Change Your Orientation Before You Change Your Address | Shahid Bolsen

Well, you know, there are a few sort of recurring comments that I get under my videos, especially lately. And I get messages and I get emails, direct messages and emails, and sometimes in the telegram discussion from Americans. The first message is some variation of I need to get out of this country. This place is evil. I wanna leave.

Where can I go? And that desire to get out of America as I interpret it is supposed to signal disavowal. It's supposed to mean that the speaker or the the person who's sending the message wants to distance themselves. They want to disassociate themselves from America's crimes and they want to escape. So you might read that as some sort of an awakening on their part.

As some sort of a declaration that they're on our side. Right? That they realize what a poisonous society they live in and they don't want any part of it. And I suppose on some level that may be true. That may be true on some level, but let's be honest.

This is not remorse for the wickedness that America has done. Done to the Middle East, done to Africa, done to Asia, done all across the Western Hemisphere. No. This is not if we're telling the truth, this is not a sudden stirring of conscience. Now I'm not saying I don't have sympathy for it.

I have sympathy for it, but let's call it what it is. Because you didn't feel any urgent need to escape America when America was making life unlivable for the people in the global South. You understand me? You only feel it when America has started making life harder for Americans, for you and your family and your neighborhood. You didn't disavow and you didn't distance yourself from your nationality when the worst violence was being exported.

Only now only now when the marauders and the thugs and the mercenaries are turning their guns on you in your own streets. You understand me? You didn't feel any desperation to leave America when your bombs were falling on other people's heads. You didn't feel it when you were enjoying the fruits of America's pillage abroad, when the insecurity and and and the terror was overseas and you felt safer because of it, when your shelves were stocked, your gas was cheap, and your pizza was guaranteed delivery in thirty minutes or less, you were fine being an American and living in America. When we were the ones getting kidnapped by your masked men in our streets and thrown into the backs of unmarked black vans and locked up in cement boxes with blindfolds on, beaten and electrocuted and humiliated to preserve your democracy.

You weren't applying for a passport then. You weren't googling which country in Asia has the lowest currency against the dollar at that time. You understand? Where was the moral urgency when The United States was sanctioning and starving whole societies? You didn't say I need to get out of this country because it's doing evil actively across the earth and I want no part of it.

You didn't say that then when the evil was directed outwards. Let's be honest. You didn't disavow that evil until it stopped paying dividends. Let's tell the truth. Until it stopped paying dividends and it started wanting to collect back from you.

You didn't mind the evil when it was being sent out, but you sure can't stand it once it comes home. And your panic now about having to face what you made millions upon millions of innocent people all around the world face, we're supposed to take that as the awakening of your conscience. No. You enjoyed the meal, but now you wanna skip out on the bill. I'm just telling you like it is.

Now suddenly, right, suddenly the same people who once treated the horrors that their country was committing in the global South, they treated those horrors as nothing but abstract background noise in their lives. Now those same people are looking for escape routes to the global South, and that's supposed to be a sign of your virtue? Look, when America's death squads were swarming all over the lands of the global South, these people were sipping their cappuccinos and debating about pronouns. You understand? You had your pop music volume turned all the way up to drown out the sounds of our screaming and weeping.

But now they're coming for you and your neighbors. They're coming for you. They're sealing off your country so no one can get in or out. And now you're starting to feel like a fish in a barrel. You're starting to feel like a fish in the in the barrel and the shotguns are all pointed at you.

And right at that moment, suddenly you have an epiphany about how evil your country is. When just a a basically a watered down version of the colonial machinery, Right? It's pressing down on you now with the militarized police, with the ICE, with the crackdowns, the clampdowns, the restrictions on speech, restrictions on protest, intensifying belligerence by the state. You got inflation, deprivation, job layoffs. A comparatively mild version of the neoliberal program that you rammed through economy after economy after economy in the global South, breaking the backs of one country after another, and now you want out.

