"The Cult of the West: How Trauma Becomes Doctrine" – Shahid Bolsen

0:01 Really, the West is a cult. I mean, I've said it before. The West, America is a cult. And I'm not being hyperbolic. This is why Americans specifically are immediately identifiable no matter where they are. You know, why they really come across as strange and brainwashed to everyone else in the world if they travel. You know, if you interact with an American, you genuinely feel like you're talking to someone uh who who just has a really insular frame of reference. You know, a fabricated sense of reality, a sense of reality that only makes sense uh within the American cult compound. It's always a non-interaction interaction. You know what I mean? Like no actual communication uh takes place in those interactions.

0:49 It's like they have a stencil, you know, like they're looking through a stencil. They're looking through a filter and everything that comes from them adheres to that stencil and nothing that does not adhere to that stencil can reach them. That's programming. That's what that is. That's brainwashing. You know, uh, a cult is never going to tell you uh that they're brainwashing you. They won't call their indoctrination programming. They'll call it deprogramming, you know. They'll call it deprogramming. A cult will tell you uh that everything that you ever been taught, everything that you uh have ever felt, everything that you have ever known, your whole view of reality all this time has been satanic. And we here in the cult, we will dismantle all the

1:35 lies and we will guide you to the ultimate truth. That's how they'll put it. Well, that's the West. That's so-called liberalism. And what they want to deprogram is your fra, your innate human nature. And it's escalatory again, just like a cult. It's escalatory. You know how these sorts of uh well, I won't I won't name any, but you know these weird sort of insular secretive cults that exist uh they have this sort of tiered system of revealing so-called higher and deeper truths when they let you know what the cult's really about. You know, they don't start right off the bat uh with the really bonkers stuff. You know, they don't tell you about the mothership the moment that you walk through the door. You know, they'll tell you about hacks for making you more productive that the cult can

2:21 can teach you how you can be more centered, heal your trauma, you know, make you more positive and so on. But once you buy in and you get into that ecosystem, then you start to move up the ranks within their internal hierarchy. And then you start getting told things that you didn't hear at the at the beginning like the cult leader is a messiah, you know, or we're all descended from alien spirits or what have you. That's when they start to get the weird stuff. They tell you to start let go of your relationships and so on. Then you move up more uh and find out that you're supposed to share your spouse with the rest of the cult. You know, it gets weirder the higher you go. We're all preparing right now for our departure to another galaxy. here, have some Kool-Aid. It escalates. That's how

3:08 they go. That's how they do. And the longer these cults go, the more permissive they get within the within the cult, the more corrupt, the more debauched, the more depraved they get. Well, again, that's the West. That's America. Honestly, if you look at it that way, you can't unsee it. They're trying to deprogram your fra and it is escalating. And just like uh in many cults, they focus on women. They focus on brainwashing and indoctrinating and corrupting women through all sorts of moral inversion. They teach that everything that's moral is immoral. That their shame in dignity and dignity in shame. It's inversion. Modesty and chastity are oppression. Exploitation and objectification are liberatory.

3:53 This is a cult deprogramming your fithra, deprogramming your nature. And it's escalating. And you know, one of the arguments uh that cults always use is that their members are happy, they're content, they're comfortable. You know, they drank the Kool-Aid and they like the Kool-Aid. So, who are you uh uh to call them brainwashed and enslaved? But see, it's all about framing, framing and prioritization. So, like the West uh Western liberalism, America, etc., they depprioritize and they negate every metric of well-being. besides so-called freedom, right? Nothing matters more than freedom. That's the official doctrine. So, as long as cult members

4:39 feel that they have this freedom, then nothing else is important. And they can't even articulate any dissatisfaction that they might feel. You know, it's just like someone who has bought into the internal logic of a cult. That's Americans. No matter how objectively horrible, no matter how how how objectively abnormal things are within your compound, you can rationalize it. You can anesthetize yourself to it because you have absorbed the cult logic, the cult doctrine that makes it all make sense to you. You wake up every day in America already in debt. Before your eyes even open, you owe on your house, you owe on your car, you owe on your education, you owe uh for your health. Your whole life is uh chained to subscription services, debt slavery,

