Shahid Bolsen | Psychological Decolonization, Protest, and Indigenous Governance

About the West conception of us.

Oh, right. Right. Right. It's it's the West conception of us, then it's then it's our own our own adoption of the Western paradigm of how you do social change. And that that that a lot of us have bought into this idea that we can only achieve social change or improvement or advancement in the society through protest and through an adversarial approach to our leaders.

Not understanding that that whole approach, that whole paradigm is based upon an adversarial paradigm that exists in the West.

Yes.

That's their experience. Their leaders, their rulers, their elites hate them and always have hated them and have always exploited and oppressed and misused them. That hasn't always been the case with us. And we have systems, we have channels, we have bodies, we have intermediaries, we have the and like in Indonesia, you have the you have religious organizations, you have imams, you have provincial sultans, you have traditional authority structures that can be the intermediary between the people, the population and the government. And we adopted this idea or the westernized people, this is part of psychological decolonization.

And that we've adopted this this the idea that this kind of protest, that disruptive protest is a sign of freedom.

Yeah.

And if it's not allowed, then this is repression and this is backwards and this is authoritarian and all of these other western words, western categories. And it kind of reminds me of that whole conversation with the native American guy talking about the wheel. Yeah. In that the disruptive protest, the adversarial approach to government is something that worked for you in the West. This fits your society, your dysfunctional society And the dysfunctional relationship of the people in power, the people of authority, the dysfunctional relationship between them and the rest of the people, the rest of the population.

And then to assume that we must have this and if we are therefore denied this, then we're being oppressed. Well obviously that's very mistaken. If you're denied the right to destabilize and disrupt your society. You think it's because, you think that means that now we are that that progress is being denied. Yeah.

The advancement and then improvement is being denied. But in fact, you don't need to do all of those things for advancement improvement. They've needed to do that historically in the West because the elites and the power structure and so forth were oppressive and were denying people their rights and were only interested in maintaining and consolidating their power and their status quo. Yeah. In our societies, all tiers of the society have historically worked together.

Yes.

They've they've all collaborated and worked together. There's cohesion. Yeah. So you are disrupting the society in for example, the protest in Indonesia. You are disrupting the society on the pretense that you're doing that for the sake of societal improvement.

When in fact

When in fact, if you're interested in societal improvement, you will work with the other elements in the society that exist. The mediation or the mediating intermediaries

Yes.

That exist in the society between the people and the government to achieve actual positive social change as a total cohesive community.

Yes. Because over in the last, it is very impersonal. The your authority structure, your elites are not interested in or vested in the reaching out to the populations. And you have no like like in our societies, we have tribes, we have communities, we have a lot of familial connections that link us to the universe. So we're not, like, completely we have ties, kinship.

All of these matters to us. But your societies are fragmented and scattered, and you get together and form Germany or Spain or UK or America. But you won't have any of that cohesiveness that we all have, that we have had. And I will again, we have had this, and again, we are not estranged from the top tier of our our society the way you have been. We're not pretending like there's some egalitarian utopia or something.

It's not like that at all. But there's actual kinship, there's connections.

Right. And and and I I think also there's the there's the element of the whole individualism in the West that the the enlightenment sort of codified as their official dogma. The individualism which is just another way of saying greed, selfishness and greed. And you have, you as they always do, you have now assumed that that's universal.

Yeah.

That approach to life is universal. So this is why you have this very adversarial relationship because the the individuals at the top of your hierarchy are just out for themselves. With the full sanction and the full blessing of western dogma. You're supposed to be just out for yourself. So there's no blame on you.

So now everyone has to rally their troops to try to extract some rights from these people at the top of the hierarchy because they are only out for themselves. Yes. That's not the case everywhere in the world. Not everyone is that psychopathic. Not everyone in the world is as sociopathic as what you consider to be the pinnacle of human evolution, human development.

To you, the the pinnacle of that is to be as a psychopath or to be a sociopath. That's the western model of the perfect person. Yeah. Someone who is completely sociopathic, completely psychopathic, completely selfish, completely only interested in their own particular individual benefit.

Right. Of course, you sugarcoat all of that in the name of freedom, individual Right. Know.

