[A question from H., a member of the audience:]
I understand that sentiment but lets say it was a school project and you had to work in a group, save the fact that you would carry the majority of the weight, who in the YouTube Vegan community would best benefit from working with you?...(I promise this is the last question)
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It's a stupid question.
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[H. replies:]
How so? You spent 5 years with these people and none not nada have developed enough, via your "conflict model" of tutolage, enough to actually do serious work with the Vegan movement?
Is being humiliated a prerequiste to enacting meaningful change?
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It is a stupid question, because you ask "…who in the YouTube Vegan community would best benefit from working with you?"
If you are asking about THEM (not me, [and not the audience, not about the future of the movement or broader political goals] but [just] the other person)…
Yes, of course I think Nina and Randa would benefit from working with me, and I said so in the video. My implicit point here being that even the least intellectually inclined of other youtubers would benefit. People who are MORE intellectually inclined (like ODS) benefit more, people who are more interested in politics benefit more, of course —but, as I said in the video, Richard would be better off today if he'd followed my advice five years ago, Henya, Erin Janus, etc., would all be better off if they'd followed my advice (if they'd worked with me in any way). I think it's demonstrable that all the people who did work with me benefitted from it, too (ModVegan, etc., and, yes, obviously, people who work with me now like ODS).
Re: "Is being humiliated a prerequiste to enacting meaningful change?"
For a lot of people, it is.
Not for everyone.
Plenty of people supported the "Socmas" idea. There were atheist youtubers who opposed it. Did I humiliate my opponents in criticizing them, and stating my case so powerfully? (This example has spanned at least three years.) Quite possibly some of them did feel humiliated. Some were too stupid to feel humiliated. (I spoke to one, in a livestream, and I remember he did seem humiliated: he'd never retracted his video denouncing me, but I think he was aware, on some level, that he'd adopted a stupid and needlessly hostile position against me.) So, yes, SOME PEOPLE had to be humiliated even in advancing an idea that wholesome and helpful (and, frankly, "non-dangerous").
Well, we deal with a lot of dangerous ideas on this channel. And a lot of people are going to be shocked and humiliated to have their own ignorance, mendacity and malice pointed out to them in the ensuing discussion.
Do you think people feel happy when I point out to them that they don't know what they're talking about re: the politics of Thailand or Xinjiang?
But if you ask me --with any of these examples-- "Would these other youtubers benefit from working with you?", the answer is yes. Yes, they'd benefit from listening to me, they'd benefit from learning from me --and they'd even benefit if they just made the effort to disagree with me on a more sophisticated level.
The question is, simply, who has the strength of character (or seriousness of intent) to respond to that kind of critique positively.
Why wouldn't Mic the Vegan respond —with serious interest— to my pointing out that one of his scientific videos is factually wrong (in one case about marijuana, in another case it was about a dietary study that —in fact— had nothing to do with veganism, and he'd misrepresented his sources, as I recall)? Why wouldn't Vegan Gains respond —with serious interest— when it is pointed out to him that he's been publicly endorsing and supporting a white supremacist who wants to exile all blacks from the U.S. and Canada (i.e., Cory McCarthy)? Why wouldn't Nina and Randa want to have a serious discussion abut the future of the vegan movement?
Dude, there is NO TALENT there.
Talent is SCARCE.
I'm not missing out on anything by NOT helping those people, and they're not missing out on anything by refusing to be helped by me, because they're (1) stupid and (2) malign. They don't have the intellectual, ethical or emotional character to accomplish ANYTHING positive (Richard is a great example of that). People PRESUME good intentions, as if they're the most common thing, but good intentions (EVEN WITHIN VEGAN ACTIVISM) are really scarce!
Money, fame, power, respect, sex. Not necessarily in that order.
If Mic the Vegan were motivated by ANYTHING ELSE, why wouldn't he care about the scientific facts I'd pointed out to him? Why wouldn't he be fascinated, frankly? Jaclyn Glenn, same question? Unnatural Vegan, same question?
They're not even interested in scientific truth, vs. scientific falsehood —let alone the more dangerous and flexible kind of truth that politics involves. They're not interested in the difference between true and false, even when we're talking about the heavy cutlass that differentiates brain damage from a medical benefit —rather than the slim, flexible rapier that differentiates a useful economic theory (or an accurate interpretation of history) from dishonest political propaganda.
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[A follow-up question from JRM:]
Eisel, what do you think the solution is to someone who may have bad, evil or wrong intentions, but isn't aware of it themselves?
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[And I reply:]
Although NOT ALL EXAMPLES are equally positive, you get to see MANY, MANY examples of the type of "positive intervention" I've attempted myself on my youtube channel: even the most recent video about Brian Turner's stock market investment advice really is an example of this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFGOYGIXZvo
I think Brian is a great example [of someone] who is unaware of the harm he's doing, and who is unaware of his own motivations in doing that harm. And in that brief video, I am directly attempting to get him to reconsider what his own motivations are —in even plainer English, to reconsider what he's doing and why.
The videos about (i.e., AGAINST) ayahuasca are also excellent examples: I know the people promoting this stuff (and in one case, it was a PAID PROMOTION on a vegan youtube channel) are really unaware of the significance of what they're doing and why…
https://www.youtube.com/c/A-bas-le-cielBlogspot/search?query=ayahuasca
These are attempts —some more effective than others— to make people aware of the evil that they do —and it is, admittedly, a type of evil they cannot perceive themselves.
A lot of the material on Buddhism (debunking meditation courses, etc.) and a lot of the material on Communism (debunking false economic claims made about MMT, etc.) has the same sort of quality: yes, you're dealing, in part, with "dry facts" —but you're also dealing with human motivations, dripping wet. And you can tell me, on a case by case basis, how successful I've been in challenging people to re-evaluate their motivations.
I certainly do know of examples of people who wrote in, letting me know that they broke down weeping, were shaken to their core, and suddenly felt that their whole life was a lie, etc. —and you can tell me if that's better or worse than someone having a detached, intellectual reaction, and thinking, "maybe this guy has a point".
