Megan Phelps-Roper is Wrong About Everything

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOl-5rhyTms

We’re living through an interesting period of history in which nobody really studies how to deal with conflict. Nobody really studies how to win in political conflicts. What people study, who people are taught to respect is avoidance of conflict. Is de-escalation of conflict. You’ve probably heard these terms all your life.

I met a man who had been for many years a Buddhist monk. He was a white European and he had gone to Thailand and he was a formal Therevada Buddhist monk in the full saffron colored robe. He became fluent in the Thai language. He preached to Thai people. He really did live in immersion. He wasn’t just hanging out with a bunch of white hippies and dreadlocks or something. He lived that life. What do you think he did with the rest of his career after he, after he gave up being a Buddhist? Oh, he taught conflict resolution.

So we talk a lot about conflict resolution and we have a sort of political education. We’re growing up that has to do with minimizing, avoiding and deescalating conflict and certainly currently in the year 2022, that is what we hear about. On the news. The time the police we find fault with them for escalating a conflict instead of deescalating it so on and so forth. But when we turn to the questions that matter to us most, both on massive scale of a Society of millions of people, planet of millions of people, and on the most intimate scale, the one to one scale of friends, lovers, colleagues and family members very often, what we’re actually talking about is escalating a conflict, taking what might be a relatively minor or relatively subtle. Conflict between two people and raising the stakes, raising the consequences. So. That and until something really fundamentally changes now can give you about 100 different examples here.

Let’s just say you have a brother and your brother drinks alcohol, smoke, cigarettes and gambles. And he doesn’t do any of these things to such an excess that it would be perceived as a mental illness in our society. He does you. Know he’s not diagnosable as an alcoholic. But this adds up to a lot of his time and energy. What are you going to do? If you really want to convince him to make a change if you don’t want to normalize his behavior, you want to abnormalize his behavior. You want him to see the consequences of his actions. You even want to exaggerate the consequences of his actions. You want to, in a sense. Great. Consequences for his actions that they currently don’t have. I mean, currently he may be able to say he can still hold down his job and his girlfriend puts up with him and he has a wonderful social life and his drinking and smoking and gambling that it’s really not a problem for. Him. But it’s. A problem for you and in a. Sense you want to convince him? That it should be a problem for him to let’s say you’re born and raised Muslim. Your father is Muslim, your mother is Muslim, but you’re not. You’re an open atheist and a Muslim household household, and assume you’re in your 20s as long you’ve moved out of the house. You’ve got brothers and sisters. And in the same way that someone can be a little bit of an alcoholic and a little bit of a smoker and a little bit of a gambler and just get by in your life, let’s say this is a very realistic scenario for many of you. Let’s say your brothers and sisters, they’re not atheists. And they’re not devout Muslims either. They’re just a little bit Muslim. They just, they just get. You know, they get along with their parents, they get along with the church, they get along with worldly authorities. Oh, that’s a real. Easy situation to avoid conflict and both of them are right, we can be conflict avoiding have conflict resolution of conflict minimization. We can we can. Yes we can all we can all just get along. And years and years are going to go by and nothing is really going to change, right? So what about the conflicts and what’s exactly what we want is to insist that people be uncompromising, that they face up to the consequences and implications of their beliefs, of their decisions, of their, of their commitments. The actual what we want to do is abnormal.

It’s their behavior to lead them into a situation where they are distanciation enough from alienated enough from the trappings of their daily life, things that they’ve they’ve learned to ignore, things that have become invisible, invisible to them through repetition and familiarity, things you see and do every day, which can include prayer, I mean things you see and do every day. Include drinking alcohol and it can include praying to a God that doesn’t exist and you want to stop this cycle of self, justifying you know compromised behavior and say no, no let’s let’s really think this, OK? What if you have a family? When your father takes antidepressants. Your mother takes anti anxiety, drugs and so let’s say she was diagnosed at some point with attention deficit disorder. Maybe she also has take sleeping pills to help her because she’s on the the meds for those other things, screw up her sleep and you got a number of brothers and sisters and cousins. And seemingly everyone is on mind altering prescription medication. 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and for them it’s normal. Like like the gambler I talked about as the first example, right? Probably they’re all accustomed to complaining about the side effects. You know, probably they complain amongst themselves. Ohh, you know, I’ve been taking such and such and my doctors organization ohh and they tried increasing the prescription and then we tried decreasing it and then I tried switching to this other drug they they probably do admit. Your. That there are problems. Admit that there are drawbacks. Probably they admit things like erectile dysfunction as a side effect, loss of sense of smell. And I’ve known people who take these drugs. They have all kinds of weird side effects, just loss of sleep and and all kinds of things that affect probably. But for them, right it’s become normal. It’s something they accepted. Something made peace with, and if you want to challenge them, if you want to really challenge them about the question of what do they believe? And what are the implications of those beliefs if you think them all the way through? Do you believe? It’s good to take a medicine that has been debunked, that has been scientifically proven to not work, to not be effective. For the disease you claim you have a whole separate question here. Whether or