5:25 wage slavery, subscription slavery. You know, your whole existence is leased. It's on loan from the moment you're born. From the moment you're born, you are plugged into a system that feeds on you financially, psychologically, spiritually. And you're told that all of that is freedom. You're told it's the best thing that ever happened to humanity. It's the best system there is. And you should be grateful. You should be proud. Tell me that isn't cultlike. You live in a bubble of euphemisms. You work like a slave. You sell your time, which is what your life is, by the way. It's time. Your presence in this world is nothing but time. And actually, you don't even sell it because selling it would imply that you have a choice. But you don't have a choice to sell your time. Do you

6:10 understand? You have to. That's what I mean. You're literally born in debt because from the moment that you enter the world if you live in the west, if you live in America, well, you have to start justifying your existence within the prevailing profit model. You know, whatever intrinsic value that you have as a human being, uh whatever purpose you might have in this life is uh subordinated by necessity to a job that you don't care about for people who you don't even know uh in a company that would replace you tomorrow with a machine or with AI or with a robot if they could. Your dignity is tied to your productivity. And if you don't produce, you don't deserve to eat. If you don't produce, you don't deserve shelter. You don't deserve peace. You're only worth whatever you can

6:56 generate monetarily for someone else. So you cope, you consume, you scroll, you eat, you buy things that you don't need on credit to reward yourself uh with the cold comfort of frivolous goods. You know, reward yourself for all the uh the hard work that you're doing only to keep the cycle going. You bury yourself in entertainment. Entertainment that makes you feel uh a little bit less numb for just a few hours. Imagine the only way that you can feel anything similar to being alive is to watch fiction. But you think that's normal because that's what everyone in the cult does. You live alone with little to no human interaction, no human connection. You walk through crowds like a ghost. Your family most likely uh is scattered, is

7:41 broken, is aranged. Again, just like a cult, you know, these are these are fundamental things that cults do. They break all your relationships. They alienate you from your family. You know, even your friends most likely are just avatars on the screen, curated versions of people pretending to uh not be as miserable as you are, you know, with their Instagrammable perfect lives that no one's actually living. No one lives like that. That's called lateral reinforcement of cult dogma. Your body is malnourished but overstimulated. you're uh uh chemically altered from morning to night, coffee to wake up, uh pills to concentrate, sugar to cope and make you feel better, weed to make you relax, porn to escape, and then

8:28 melatonin to fall asleep. You don't even know what it feels like to be natural anymore, to live naturally without uh chemical uh uh augmentation. You don't remember what it's even like to be human because this is the only version of a human that the cult defines as human. The cult brands approved addiction as self-care, you know, dysfunction, as beautiful. This is a cult. Sex isn't sacred anymore. It's not even intimate. It's a commodity. It's a performance. It's a sport. You know, you're taught that your body is your sole value. Desiraability is your whole identity. Especially if you're a woman, you're trained to be attractive, not decent, to be desired, not loved. In the West, you treat people, relationships like consumables.

9:14 And then you wonder why you feel disposable, why you are disposable. Because cults always flatten people to pure function. You can't have anything personal, anything intimate, anything private. And you know, every every cult almost eventually becomes a sex cult. I mean, the people's temple, uh, the branch dividians, the children of God, Nexium, obviously, they almost always go this way. Cults almost always go this way. That's why I said you have to pay attention to what uh uh, western popular culture is doing to women. You have to pay attention to that because cult governance depends on dissolving personal borders and sexual access is the crowning test of loyalty because that violates uh uh the most intimate frontier between people. I mean look at

