Summary
In this video, I respond to comments from my previous video on authoritarianism and share deeper thoughts on what it means to decolonize your mind. I discuss two powerful books — Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon and The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins — and how they gave me frameworks to navigate sacred rage, understand the origins of anti-communist rhetoric, and process the emotional weight of learning your people’s history.
I also share my stance on AI: it’s not going anywhere, and being completely against it is as unwise as being completely in favor of it without integrity. I use AI to help me learn faster, unpack dense academic concepts, and access reading in ways I couldn’t before. The real question isn’t about the tool — it’s about the intent behind how we use it.
Key Themes
- Decolonization as a spiritual process — Learning your culture’s history triggers a sacred rage. Fanon gives you tools to integrate that rage without becoming the oppressor.
- The Jakarta Method — Anti-communist rhetoric was used to justify mass genocide in Indonesia and beyond. The same rhetorical patterns are being used today.
- AI Ethics — Don’t blame the tool, focus on the people using it. AI and oppressive systems are not mutually exclusive.
- Critical thinking — Welcoming pushback and being honest about what I don’t know.
Full Transcript
Hey everyone, I wanted to say thank you. The video that I posted the other day where it’s 72% of the world is authoritarian and then I shared my colonial reading list. I didn’t expect that to blow up and it didn’t go viral or anything. Right now there’s like 600 views on it. I posted it two days ago, but I just wasn’t expecting people to see it. So thank you for all the nice comments. It’s really trippy. Yeah, because again it’s — I don’t really talk about these topics a lot on social media, so this is new for me. But thank you for being here and thanks for all the new subscribers.
I wanted to respond to some comments because my intention with social media is to build a community around the topics that I’m learning, you know. So yeah, I’m just going to respond to some comments.
From Taylor Lawrence: “This is an excellent video. You deserve so many subscribers.” I’m not going to lie, this kind of made me tear up a little bit. I appreciate you so much and I took a look at your page and you make amazing content as well. I’m not on that level, but I appreciate you taking the time to watch my video and commenting this.
“The algorithm found me.” Thank you so much, Acid Papon.
“As someone who’s also getting into the weeds with this information and reconnecting with my culture, thank you for sharing.” I definitely recommend — if you want to connect with your culture, you unknowingly walk down a path of decolonization. So I never had words for this but after reading the work of Frantz Fanon — I don’t know what your culture is — but Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, when you learn about your culture and when you learn about the true history, especially if you’re a black person, a brown person who has suffered the effects of colonialism even unconsciously, when you learn about history and how your people have been affected, what I can tell you is that it can trigger a sacred rage. And this is what Frantz Fanon talks about.
Frantz Fanon — he was a psychiatrist that treated Algerian soldiers that were tortured by the French during the Algerian French War. And he basically documents firsthand accounts of just how Algerians were treated like animals by the French colonizers. And he just documents and outlines the process, the spiritual process, the emotional process of decolonization.
And I think when you learn and navigate the history of your culture, at least for me, it’s a very emotional process. It’s a very sacred process. It’s a very deep and challenging process to learn what was done to your people. Even though it happened years ago, it wasn’t even that long ago, honestly. It wasn’t even a century ago in terms of the Philippines.
But anyway, this book specifically, I think, gives you powerful tools to — one, it ignites something within you. This book is kind of dangerous. Like, this is a book that starts revolutions, and I understand why the more I read it. It ignites something within you. It ignites a sacred rage within you. But then Fanon also talks about how it’s important to — once you learn these things, you learn what was done to your people, you experience this sacred rage and you go through this process of release. He goes to say that decolonization is a process. It’s always going to be a violent process whether it be physically, psychologically, spiritually, emotionally — it happens. And once it does happen, how do you then integrate that so that you don’t become the oppressor? How do you fight the monster without becoming the monster?
And I think Fanon’s work is just foundational. I’m glad this is one of the first books that I started reading along my process of decolonizing and learning about the history of the Philippines because it’s given me tools and a framework to understand where I’m at in the decolonization journey in my psyche and how to integrate and not just be sitting here and become an angry person.
Like one of my favorite questions that I have right now that I’m seeking answers to is: how do I decolonize my mind and how do I decolonize my relationship to different ideas that Western culture and colonialism have taught me and that I was raised in? How do I decolonize but not turn into just an angry grumpy person? Because there are a lot of people who are like that and I’ve seen it and now I’m starting to understand it. I’m understanding the root of that. This book gives you tools to not become that.
From Charles 8939: “This has inspired me to keep going through the pile of books in the corner of my room. It’s so important to keep reading, keep doing what you’re doing.” Thanks for the support. Really appreciate it. Yeah, I just started learning to love reading. It changes you. It changes your consciousness. You’re having conversations with authors and thinkers who have walked down psychological paths farther than we could ever have relative to our own life experience. It does something to you.
Rene 6: “I’m 59. I have lived in the US my entire life. What I’ve seen is steady accelerating decline. It’s truly terrifying.” Yeah.
Jaloo 2978: “The Jakarta method is devastating. Everyone should know about that shameful part of America’s history.” Yeah. And it’s not even just history. I would say the Jakarta Method is one of the key books to read and to understand because the Jakarta Method is used all across the world in the name of colonialism. It reveals the source of anti-communist rhetoric — like why is there so much fear about communism and socialism, Marxism. And mind you too, I look at things from a lot of different lenses.