not that disease even exists scientifically, you know, do you think it’s moral and good for you? Not even your doctor, not even the bogeyman of the Big pharmaceutical corporation. But do you think it’s? Good for you. To encourage people to take a drug that is non effect. And that has side effects that include brain damage, medically proven. We can show it through an X-ray. We can show it through an MRI scan. We can show it through examining. We can prove permanent brain damage. Is that really what you believe? Are those the tenets of your religion? Is that really what you’re willing to live with? All these people are comfortable, OK? You can’t solve the problem through conflict of plants or conflict resolution. We’re talking about conflict creation. We’re talking about, you know, jarring people out of their complacency. And again, Abnormalize doing what for them is completely normal behavior, right? It’s part of the drum beat of daily life in the same way that, you know, if you sit down and read a book on a subway, maybe when you first sit down, the noise of the subway. Disturbs you have a long subway ride? You start reading the book and you know the noise of the grinding gears and so on, or the subway around you starts to disappear into the background right now. Again, I want to emphasize this. This kind of conflict exists at the most intimate level. Your husband, your wife, your boyfriend, your girlfriend. Your parents, your brothers and sisters, right? Your coworkers at the office and you can scale it up and it exists at the level of the city of the state of the province of the country of the continent. Of the world, and we’re talking about conflict creation. We’re talking about taking a situation where everybody, everybody tolerates each other. The Alcoholics tolerate the sober people and the sober people tolerate the Alcoholics, the people who are morally opposed to gambling. They get along just fine with the people who go and gamble. Every weekend, right. And the atheists get along just fine with the Muslim fundamentalists. We’re all one big happy family and you know. What percent of the population United States of America can be on a prescription with mind altering, ineffective medication that causes permanent brain damage? Antidepressants. Antipsychotics can go up to. 30% go to. Fitness we can all keep tolerating each other. We all keep on avoiding conflict with one another. Saying yes, yes, good for good. For you, you know what? Good patting each other on the on the head, patting each other on the back. Everyone, everyone enjoying each other’s company from the cradle to the grave with no no conflict. What about? What about creating conflict? And once you create those conflicts, creating stakes. Creating consequences where there’s something to win and something to lose, you know. For both of us. Now, I haven’t mentioned veganism in this video, and I don’t have to. I mean, we can do the whole video, we can just talk about atheism. Just talk about left wing politics, right wing politics. We talk about Conservative and Liberal politics. There’s so many examples. Thing with here, but for those of you minions who are very. I think you will right away know what I’m talking about, whether it’s on the ethical side, on the ecological side, or even on the health side of the equation, which I talk about the least. Or so you live in a family where it’s normal for people to have heart attacks at 55, someone has their first heart attack at 65. Oh well, you know, that’s not too bad. Because my brother, he had his first at 55 and like you can leave it alone where everybody’s having heart attacks between 55 and 65 and everyone’s. And at 75, you could you could have family where it’s normal to not being able to walk up five flights of stairs. It’s just normal, like, you know, whether it’s cardiovascular or that’s just or it’s considered extraordinary to be able to run up five flights of stairs. And for it to be no big deal to carry, you know, remember moving. Furniture and an apartment going. Up and down. So a lot of flights of stairs. Since 13 flights of stairs, with every every piece of baggage and whatever. You know that that’s extreme. OK, well, you know, so my point is the health side of it is the shallowest and the stupidest. I’m much more interested in the ethics, the politics, the ecology and so on. But even on that level, right. I’m not trying to avoid. Until you, I’m not trying to. Get along with you.

This is about conflict escalation, right? Because maybe maybe there is a little bit right. There’s a little bit of doubt gnawing away at you like you, let’s say, whether it’s your brother or your father, let’s say, you know, a guy who’s 55, I probably do. Have brothers who are 50. 5 Now I do so I’m in my 40s. I have brothers who are 15 years old than me, so I do so I can turn to one of my brothers. And say, hey, you know what, when you take your shirt off and look in the mirror, you know, here’s what you see. And here’s what you don’t see. Why don’t you think about what you’re gonna be like now? 55 to 65 and what the, you know, you can. You can really try. So my point is, there may be a little bit of a conflict. There’s a little bit of awareness. Life doesn’t have to be this way. It doesn’t have to be so hard to get up a flight of stairs. It doesn’t. Have to be. It doesn’t have to be so embarrassing to go swimming at the beach or the pool when you take your shirt off. As a guy you know may have felt feel something knowing which ethically there might be some little awareness knowing away at you. It doesn’t really seem necessary for animals to be raised in captivity just to produce a hot dog. And for them to be slaughtered and suffer and pollute the air and pollute the water. And all these. Terrible ponds, a hot dog that really qualitatively is not that different from the experience of eating a vegan hot dog. And you know, in terms of health. That’s even worse. There’s maybe something gnawing away at them. There is some small degree of conflict there. That can be escalated, right? And look, when you’re dealing with left wing politics, right wing politics, you know, religion, you know, we talk a lot about the kind of acceptance and reinforcement religious people get inside the temple. It’s the Hindu temple of Muslim temple. Jewish temple. Yeah. But they’re also a kind of pariah. In the rest of society, you know, talk to any girl who grew up in Canada wearing the headscarf the whole time she went. Through primary school and high school, and justifying to herself why it is she stands at why it is she is 24/7 