To tell the truth: politics, persuasion & personal compromise.

I got a question remember the audience
and it deals with telling the truth it's very easy to think of telling the truth as a strength but I think most of us here on the Internet are telling the truth from a position of weakness we are clinging to the truth because it's all we've got when I first went to Cambodia to do humanitarian work I was a critic of several of the humanitarian agencies there so talking about wealthy white people almost entirely European who'd come to Cambodia set up agencies denounced and criticized the Cambodian government and they got kicked out one way or another the Cambodian government got rid of these charities as unwanted criticism and you know when I first got there to Cambodia I was very critical of those groups did you come to this country to help poor people just because they're poor or did you come to rub the government's face in your sense of moral intellectual superiority you know what maybe you do know better than the government can put you with your Cambridge education or your Oxford education we are Ivy League education you know what you're rich and you're white and you're West you may know better about all kinds of things when I lived in Laos I seemed to know more about sewage treatment plants than the people in the Lao government and it drove me crazy I seem to know more about ecology and all kinds of things I care to vote but you know I didn't feel it was my place to in that disrespectful and accusatory way point the figure even if I were right and here's here's the thing for those agencies with that money in that position of privilege and power okay it would have been more powerful for them to lie for them to remain insider for them to play the game they could have influenced the government they could have brought about real change and they could have brought about real changes through their own humanitarian agency their one organization in Cambodia and instead they got their asses kicked out they became exiled because they wanted to tell the truth alright I was I was younger then you know and when I'm looking at that you know so what do you what do you really care about you know this is before I knew about YouTube probably YouTube existed then but it was in the in the early days you know so I mean like what do you want to be like a radio talk-show host do you want to be like a youtuber who comes to Cambodia and points the finger and says this government official is corrupt and that government officials broke and you're probably right I mean I can't just say these these NGOs were 100% right all the time but whatever they're probably 90% right 90% of the time or whatever it is there's a lot of corruption it's government it's the point is not that I disagree with the critique but did you come here to be a critic did you come here to be a radio talk-show host or did you come here to give clean running water to people who don't have clean running water and build homes and put roofs over people's heads and teach people how to do a job or offer them education or literacy or whatever it is you know look what is the point of what you're doing here okay and as soon as you get on that path of compromise right then you start asking yourself another bunch of questions okay so let's say you care about helping the poor and you care about helping the downtrodden and providing them with running water okay so now how many lies are you willing to tell how much government corruption are you willing to cover-up are you willing to stay solid about how many people get killed how many dead bodies how many people disappear see when I was younger I didn't understand that side of the game right I saw like look you can compromise and be a power player inside and get results and work with the government and work with corrupt companies and things too it's not all government it's primarily the government maybe you know maybe there's a local sugar cane corporation or something you got to work with to to achieve your humanitarian goals okay you can you can play it cool and be on the inside and get results or you can be like a radio talk show host who everyday is saying you're corrupt you don't know what you're doing you're incompetent it's a critic and you're an outsider and you can accomplish nothing you can't bring about any real change in the world and then yeah you get to just indulge your cell sense of moral superiority and intellectual superiority but you've ruined yourself okay I'm older now I'm more mature and I understand there were a lot of other questions do a lot of other questions here that are at stake all right and the most fundamental and the one you have to deal with every day is Who am I when I wake up in the morning and look at the mirror who do I have to deal with who do I get to be right and maybe it's just one dead body you know maybe you're not covering up a whole lot maybe it's just two or three you know corrupt government officials it may not you know may not be that terrible the things you have to do in the scale of things about but you're the guy who did it and that's you're looking at in the mirror when you wake up in the morning whether it's just a few murders or a few bribes or a few covered up disasters controversies or what-have-you right who are you gonna work with if you're a coward if you compromise right it's interesting you find yourself surrounded by cowards you're living in a culture of cowardice right if you're a hero if you're a person of principle if you stand up until the truth even if it gets you kicked out of the country or even gets you killed or whatever you find yourself in the company of heroes it's interesting all those things gravitate together right so I now look back at that in a in a very different way than when I first arrived in Cambodia and you know what both matter you know both the real-world outcomes matter and the truth matters you know doing the right thing because the