money involved and where there's money there's a certain kind of institutional durability I don't see that happening in veganism at all and you know the possibility of veganism receding to being a shadow of the level of influence that has right now however small levels me that's that's very very real to me I have one more thing to be pessimistic no I think that's interesting that's a really valid concern um I can I guess business with no claims of effective activism or anything any I had no evidence to support this I just given the the waters of the statistics something like eighty six percent of people who go vegan end up reverting back to non vegan lifestyle I have to believe that there or I do believe that that is in large part due to just be social and logistical difficulty of maintaining that lifestyle just that yeah that I'm sure I'm sure there is a component of that that is people truly are just like but I want to be addicted but you know what i mean like they can't shake the cravings for animal foods or they can't deal with the social pressure even if there are vegan options at chipotle they still feel like they're being made fun of i'm sure that's part of it but well I mean all add on my I'm going to interrupt your midst ends here I think the other this is the other sense in which I really want to talk about community not a Facebook group but real community in the real world there's this other big element of moral suasion so you and I both are Jewish to some extent uh you know you can have people who are involved with Judaism because they're positively motivated to be part of the community right and you can also have people who adhere to the religious laws of Judaism maybe even rules they don't particularly respect you know particular customs particular religious observances because of the moral suasion of the community because they don't want to be excluded from the community they don't want to be punished or look down upon by the community right so to be blunt there's both the sense of wanting to be part of a Jewish community that actually exists that is not a Facebook group and there's also an aversion to being perceived as a bad Jew by one fellow Jews right that's heavy that's a heavy trip I mean for a lot of people whether you've seen that in a family dispute or something else to have a guilt trip put on somebody that they're you know they're they're letting they're letting the group down you know now on on a microcosmic level you see that because I really do think this is part of the statistic whether it's cystic is eighty-six percent or whatever a very very large number of beacon see Stevie I know a lot of vegan women including some of the vegan women try to start relationships with me who have men in their lives who drag their feet and only become vegan because their girlfriend insists on it because their wife insists on it right so after they break up why would you why would that man be vegan anymore you see now again uh if someone converted to Judaism only because they married a Jewish woman and i actually have known some examples of that well then if you get divorced what kind of moral suasion is on you either positively or negatively so now look I I gotta put in a foot in here I'm not saying this because I want to trick people into veganism who don't really want to be vegan I think that's ridiculous but if we're if we're trying to understand a number like that and the durability of veganism as a movement I do think that a very significant percentage of those people you know yes the tech the difficulty of remaining vegan is one thing but I do think the the absence of community in that sense it is both chicken and egg it's both that people are getting a vegan girlfriend and then going back to eating meat when they break up with that girlfriend and also that they they don't have any of that push or pull of being engaged in a community to make them feel so that they would feel bad if they became a bad vegan or where they positively want to be vegan because they want to be part of the movement that we got going on you know and and people make sacrifice the only sacrifice just be part of the Green Party the Green Party is not is not nearly as rewarding as as being part of a jewish community center or something you know being being Jewish is not that great but you know you get you get to go to some picnics you get to talk to some you know so yeah I've seen that definitely even just with something as pathetic as the Green Party that you have a little bit of a community there and you get that type of change in people's motives and behavior yeah no I mean that's totally right and I don't want to make it sound to transactional but but in a real blunt way like when you go vegan what do you get you get I know that do you get you know do you get friends do you get a place to spend your afternoons or evenings or your weekend do you get you know do you get any kind of social capital any career advancement opportunities I mean these are things that even with relatively loose ties to a Jewish community you just walk into your jewish community center or temple and it's all there for you there they have on the website like do you want friends are you single are you looking to date people do you need a job do you want to volunteer but it's all there I know and we yeah you is and I think the amount into distress is I I think that there is obviously there's a blurriness here but like there's a degree to which all the things we're talking about building a community in a lot of ways obviously if you're vegan restaurant serving food but they don't really have anything to do with veganism or they let stay with veganism and they're just about the people who are vegan yes and and I think that where I think there's I think there's also like a crypto version of this in there are there are these weird clusters of personality traits or points of interest you've raised the issue of mental health and eating disorders there's also just