well whatever 12 hours a day which is outside of the house. Why is it that in every class she ever took, first and foremost everyone’s first impression of her was her religion because she was wearing a religious uniform and every job she applies for and every interaction? Whether at the grocery store or anywhere else like you know, OK, there is, there is some conflict. Here we have a whole society and culture of saying, hey, minimize, deescalate and boy, let her know that she’s welcome. Let her know that you see her for the person she is, despite the fact that she’s wearing a religious symbol around covering part of her face, covering her hair, you know, and so on. Right. But there is some conflict. Within her, there’s some part of her that’s thinking the same way my brother might be thinking. You should be able to run up five flights of stairs, something you know there’s some part of her that’s thinking life doesn’t have to be this way. And whether it’s people who have been her friends who are non-muslim, just secular people, people who are maybe this much Christian, or people who are outright this or it’s people she sees on TV, people she sees on the news, some part of her is thinking I could have a life like that woman. I could be like her. I don’t have to live this way. Encumbered by the religion forever and I didn’t have to suffer through this in primary school in high school. It’s all for God and it’s all for nothing. It’s for no reason, no. So there is. There is a conflict there, right? Do any of you feel? Confident. Taking someone aside and as I say, escalating that conflict and saying, yeah, you know what, the stakes are way higher than you think. They are making excuses for this religion. There are consequences for the next century on this planet that go way beyond you and I on the level of of two people, just talking to each other. The consequences for who you want to be for the rest of your life. Maybe you got 40 years on this planet. Maybe. Maybe you got 100 years plan. How you gonna live? Whether whether you got another 10 years, another 100 years, whatever, it’s gonna be there. There are consequences on that scale. But there are also, you know, much more serious, much more far reaching. Consequences. That’s, you know, let’s let’s, let’s talk about let’s escalate this conflict. Let’s make you feel responsible. Let’s make you feel. Ashamed of yourself? Let’s make you feel like if you don’t make a change, if you don’t start innovating. If you don’t start coming up with some new options right, you’re going to hate yourself for the rest of your life, for squandering this opportunity and and doing the wrong thing, creating a sense of. Urgency creating an awareness that you’re standing at a fork in the road where you get to decide what kind of person you want to be, what kind of world you want to live in, and then what kind of commitment you’re willing to make, what kind of effort you want to make, what kind of envision you have to make that happen to change the world beyond. You know, the immediate sphere of. People who already know you and love you and. And care about you. No, you know what I’m talking about here right away. It does have resemblance to 1’s sales tactics. Two religious conversion. Right. If I am trying to convince you to buy a car, let’s say, specifically buying what Americans call an RV, a mobile home, a camper van, you know, so this is a car you don’t need. You already have a car. But now I want to convince you to buy another car kind of car. That you’re just going to use on your vacations special vacation vehicle. Think about how similar that is to what I’ve just been talking about in terms of political conflict, religious conflict. Ohh, you think you’re happy. With the car you’ve already got, you think you’re happy with the vacations you take with your family, but now I’m gonna sell you on this idea. I’m gonna take this seed of doubt. You’ve got that you could be happier if you had the ability to go camping and pitch a tent. What you really need is a vehicle that’s big enough that you can put. Surfboards in the back of it and you can drive to the beach with your girlfriend or your kids or whatever you’ve got with the surfboards and you have a place to change into your bathing suits like you have, you know, even if you don’t sleep there, you have a little enclosed space, you have a place where you can have lunch, you know, then you can go to the beach. You’ve got to buy a camp. I’m going to escalate and escalate until you are ready to make this commitment to change your life. So you’re ready to go into debt. You’re ready to take out a bank loan. Whatever it takes. Ready to put it on the credit card to make this this change in your life, right? It resembles sales tax. And I gotta tell you like I used to be a member of the. Theravada Buddhist faith. I was good at it. All right, one of the reasons I have so much contempt for my contemporaries, my competitors, who may be cult leaders, and they may be religious leaders, is that I know I would be better at running the same game that they’re running, you know? Ohh you think Paul Beshear can talk a good game? You think? James asked me. Can talk a good game, homie. Come on, I can. I can talk to Dalai Lama into converting to Judaism. OK, Rahul, like I can. I can sell Buddhist reincarnation. I can sell Buddhist ethics. I can talk people into the philosophy and the. Religion of of Theravada Buddhism I’m I’m good at. I can work a crowd. I mean like when I say work crowd. So when you’re talking to 30 people at once and I can talk to people 11 at a time, I have experience, you know. Doing that kind of thing. You know, have experience and you know when you’re talking to someone and you recognize what it is they care about and you. Know where you you. You preach to that and so and you take advantage of what their their interests and commitments already are, and you make. Them aware of. Interests and commitments that they didn’t even they didn’t even know they had. You know, if I actually were to do what Dorian rider did. Jesus. A friend of mine is is convinced that durian rider is autistic. Actually, I have a friend who is herself diagnosed as autistic. She has a lot of experience with autism. I remember she was talking through her analysis of him and why she believes he also is a diagnosable autistic person. I don’t. I don’t find it completely convincing. I don’t. I’m looking at. But he’s certainly someone who struggles with exactly the kind of eye contact and conversational ability and and the confidence work. Taking someone into