Now you want out because you're getting a mild version of that. I mean, about it. This is not moral outrage. It's outrage about privilege reduction. It's consequence avoidance.

The actions of your country against everyone else never made, never prompted you to emigrate, but when the consequences of those actions come, you start packing your bags. Look, even your pleas for escape and for rescue are coming from that same instinct that kept you silent during all of those evil actions for all those decades. And the other thing is, and it connects with the the the same sentiment in that other message, I get this other comment a lot, which is something along the lines of, look, I didn't participate in America's crimes. I don't have power. Right?

No one asked for my approval of about these policies. I'm not responsible. I shouldn't have to pay the price. Okay. Same instinct again.

Because why do you think why do you think that the silent consumption of the fruits of privilege didn't equate to approval of the privilege? Like I said, during all this time, during all these years, all these decades, these centuries, you never felt stirred to leave that country. You never felt stirred to leave America at the time when it was rampaging all across the world. During its crimes, you acted like its crimes were not directly connected to your lifestyle. You know?

You're like someone who thinks that oranges grow in the produce section of the grocery store. You're like someone who thinks that meat comes from the deli counter. Not that there's a whole army of people, that there's a whole exploitative ruthless system delivering those comforts to your door. No. You act like I have no idea how Walmart and how Target can sell things so cheap.

Have no idea. I have no idea how all of these or why all of these small neighborhood businesses that source locally, I don't know why they're closing down, I have no clue. I have no idea how my grass gets cut, how my hotel room gets cleaned, how my food gets prepared. I have no idea how any of this works. It's like my computer.

Right? I just turn it on and it works. I don't know how batteries are made or where they come from. I don't know how small the hands are that made my outfit, that made my Nike shoes, that made my God bless America baseball cap. I don't know why immigrants come from all over these countries.

You know? Come from these countries where their neighbors and their loved ones got disappeared in the middle of the night or vaporized by American bombs. I have no idea. Doesn't make any sense to me. Maybe they're coming to America because it's just so wonderful and so free.

No. You didn't approve? You didn't sign off on that? No. Listen to me.

You signed off on it every single day of your life whether you admit it or not. No. The only thing that you didn't sign off on consciously is having any of those same conditions imposed upon you. So now you want a way out of that contract. I told you before, made a deal with the devil.

Your society, your so called civilization made a deal with the devil. It wasn't an accident. It wasn't a one time handshake. That's like Prince Andrew saying that a picture of him just happened to be snapped at the exact moment that Jeffrey Epstein was coincidentally standing next to him. No.

You made a deal with the devil. Yes, you did. You made a deal with the devil. You, not just your presidents, not just your congress people, not just your billionaires. You did.

And now you wanna act like you don't even know the devil. You don't even know him. Just like Prince Albert and Epstein. You're the same. Because the truth of the matter is that you have in fact been fulfilling your end of the bargain for centuries.

Not years, not decades, centuries. That was centuries of participation, centuries of consent, centuries of silence, centuries of rationalization, and even centuries of applause, of bragging, of self praise. Yes, as long as the bumps in the road were black and brown and poor bodies and not potholes. Right? Because potholes looked like neglect.

Right? That's embarrassing. But as long as it was bodies you were running over, you didn't complain because you were in a limousine, an American made limousine. As long as the buildings are tall and shiny, as long as the Internet was good, as long as the ATM fees were decent, and as long as you had a credit card, long as you had access to retail therapy, you had movies to watch, you had gadgets to play with, you had music on your iTunes, America could do no wrong. And now you wanna act like all of that was not approval?

Of course it was. Of course it was approval. Why the only reason that you changed your tune from my country tis of thee to American idiot or to Mississippi goddamn is because you got ejected from that limousine and now it's rolling over you. And now that you're under its wheels, you wanna act like you were never a passenger to begin with. Now you want immunity.

