The lie you’ve been sold about your neighbor (and why it’s making someone else rich)

I need to tell you about something that’s been breaking my heart.

Last summer, I took my kids, Hayden and Eve, on a two-week road trip across the heart of America. From South Dakota to Wyoming to Montana.

We fired guns at a range outside Cody. We camped in Yellowstone under stars so bright it felt like the sky was showing off. We sat at the famous Cody Rodeo while families around us waved American flags with a pride that made my chest tight with emotion.

The people we met were extraordinary.

At a local diner, the waitress gave us the warmest service and the best pie I’ve had in years. At the hotels we stayed in, we were treated with overwhelming kindness and sincerity.

I am not an American citizen. I was born in Malaysia. I run Mindvalley, an American company. But I’ve spent nearly three decades traveling across your country—from my college years in Michigan to speaking events in Florida; from tech conferences in San Francisco to quiet conversations in Ohio diners.

And here is what I know to be true:

The American people are not the problem.

The warmth I felt in Wyoming, I have felt in every corner of this nation. In so-called “red” America and so-called “blue” America. Among people who voted for Trump and people who voted for Biden. Among ranchers and professors, veterans and artists, churchgoers and skeptics.

Goodness is everywhere.

So why does it feel like you are at war with each other?

The rodeo speech that changed something in me

At the Cody Rodeo, the announcer stepped into the ring and gave a speech called “Why We Stand.”

He spoke of soldiers who never came home from Vietnam. From Iraq. From the beaches of Normandy. He spoke of sacrifice, of freedom, of a flag that represents something men and women were willing to die for.

The crowd went silent. Hats came off. Hands covered hearts.

And I thought: This is real. This love of country is real. This reverence is real.

These people are not hateful. These people are not ignorant. These people are not my enemies.

Then a second thought hit me hard:

Who the hell convinced Americans that they are enemies of each other?

I was manipulated too

I need to confess something.

For years, I consumed media that painted a certain picture of Trump supporters. I read the tweets. I watched the clips. I saw the worst moments replayed on loop until they seemed like the whole story.

I absorbed a caricature.

Then I went to Wyoming. And I met human beings.

They didn’t match the cartoon I’d been sold. Not even close. These were people worried about the same things everyone worries about:

Can I afford to get sick?
Will my children have a better life than I?
Why does it feel like the whole system is rigged against regular folks?

These aren’t Republican questions or Democratic questions. These are human questions. These are kitchen-table questions.

I realized I had allowed myself to see my fellow human beings as enemies—because it’s easier to hate a cartoon than to sit with complexity.

If I were manipulated, I suspect I’m not the only one.

The inclusion paradox

There is a hard question I had to ask myself—a question raised by philosopher Ken Wilber, whose course “Integral Life” is part of the Mindvalley curriculum.

He describes a strange paradox in our modern culture. We have a “leading edge” of society that prides itself on love, diversity, and inclusion. We fight for the environment. We fight for minorities. We fight for the oppressed.

But there is one group we often feel comfortable excluding.

Wilber calls this a “performative contradiction.” How can we claim to be the movement of diversity if we look down on half the country as “deplorables”?

We cannot claim to stand for “inclusion” if we hold contempt for diversity of thought.

If our tolerance stops the moment someone wears a red hat, it isn’t tolerance. It is just another form of tribalism wearing a nicer outfit.

We have to be better than that. True inclusivity means holding space even for those we vehemently disagree with, understanding that their pain is just as real as ours.

The machine that profits from your division

Here’s what I’ve come to believe.

There are forces that profit when Americans hate each other.

The equation is simple:

When you’re angry, you click. When you click, someone makes money.

When you’re afraid, you watch. When you watch, someone sells ads.

And when you are divided, you don’t notice that your wages haven’t kept pace with inflation while CEO pay has soared. You don’t notice that healthcare bankrupts half a million families a year. You don’t notice that the same corporations often fund both parties, ensuring they win no matter who is in the White House.

The platform owners know exactly what they’re doing.

A study from MIT found that falsehoods and outrage-driven content spread six times faster than the truth.