your confidence and then. Moving them and so on that I have to say already, as a teenager I knew I was good at and I knew well enough to be afraid of it. I didn’t want to be a salesman, and I didn’t want to be a cult leader and I’d like to think I’m still not. You know. If you have people in your life. Who are communists? If you have people in your life who call themselves. Anarchists or socialists? But really, they’re on that slippery slope. They’re involved with other communist revolutionary people. You know. The problem isn’t that they’re radical. The problem isn’t that they’re uncomfortable. The problem is that they’re comfortable, like when you talk to those people, they know about the mass murder. They know about the mass starvation, they know about the failures coming. They know about that, that stuff, right? And the question is, how are you going to escalate this conflict? How are you going to find the basis for doubt and expand on it? How are you going to make them feel ashamed of themselves? Because they do. They support. They endorse mass murder and ************. They support communism. They’re anti democracy and. To be blunt, anti freedom. Whatever you want to put it that they that they support this. How are you going to abnormalize that when for them it has become normal. It’s part of the drum beat of their life. Now again, it’s my point here is. It’s easy if you’re unfamiliar with these things, to think the radicalism is the problem, and all you have. To do is de. Radicalize them? It’s it’s kind of natural. What I’m saying to you is instead you have to look at this and see exactly the compromise and the tolerance and the normalcy you have to see the mediocrity of it as the problem. The problem is the extent to which they’re. They’re comfortable with this today. I’ve and I’ve dealt with a lot of communists. In my own family. On the Internet face to face, I’ve lived in communist countries. Communism. It has been a real problem. It is a real problem. You know, moving ahead, it still is case. You don’t know right now Joe Biden is more or less in a Cold War situation with Communist China. It does not look like in the next 50 years Communism is is going away. It looks like this time we’ll have to deal with more and more. So in turning to Margaret Phelps. Roper, look at her name on Megan. Thank you. Melissa is just off camera doing the fact checking Megan Phelps Roper. This is an author and a sort of ex Christian activist whose existence I was reminded of because one of my supporters on Patreon mentioned reading her book. She has a Ted. Talk. She has the lecture here on YouTube with over 6 million views. And she gives just 4. Points of advice points of guidance for the audience and how to deal with how to approach people of contrary ideological persuasions. And I think she’s wrong about every single one of them. I think it’s really, really bad advice. I know it’s well intended. I know she’s think she thinks she’s helping you. And she thinks she’s helping you on the basis of what her own experience was, how it was. She started to doubt the Christian doctrine, how it was, she was converted or deconverted from Christianity to some. Kind of atheist. You know, the first point is perhaps the most interesting her point #1 is. Don’t assume bad intent. Go through all these examples and more. If your brother is getting drunk. And gambling. What do you mean? Don’t assume bad intent when you confront him when you’re trying to create a conflict with him when you’re trying, as I say, really still like a salesman. You’re trying to increase the consequences. You’re trying to escalate the conflicts so that he’ll make a decision to change his life. What do you mean by don’t assume bad intent? Now I know I think this really fundamentally reflects the extent to which she remains Christian. She thinks it is a good and pious thing. To go out in the world and attribute positive intentions to everyone, attribute the the the the best of intentions. There’s a there’s a Christian phrase. It’s a terrible way to operate, frankly, even in the absence of this kind of conflict. I mean, you know, you go into the guidance counselors office at the university, and they have a sign on the wall saying we’re here to help. Assume bad intent. You go to a psychiatrist’s office. He has a sign on the wall saying tell me all your problems. Open up your heart to me. Bear your soul. We’re here to help. He may even tell you he has the cure. He is a pill in a bottle. It’s going. To cure what’s wrong with you. Assume bad intent. Even the people who are paid a generous salary to help you. Assume bad intent when I have gone to unemployment offices here in Canada, I think they refer to them as employment offices at the power of positive thinking, not unemployment employment. But you know, government offices to supposedly assist you in finding a job, somebody that that’s their. That’s their only job. They’re just paid to help people who come in saying, hey, look. I’m trying to transition to a new career I’m trying. To find work. Assume bad intent. You are dealing with bad people who have bad motivations in all these situations and that is in the absence of a religious conflict and the absence of a political conflict in the absence of an ideological conflict such as we’re talking about here, that’s not even as fraught as situation. As you know, trying to convert someone of the vegan diet, that’s just, hey, I’m trying to get help. Help. Your job description says you’re here to help me. You’re paid for government. Me, but they’re not there to help you. And sadly, they are bad people with bad intentions. Some of you guys are watching this video and you’re 55 years old and you know exactly what I’m talking about. And some of you guys are watching this video and you’re 18 years old. You have no. Idea what I’m talking about. Yet. UM. You know, sadly, I mean right now real world 2022. When you go into a police station. The police might have a sign on the wall saying we’re here to help you. No, they’re not. You have to deal with the police on an adversarial basis. You have to assume bad intent. You have to go in with all the evidence for your case, you say, hey, police officer, I’m gonna compel you to do the right thing. And here’s how I’m gonna do it. And I’ve had that experience even when I went in just to report that I got. Hit by a car? I was a pedestrian hit by a car and. You would think they were interrogating the Taliban. The level of hostility and threat which was very good at at at dealing with I cope with that very well. Other people would broke