sort of this you know anarchists anti-establishment anti-capitalist sort of strain that runs through it and it and I'm really quite conflicted because it I don't know my instinct is not to do this but I don't know if it makes sense should we be really building institutions in our populations that cater to these desires should we do have those vegan anti-gmo lobbying groups and esophagus GMOs have anything to do with veganism but just because vegan seem to hate GMO I actually I also feel pretty strongly that I haven't thought this through that that much but i find the kind of people and maybe it's just the most vocal people to people on youtube the people who post in facebook groups the folks who are attracted to veganism are I don't know what ties them all together but it's not it seems like it's not maybe this is wrong I'll just say it you can be like well with no you're totally wrong but it seems like it's not just average people like if you took a cross section of the vegan populations you wouldn't have the demographic and personality profiles of like the average whatever group of people you yeah it seems like there is a lot of this sort of Fringe looking for new lifestyles and a thing which is which so for me I live in a really weird place where in the in the vegan population I'm probably among the most mainstream and you know little feed conservative I'm certainly on that end of the spectrum and then compared to like the population of even a super progressive city like DC I'm quite far to the left well okay so I think you raised two interesting questions here you know the third point you made is really just the difference between early adopters versus who will be the adopters when it's a mature movement but part of omens we don't we don't know who else will adopt it I mean you know maybe because again I'm open to this I just made this video saying I am NOT left-wing but once were past the early adopters phase maybe veganism is going to be even more left-wing like maybe because I mean historically veganism and animal rights have been received very poorly by traditional the traditional labor left it has been very hostile to because minimal Rises add no buzzing but okay maybe in the year twenty forty veganism has taken that over and vice versa because I mean the labor unions are falling apart anyway maybe so like maybe and maybe the left wing of the Democrat Party in the US and in Canada the NDP maybe those have really become Majority vegan like that that's one possible future so I can talk about the difference between early adopters and when it's a robust movement but i don't really know like you know it would also be a false assumption for me to assume that veganism is going to cluster around the middle of the political spectrum it could just continue to grow to the left that's not even hard to imagine that's not that not that implausible before you were asked social you know the fact that we can criticize the cross-section of vegans we've got now is merely being really adopters that's very true and very useful but that doesn't mean we can guess which where the future goes I've raised up challenged people repeatedly by saying look you think you know the future of veganism but you're not even thinking about the Hindus you're not even thinking about the Buddhist and I do think those are really significant queuing factors so there's two examples you know but maybe the clothing industry maybe there's something I'm not thinking about the dynamic role you know the vegan veganism in the clothing issue we were just talking about restaurants but we don't talk about the clothing industry so much the clothing industry certainly has the money and cloud and organization to may have a big impact if they want to you know what I mean so you could have you could have leadership from from an unforeseen position that has those again skewing the factors for the progress meant you ask a question that I'm really well prepared for because of my experience with the Green Party you ask look when you join veganism what do you get it's a crucial problem and i can remember saying that directly to the Green Party of Canada and the leadership not being able to answer i said look people sign up and actually pay money to join the Green Party and what do you get let's actually draw a flowchart like I'm seriously challenged they know you have to think through step by step because the reality is people are walking up and paying thirty dollars you know students get amount of money and their money goes into a hole and disappears and they get nothing or they get a button that says I joined the Green Party and nothing else and they never hear back from you again for four years no the next election you know so let's actually you a photo of what what do you get when you join and certainly for a vegan foundation for an actual organization you have to look at that very carefully if ppl donate money or join you know what you get in canada we have an old saying for my thing to 1960s it's possible it's older than another but i would guess it's either 1960s or 1970s which was so in canada we have three main parties instead of just two in the united states to say this is the same people join the conservative party to get drunk they joined the Liberal Party to get laid and they joined the NDP to get pamphlets so uh and they're used to really be some truth to that you're talking about you know the social elements or the social elements of going to a Jewish temple or you know joining a mainstream compartir leave the Conservative Party the decimals tradition small towns in Canada if you were looking for a job going to conservative party meetings was a good way to meet employers or people you could be in business with or without be there was really a you know that was a crucial form of social capital I don't know if that's true today I just don't know but certainly in the 1970s that was really really true a reason to be involved in a political party and there really