My elegy to the vegan movement is more than two years old...
My book, Veganism: Future of an Illusion, was written in response to ONE request from ONE viewer (i.e., a supporter on Patreon) as my final act of vegan activism, looking back on the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the movement in retrospect. I understand that people who read the book are excited by it, as if it's the beginning of a new period in which I become some kind of guiding voice for the cause, but the exact opposite is the case.
Talent is scarce: the Cree and Ojibwe (language and politics) need all the talented people they can get, but they (i.e., anyone who cares in that field, not necessarily a person with power in an institution) squandered the opportunity to work with me (or to help me or encourage me) while it lasted, and they'll never have that opportunity again.
You might want to read that single sentence paragraph twice: I can say the same about research in Laos and Cambodia, or about Pali and Buddhist studies, or several other fields that I lost years of my life to without meeting a single person of any brilliance, ambition or even moral fiber (this includes the politics and language of modern China: supposedly significant to over a billion of us on planet earth, but paradoxically a smaller field than the other examples mentioned). I'm not going to be a one man political movement: I'm not going to be a one man academic discipline. I have to work with people, I have to work for people, and I have to work toward real outcomes: none of that is possible in veganism (nor in Chinese, etc.) so I'm moving on —and many members of my audience have disregarded the extent to which I already have moved on. I'm not suck in 2016: they are.
I still have people writing to me saying that I'm this uniquely important voice for the future of the vegan movement. They're wrong: in 2023, I'm a uniquely important voice FROM THE PAST. I'm part of the history of the vegan movement that's already over.
My book may be the most brilliant thing that's ever been written about vegan politics, and it may remain the most brilliant thing for many years to come. Yeah, guess what? Not a lot of people are writing brilliant essays about the politics of Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar or even (shockingly) China. You wanna take a look at how much talent is on the bench for Hobbema, Alberta, as the Cree language slowly goes extinct?
By sheer dint of the stupidity and self-indulgent fatuousness of my contemporaries, I could have been (and/or briefly was) the most brilliant writer in any number of fields (even if I was only involved for a short time, as with Cree and Ojibwe). As an intellectual, I can't work FOR NOTHING and FOR NOBODY: being talented isn't rewarding for the person who has the talent, it's only rewarding for the people who lack it. Being the most brilliant author in veganism is an utterly thankless task: it would be just as miserable to be turning out one essay after another on the politics of Laos, or the misinterpretation of ancient Buddhist texts, I assure you.
The audience has power over the fate of the author: if everyone within Buddhism is genuinely too stupid to appreciate what I have to offer (and they were, and presumably still are) then I'm not going to remain a Buddhist intellectual. It absolutely never occurred to me that a field as enormous as Modern Chinese could be WORSE (in all these respects) than the rare and recondite areas of study I'd been in before, but it was (and is). Most of you can't imagine the kind of sacrifice (and permanent brain damage) you endure in learning Chinese as a second language over so many years; it is easier for you to visualize the permanent harm done to my life by my involvement in veganism (i.e., very few career options are open to me now, etc.). You tell me what's harder: walking away from Chinese, or walking away from the vegan movement?
They're both easy, because I'm walking away from you: from you utterly untalented people, who were neither worthwhile to work with, nor worthwhile to work for. I'm leaving nothing of value behind, because I'm leaving nobody of value behind. I will never wake up and wish I was back in Cambodia, but, likewise, I'll never wake up and wish I was (once again) eating lunch with my professors of Chinese studies, etc.