down leaving it was it was that bad. I could say the same here. So I’m pointing out the window. That’s what happened when I confronted the police here about drug addicts openly injecting themselves. I don’t know if it’s heroin or fennel, but injecting those needles. In public broad daylight and the police refusing to enforce the law in those circumstances. Assume. Bad intent, so look. Her claim is so. This is Megan Phelps. And again, I think she just hasn’t recognized the extent to which she remains fundamentally a Christian person with the Christian, a Christian charitable perspective on the world, quote. Assuming ill motives cuts us off from understanding why someone does and believes as they do. Quotation #2. When we assume good or neutral intent, we have a better framework for dialogue. Now what I’m saying to you is not the opposite. Of what she says. When you’re dealing with someone in this kind of ideological conflict, so you meet someone who is communist. Quite recently, I spoke to a guy and he had an Instagram account and believe his most recent picture of himself on Instagram was him proudly posing in front of a communist hammer and sickle flag. He was him identifying as a communist. And he was writing to me and saying he’s a fan of my YouTube channel and he he appreciates what I say and criticizing Communism, but he nevertheless remains a die hard devoted communist. Now. What would it mean if you were going to talk to someone and you know my only real interest in this conversation? And one and OK, yeah, I appreciate you watch my channel. I appreciate that you’re willing to listen to someone who’s a total anti communist, but you know, obviously my agenda is to try to make you uncomfortable with the compromises you’re comfortable with is to make you realize that what you’re doing here. It’s just as bad and evil and wrong as a young man who commits to the neo-Nazi movement and poses in front of a swastika. Black. You know, it’s it is just as bad. It’s just as serious. And what it tells me about you is just as dark, like on the judgment of the individual person. Whether or not the knock on consequences are as bad as is really another. Another question, what do? You. Think you think I’m going to assume good intentions then going to impute good intentions to them. I neither assign good intentions to them, nor do I assign bad intentions to them. I assume. That he doesn’t. Even know what his intentions are himself. His intentions. Good or bad? I don’t just work with the assumption that they’re unknowable to me. I work with the assumption that they are unknowable to him. I’ve talked to people who used to be. Vegan. They used to be vegan activists. And then they became ex vegan and they became anti vegan. One of these guys, I could name him but I won’t. I notice. At that time he got a girlfriend with really big breasts. And he started posing on his Instagram with her in a wet bikini showing off her breasts. Her face wasn’t very pretty, just being honest to you. She was one of those women. She had a really impressive pair of breasts, but not a very pretty face. And he was letting you know about it on on Instagram. You know, there were a couple other changes in his life. He was the guy who saved up a lot of money and then he’d taken a few years off work and he then returned. To the workplace, there are few different changes in his life at this time. When he didn’t just quit veganism, he actually became an anti vegan activist endorsing like Butler, claiming cow butter is healthy, things that most meat eaters don’t believe. Most mediators think it’s OK to indulge in. Butter, but they recognize. It’s unhealthy, you know, is endorsing, you know. Butter and and beef and things. It’s it was totally ridiculous. And look still today, like now. In retrospect, I can’t draw you a diagram. We can’t set out billiard balls on a table and talk about cause and effect like, OK. Like you went back to the workplace, started having work colleagues. You you got this girlfriend with big breasts like. I can’t give you a cause and effect relationship like ohh you got laid and all of a sudden you don’t care about ethics anymore, alright? Now and by the way, I’m not even claiming it isn’t that simple for a lot of people. It is for a lot of people. It’s that simple. What they wanted was to get late. There were people who became vegan to *** ****. They became vegan because of a particular boyfriend, girlfriend, but they became vegan. They started being an activist started. Going to events. No doubt it can be that simple. OK, but my point is I don’t know. And my conviction is he doesn’t know either. I think he’s not aware of how his sex life changed the way he viewed ethics, ecology and ultimately even. Health and diet now real quickly. I think you guys know there’s a YouTuber just using the name Tucker. He used to be a fan of my channel. I’ve used to be vegan. He knew a lot and talked about veganism and he knew a lot about my specific cynical perspective on veganism. He made a video giving all his reasons why now he’s ex vegan. Now he eats meat and drinks milk and does whatever he acquiesces in the culture of time and his reasons. When I’m listening to them. So this is subjective when I’m hearing them. I’m hearing ******** ********. ********. Then he admits he can’t *** ****. Right. That’s the one that stands out to me as something palpable and real. I I think I’m reading this guy and his, but I think he’s down bad. He talks about his desire to get married and have children to find one. I just mentioned. He didn’t. He didn’t mention his desire to sleep with 10 different women or 100 different. He’s talking about finding one woman and getting married. And having kids. Not all guys are like that. Some guys would rather sleep with 200 women, but that that was his. That’s how he put it. I can’t set out the billiard balls on the table and give you cause and effect, right? And I am not claiming that I know his motives and I am not even claiming to judge his motives as good or bad. My point is when I approach these situations, I assume and I treat people. As if they do not know their bad intentions themselves. When you’re talking about someone. Who’s born Muslim so raised Muslim? Do you think they know their reasons for continuing to be Muslim for continuing to make excuses for their religion to justify their commitment to their religion? Is that really something they can know themselves? Almost by definition, they’ll only be able to know that and reflect on that and analyze it. After they’ve lost their faith, it’s after you’ve quit.