right thing to do matters and and you know it really does matter whether or not people have clean water drink oh that's it's not it's not one of the other it's gotta be both right you've got but the tragedy of human life is at what point does doing the right thing because the right thing to do become a pretext for evil and it happens okay I got an email I'm not gonna read out you got a message from someone actually on discord viewer the channel he's asking me is it worth it to stand up and tell the truth to people when you really fundamentally morally disagree with him he gives two examples from opposite ends of the spectrum of seriousness one is standing up to and confronting people who really do support Anacin so in essence a youtuber with mmm storied storied love life here on YouTube and various ethical transgressions we all like to criticize okay is it worth it to stand up and tell the truth and confront those people and the opposite example he gives is standing up and talking to neo-nazis white supremacists racists and people that in the political spectrum Andy outlines some of the sort of psychological and political problems with creating these conflicts and won't that just make the people you're opposing more embittered and self-pitying and one have various kind of negative consequences that end rather than positive consequences want to bring more public attention to the people you're criticizing rather than ignoring them or what have you all right my channel has basically been blacklisted on YouTube since I stood up and pointed the finger at a series of racists white supremacist India Nazis all right and I know most people on YouTube care about success they care about earning a living on this platform they don't want to be blacklisted so those people will never do what I did you know there is one video on this channel the title of which memorably is Canadian Hitler and it is pointing the finger at a racist anti-semitic white supremacist youtuber who became a real political leader and as I believe stood in two different elections one I'm certain of she stood for election at least once but I think a second time in no time at all she went from being a YouTube personality to being a serious player in Canadian politics with consequences and it really matters that we have voices on YouTube who are going to point the finger and say in no uncertain terms look this woman uses coded language because she does this woman uses so-called dog whistles and so on but make no mistake this is a neo-nazi this is what she represents politically ethically so on and so forth all right that critique is you know necessary and kind of morally important to do all right so this comes down to two very simple questions what kind of person do you want to be and if not you then who we are making a transition in the 21st century professional journalism is dying it used to be that there were two separate types of people in the world there were people who did real things and then there were journalists who wrote about it and you can imagine in that that old world the professional journalism let's say 50 years ago there might be someone who was making the compromises to meet with corrupt government officials so that they could get clean running water hodor for some charity and someone who was recording what was happening and secretly handing documents to professional journalists to write about it so they could continue doing their work and the journalist can separately publish it and try to chase up the ends that is gone all right the role of the professional journalist is over and the era of the amateur journalist the era of each and every one of us being in our own small way a radio talk show host is very real here and now all right if I did not stand up and make those videos there are quite a few pointing the finger at people and saying look this is real racism this is really a problem this really matters I think my daughter and my grandchildren would be in a position to ask me what the hell were you doing that was so important that you didn't do this this was on this is on your watch right and the dissent of societies from democracy into tyranny whether it be democracy into fascism or democracy into communism or democracy and authoritarianism it happens because people like you and me don't point the finger and say hey this is what's really going on here this is what this is what really matters the most tragic thing of all when you're reading the history of the rise of Adolf Hitler isn't that there were crazy people on one extreme and crazy people on the other but that there were all these reasonable people in the middle who just said well you know it won't be that bad you know it'll just be a fad this fascism thing it'll come and go after a few years you'll you'll see and well it will be that bad and obviously at that time a small number of people had access to a printing press or a microphone at a radio station a very small number of people would have had the option to do original research and present an informed opinion and say no this is not like any other fad the nature of the threat is very real the consequences for this are very real and what you think is reasonable is profoundly irrational dangerous the excuses in the middle core sir you're taking right you can't always be right you can always try to tell the truth you can always try to do the right thing because it's the right thing to do and you don't get to decide if you will be hated or you will be loved for that there were university professors here University of Victoria right now who hate me hate me for telling certain inconvenient truths you don't get to choose if you're gonna be hated or I love for that but you get to choose who that person is that you see in the mirror in the morning you get to choose who you're going to be and when you make compromises when you're a coward there are terrible consequences for the character of that person you have to live with