Yeah. Always with the always with the euphemisms. Yeah. But but ultimately, that's what it comes down to. Yes.

And then you further sugarcoat it and further justify it by saying, well, everyone is like this. It's not true.

Yeah. You insist that everyone is

like this. You insist that everyone is like this, but no it's not true. Historically, our leaders cared about the whole community. Our our our elites were also invested in the community. They were they were invested in the society as a whole.

Everyone was interested in progressing together, everyone was interested in advancing and improving together. Now again, that doesn't mean that there's no greed, that doesn't mean there's no selfishness, that doesn't mean that there's no individual that an individual doesn't prioritize themselves above others. But this is where it happens to a normal actual, an actual normal human degree. You know, which is that there are limits to the extent to which I will be that way. Because either because I am already a basically a fundamentally decent human being or because I live in a society that will hold me accountable.

Checks and balances actually exist.

Checks and balances actually exist in terms of your own reputation. Yes. Your own reputation, your own credibility. And if your reputation and your credibility suffer because of your behavior, because of your selfish behavior, because of harming others for the sake of your own benefit, then you will lose your influence. And then you won't be able to even serve your own self interest anymore.

This is this is this is why like these, you know, these movements tend to be these these protest movements betray a very westernized mentality that you think that you have to disrupt and you have to be adversarial with those in power. When you don't have to be. Because you're you're looking at your elites the way westerners look at their elites rather than looking at the real situation in your own society. And again, that doesn't mean that the elites in the Muslim world or in the global South can't be corrupt, can't be selfish, can't be oppressive. Obviously, these things can happen.

But we have other ways of dealing with it.

Exactly.

Another aspect of psychological decolonization is realizing that the colonized people always have agency.

Oh, yeah.

And always did have agency. And that, for example, one of the leftist narratives, like I say a Chomsky, is that America goes around the world and does whatever they want. And if they want to install a puppet, they'll install a puppet. If they want to overthrow, they will overthrow. If they want to activate social movement or a purge against leftist, against communist or what have you, then they'll just do it.

Because they can just appoint a a puppet regime to carry out their will. And you you This this in and of itself is a very western supremacist, western exceptionalist, white supremacist mentality that you actually are imagining. That for example, like we were talking about before, the purge of communist in Indonesia was not done against the will of the majority of the population. The leftist tried to present this as, and of course they would, as the CIA ordered Suharto to do it and therefore he obliged like a good puppet. Not that the majority of Indonesians were already having a problem with communist.

That this is something that was imposed against the will of the Indonesian population. And that the communist were the good ones who were advocating for the peasants and the workers and so forth. You don't bother to ask the peasants and the workers and so forth. You just take it as a given that the commies were on the good side and because America didn't like communists. So therefore they decided, America decided on behalf of the leader of Indonesia that these communists were bad actors and needed to be removed.

Not that the president or the leader of Indonesia can make that decision on his own. And and that that if the CIA cooperated with the government of Indonesia to purge communist by providing them names and lists and so forth, that's not the same thing as America ordering them to do it. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like you act like none of these, none none of the colonized countries or formally colonized countries have any agency whatsoever if America gets involved.

And like I talked about when I was talking about Ruto in Kenya, It's really not appropriate or realistic to talk about puppet governance. To talk about puppets. What you Because because anyone like I've I've said this many times, anyone who is a leader of a country wants to have power and sovereignty. Yes. This is this you know this yourself.

No one is happy being a servant. Especially if you have a title and you have, you know, the title of leader or ruler or president or prime minister or king or what have you. You want to exercise autonomy. But you are in certain conditions. You're under certain circumstances that may restrict your ability to act autonomously.

And that makes you more of a hostage, that makes you more of a prisoner than a puppet. So we can't always assume that if the leaders are making decisions in Africa or Asia or anywhere else that accommodate or coincide with western interests. That means that they're just taking dictation. They're dealing with actual circumstances and conditions that are maybe beyond their control or that they inherited when they got into power. That they have to navigate.

And it also might mean like like in the example of the communist in Indonesia. Mhmm. What America wanted and what the majority of Indonesians wanted coincided. There was a consensus that the communist were a problem in Indonesia. And the communist had made themselves a problem in Indonesia for multiple reasons that we don't need to get into.