All right. Now communism. My parents were communists. I was, in effect, born and raised communist. I rejected communism. OK. I can sit here now and tell you in detail. I can tell you how I felt about communism at age 10 at age 15 at age 20. Ohh, yeah. Now, now that I don’t believe in it and I can talk about my motivations and my parents motivations. You can psychoanalyze this down to smithereens, right? Oh, I know. Now, now that I’m outside of the ideology, you know, the outside of the belief system. Right. Someone who’s still inside it. I wish I could say to you good or bad, they won’t know their own intentions. But you know, through this, they’re always bad. They are always bad intentions, but they won’t be able to recognize them. Not even if you say them yourself, you know. Sorry, whether it’s Islam, whether it’s Christianity or or another religion, gonna mention an example from from Buddhism. You know how many people can say to you while they’re still inside the faith? That the reason why they still practiced this religion was that every time they questioned it as a child, every time they stepped out of line, their grandfather took a stick and beat them. While you still believe, while you’re still afraid of going to hell after dying, while you still maybe want your grandfather to love you and approve of you, like while you’re still in that relationship, you may have some really intense relationship with the grandfather who beat you. There’s a that’s when you can’t see that, and that’s why you can’t say that it’s a bad reason. It’s a bad motivation. It’s a bad intent. Mention the fact that you’re afraid of your father whipping you, or that you know there’s this weird, like, almost **** relationship to authority that shapes the way you live your life. It’s there’s no way it can. Be good, it’s bad. But but I won’t know that about you. And you won’t know that about yourself. I was once some. I was once at a Buddhist retreat so I could describe the whole situation, but anyway, this is a Buddhist institution and relatively philosophical. There were a bunch of people there with pH D’s or some level of expertise in Buddhism, but it it wasn’t academic. It was, you know, there were also people. There were just whatever. People enthusiastic about meditation should say so. It was a mixed. Crowd. There were some. Chinese people there, there were some people from Sri Lanka. There was good both 50% white people, 50% East Asian traditional Buddhists and some of the discussions were at. A high acting. Level anyway, there was this white guy and he was a former Buddhist monk. He had experienced with the Zen Buddhist tradition being a Zen monk, and he later went on to. After this conversation he became a terravita Buddhist monk in the Burmese tradition, so he was a serious, lifelong, passionate lay Buddhist, you could say. Went on to become a a serious monk. I I doubt he’s still alive, but anyway probably died wearing the rope. He died walking the ancient narrow path to Nirvana. So we’re in this context and I know his level of education with the scripture, the philosophy of ancient text. And I basically, and we have an audience there are there are other people there are having this area. I say to him, look. Buddhism is a religion of non violence, detachment, compassion, insight. This particular philosophy, this critique of desire. How can you possibly justify? Being a member of a corrupt form of the religion. In which your normal religious practice is to. Beat someone with a stick. This is the Zen Buddhist practice in some forms of Zen in Japan. It carries on. It’s more than one form of Buddhism in Japan. But I knew the particular group he was with in the United States. They were one of the they believed in beating you with, like, beating you into enlightenment, stupid. This is not what the Buddha taught. The Buddha did not teach beating people with stick. And the guy stood there and he gave this completely. Meredith like semi Freudian semi philosophical semi Buddhist you know. Sure about his justification of why he thinks being beaten with a stick by a Zen master is, you know. So I I loved well, he spoke uninterrupted for a long time and I stood there. I said. Your parents beat you with a stick, didn’t they? And your grandparents? And your babysitter? And what you want to believe more than anything else? Is that they did it for a really good reason. And not just because they were stupid or afraid, didn’t know what to do, and didn’t know how to take care of you and didn’t know what to teach you. That like, you know, your parents might have been 18 at the time. You know, a lot of people, whenever they’re 18 or 28, that your parents were just dumb mixed up young people who didn’t know how to raise a kid and they hadn’t taken a course in it and whatever. And they’re they’re they’re they’re beating you for stupid. Irrational. Ignorant. Reasons you want to believe more than anything else that these people had some kind of profound wisdom and insight that motivated them to beat you, and now you are acting out that same script again with a Zen master. Or what you want to believe the fantasy you want to gratify is that when they beat you for a stick, it’s for your own good. It’s for your own enlightenment. And it’s because the person who holds the. **** has some kind of profound, ineffable wisdom. That you don’t have. And he broke down. On the spot. He fell apart into pixels. I have experience making people breakdown crying. Teachers, professors, authority figures. I. Do. Border guards. I can interrogate the border and taking apart the people who are who are trying. To interrogate me, alright. You know and and this dude he was, he was a preacher. He was used to preaching. This same doctrine and variations of it. I’m just going. To tell you. I don’t know that I’m right. It’s a very compelling analysis and I saw this guy completely freak out and fall apart. I could be wrong, I don’t know. Neither does he. Megan Phelps Roper says rule #1 don’t assume bad intent. I’m saying to you assume that these people do not know their own bad intentions themselves. Why did my father become a communist? I think he went to his grave without ever knowing himself. I think you could read all those written work. A lot of it’s on. The Internet now don’t read it. It’s garbage. It’s down, but. You could read what he wrote decade by decade and never find an answer, and you could ask him and never find an answer. And it’s because he never lost his faith. He never stood outside of that ideology. He never stood outside of that beliefs until look back on it. And with real detachment evaluate, you know what his motives really were. And again, the hardest thing about challenging these people is not that they’re radical. It’s not that they’re extreme, it’s that they’re comfortable, and you’ve got to make them uncomfortable. You’ve got to find the basis for the conflict and then escalate it. Point #2 from Megan is ask questions. I think this woman just doesn’t have experience with these kinds of conflict. And the little bit of experience she has is as a conventionally good looking woman in American culture. And this is, to me telling, she says, quote, it gives them an opportunity to point out flaws in our position. No it. Doesn’t. So if I’m asking you questions, if I’m asking you ohh, how do you justify supporting Joseph Stalin when he did this terrible thing? That doesn’t give the other person an opportunity to point out a flaw in my position. OK, I