10:00 your culture so-called. Honestly, you need to just remove the last three letters of that word. It's not a culture, it's a cult. I mean, if you look at how cults do, you'll start with platitudes about free love and whatnot. Well, as a society, you've already gone through that phase in the 1960s. And of course, then that free love idea promotes suspending judgment on all forms of sexuality and promiscuity, normalizing all sorts of behaviors. And then it moves on to uh uh sexual healing within the cult. I mean, that concept sexual healing was already established in the in the public mind through song. And then that uh concept that further normalizes all sorts of practices even

10:45 truly perverted and dark practices. It promotes that as therapeutic you know living out your wildest darkest fantasies uh without ever actually addressing the sick uh thing inside you that makes you even have those fantasies. That's never addressed. It's just uh uh well the idea is it's better for you to do this consensually with someone rather than to force yourself on someone. force someone else to do this dark fantasy that you have by force and that's framed as healthy. Think that through. The culture, the cult does not help you purge yourself of toxic urges. It provides you pathways for acting on them because for as far as the cult is concerned, all those toxic urges that you have are just levers for creating dependency, levers for for creating

11:32 addiction. And then the way cults normally go traditionally, they start to uh move basically into turning cult members into sexual slaves for those at the top of the cult hierarchy with all the members vying for their favor. And I mean that's all across your social media, you know, highest bidder access, women objectifying themselves, women sexualizing themselves for sponsorship. And again, that's lateral uh indoctrination, reinforcement between women in this case, normalizing, degradation, sexualization, objectification, pornification, the flattening of women to their function inside the cult. That's your culture. That's all across social media. And like I've talked about before, women and girls are made immeasurably

12:19 uh more neurotic, more depressed, more anxious, more insecure, all because of social media. But within the accepted logic of the cult, you can't say that. So you just post a picture of yourself at the gym and wait for the cult to approve you. And of course, in terms of this, the culture has made all the men Unix, just like the Unix who used to guard the herums. You know, you get to see everything, but only on your phone screen, only on your laptop screen, your computer, you know, porn, only fans, whatever. You're Unix. Your men are Unix. And all of you people who talk about high value men and alpha males and so on, that's your lateral reinforcement of the hierarchy. That's your lateral reinforcement of cult logic that you've absorbed. You've accepted

13:06 that what the cult tells you you should want uh is correct because that's what the elites have. And you've accepted that also that only the elites can have it. Never mind that the it that we're talking about here is a plastic soulless sex slave. It's moral inversion. And you know the the the elite of a cult are always the most degenerate. So look at the elite of your society. Well, these are the ones who built your system. They're the ones who programmed your cult. And they are undeniably the most depraved, the most immoral, the most degenerate people that you can even imagine. Like just for me, I can tell you from my generation, basically all the music and all the movies that we grew up on, all of that was produced by truly demonic perverts. Tell me that

13:52 isn't programming. You think they're giving us anything good to listen to, anything good to watch that's going to help our brains? No. It's it's all for programming purposes and it will reflect the ideology of that cult. And again, just like in a cult, conformity is relentlessly enforced. You memorize scripts and you recite those scripts just like dogma. Not because you necessarily believe in them or even understand them, but because they are the scripts of the cult. right or left, liberal or conservative, whatever the case may be, the cult has relieved you of having to think. You know, you're only allowed to think that you are choosing within that totalistic cult compound of America that shrinks the menu of available decisions until

14:37 obedience feels uh self-chosen. I mean, your streets are violent, your cities are broken, your police are militarized, your children are medicated, your schools are a battleground. You know, your politicians are circus acts. You're absolutely ruled by corporate landlords. You're entertained by corporate propaganda. You're educated by corporate institutions, and you're treated at a very high cost uh by corporate pharmaceuticals. you're captured in every which way, in every direction, you're captured. But still, you think that you're free. That's a cult. When the reality is that if you get sick, you go bankrupt. If you get educated, you go bankrupt. If you go if you get married, you go bankrupt.