Internal Facebook files leaked in 2021 revealed that their algorithm privileged anger to such a degree that even Meta’s own engineers warned it was “ripping society apart.”

Ken Wilber calls this the “Culture of Post-Truth.”

It creates a state of “aperspectival madness”—where we lose our shared reality and retreat into warring tribes. When algorithms prioritize outrage over facts, truth vanishes. And when there is no truth, there is only power.

The division is not an accident. It is a business model.

And all of us—left and right, rural and urban, MAGA and progressive—we are the product being sold.

Then comes the second wave: The Bots.

A 2024 USC study analyzed online traffic during political flashpoints. What they found was chilling.

Nearly half of the most viral, toxic conversations weren’t coming from humans.

They were generated by bots. In some cases, bot activity spiked from 20% to 43% of the total conversation.

These weren’t Americans. These were automated scripts originating from Russia, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Macedonia.

Think about that.

When you see a comment that makes your blood boil, when you rage at “the other side”—half the time, you aren’t fighting a fellow citizen. You are fighting a line of code from a server farm halfway across the world.

It is a foreign algorithm wearing the mask of your neighbor.

The bots are designed to make you hate each other. The actual Americans I’ve met just want the same things.

Something doesn’t add up

I’m not an economist. I’m not a policy expert.

But I’m someone who has built a life on questioning assumptions—what I call “brules,” the bullshit rules society programs into us without evidence.

In a “Post-Truth” world, b-rules thrive. They fill the void where facts used to be. So I decided to look at the actual data. And the reality I found didn’t match the stories I’d been told.

Here are four ideas worth reexamining.

1. On the economy

I always heard that one party was better for business, better for the stock market, better for jobs. It seemed obvious. Everyone repeated it.

Then I looked at the record.

Since 1933, the stock market has performed more than twice as well under Democratic presidents (NYU / Stock Market Historical Review).

Job creation has nearly doubled.

And 10 of the last 11 recessions began under Republican administrations.

I’m not sharing this to score political points. I’m saying: the story I was told was a “brule”. It didn’t match reality.

2. On immigration

I was told immigrants were driving crime and draining resources.

But study after study shows the opposite.

Texas—a state at the center of the immigration debate—found that native-born Americans commit violent crimes at nearly twice the rate of undocumented immigrants (Texas Dept. of Public Safety, 2024).

And in 2022 alone, undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in taxes (ITEP, 2024).

They pay billions. They work in agriculture, construction, elder care, and childcare—industries that would collapse without them. Many can’t even claim refunds on the taxes they pay.

So if they’re not causing crime… and they’re not draining your taxes…

Why have we been taught to fear them?

Who benefits when we are afraid of the most vulnerable among us?

3. On healthcare: the freedom to fail

530,000.

That is the number of American families that go bankrupt every year due to medical bills.

In Canada: zero.
In Germany: zero.
In the U.K., France, Japan, Australia: virtually zero.

This isn’t because Americans are sicker. It’s because of policy choices made by people who benefit from the status quo.

But here is the brule we’ve been taught: safety nets make people lazy.

The data shows the exact opposite.

Countries with robust social safety nets—like Sweden, Norway, and Denmark—are hotbeds for entrepreneurship. Sweden produces more unicorn tech companies per capita than any region except Silicon Valley.

Why?

Because entrepreneurship requires risk. And risk requires security.

In America, “freedom” often means the freedom to fall through the cracks.

In social democracies, the government provides a trampoline.

When you don’t have to worry about losing your healthcare because you left your corporate job, you are free to be brave.

4. On the American dream: a personal warning

I was always told America has the highest upward mobility in the world—that this is the only place where anyone, from any background, can make it to the top.

It is a beautiful story. But I decided to look at the rankings.

The Global Social Mobility Index ranks countries on how easy it is for a person to start at zero and climb to the top.

The United States ranks 27th.

The top of the list? Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden.

The “American Dream” is now statistically more likely to happen in Scandinavia than in America.

So why do we resist the very policies that would fix this?