say the opposite. Here addressing something actually I could have. I could have talked about under point number 1/2. But point #1 long enough. The real problem people get into whether they’re asking questions or making assertions or offering argument. The real problem people get into is that they struggle over the moral high ground. Over who is going to be a good you know that that you want the other person to regard you as morally good or as authoritative. Alright, the way to give the other person the opportunity to point out a flaw in your own position is to go ahead and do it yourself. Is to criticize your own position is to expose its weaknesses. Is to expose your own agenda. Is to engage in self criticism. It’s not to ask them questions and what she says here about asking questions. It’s just completely wrong. Now, again, if she were kind of a large, imposing looking man. I think she’d have a very different experience of this in American culture. You know, if you’re asking someone, how do you know what you think you know about the Bible? How do you know what you think you know about the Koran? How do you know what you think you know about Communism? How do you know what you think you know about how, how healthy it is to eat butter or, you know, saturated fat or something, you know? Just what you’re saying here, it’s 180° wrong now. When I talk to people, whether they’re communists or fascists or left wing or right wings and whatever liberals or or conservatives, when I criticize my own position, I’m revealing its limits. I’m revealing its its disadvantages, but I’m also revealing the kind of person I am. And like, I’m willing to say, look, I’m a terrible person. I’m a bad person, you know, I’m not trying to be better than you. I’m telling you that for the kind of person I am. This is the program of action that I’ve proposed, so really really briefly. Over the last 10 years, if you talk to left wing people, but the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, war in Syria, America’s involvement in Israel, Palestine, the never ending conflict all. Right so often. Left wingers will begin with the assumption that it’s completely preposterous for anyone to disagree with them. It’s unimaginable to them that anyone takes the other point of view. You can’t make progress by asking questions well. Oh well, how do you know what you think you know about Hamas? How do you know what you think? You know about Israel or 100%? Event. Counterproductive, right? But I can attack my own position. I can criticize my own position, and I can reveal something important about the kind of person I am. So look, maybe I’m a terrible person. Maybe I’m worse than you. In some ways. I’ll tell you something. I care so much about democracy. Democracy is so important to me. That I’m willing to support American imperialism, as you call it, in Cuba. For the sake of democracy, I’m willing to support American imperialism. In the Middle East, you know, I’m willing to support a military alliance between the United States and Israel, even though Israel may have all kinds of problems that may be a deeply flawed democracy. America also is a deeply flawed democracy. But like the extent to which is real is democratic. And represents democracy and advances the cause of democracy. That’s enough. For me to see the conflict in this way, and now let’s talk about you because with most left wing people, they’re instead thinking of this in terms of American democracy. Is they just think American, sorry, they think American imperialism is bad and evil and wrong, and then they don’t care if they’re supporting Hamas in Palestine. They don’t care if they’re supporting. Bashar al-Assad in Syria, they don’t care if they’re supporting Muslim dictatorships or communist dictators. They don’t care if they’re supporting North Korea or Cuba. You know, they don’t care what horrible regime they’re sporting, as long as it’s something that’s against American. Realism. You can’t make progress through questions. You can make progress through criticizing your own position. Well, look, I’m the kind of terrible person. Who, who sees the market this way now, how about you? Now what do you see that makes your view of this so different? In criticizing my own position? I’m not just disclosing. I’m not just disclosing my argument or something. I’m disclosing who I am, right. And that’s the hardest thing to get across and you’ll never get there by by questioning. And by the way, compare this to what I said about .1 in a sense, I’m just closing my bad intentions. Like and I’ve I’ve said to people I’ve said to left people look, I am willing to accept a body count in the 10s of thousands to create democracy like to replace a dictatorship with democracy. I think that justifies 10s of thousands of people dying in war. So with that, that’s my perspective. No. Like maybe I’m a bad person. Like maybe I’m a bad person. Way you’re not. But I notice your point of view where you say you’re you’re not willing to support that and yet you are willing to justify 10s of thousands of people dying in order to sustain a communist dictatorship or even in some cases of Muslim dictatorships. Totally paradoxical. But the left wing is insanely pro Muslim. In 2022, this is, you know, strange bedfellows, partly created by the Israel Palestine conflict. You know, so, so. And so OK. You can see what I’m doing here in part what I’m describing in this video is nihilism. In practice, OK .3 these last two I’m going to do very briefly. We’re gonna wrap. This up .3, she says. Stay calm. She says of her husband. He would always refuse to escalate the conflict. He would change the subject. He would tell a joke. He would recommend a book or gently excuse himself from the conversation. close quote. Again, I think her perspective one and she doesn’t have a lot of experience. This the manager perspective is just as this kind of good looking female in these very peculiar circumstances. You’re talking to someone who’s a communist, talking to someone who’s a devout Muslim, you know, and you want to change their mind. You can’t stay calm. It’s totally counter broadcast. Stay. Calm even. You’re. Talking to your brother, who is a gambler and drunk. The whole point is to let them know how much this means to you, how much it hurts you, how much it believes you. You know, like you can say to your brother, I just can’t stand the fact that when we were growing up, you were the smart 1. You were smarter than me. I thought you were more gifted than. And now you eat meat, you drink alcohol, you gamble, you leave this totally dissolute life. And compared to me, you might as well be ********. Like I’m moving ahead as an intellectual. I’ve made all this progress and growth and I see you living this, this, this little life. Don’t stay calm. Show how it hurts. You show how it chews you up inside. Show it. Show what gives you nightmares, so I can’t stand to talk to you anymore. Can’t stand to look at. Because I see how you’ve squandered your potential in life, what could be worse? And again, this is just confronting your brother about drinking. And gambling, but. It’s exact same thing talking about your brother has become a communist. Your brother has become a neo-Nazi. Your brother has become a Muslim fundamentalist. What? Whatever the theological commitment is, right. Saying to your brother. Oh, let me change the subject. Let me tell a joke. Let me recommend a book. Oh, oh, yeah. Have you read Karl Marx’s desk capital?