was something you would get you would actually go and get drunk and meet you know maybe meet your future wife and meet your future boss or business colleague um and the joke there implicitly is that the most left-wing party is lacking these things that if you join the left-wing party all you get our pamphlets you don't get drunk you don't get laid you don't get any other social capital um when you're looking at these kinds of social movements in a dynamic period of growth which is what we think veganism is in the other question is are you going to cater to vegans as they are or do vegans as they should be and that may sound like an academic point but it's not it's not academic at all if you're in the Green Party and you have only a couple hundred people involved like in Canada it's a couple hundred people are you going to write articles and produce material and politically campaign in a way that reaches out and rewards those few hundred people makes them happy like you were saying before like okay maybe it's hysteria over genetically modified organisms could be anything you know some particular issue that really shouldn't be in your mandate or you say no this is not what the green party's about the Green Party is supposed to be serving a larger function a higher ideal we're supposed to have this mission that serves everybody in Canada that serves some long-term goal that may be defined scientifically and socially yokas but it is partly scientific when you're talking about ecology we have this mandate actually has nothing to do with the couple hundred losers who just happen to be the fringe elements who signed up when we were first getting started all right and you can even be in a situation where you have contempt for your current supporters on behalf of the people you're imagining as being your future supporters I think all kinds of organizations go through that you know you could even just be having some kind of a public service you know if you're doing a library or actually in a wheel sub tradition of library trucks you know a truck that goes around bringing books to a community well do you actually provide the books that people want to read or do you provide the books that they should read there's a problem with prison libraries you know are you get are you there to provide a certain quality and caliber of book or just the books that i should get asked for so yeah that tension i think is fundamental and I just feel well rehearsed for it because that they're gonna that's interesting and again I don't want to be too harsh on all our fellow vegans I mean I'm happy to criticize them for lots of things but not for being who they are it's just they don't realize that if our goal is to bring more people into our movement if we call it a movement necessarily we're going to dilute so that we're not all politically aligned we're not all culturally aligned we may really have visceral hatred for the beliefs of other vegans I mean you I think it's really easy to imagine right right now I think they're some overwhelming majority of vegans at least the ones that I've been exposed to and spoken to are our pro choice when it comes to abortion right and one could imagine a situation where some connection is made between pro-life anti-abortion arguments and the sentient animals I'm not suggesting that it will happen but I've seen those you're right that that exists that debate exists it does already you're quite correct oh yeah but yeah just one could imagine the ranks of veganism swelling aggressively with folks who are staunchly pro-life and that being a real conflict and like I think we have to say if this is the movement if we want to turn this into a movement if we want to grow it like that's what we have to want is to bring people in who aren't just like us I bunderson
raised two interesting questions here you know the third point you made is really just the difference between early adopters versus who will be the adopters when it's a mature movement but part of omens we don't we don't know who else will adopt it I mean you know maybe because again I'm open to this I just made this video saying I am NOT left-wing but once were past the early adopters phase maybe veganism is going to be even more left-wing like maybe because I mean historically veganism and animal rights have been received very poorly by traditional the traditional labor left it has been very hostile to become an animal Rises add no buzzing but okay maybe in the year twenty forty veganism has taken that over and vice versa because I mean the labor unions are falling apart anyway maybe so like maybe and maybe the left wing of the Democrat Party in the US and in Canada the NDP maybe those have really become Majority vegan like that's one possible future so I can talk about the difference between early adopters and one it's a robust movement but i don't really know like you know it would also be a false assumption for me to assume that veganism is going to cluster around the middle of the political spectrum it could just continue to grow to the left and matt new yen hey guys just a short clarification this is actually the third video on this channel of myself speaking with a lawyer based in washington DC called Stephen fight the first video is over an hour long you can still go back and see that one great discussion worth seeing the second video I just wept uploaded a few days ago he's an excerpt from a podcast that's one hour and 40 minutes long you can get that podcast from patreon click on the link below this channel and pay one dollar per month to support the creation of content of this kind and support my survival oh here engine and China on the border with Myanmar but look just to avoid any confusion this is actually the third video in total that have uploaded dialogue to me in this particular fellow and it is the second and final excerpt that I'm uploading to youtube but if you click on patreon get here the whole conversation in all its unedited glory you know