IMHO, the Political Approach to Veganism is Less Depressing than the Alternatives.

a lot of people feel that somehow the
political approach to veganism ecology in animal rights is more depressing than the lifestyle approach or the consumer centered approach or the yoga centered approach or the health and fitness and weight loss centered approach and it's not and I'll tell you why I'm gonna respond here to just a couple of seconds from a podcast by a guy named Michael good child he uses the name the vegan activist on the internet but obviously we're gonna refer to him as Michael good child because calling him the vegan activist is just ridiculous but here's a here's a moment of of him reflecting on how bleak and depressing the reality of his life is vegan activist really is it's a long par guys did a two hour podcast meditating on how disappointed he is with me gizem I understand and uh you'll see why actually an explicitly political approach to veganism is in many ways much more optimistic it gives me a much brighter outlook on life here we go it's a very long slow process of supply and demand where we will have to keep not buying these products and buying the other products for them to realize that we need to stop glass a lot of products get wasted along the way and that's quite hard to deal with and we can use that as a justification to keep eating animals but you know 500 people stopped buying the regular milk and start buying the soy milk they put like two less crates of that in the supermarket very slowly we start to see a less demand for the farmers so they stop breeding as many animals and and then there were suddenly start to realize there's less profit in the business and then me okay so as you got from even those few seconds uh this view of the world he's describing is one of consumer centered activism the idea that gradually a larger and larger percentage of people are refusing during cow milk and thus as he says stores stop buying cow milk and then cows stop being bred to live their lives in captivity to produce cow milk etc and that view basically entails that we only achieve a vegan world or a vegan society or even a vegan town when we get way past fifty one percent of the population being vegan so as a matter of fact my view my really explicitly political view of veganism is much more optimistic because I think that five percent of people can have a dynamic impact on society and I've seen that again and again it is not the case that homosexuals needed to become 51% of society to get their changes to the law is passed it is not the case that activists who were against cigarette smoking had to become 51 percent of the population to get their changes to our society past and they're quite dramatic I'm not really old enough to remember that change it's really my parents generation who can remember the time when cigarette smoking was everywhere it was a time when if you bought a boardroom table if you bought a table for boardroom meetings it had ashtrays built into it people were smoking all the time during public meetings etc etc it is definitely not the case one of my favorite examples to look at is you know the groups that are against drunk driving like Mothers Against Drunk Driving they didn't have to become 51% the population they didn't even have to become ten percent of the population they made dramatic changes of the society we live in these are success stories there are also tragic failures I think I think we can look at a you know the status of First Nations people in Canada or indigenous people of minority groups that failed to put together the aspects necessary to succeed as lobbyists to bring about the political changes they wanted I do think you know it's very it's very sad I sympathize with I support I would much prefer to be in a country like Canada if our government did support for example the the status of indigenous peoples languages etc etc it's an issue have been involved in the past city should I care about it's not my point my point is to say this is a failure not all the examples are positive we can look at positive examples we can look at negative examples and obviously in terms their political organization their funding their access to government in many ways the struggle for gay rights had many many advantages tactical advantages over the struggle for First Nations rights indigenous peoples rights in Canada not getting into this video my view of veganism is that we can win with five percent his view of veganism is we could only win with something like ninety percent and that's why he's so depressed he actually is thinking of this short term and long term as a kind of consumer boycott if you search for the word boycott on this channel oh I think it's on this channel but I also did a whole podcast on the boycott mentality with in veganism and I think that's a patreon only podcast so I'm sorry I forget to what extent it's on YouTube to what I sense on patreon but I do think that the boycott mentality with in veganism is actually problematic the boycott mentality takes us so far but only so far and no further and we have to move past that and I did I'm sorry maybe I should dig up that podcast and actually upload part of it to YouTube because it's a really good discussion and a lot of people said to be response to that wow I never thought about that before but it's true veganism it partly is a boycott movement and it partly is not and again we can just come back to a simple example like cigarette smoking the anti-smoking movement is not just a boycott movement they're not just trying to boycott cigarettes it's also a public education movement it's a public policy movement because they're trying to stop everyone from smoking cigarettes and yes that does sometimes result in ridiculous laws like I used to walk past a hospital in Canada and all the time you would see the medical doctors not the patients the doctors and the nurses who would have to walk outside the hospital and walk to the nearest street corner to smoke a cigarette because now we got these laws in Canada that you you can't smoke inside the hospital you can't even smoke close to the hospital it's a it's oppressive we're opressing the cigarette smokers I admit it but this is part of a grander design for social change that we're engaged in pursuing what percentage of Canadians were ever a part of that movement wherever part of an actual organized political movement to bring about social change to gradually eliminate cigarette smoking and do not so gradually at all stigmatize cigarette smoke that's what is is a stigma we're making those medical doctors ashamed that they still smoke cigarettes while they're advising other people to quit smoking this push and pull it is what it is I don't even think five percent of Canadians ever got organized or ever got engaged but we managed to achieve that social change I i doubt i really doubt ten percent of people were really active and organized in gay rights movements it's probably if you could get a realistic estimates pretty much smaller than that but again gay rights movements had some some really big advantages in terms of the fact that homosexuals are distributed throughout the whole society pretty much randomly and pretty much equally so there were gay lawyers that were gay p but within the government there were gay people there also of course gay people living in poverty don't get me wrong there are gay people who work at the corner store there are gay people who work at the gas station but the fact that there were some gay people who were already lobbyists for the federal government who already lawyers who already had those positions that was a huge advantage and for our indigenous people in Canada you have to be dreaming if you think indigenous people in Canada are distributed randomly or evenly they're not distributed evenly geographically they're not distribute it evenly financially like in terms of their their economic situation of society etc etc there are really huge obstacles for them to overcome that that's and that's one of the reasons why as a dynamic minority rights based movement homosexuals are so much more effective so much more successful than indigenous people in Canada what's our status vegans what's it going to be for us are we going to be a bunch of losers with yoga mats selling weight loss dreams is that the future of veganism your choice you decide are we going to be as my good friend Charles Marlow say are we going to be a bunch of degenerates selling fad diet books Oh are we gonna put ourselves into the hippy ghetto or the left-wing ghetto or the anti-capitalist ghetto or are we going to be in the in a sense the pro-capitalist ghetto are we going to be just another consumerist fat hobby selling you you know all the different ways you can make money out of vegan cheese or whatever what's it gonna be I think we can look at the groups that lobbied for change on cigarettes on alcohol on drunk driving the groups that lobby for gay rights I think we can do better I think as you we have a lot of advantages over groups that are really oppressed that are really marginalized some vegans are rich something's are poor but actually there's no excuse for what pathetic failures you've been so far I think with far fewer than five percent of people becoming vegan we can actually start lobbying for dynamic social change and yes some of that is from the grassroots is from the bottom up but some of it if we're being honest is from the top down