Hi.
I’ve broken down a Shahid Bolsen video for easy analysis, many interesting points were raised. Please read through (if you so desire), and provide your thoughts.
Impossible ideals:
“The disconnect (is) between what people say they believe in, versus what they actually do, and what their actions actually are. Because the fact of the matter is that what you do; what you do consistently, what you do systematically, what you do at scale, that is what you believe in, not what you tell yourself you believe in.”
“Take Christianity, for example: ‘Turn the other cheek’. Beautiful sentiment, right? Except nobody does it. No Christian nation ever practiced pacifism, ever, no Christian individual actually ‘turns the other cheek’, certainly not if their family is threatened, or even if they’re threatened. .. It would lead to your own annihilation if you ‘turned the other cheek’ as a practical principle, everyone knows this, it’s suicidal, so why maintain it as a moral ideal? No one believes it, and no one practices it.”
Exploitation of children:
“Look at child protection (CPS), they will tell you with absolute conviction, that they don’t tolerate the sexualisation of children—zero tolerance, unspeakable, right? Except child marriage is still legal in most US states.”
“You’ve got your little child beauty pageants, with little girls in swimsuits, and that’s normal entertainment for you. Your fashion industry uses pre-pubescent models in adult contexts. Like I’ve said before, the average age of first exposure to pornography is just 11 years old. Jeffrey Epstein operated for decades with apparent institutional protection in your society. You adultify children, and you infantilise adults.”
..
“So just like in the case of child protection, genuine protection of children is supposed to manifest in concrete actions, concrete measures. Concrete measures that provide real world safeguards, real world protections for children; not just speeches and declarations about how much children should be protected. The answer isn’t that we need to rehabilitate child predators so that finally our children can be safe.”
Liberty and freedom of speech:
“What you practice on a societal level, is actually what you believe in, whether you like to admit it or not. No matter what you tell yourselves, and no matter what you tell us. We see what you do, and that’s how we know you. .. So in fact we’re looking at a society that proclaims absolute moral standards while systematically violating them.”
“Meanwhile you’ve got mass incarceration in your country, with obviously very drastically unequal legal outcomes by race and by class. You say you have absolute belief in the freedom of speech; meanwhile public speech is exclusively contained now on privately owned platforms, and those privately owned platforms do not guarantee free speech. You believe in the right to privacy—meanwhile you’ve got mass surveillance, you’ve got data harvesting, you’ve got government monitoring and so on.”
Human rights hypocrisy:
“Your lofty values like: ‘Government by the people, of the people, and for the people’ and so forth.. Meanwhile, in real life, you have total oligarchic control in your country; unlimited campaign funding, lobbying, total corporate capture of policy, total corporate capture of the state.”
“You say that you stand for human rights everywhere, meanwhile you starve, you sanction, and you bomb, you mass murder, you kidnap people off the streets; even your own streets, to send them back to black sites for torture, send them to Guantanamo, which is still operating by the way, and you say torture is absolutely prohibited—since when?”
“You say ‘Give us your tired, your poor, your starving masses who yearn to breathe free’. Well you made them tired, you made them poor, you starved them, and they yearn to be free from the suffering that you imposed upon them in their countries, and then you sick ICE on them when they (do) come to you..”
Money fixation:
“Meanwhile your whole economic model requires both parents to work. You have minimal parental leave, you have unaffordable child care, unaffordable health care, you know? People are divorcing in your country more than they marry. You’ve got children divorcing their parents in your ‘family values’ country, old people thrown into nursing homes, or thrown out into the street.”
“You worship money. You have utter contempt for the poor, utter contempt for poverty. In your religion you say: ‘Judge not lest ye be judged’, meanwhile the only time in real life that you ever bring up morality is to judge others, to criticise others, to operate your whole ‘cancel culture’.”
“It seems like when you heard in your Bible: ‘It’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven’, you just decided to abandon the idea of ever getting into heaven altogether. You just decided to focus all your efforts on getting rich in this world, and have your heaven right here, right now.”