I believe it is because Americans have been manipulated into confusing “Social Democracy” with “Communism.”

And I need to make a distinction here that is deeply personal to me.

I am an entrepreneur. I love entrepreneurs. And I hate Communism with a fire that comes from my own blood.

The Estonian side of my family owned a farm on the Baltic island of Hiiumaa for hundreds of years. But when the Communists took control of Estonia in the 1940s, that legacy was shattered.

They sent a massive portion of the Estonian population to the gulags. My children’s great-grandparents were marched into a forest, lined up, and shot in the head. They were buried in unmarked graves.

Their sin? They were farmers who happened to own their own land.

This is a scar on my family’s history. That land was stolen, and it was only returned to us in the early 1990s when Estonia finally threw off the shackles of Communism and property ownership was legal again.

So you can imagine how I feel when I hear Americans screaming the word “Communism” at things that are clearly not Communism.

I know what Communism is. I know the smell of the graves it digs.

And I need you to know: A safety net is not Communism.

We need to understand the difference between three very different things:

1. Communism: The government owns everything. They shoot you for owning a farm. (Think Soviet Estonia).
2. Socialism: The government owns the means of production.
3. Social Democracy: The government provides a floor so that capitalism can thrive. (Think modern Europe).

The tragedy is that by fearing the ghost of Communism, Americans have rejected the very systems that would make their capitalism stronger.

You can’t take big risks if the system is designed to crush you for stumbling.

When I look at my family’s history, I know that Communism destroys the human spirit. But I also know that unbridled capitalism, without a safety net, breaks the human body.

Real freedom requires a floor you can’t fall through.

The scripture I can’t stop thinking about

After Wyoming, I took Hayden to Ellis Island.

We stood at the base of the Statue of Liberty and read the famous inscription: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”

I thought about my own family—immigrants who came to Malaysia with nothing. I thought about the families at the rodeo, many of whose ancestors arrived the same way, chasing the same dream.

Then I remembered these words from Jesus:

“I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” (Matthew 25:35)

“Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me.” (Matthew 25:40)

I’m not a theologian. But those verses haunted me on that island.

I started wondering: What would it mean to take them seriously—not as a political slogan, but as a genuine challenge to how we treat the desperate?

Christ didn’t say: Fear the foreigner. Blame the stranger. Build walls and turn the desperate into demons.

So how did so many good people of faith end up cheering for rhetoric that seems to contradict the teacher they follow?

I don’t ask this to judge. I ask because the contradiction breaks my heart.

The real enemies are not each other

If I could share one insight from an outsider looking in with love, it would be this:

The veteran in Wyoming and the activist in Oakland are not enemies. They are prisoners in the same cell, fighting over crumbs while the warden laughs.

The immigrant picking strawberries didn’t move your factory overseas.

The college student protesting injustice didn’t write the tax code that lets billionaires pay lower rates than nurses.

The single mother on food stamps didn’t create a healthcare system that charges $800 for insulin that costs $8 to make.

Your frustration is real.

But the target you’ve been given is wrong.

And while you are fighting your neighbor, the systems that squeeze you keep squeezing.

What I’m asking

I’m not asking you to change your vote.

I’m not asking you to abandon your values.

I’m not asking you to agree with me.

I’m asking something simpler:

Be suspicious of anyone who tells you to hate.

Be suspicious of the media that makes you angry every single day—because anger is profitable, and you are the product.

Be suspicious of leaders who need enemies more than they need solutions.

And ask yourself, honestly:

Is my life actually better under the policies I support?

Are my bills lower?

Is my healthcare more affordable?

Are my wages keeping up?

Do my children have more opportunity than I did?

If the answer is no, then maybe, just maybe, you’ve been convinced to fight the wrong battles.

I dream of an America that finally lives up to its own giant story.

That dream doesn’t belong to the left or the right.

It belongs to anyone willing to fight for it.

Not fight each other.

Fight for each other.

PS: If this article stirred something in you—agreement, discomfort, clarity, anything—leave a comment below. Honest dialogue is how we start healing what’s been broken. I’d love to hear your thoughts.