What is one of the things that authoritarian governments — in this current time, the Trump administration — what do they say? What do they call people that they don’t like? Communists. Marxists. Socialists. Majority of people don’t even understand what these words mean and majority of people don’t understand how this rhetoric was used in history, in the past, to justify the means of mass genocide and killing of large groups of populations.
Specifically in Indonesia and Jakarta, it was used to attack not radical left people, but center-left people who just wanted to push like small reforms. Anti-communist rhetoric was used to attack indigenous peoples, to remove them from their land, to imprison them, to torture people, to kill and incarcerate over 500,000 Indonesians in the 1960s, you know, and this wasn’t even that long ago. And this Jakarta Method was then used in other Southeast Asian countries as well as the United States to attack normal citizens who aren’t even that radical. It creates the us versus them mentality that creates an environment of fascism, a container of us and them.
And yeah, it’s a whole bunch of things, but the Jakarta Method — thank you for making this comment. It’s one of the most powerful books that I’ve ever read. And it’s helping me understand the origins of the arguments and the discourse and the name calling that happens in the political narratives that are happening today in 2025 with the current Trump administration and just how it bleeds into normal conversations in everyday people who don’t even know where it comes from.
Yeah, everyone should read the Jakarta Method. Would highly recommend — or even just watch, there’s a really good interview with Vincent Bevins, the author, who describes it all. You can just listen to it in a podcast and that will open up your eyes a lot to everything too.
“If you want to understand racism, play Sid Meier’s Civilization — addictive but surprisingly clarifying re: human psychology.” Thank you for the recommendation. I’ll check it out.
Okay, this is from Racket Dude: “Snider said that he was going to leave the USA irrespective of whom was going to be president though. Dude, less than 2 minutes in and already something false unless the interview I saw him a few weeks ago is now dated.”
So firstly, thank you for inviting critical thinking into the comment section. I’m just one person, so I see what I see. Saw news articles saying that three Yale University professors left the country because America is turning into a fascist dictatorship. I’m just one person. I have one mind. And so I do the best I can to be as precise and accurate with information as possible, but sometimes I miss things. So yeah, if that’s true, there you go. But it still happens. And Harvard’s being attacked right now, too. Trying to attack Harvard professors and Harvard’s fighting back. They literally released a whole free course to the public on understanding government and how to tell if a government is turning into a dictatorship.
So regardless of what and why Snyder left, you can see it echo into the policies and the executive orders that the administration is actually giving out. So you could say that we could talk about the specifics of things, but they’re attacking Harvard. But overall, thank you for inviting critical thinking into the comment section, and that’s welcome here. I’m only one person. I’m not perfect. I don’t know everything. So, I appreciate you.
“Be careful walking around telling people that you’re redpilled, but jokes aside, I wish you all the best, whatever that might be.” Thank you so much. I get what you’re saying. I know that the concept, the term red pill is seen as very controversial because of the manosphere and all that — I don’t like any of that stuff. Thanks for looking out. Yeah, I’ll be careful to use that analogy in the future, especially if more people see my videos because I wasn’t expecting this one to even get the attention that it has, but yeah, thank you for that.
This is from Racket Dude as well: “Like how you’re seemingly against a lot of aggressive systems, yet you have been very pro AI. Not sure how that works.”
So, these are my thoughts on AI. I think AI can be harmful, but it can also be helpful. It all depends on how we use it. It’s like the internet. When the internet came out in the 1960s, I think that’s when it came out. A lot of people were against the internet as well. But what I think is that like the internet, it’s here to stay. AI is not going anywhere. And like the internet too, it can help us amplify more of who we are and how we express ourselves for better or for worse.
I think it’s better to understand it and how to work with it with integrity and responsibility than to be completely against it. In my case, I use AI to help me learn things faster. Or if I don’t understand something from a book, if I don’t understand the prose it was written in or certain high-level academic concepts, then I throw it into AI and then I have it unpack it. I have it simplify it and teach me and reframe it in a way that’s easier for me to understand. Because of AI, I’ve been able to access reading in general. So, I think that’s a beautiful thing because it’s helping me read more. It’s helping me learn more. It’s helping me become more of a better person. And that’s shaped by the intent that I use it with.
Right — on the other side of the spectrum, have you seen VO3 with Google? It’s extremely scary to see that it’s getting more and more realistic with the video generation features to where people can start creating more false information, especially during the current social political climate with 72% of the world today being under authoritarian rule. AI is scary and it’s changing the world. It’s changing jobs. It’s changing the economy. It’s changing how we interact with each other socially. It’s changing how we interact with ourselves and our own personal development because a lot of people use it for therapy. A lot of people use it to enhance their thinking.
If we’re talking about aggressive systems and AI — correlation versus causation — I don’t think AI and oppressive systems are mutually exclusive to one another. They’re two separate things. And it’s human beings and how we personally interact with our government systems, with AI and the tools that we have to express ourselves. That is more of the root. Don’t blame the tool. Blame the people using the tool. Don’t focus on the tool. Focus on the interpersonal change and transformation that needs to be done to use these tools wisely. I think that’s a more important question, a more important intention.
Again, AI is changing the world like the internet. And to be completely against it is unwise, but to also be completely in favor of it without regulations or integrity is also unwise. It’s something that needs to be navigated with wisdom and conscious intent. And I don’t know where that’s going to go, but I can speak for myself and it helps me learn. I’m grateful for it.
With that — again, thank you guys all for the comments on the last video. Really means a lot. Didn’t expect it to even see that much attention, but it’s cool. So, I’m excited to keep creating from this space, integrating my new knowledge about politics and all this crazy stuff. But anyways, I love you guys like I love myself.