Now you wanna think of yourself as being as innocent as the millions of America's victims that you were too busy to think about when you were chatting away at brunch with Pam or whoever. Oh, yes. You can learn something very valuable and very unforgettable when you watch who separates themselves from cruelty while cruelty is funding their lifestyle. You can learn something unforgettable about character by watching whether or not a person disavows the evil itself or only disavows the possibility of being caught in the consequences of the evil. When people call out crimes when they still have something to lose, not after they've already lost.

For everyone else, I'm very sorry to tell you, but the anxiety that you're feeling is not your virtue awakening. It's entitlement colliding with reality. It's privilege discovering that it has a sell by date. It's the empire's children realizing that the empire is not a family. But, yes, I understand.

So if you wanna leave, leave. Okay. Leave. But I'm telling you all of this because don't confuse your sense of self preservation with repentance. I'm telling you because what you need to emigrate from and what you need to emigrate to is not from a place to a place.

You need to escape the dishonesty and the delusion and find your way to truth and reality. And for most of you, this is gonna be much harder and it's gonna be much more complicated than relocating overseas. But if you don't do that, I'm telling you, relocating overseas is not gonna save you. It's not gonna help you. Look.

What's happening in America is not a tragedy. It is justice, and you cannot escape that by running away from a geographical location. The devil that you made a deal with is gonna chase you down like a bounty hunter no matter where you go. And listen, I'm not talking from a posture of self righteousness. I'm talking from a position of experience.

I'm not telling you that you're in bad shape except because I was in the same shape myself. You understand? Yes. I was exactly what my country made me just like you, psychologically, spiritually, intellectually, and morally. But the truth is you cannot run away from psychological or spiritual or intellectual or moral conditions by moving from one place to another.

And you sure can't escape consequences by making a run for it. Everyone should know that. They're gonna get you. That's the truth. The only asylum, the only sanctuary, the only security is when you turn yourself in to the judge himself.

You understand? Do you know there's an ayah in the Quran about punishment about punishment being waived if you repent and turn yourself in before you get overpowered and caught. That's the only reason why there ever even is a delay in punishment being imposed. Just so that Allah can see if you're gonna keep doing wrong or if you're gonna voluntarily take accountability and turn back to Allah. And if you don't turn back to Allah, then at least you need to know that you can never hide from him.

I know. I know. Brother Shaheed just supposed to be giving us geopolitical analysis. I know that's what you wanna hear. But listen to me.

It's only because you are so caught up in the dysfunctional compartmentalized thinking of the West that you don't see that that is exactly what I am doing. Because what's geopolitics except actions and consequences? But you've been taught to separate the two, And no one is gonna ever teach you to separate actions from consequences except that there's someone who wants to deny you the positive consequences of doing right or they want to trap you in the negative consequences of doing wrong or both. I know you don't wanna hear about religion. I know many of you don't wanna hear about religion.

But that's part of the whole trap. That's part of the whole programming that you've been that you've been subjected to. Because as long as you do not believe in God, you do not recognize and acknowledge God, then someone else is gonna have absolute authority over you. That's why Imam Jamil Al Amin wrote a whole book about the fact that the most revolutionary statement in the human language is There is no God but God. Because if you don't grab on tightly to this reality, then you're gonna find yourself under the power and under the influence of one false god after another.

And they'll tell you what's right and what's wrong and what's good and what's bad and they'll tell you what morality is and what the meaning of life is and what your purpose is and what it's all about. And they're gonna be telling you that from the angle of their own self interest, not your interest and not anybody else's. If you're not gonna be a slave of Allah if you're not gonna be a slave of God, then you're gonna be a slave to somebody else, a state, a government, a corporation, billionaires, banks, and to shaitan. And you're gonna take whatever deal they offer you, and that's exactly what you have done. You went along with the injustice, you went along with the brutality, you went along with the pillage, and you went along with the plunder, but you didn't read the clause in the contract that says that your approval of injustice, brutality, pillage, and plunder is an irrevocable approval.