Let me let me change the topic conversation. Excuse me from from the conversation Deescalating doesn’t work and the worst part of all is it makes you complicit if you deescalate with your uncle and your uncle’s a Nazi. If you deescalate with your grandfather, your grandfather is a member of the KKK. Your grandfather is a racist. He’s a white supremacist. You deescalate. You get along with them, use these. Tactics right. You are gonna feel dirty. And guess what? You are dirty. You’re making yourself complicit. You’re making yourself part of the mechanism of excuse making people the enablers that surround him in his life. And obviously this can be true too with. Drugs, alcohol, psychiatric medication. So many things. Ohh good for you. Let me just deescalate. Let me recommend a book. Let me make a joke. Let me change. No. So you know again, I know is the first thing to the don’t repeat myself. But exactly what we’re talking about. 1^st 20 minutes. This video is like we’re actually talking about escalation. We’re talking about conflict creation, not conflict resolution, not deescalation. Conflict of minds. All right, and #4 this is also interesting. It’s so obvious. And yet, you know, I disagree with it or point #4 is simply quote, make the argument. As opposed to treating quote, the value of our position as obvious and self-evident. So I just say I think this is failing to deal with the fact and failing to deal with the extent to which the problem we’re trying to address in these conflicts is exactly that the people we’re confronting, whether they’re people we love, people complete strangers to us for them, their the value of their position is obvious. And self-evident, right like that is exactly what we’re trying to. Abnormalize make them uncomfortable with we’re trying to reach down to the roots of the doubt that underlie this great oak tree of faith. You know, what is your faith rooted and it’s rooted and scarcely suppressed, self contradictory doubts. And that’s what we have to reach down into. And I don’t think you do that. By asserting your own argument, I think you do it by asserting. Your own doubts. And then finding the way into what their doubts are, I think you actually do it not by talking about what you believe, but what it is. You can’t believe what you couldn’t accept, and the doubts that led you up to your current point of perspective. And if it’s one-on-one, you’re going to see them reacting to that because they’re going to be things they’ve doubted too. You know, they’re going to be some things you have in common. And then you try to get at. What it is OK, guys, we’re coming up on three in the afternoon. I’m happy to have you all here. I notice we have only 22 people in the audience. There was. No advanced warning for. This this unscheduled talk. I would appreciate it if you hit the thumbs up button. It helps more people discover the the video. It helps them discover it and join the conversation while the conversation is ongoing. It also helps them discover it after the video is up. I would appreciate it if you shared the link with somebody you know where it could make a difference in their lives. I normally say, you know, only share the link of these videos with people. You know, we’re willing. To hear you know it’s. Like there’s no point taking one of our videos and dumping it into a Reddit group, or nobody wants to hear it. Where there’s no, there’s no interest, there’s no comment, no comment ground. But you know, in this case, I’ve got to say. Maybe some of you have a brother who’s a drunk and a gambler. You gotta share this link with. Maybe you have parents or grandparents who are taking psychiatric medications. Maybe you have friends who in the past were highly motivated, firebrand atheists, and they’ve lost their passion. For the advancement of the atheist movement, maybe you have friends who were in the. Best vegan activists, and they’ve lost their their passion for that. I think you probably do know people you can share the link with and I’ve got to tell you, I don’t present this video as a final decision on the matter. I would love to think there are people who can write into me and disagree with me or even. Have an interview with me on Skype and present a contrasting point of view. All right. I didn’t get into this movement, you know, to stand alone. But the fact is I am. Oh, here alone every day I’m asking these questions and I wonder why is nobody else asking them. I just close by, reiterating when I said in the description to my most recent video posted on YouTube. OK, with all of these things, with all of these struggles. Yeah, you can think about the outcomes, yes, but I’m not asking you to predict the future. What’s the future of North Korea five years from now? What’s the future of Syria five years from now.

I’m asking you to think seriously about who you are going to be 5 years from now. What kind of a man, what kind of a woman? Because in choosing the struggles, you engage in, whether those are purely academic and research based struggles, whether those are explicitly political struggles, you know whether it is veganism, atheism. Any kind of endeavor, whether it’s even the struggle of a creative artist. It’s trouble to make a new film, you know, whether it’s a documentary film or narrative fiction struggle to illustrate and publish a children’s storybook. You want to change the world. In some ways, I’m asking you to examine seriously how that struggle is going to change, who you are, cause that is the one outcome you can control. And I hope five years from now you’re not dead. You are alive, I hope. Five years from now you’re not ashamed of who you are, of what you’ve become. I hope you’re not looking back at the last five years and feeling that you also. Have squandered your potential.

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