it's terrifying and I mean you know this comes back to the reckless optimism you're talking about earlier that you use on cv gan's expressing that some of the whole world is going to become vegan I'm familiar with that kind of misplaced optimism because it happened it happened actually both with Buddhism in the Western world so the Western adoption of Buddhism and it happened just before that with the Western adoption of Hinduism you know there was a time back when the Beatles so this is the rock band the top ten rocked them back when the Beatles briefly became Hindu you know there was this wave of optimism that suddenly a certain form of dumb down westernized translated in english hinduism was going to become massively influential in the Western world and not without reason like if you just look at the percentage growth per year you know year-on-year you had a couple of years in a row there where these can do foundations in California and in New York were growing very rapidly and their number of adherents and they were being on you know the cover of newspapers and magazines and much talked about they suddenly had a high profile and they also suddenly had a lot of money and in many ways Buddhism tera vaada Buddhism is mostly when I'm talking about here no I'm not a Zen Buddhism is a slightly different history but you know tera vaada Buddhism especially very much tried to reproduce this this way is and there's done you can look at some you can even look at Buddhist publications in the 1980s that are really optimistically talking about Buddhism is exploding in America and in Canada that suddenly like millions of white people are going to be practicing Buddhist now it never happened it's not just possible that veganism will similarly collapse that way that it'll have its day being on the front page of the newspaper and then fade we're in much greater danger of that because among other things we don't have the money you know those Hindu foundations a lot of them are shameful but they got millions of dollars and they built universities within the United States and around the world they built Brixton order big institutions they built temples but you know the there was real money involved and where there's money there's a certain kind of institutional durability I don't see that happening in veganism at all and you know the possibility of veganism receding to being a shadow of the level of influence that has right now however small levels me that's that's very very real to me I have one more thing to be pessimistic no I think that's interesting that's a really valid concern um I can I guess business with no claims of effective activism or anything any I had no evidence to support this I just given the the waters of the statistics something like eighty six percent of people who go vegan end up reverting back to non vegan lifestyle I have to believe that there or I do believe that that is in large part due to just be social and logistical difficulty of maintaining that lifestyle just that yeah that I'm sure I'm sure there is a component of that that is people truly are just like but I want to be addicted but you know what i mean like they can't shake the cravings for animal foods or they can't deal with the social pressure even if there are vegan options at chipotle they still feel like they're being made fun of i'm sure that's part of it but well I mean all add on my I'm going to interrupt your midst ends here I think the other this is the other sense in which I really want to talk about community not a Facebook group but real community in the real world there's this other big element of moral suasion so you and I both are Jewish to some extent uh you know you can have people who are involved with Judaism because they're positively motivated to be part of the community right and you can also have people who adhere to the religious laws of Judaism maybe even rules they don't particularly respect you know particular customs particular religious observances because of the moral suasion of the community because they don't want to be excluded from the community they don't want to be punished or look down upon by the community right so to be blunt there's both the sense of wanting to be part of a Jewish community that actually exists that is not a Facebook group and there's also an aversion to being perceived as a bad Jew by one fellow Jews right that's heavy that's a heavy trip I mean for a lot of people whether you've seen that in a family dispute or something else to have a guilt trip put on somebody that they're you know they're they're letting they're letting the group down you know now on on a microcosmic level you see that because I really do think this is part of the statistic whether it's cystic is eighty-six percent or whatever a very very large number of beacon see Stevie I know a lot of vegan women including some of the vegan women try to start relationships with me who have men in their lives who drag their feet and only become vegan because their girlfriend insists on it because their wife insists on it right so after they break up why would you why would that man be vegan anymore you see now again uh if someone converted to Judaism only because they married a Jewish woman and i actually have known some examples of that well then if you get divorced what kind of moral suasion is on you either positively or negatively so now look I I gotta put in a foot in here I'm not saying this because I want to trick people into veganism who don't really want to be vegan I think that's ridiculous but if we're if we're trying to understand a number like that and the durability of veganism as a movement I do think that a very significant percentage of those people you know yes the tech the difficulty of remaining vegan is one thing but I do think the the absence of community in that sense it is both chicken and egg it's both that people are getting a vegan girlfriend and then going back to eating meat when they break up with that girlfriend