15:23 And they tell you this is all the American dream. It's not a dream. It's a drug. It's a simulation. You're living a a a ritual of slow death that's funded by your own labor. But that's all fine. It's all normal. It's all good inside the cult. But no objective, non-brainwashed outsider can look at any of this as normal or okay or fine or good. It's an abomination. It's sick. And the more you tell yourself that you are free, that you are comfortable, uh that you have democracy and rights and so on. The more you say that, the more you talk like that, the more brainwashed you sound. You'll look at a Muslim country or really almost any country in the global south uh and you'll think it's miserable over there. You'll think it's not free, it's

16:10 poor, what have you, because you're using cult metrics, not objective metrics in almost any meaningful metric of human well-being, of human happiness and health and so on. The Muslim world and most of the global south countries outrank you in America. The only countries where that's not the case are the countries that you have invaded or occupied or you're you're otherwise interfering with them. Malaysians are happier than you and healthier than you. Indonesians are happier than you. Sudis, Emirati, Kuwaitis, etc., etc. They're safer than you. Their streets are uh not nearly as violent as yours. Their lives are generally more affordable than your life. Their families are stronger. Their families are more stable. Their mental health, their emotional health is better than yours. unquestionably. They don't kill themselves like you do.

16:57 Their rates of addiction are far lower than yours. You know, they produce far fewer criminals than you do. They have far fewer issues of uh like body dysmorphia, eating disorders, you know, low self-worth, low self-esteem, depression, loneliness, anxiety, on and on and on. They're more connected as a society. Their relationships are stronger. I mean, I'm not trying to say that they're perfect in the Muslim world or in the global south, but they are unquestionably uh better, happier, and healthier people than what you have done to your people in the West, especially in America. You know, your cult tells you that everyone outside of the cult is lost. Everyone outside of the cult is miserable and suffering and so on. They claim that their so-called liberalism is deprogramming you from uh say oppressive

17:45 traditions, age-old customs, age-old understanding, and that the cult has higher and more uh evolved and that they're more enlightened than anyone else when this is subjectively false. They're making you worse by the day. They're normalizing worse and worse things by the day. They're deprogramming your humanity day in day out. But because they call all all of this freedom and they call all this all all of this progress, you are left with no way to articulate your ever worsening existential crisis because you're stuck in the cult lexicon. Listen, I'm not even joking about this. Think about this. There's a sort of window, bear with me, there's a

18:31 sort of a window of neuroplasticity immediately after a traumatic event. You know, trauma can can shatter uh an individual's internal narrative to understand the world. It causes dissociation, disorientation and so on. Basically, a breakdown of meaning. During this uh post-t trauma phase, their brain uh can easily become open to new interpretations of reality to help them regain some kind of coherence. It almost mirrors uh early childhood development. And this is when and how and why a lot of people uh who get involved in cults, they do so after suffering some kind of trauma or maybe uh as a result of ongoing trauma. And the cult gives them a way to process

19:17 that. Of course, not a not a therapeutic way to process that, but a manipulative way, gaslighting, trauma bonding, cult indoctrination. You know, cults and extremist groups seize on that moment of neuroplasticity, that vulnerability, that broken psyche uh that's struggling to find some kind of a framework that can help them reinterpret uh uh whatever that person has experienced, whatever negative thing that person has experienced. It's helping them to reinterpret that uh in a way that removes the negative emotions that they have around it or that channels those negative emotions uh into uh supposedly some sort of positive cult related activity. Okay, this is established. This is factual. This is neuroscience and psychology. Well, the west, especially America, it's

20:04 a trauma factory. They're not like any nickel and dime cult, you know, that just seizes on people to rewrite their moral and their ideological framework post trauma. No, they create the trauma. See, America and the West more broadly understand something in my opinion that cult leaders and interrogators and psychological operatives uh have always known. If you destabilize someone enough, if you traumatize them just right, you can make them rebuild their whole identity around any ideology or any framework that you give them. And that society, America is built to traumatize you, okay? Not always dramatically, but always constantly. There is uh real