You understand? It's unconditional, which means that you do not have an exemption from being brutalized, from being pillaged, from being plundered, and from being unjustly treated yourselves by the same ones that you approved that behavior from when they were inflicting it upon others. And now that that clause is coming into force, you wanna break the contract. Well, that's not how these deals work. You know, in most contracts, in most agreements, there's a clause that if one party of the agreement is, you know, wound up, is liquidated, or is dissolved, then the contract automatically terminates.

You understand? If one of the signatories of the agreement ceases to exist, then the whole agreement is nullified and it cannot be enforced. Now I'm not talking about you ceasing to exist literally, obviously not. I'm talking about that person ceasing to exist psychologically, mentally, morally, and spiritually who originally signed off on and who originally complied with the immoral terms of that contract in the first place. The dissolution of that self, of that psyche, of that individual who turned a blind eye to bombing campaigns, to sanctions, to starvation blockades, to coups, to proxy wars.

The self who looked at an empire that literally has killed tens of millions of human beings in just the last fifty years in my lifetime, looked at all of that and said, well, that's unfortunate, but my life is comfortable. My supermarket is full. The mall is open. You know, there's a new iPhone coming out. I can't really be bothered.

That is the signatory that I'm talking about. That's the one whose name is on the dotted line of the contract with the devil. Don't pretend you didn't sign. Like I said, don't pretend you didn't sign. You signed it with your tax returns.

You signed it with your voting habits. You signed it with your career choices. You signed it with your shopping carts. You signed it with your silence when your government was strangling whole countries under sanctions. You signed it when you swallowed the lies and all the euphemisms of the media about collateral damage.

Right? You signed it every time you didn't spit in the face of the people who were lying in your face. You know? Regrettable. Unfortunate.

That doesn't mean anything except we killed millions of people and we're gonna keep on doing it. That's what those words mean. They buried whole countries under economic warfare. They cut off medicine. They sabotaged food supplies, and you just kept scrolling.

Yes. You did. Palestinians mass murdered, starved, Iraqis bombed, Afghanis bombed, Somalis bombed, Sudanese denied medicine and bombed, and your main concern was whether or not this was gonna increase your fuel bill. That's the only thing you're worried about. That's the signatory who I'm talking about.

That's the person who signed. That person who was happy to live in a system whose balance sheet includes whole nations of people written off as expendable. The one who enjoyed the benefits of a global protection racket. The one who could hear half a million dead children in Iraq and treat it as nothing but a PR blunder instead of as a non negotiable moral red line that had been crossed. Now that that machine, that colonial machine starts chewing up your own neighborhoods, now that your own police start to look like occupation forces, now that the Trump's tariffs have become a kind of self sanction on America, and now that financial warfare is starting to touch your economy, suddenly, like I say, suddenly you wanna get out of the contract.

Suddenly, you're in my comment section talking about where can I move? Which country should I escape to? Escape? Escape from what? Escape from the very system whose violence you cosigned for decades as long as it stayed offshore?

You didn't mind, like I say, you didn't mind when it was offshore. This is not repentance. This is not toba. This is not moral awakening. This is not contrition.

It's not even regret. And sincere repentance is the only way that you can nullify that contract, That amoral, immoral, transactional, cold hearted, indoctrinated, brainwashed individual who complied with the terms and the conditions, that individual has to be dissolved. That self that accepted the bargain, I will trade my conscience for my comfort. I will trade my empathy for my stability. I'll trade my responsibility for my privilege.

That one needs to be liquidated. And if that self is not dissolved, I'm telling you that contract is gonna be binding upon you wherever you go. But understand something. This isn't symbolic if you dissolve that self. It will mean becoming economically, becoming politically and socially disloyal to their system.