Environmental hypocrisy:
“You talk about environmentalism, saving the planet and whatnot, meanwhile, you’ve got the highest per-capita emissions in the world, the highest consumption in the world, and the most corporate exemptions from any sort of environmental regulations or responsibility. .. You talk about sustainability, well you have the worst throwaway disposable culture on Earth; simultaneously destroying whole eco-systems across the planet just for your disposable whims, just so you can have something for a few minutes, and throw it away.”
Impossible morality:
“Like I said, it doesn’t matter which so-called values we’re talking about, which values that you talk about, every single one of them is systematically violated at scale; as official policy, as lived culture with popular participation. Across all of these proclaimed absolute moral values, moral principles, you literally contradict them systematically for your own benefit, but you’ll uphold them rhetorically so that you can claim moral authority.”
“You have to understand how damaging this is, truly damaging; how destructive it is when you actually allow such a constant and such a massive disconnection between what you claim to believe in, and what you actually do and what you actually act upon.”
“Because like I said, when you establish completely unrealistically high moral standards, standards that nobody could actually meet in real life, you create a system where everyone is perpetually guilty; everyone has already failed before they even tried, and when everyone has failed, then failure itself becomes meaningless. You can just say ‘I’m not a saint..’ and then that becomes an excuse for any violation, because you’ve set the bar for what constitutes moral behaviour at sainthood.”
“Well what sort of psychological dissonance do you think that must create in any individual in your society, if the moral value is inapplicable in real life? If it’s inapplicable in real life, then violating it is not morally wrong. .. But the individual feels that they have failed. You see my point? In other words you are placing unnatural behavioural obligations on individuals rather than determining moral values that are actually consistent with natural human behaviour.”
“Unnatural moral expectations do not elevate people, they break people. They create a psychological pathology by demanding (that) people deny their own nature, then condemning them when they can’t deny their own nature. .. So what I’m saying is that people have to—they must, identify what they actually believe by what they actually practice, and stop with all the performative moral values declarations that bear no resemblance whatsoever to what you actually believe and what you actually do.”
“And if you see a disparity between what you espouse and what you practice, then you need to examine the realism of what you espouse. .. Your actual moral values are demonstrated by your behaviour, so you need to look honestly, you need to look with ruthless honesty at your own behaviour, and then figure out by that behaviour what it means you truly believe in.”
Racism:
“I mean, look at racism in America, just look at racism in the West. For the longest time in America, all of my life, and certainly before my life, you keep talking about ‘we need to end racism’. Well that’s like saying that you need to end greed, you need to end stupidity, you need to end evil and obnoxiousness, (you need) to end arrogance. No, these are all ways of just misdirecting the victims of racism from their own practical liberation. .. Telling you that your only hope is for your oppressors to become enlightened, for your oppressors to become fair-minded and benevolent people. That just keeps you neutralised.”
“Racism exists here and now; it affects people. And the only truly moral thing is to take action to neutralise it, rather than allow yourself to be neutralised by it, while you’re waiting around for racists to reform.”
..
“Because look, the reality is this: if you are African-American, or any member of the global majority living in the United States, in my opinion you need to completely abandon the idea that you’re going to end racism in America. Not because racism is acceptable—it’s contemptible, it’s evil, it’s a civilisational disease, but you need to abandon the idea, because it is baked into the ‘operating system’ of America, and you are wasting precious time, energy and resources fighting in a battle that was designed to be unwinnable.”
“Because white supremacy in America is a permanent feature, it’s a permanent feature of western society, it’s just as much a feature of that as tornadoes in Illinois. .. You’re not going to eliminate racism in the west any more than you’re going to eliminate rain in Seattle, it’s not going to happen, it’s a part of the weather system. .. It’s absolutely unnatural, but it’s also structural. It’s engineered, and it’s maintained by foundational civilisational incentives.”
..