20:52 serious trauma as a result of crime. you know, literal fear and insecurity, especially in the urban places, uh, a trauma of predation, but they keep you also in a in a in a low-grade crisis at all times. You know, your job isn't secure, your housing is insecure or stable, your relationships are fragile, you have no support structure. Not to mention that you have the government constantly telling you telling you to be afraid of this boogeyman or that boogeyman. You're overstimulated. You're overworked. You're undernourished. You're emotionally neglected. And you are spiritually starved. You're in crisis. And then they'll tell you if you're anxious, it's because of your childhood. If you're broken, maybe it's because of those, you know, oppressive religious morals that you grew up with. If you're depressed, uh, it's because of your heteronormativity. You feel like a stranger in your body.

21:37 Oh, that's great. That's liberation coming through. So, you cling to the doctrine that they give you because it makes some kind of sense of your dysfunction, moral relativity, sexual fluidity. They just give you a framework to process your the trauma that they inflicted on you. Do you understand? They're giving you some sort of a positive spin uh on the psychological, mental, and emotional problems that they afflicted you with to make you escape into the safety of the cult compound. You're traumatized by the system and then uh indoctrinated by that same system to interpret the trauma that they cause as proof of the system's necessity. It's a perfect feedback loop. They wound you

22:24 and then they uh sell you a script that tells you that the wound that you have is actually proof that you're healed. They don't just uh seize upon your trauma, they cultivate your trauma because trauma makes your brain plastic. It makes your identity malleable. It makes you pliable. It makes you suggestable. And when people are emotionally disoriented, they become desperate. Desperate for certainty, desperate for security, desperate for uh meaning. So the west keeps you in that state. They keep you vulnerable. Vulnerable enough to doubt your instincts, broken enough to beg for meaning, but still functional enough to work, to buy, and to laterally reinforce the programming. And in that state, your fithra, your godgiven compass is overwritten. See,

23:12 you were actually born with your fra. You were born with the truth inside you, your nature. But they force you to interpret the suffering that they inflict on you uh through the lens of your victimizer. Until you're grateful for the pain, until you'll defend uh the one who's attacking you, until you'll call the prison that you live in a sanctuary, until you call poison a cure. That's how cults work. And that's how liberalism works. It's not liberation. It's only liberating you from recognizing that you need to be liberated. That's the only liberation you get from liberalism. It's making you applaud and it's making you cheer for your own trauma because they told you that your trauma means that you're free. And until you see that, until you recognize the manipulation uh that you're subject to morning, noon, and night, you're going to keep turning to

23:58 that same ideology, the same ideology that has destroyed you, you know, asking that ideology to explain what it did. And it will explain it. It'll it will explain it beautifully to you. It will rebrand your collapse as self-discovery. And then it will commodify it. Your utter degradation as a human being, the inversion of your decency, the inversion of your dignity, your morality. These are all monetizable. You can sell tickets to your own ruin, live stream your own rot, and the cult will celebrate you for it, and you'll thank them for it, and you'll defend it, and you'll call it liberty. But it's not freedom. It's traumainduced loyalty and obedience. It's spiritual Stockholm

24:44 syndrome. And the first step out is to try to remember your fra and start asking what is it about your fitra that they're trying so hard to erase. Cuz this isn't life. This is erosion. I know you feel it. No matter how much dopamine you get, I still know that you feel it. You know that you're not thriving. You know that you're decaying. And the tragedy is that they made you think it's normal. They made you think that this is all there is that's out there. You were born into that machine that feeds on misery. You were born into it. Now you're its own. Now you're its product and you're its fuel. You were born into a cult. But you don't have to stay in the cult. And unless you get out, and I mean get out, not I don't mean get out of the country. I mean get out of the programming. Unless you get out, that

25:31 machine, that cult will grind you down and live stream your funeral and sell your children. [Music]