and also that they they don't have any of that push or pull of being engaged in a community to make them feel so that they would feel bad if they became a bad vegan or where they positively want to be vegan because they want to be part of the movement that we got going on you know and and people make sacrifice the only sacrifice just be part of the Green Party the Green Party is not is not nearly as rewarding as as being part of a jewish community center or something you know being being Jewish is not that great but you know you get you get to go to some picnics you get to talk to some you know so yeah I've seen that definitely even just with something as pathetic as the Green Party that you have a little bit of a community there and you get that type of change in people's motives and behavior yeah no I mean that's totally right and I don't want to make it sound to transactional but but in a real blunt way like when you go vegan what do you get you get I know that do you get you know do you get friends do you get a place to spend your afternoons or evenings or your weekend do you get you know do you get any kind of social capital any career advancement opportunities I mean these are things that even with relatively loose ties to a Jewish community you just walk into your jewish community center or temple and it's all there for you there they have on the website like do you want friends are you single are you looking to date people do you need a job do you want to volunteer but it's all there I know and we yeah you is and I think the amount into distress is I I think that there is obviously there's a blurriness here but like there's a degree to which all the things we're talking about building a community in a lot of ways obviously if you're vegan restaurant serving food but they don't really have anything to do with veganism or they let stay with veganism and they're just about the people who are vegan yes and and I think that where I think there's I think there's also like a crypto version of this in there are there are these weird clusters of personality traits or points of interest you've raised the issue of mental health and eating disorders there's also just sort of this you know anarchists anti-establishment anti-capitalist sort of strain that runs through it and it and I'm really quite conflicted because it I don't know my instinct is not to do this but I don't know if it makes sense should we be really building institutions in our populations that cater to these desires should we do have those vegan anti-gmo lobbying groups and esophagus GMOs have anything to do with veganism but just because vegan seem to hate GMO I actually I also feel pretty strongly that I haven't thought this through that that much but i find the kind of people and maybe it's just the most vocal people to people on youtube the people who post in facebook groups the folks who are attracted to veganism are I don't know what ties them all together but it's not it seems like it's not maybe this is wrong I'll just say it you can be like well with no you're totally wrong but it seems like it's not just average people like if you took a cross section of the vegan populations you wouldn't have the demographic and personality profiles of like the average whatever group of people you yeah it seems like there is a lot of this sort of Fringe looking for new lifestyles and a thing which is which so for me I live in a really weird place where in the in the vegan population I'm probably among the most mainstream and you know little feed conservative I'm certainly on that end of the spectrum and then compared to like the population of even a super progressive city like DC I'm quite far to the left well okay so I think you raised two interesting questions here you know the third point you made is really just the difference between early adopters versus who will be the adopters when it's a mature movement but part of omens we don't we don't know who else will adopt it I mean you know maybe because again I'm open to this I just made this video saying I am NOT left-wing but once were past the early adopters phase maybe veganism is going to be even more left-wing like maybe because I mean historically veganism and animal rights have been received very poorly by traditional the traditional labor left it has been very hostile to because minimal Rises add no buzzing but okay maybe in the year twenty forty veganism has taken that over and vice versa because I mean the labor unions are falling apart anyway maybe so like maybe and maybe the left wing of the Democrat Party in the US and in Canada the NDP maybe those have really become Majority vegan like that that's one possible future so I can talk about the difference between early adopters and when it's a robust movement but i don't really know like you know it would also be a false assumption for me to assume that veganism is going to cluster around the middle of the political spectrum it could just continue to grow to the left that's not even hard to imagine that's not that not that implausible before you were asked social you know the fact that we can criticize the cross-section of vegans we've got now is merely being really adopters that's very true and very useful but that doesn't mean we can guess which where the future goes I've raised up challenged people repeatedly by saying look you think you know the future of veganism but you're not even thinking about the Hindus you're not even thinking about the Buddhist and I do think those are really significant queuing factors so there's two examples you know but maybe the clothing industry maybe there's something I'm not thinking about the dynamic role you know the vegan veganism in the clothing issue we were just talking about restaurants but we don't talk about the clothing industry so much the clothing industry certainly has the money and cloud and organization to may have a big impact if they want to you know what I mean so you could have you could have