But they were destabilizing force in Indonesia.

In the region.

In the region generally, yeah. And so no one needed to order them to to handle that problem. When they handled that problem, was for their own, for the benefit of their own society. Yeah. For the benefit of their own nation.

Yeah. It's not even like to call it self preservation more than just the progress and function of Indonesian society, the nation of Indonesia, because you can't just continuously be in kind of a, you know, aggression with one country after another. Like post independence, Okay? Like twenty years down, you still wanna keep fighting other countries, other other nations over ideologies? Like it's it's

already. Yeah. See, this is this is another aspect that that especially Muslims but anyone in the global South in my opinion needs to really also wrap their head around. Communism is a western ideology. It's a western, it's a European ideology and it is just as much a colonizer ideology as capitalism or anything else.

This is not an indigenous belief system. So there was a time like in the sixties, fifties sixties, post world war two when when the the a lot of the colonies were gaining their so called independence. When, you know, during the Cold War period, the bipolar world, when you had to choose which ideology you're going to align with. So yes, many countries in the global South align more with the communist side. But just just look at what that means.

You are aligning with an external power, an external power structure subscribing to an ideology of an external power structure under coercion. Under the coercion of the overall global system where I have to choose sides. You don't have the choice to have your own indigenous system, to come up with your own indigenous system. And the problem is that as a western ideology, I think history has shown, certainly it did in Indonesia, in Malaysia, in many places, in Iran, in many parts of the world, that communists will operate exactly like western colonizers. They will operate exactly like western destabilizing provocateur colonizers who want to destabilize so that they can gain control.

They're not interested in the actual sovereignty of the nations in which they espouse caring for the poor and the workers and the laborers. They don't actually care about the nationhood and the sovereignty. Mhmm. They want supremacy for themselves just like any western ideology. It's it's baked in to the thinking of anything that comes out of the West.

This is baked into their thinking. This is baked into their ideology. So even if you're not western, even if you are Indonesian, even if you are African, even if you are Iranian, even if you are Malaysian, or what have you, even if you're Indian, even if you're Malayali, but you subscribe to that western theory. You're gonna have the the the the same thing that infects that theory is gonna affect your approach. Mhmm.

Because it's baked into it. And when I say that history has borne it out, the communist wherever they've been, have been disruptive to national cohesion. Wherever they have operated, they've been disruptive to national cohesion. They insist that you must be a Marxist. They insist.

And when Sukarno tried to work with them, they did what they did. They were disruptive. And I think it's very important now in 2025 and moving forward for us in for for for Muslims, Muslims in the Muslim world, for everyone in the global South to understand that there are groups that we cannot work with. Yeah. There are groups that simply as much as we want to have cohesion and solidarity and coalition with you, you make that impossible.

Because you are not in fact a team player. We can be team players, but you don't really understand the concept. You wanna be the coach of the team. No matter what team you join, you wanna be the coach of that team. And again, this is comes from the western supremacist mentality that is baked into every western ideology.

Whether it is supposedly the antithesis of another western ideology like communism versus capitalism or marxism or socialism versus capitalism or what have you, free market blah blah blah. Both of these are western ideologies. They have the same western supremacist mentality that's baked into it. So they don't know how to be team players. They always wanna be the coach of the team.

So I think it's important for us to understand that there are people we cannot work with. And now, Alhamdulillah, we don't have to choose between this one or that one. Yeah. Between we don't have to choose even between China and America, between Russia and America, Soviet Union and America like the cold war period. We don't have to choose between China and them either.

Now it is becoming multi polar.

Yes.

So I think that we're entering a kind of a renaissance, where we will see the pioneering of new political theories that will be indigenous political theories, indigenous governance models that hopefully will take from and be informed by their traditional authority structures. Because I think that Because in most of these countries like I've talked about many times, those still exist. The traditional authority structures are still there to varying degrees, but they're still there and they should be revived in my opinion. Because they they existed for a reason and they were dismantled for a reason. So if if they can be there be a resurgence and a reinvigoration of those traditional authority structures, I think that all of our countries will do better insha'Allah.