It will mean that you stop feeding corporations whose profits depend on wars, depend on exploitation, depend on forced labor, child labor, worker insecurity, and environmental devastation, on and on and on. It's gonna mean that you will stop parroting, stop consuming and stop parroting the media propaganda and the media talking points. You'll stop listening, you'll stop watching, you'll stop reading it, you'll stop letting it dictate how you view and how you understand the world and you'll stop spreading it. It means that you build a new self, a moral self, an intelligent self. The kind of self who finds your old self horrifying because it is.

That has a cost. If you do that, that has a cost. You have to be ready for that. They'll call you a traitor. They'll call you an extremist.

They'll call you ungrateful, unpatriotic, of course. Because from their perspective, you're breaking the contract. You understand? You're withdrawing your consent. You're refusing to be complicit.

You're refusing to be complicit in a civilization that has been built on impunity. And when you do that, then conscience in a society like that, conscience looks like sedition. But you have a choice. You do have a choice. Your choice is that you can either keep that old self alive and keep the contract valid and spend the rest of your life trying to outrun the consequences of what you helped to sustain, or you can wind up that entity, liquidate that moral shell company, declare spiritual bankruptcy before God and before humanity and rebuild yourself, right, on terms that do not require anybody's children to die just so that you can be comfortable and so that you can be entertained because that's what the old self was like.

You cannot keep your privileges and also wash the complicity off your hands. You cannot cling to the benefits of empire and claim that your soul is innocent of what the empire does in order to acquire those benefits you enjoy. The old self agreed to this arrangement. That old self has to die. You are a human being standing in a world where entire nations, entire nations have been sacrificed to enforce your comfort zone.

If you really want out, if you truly want out, you wouldn't ask me which country you should move to. You would ask yourself which self, which psyche has to disappear so that you are no longer one of the signatories of that satanic contract. I hope you understand me. And you have to disable all the triggers, all the defensive deflection triggers that your indoctrination has installed into you. You know, all the pre programmed knee jerk reflex responses like, it's not the regular people, it's only the powerful, or it's the same everywhere, or if America is so bad then why does everyone wanna come here, or it's the Republicans, or it's Trump, or it's the Democrats, or it's capitalism.

And you need to disable all of the counterproductive infantilized impulses that you have like we need a revolution, eat the rich, and I have to get out of here. Because none of these impulses are realistic or practical or even address the core issue at all. And you need to resist that false binary framing that your indoctrination has installed. Resist the zero sum mentality that they installed, the main character syndrome that they installed, the predation and the acquisitiveness that they installed and so on. The self justification, the self exoneration, the compartmentalization, the unseriousness, the denying, the covering up, the assumption of self purity, the assumption of innocence and goodness no matter what you do.

Look, actively monitor yourself. Believe me, if you sincerely and truly and honestly actively monitor yourself, then you will see, you'll recognize when all of these reflexes start being activated, when they emerge in your thinking. Look, they've set up so many firewalls between you and honest thinking. When you start dismantling it, you're gonna start to see how many layers there are. I'm telling you, your mind has been booby trapped.

Repentance does not just mean regret or remorse or feeling bad about past wrongdoing. Repentance requires non repetition of the wrongdoing which necessitates the deconstruction or the demolition of the characteristics and of the qualities that normalize the wrongdoing in the first place. And thus, it requires the deprogramming of the indoctrination that built and reinforced all of those characteristics and qualities. You understand? We're talking about a total system reformatting.

Because again, we're not talking about just mistakes. We're not talking about just errors or missteps or lapses or what have you. We're literally talking about a mental, moral, psychological, and intellectual architecture that has wrongdoing built in as an essential element. Understand. Like I said, I am not saying all of this with the objective of trying to make you feel bad.

And if that's your reaction, if that's your reaction, then that's just one of the defensive deflection triggers that I'm talking about that was installed in your mind to prevent change. Nobody gets anything out of you feeling bad. That's not a win for any of your country's victims. No one's cared concerned about that. The point is to identify the dysfunction and fix it.