leadership from from an unforeseen position that has those again skewing the factors for the progress meant you ask a question that I'm really well prepared for because of my experience with the Green Party you ask look when you join veganism what do you get it's a crucial problem and i can remember saying that directly to the Green Party of Canada and the leadership not being able to answer i said look people sign up and actually pay money to join the Green Party and what do you get let's actually draw a flowchart like I'm seriously challenged they know you have to think through step by step because the reality is people are walking up and paying thirty dollars you know students get amount of money and their money goes into a hole and disappears and they get nothing or they get a button that says I joined the Green Party and nothing else and they never hear back from you again for four years no the next election you know so let's actually you a photo of what what do you get when you join and certainly for a vegan foundation for an actual organization you have to look at that very carefully if ppl donate money or join you know what you get in canada we have an old saying for my thing to 1960s it's possible it's older than another but i would guess it's either 1960s or 1970s which was so in canada we have three main parties instead of just two in the united states to say this is the same people join the conservative party to get drunk they joined the Liberal Party to get laid and they joined the NDP to get pamphlets so uh and they're used to really be some truth to that you're talking about you know the social elements or the social elements of going to a Jewish temple or you know joining a mainstream compartir leave the Conservative Party the decimals tradition small towns in Canada if you were looking for a job going to conservative party meetings was a good way to meet employers or people you could be in business with or without be there was really a you know that was a crucial form of social capital I don't know if that's true today I just don't know but certainly in the 1970s that was really really true a reason to be involved in a political party and there really was something you would get you would actually go and get drunk and meet you know maybe meet your future wife and meet your future boss or business colleague um and the joke there implicitly is that the most left-wing party is lacking these things that if you join the left-wing party all you get our pamphlets you don't get drunk you don't get laid you don't get any other social capital um when you're looking at these kinds of social movements in a dynamic period of growth which is what we think veganism is in the other question is are you going to cater to vegans as they are or do vegans as they should be and that may sound like an academic point but it's not it's not academic at all if you're in the Green Party and you have only a couple hundred people involved like in Canada it's a couple hundred people are you going to write articles and produce material and politically campaign in a way that reaches out and rewards those few hundred people makes them happy like you were saying before like okay maybe it's hysteria over genetically modified organisms could be anything you know some particular issue that really shouldn't be in your mandate or you say no this is not what the green party's about the Green Party is supposed to be serving a larger function a higher ideal we're supposed to have this mission that serves everybody in Canada that serves some long-term goal that may be defined scientifically and socially yokas but it is partly scientific when you're talking about ecology we have this mandate actually has nothing to do with the couple hundred losers who just happen to be the fringe elements who signed up when we were first getting started all right and you can even be in a situation where you have contempt for your current supporters on behalf of the people you're imagining as being your future supporters I think all kinds of organizations go through that you know you could even just be having some kind of a public service you know if you're doing a library or actually in a wheel sub tradition of library trucks you know a truck that goes around bringing books to a community well do you actually provide the books that people want to read or do you provide the books that they should read there's a problem with prison libraries you know are you get are you there to provide a certain quality and caliber of book or just the books that i should get asked for so yeah that tension i think is fundamental and I just feel well rehearsed for it because that they're gonna that's interesting and again I don't want to be too harsh on all our fellow vegans I mean I'm happy to criticize them for lots of things but not for being who they are it's just they don't realize that if our goal is to bring more people into our movement if we call it a movement necessarily we're going to dilute so that we're not all politically aligned we're not all culturally aligned we may really have visceral hatred for the beliefs of other vegans I mean you I think it's really easy to imagine right right now I think they're some overwhelming majority of vegans at least the ones that I've been exposed to and spoken to are our pro choice when it comes to abortion right and one could imagine a situation where some connection is made between pro-life anti-abortion arguments and the sentient animals I'm not suggesting that it will happen but I've seen those you're right that that exists that debate exists it does already you're quite correct oh yeah but yeah just one could imagine the ranks of veganism swelling aggressively with folks who are staunchly pro-life and that being a real conflict and like I think we have to say if this is the movement if we want to turn this into a movement if we want to grow it like that's what we have to want is to bring people in who aren't just like us I bunderson