“No, asking racists to stop being racist, so that you can be free, is like asking a parasite to stop extracting blood from your body because it’s bad for your health. Well, the parasite doesn’t care about your health, he’s feeding himself. .. I’m just telling you like it is. It’s not pretty, it’s ugly, and it doesn’t get any better looking with age. And understand that the racist element in that society is a sub-element of the overall system.”
“I think it’s crucial for you to understand this, because we’re talking about a society in which 10% of the population owns and controls 70-80% of all the wealth. That’s bigotry, yes it is. .. That’s 10% of the population that despises 90% of the population no matter what so-called race they are. Because the fundamental issue is not that individual Americans are racist or have racist attitudes or what have you. No, the fundamental issue that everyone in that society is living under, is that you are economically captive to systems that are designed exclusively to extract wealth from you, to politically marginalise you in a structure that does not represent your interests.”
Practical morality:
“Like I’ve been saying, you need to understand how morality actually works; practical morality, versus how America pretends how it works. In a real civilisation, moral principles aren’t just decorations. Moral principles are supposed to be, like I said before, the actual structure, the actual architecture of your society. It’s the foundation, the walls, the roof. That’s what protects you from the elements, that’s what makes civilisation possible in the first place; your moral values, that’s what makes it possible.”
“I’ve told you before, what America actually operates on, is nothing but raw power dynamics, law of the jungle, the law of capability. If you can do it, you have the right to do it, that’s how it works in America. If you have the power to take it, then it’s yours. If you have the capability to inflict something, then you are entitled to inflict it. And if you’re too weak to stop it, well, that’s your problem.”
“And while you’re doing that, while you’re trudging on that treadmill, you’re not building power, which is what you need. You’re not creating alternatives, which is what you need. You’re not developing functional independence, which is what you need. You’re trapped in this cycle of appealing to power, then disappointment when you don’t get it, then outrage, then more appeals, more disappointment, more outrage; it’s an endless loop. That endless loop just keeps you psychologically dependent on your oppressors, while they continue doing exactly what they have always done.”
A changing world:
“Listen, the whole world is turning away from America, that’s a fact. It’s turning away from the west, and they’re turning towards each other. They’re turning away from the colonisers, and they’re turning towards each other. And if you are a so-called ‘minority’ in the west, a so-called minority in America, then like I say, you are actually a part of the global majority.”
“The truth is that you are diaspora communities over there, and in my opinion you need to do over there what your people are doing in their part of the world. In other words turning away from them, and turning towards each other. And I mean don’t just turn towards each other over there, no, turn towards your brothers and sisters in the lands that your people came from; where your ancestors came from.”
“You need to understand that when the society tries to make you identify youself as an American citizen, and not as part of the diaspora of the global south, they’re trying to make you reduce yourself. They’re trying to make you isolate yourself, and accept the lie that you are a ‘minority’. You’re the minority—not that 10% that’s controlling all the money, and not that so-called ‘white population’ that represents maybe 15% of the people on Earth, do you understand?”
“When you accept that you’re an American, the whole point is to get you to internalise the falsehood that you’re small and they’re big. Citizenship is an optical illusion if you understand it properly. If your people came from Africa, or Asia, or so-called Latin America, and ICE comes after you, and you cry out: ‘I’m an American citizen, this shouldn’t happen to me!’, you think that’s a reason why this shouldn’t be happening? No, it’s exactly why it’s happening to you.”
“Because when you call yourself that, when you call yourself an American citizen, you’re calling yourself a minority, you’re calling yourself weak, you’re calling yourself vulnerable, you’re calling yourself someone that hasn’t got any backup. When you call yourself that, you’re calling yourself the prey that’s wandered away from the herd. Meaning, you are calling yourself eligible for opression, eligible for subjugation and brutality in that society, where the law of the jungle is actually how they operate.”
Not covered:
- Islamic solutions to western dilemmas.
- Diasporas joining BRICS.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9hO2Ked5iE