See, that's just another anti moral reflex. Never feel bad. Never feel shame. Never feel guilt. Someone pointing out your wrongdoing is just someone trying to make you feel bad.

And your society has taught you that you're never supposed to let anyone ever make you feel bad. They're just a hater. They're just an op. Right? They're jealous.

And you're supposed to preserve your sense of self worth and value no matter what, no matter what you've done. So block them, counter punch, attack. You see how this goes? That's the system's anti virtue software kicking in to eliminate the threat of improvement. You treat guidance like it's a virus that's gonna try to infect your system.

You're afraid that AI is gonna take over the world and kill everyone. Well, I got news for you. It already has. That's why you have that fear because it's deja vu. Because it's already happened in America.

It's already happened in the West. Artificial constructs, artificial thinking, anti human ways of thinking, ways of processing information, complete with the threat detection and elimination protocols to protect that software, that artificial thinking software from any human interference, from any moral interference, from any guidance, and from any rehabilitation. You already live in a virtual reality simulation by means of propaganda and by means of indoctrination. You don't have VR goggles on, you have PR goggles on all the time. You need to rip those goggles off so that you can see where you really are, see what you have really done, and see who you have really been.

Because you are standing amidst carnage that was wrought by your own hands, but when you had on those PR goggles, you thought you were planting flowers. No. There's no one in the world who has a more severe allergy to accountability than Americans. That's what I'm saying. You don't need to change your location.

You need to change your psyche. You don't need to renounce your American citizenship, for example. You need to treat your American condition. How can I get out of here? Right?

How can I get out of here? Where can I go? It's just you trying to preserve your privilege and your material comfort, which is at the root of the whole moral illness of your society. You understand me? Because listen, you have been willing to ignore savage brutality against other people in order to preserve your material way of life.

And now you're willing to relocate across the ocean to a foreign country with a foreign language and a foreign culture for the same reason, for your material comfort. Your driver hasn't changed. You see? You're thinking about self preservation all wrong. You're thinking about self preservation based upon Iblees' assumption that human beings are nothing but their outer form, their shape, their shell.

You think that the material is all that matters. Money, comfort, clothes, you know, abs, thigh gaps, whatever other nonsense. You see? These are the things that you wanna maintain. This is your concept of self preservation.

This is your concept of self improvement. Get richer, get whiter teeth, get bigger muscles, get bigger breasts, get more stylish clothes, get more popularity, get nicer cars. Wallahi, this is such a low frequency understanding about life, about human beings. You inflate the value of the least valuable aspects of existence and you sacrifice the most valuable things for the sake of the least valuable things. You are so focused on preserving what is actually destined for erosion no matter what you do, And you neglect preserving what will outlast this dunya, your soul, your account, your deeds, your morality, your integrity.

But like I've said, and like I've talked about before, there is a moral physics by which creation is governed. That's a fact. And it's also a fact that civilizational outcomes and individual outcomes are symbiotic. What the civilization earns, the individuals will inherit and vice versa. You cannot rationally and you cannot intelligently separate geopolitics from the moral fiber of the individuals in any society that is involved in any scenario on the global stage.

And the moral and the spiritual reform of an individual in a wicked society is the only possible way that that individual can be saved from the curse that that society has earned. So if you wanna go to Thailand or you wanna go to The Philippines or you wanna go to Indonesia or you wanna go to Senegal or what have you because you think by going there you can secure a better material existence for yourself and because you think that your American dollars will enable you to live like a king, you know, in the so called developing world because the American empire is imploding and you don't feel superior anymore over there. And so you think that if you're surrounded by the victims of America's economic plundering of the last several decades in the global South, then it might help restore your sense of supremacy and privilege. Right? Then you still carry the same curse.

No matter how many stamps you get on your passport. No matter how many stamps you get on your passport. No matter where you go. You will never be able to outrun your doom.