Video & Transcript of Sven van Westen,
WTM Rotterdam Centre

 

(To learn more about Sven van Westen, see www.wtmrotterdam.com)

 

 

So my name is Sven van Westen. I’m 24 years old and I live right now in the Netherlands. I was born and raised in a small village of the southwest of the Netherlands. I went to school there and then afterwards I studied a little bit in the centre of the Netherlands and I studied Fashion Business Management. My dad has a clothing store. It’s been in our family for 102 years, so I was the fifth generation to work in that store. I’m an account manager right now. I work for a fashion brand, a Danish fashion brand. It’s a really big fashion label here in Europe. So that’s what I do now.

How I came across the WTM at a certain point was actually through my brother Ralph. Because Ralph called me at a certain point and he said, “I have the most exciting news in the world for you! The answer has been found! There’s nothing like it!” He went fully overboard saying, “This is the best thing to ever happen to humanity! You need to call me back right now!” because I didn’t actually pick up. So that was the voicemail. I still have that voicemail. It’s really fun to listen to sometimes. And I called him a couple of days later because it was really busy. And he eventually sat me down and talked me through the “Adam Stork story” and everything [see Video/​Freedom Essay 3: THE Explanation]. And he had already ordered the book in the first week and got really into it. He was already halfway through it and watched THE Interview two times and he was really into it. I must say, I think a lot of his enthusiasm reached me very quickly early on. So I did understand it to some level, enough to understand the potential and feel like, oh, I feel like there’s something there. You might be onto something. And so yeah, that’s a bit how I got into it, through him actually.

At a certain point I, through patient perseverance, kind of kept listening to the podcasts and kept getting back into it. But what really did strike me, which was the most, I think, important part for me of the journey was when I read Our Meaning, the draft that was there. I read that three times in a row. I just couldn’t get enough of it. When I read that, that was like, that was like everything that was kind of just burning around and that was the loose concepts that I was sort of loosely getting started to suddenly just come together and form a big whole where I started to get the whole point. And I was like, “Oh, that’s how it all works!!” and that was a really, really magnificent point. I remember that’s the moment I called Ralph, and I called him, and I was like, “Wow, now I get it. I see how the whole thing works.” I really connected the dots to that one through reading that.

So I personally resonated a lot with Resignation, especially when first getting into this information, because I think when going through Resignation I was a terribly aggressive kid [see explanation of the psychological process of Resignation in Freedom Essay 30]. I fought with my parents every day. I listened only to heavy metal music. I wore full black clothes from bottom to top with 20 chains, and the huge chunker boots, and the big skulls on my shirt, and all of that. And I actually used to scream out loud through the house and I’d bang on all my doors, and bang on the walls, and kick against stuff. And then a year after that I switched around and I started to only listen to Eminem, and I wore sweatpants every day, and I stopped going to school a lot, and I started to smoke a lot of cigarettes, and even weed, and I drank a lot and I started to use various types of drugs as well, at a quite difficult age to do all of that. And I remember in that time also being extremely vocal in school about everything, about all the injustice and I used to get kicked out of class every time because I used to point out whatever I thought was bullshit out loud. So I was very loud when it came to how I used to deal with everything around me in the world.

I think other teenagers and kids around me used to be relatively quiet and just at a certain point take up everything. I was at a certain point that I stayed in pretty long, and I was really marked as the “trouble kid”, the one that always steps out of line. And I remember my parents being extremely worried for my future, thinking that I was going to go extremely off-track into the wrong direction, which was also why when I had to resign, I had to resign pretty hard, because I had a really bad place to come out of and some extremely self-destructing behaviour. So it could have quite easily taken me into a really bad place if I wouldn’t have found a way to deal with all of that and get my ‘wins’ in. So then I kind of learned to get all my ego wins in and I got really, really good at that. I started to work at my dad’s store and it turned out that I was quite a good salesman. I managed to sell more than the other people in that store in a lot of days. So that was a really good way to get your wins in, and also because my parents were very proud of that. So they’re like, “Hey, you go! You’re doing super well!” And I was like, “Yes!” I started to really become a winner at the battle of life.

So then I started to do super well in school. I dropped basically all the friends I had, completely ignored them, told them that I didn’t want to have anything to do with them anymore. I started to 100 percent turn my life around and everybody was applauding that. It was like, left and right, everybody saying how amazing I did and how surprised they were with my complete change of behaviour and how positive it all was. And I think that’s because of how the whole world replied to that, just looking back on that now, I can realise that honestly that I wasn’t actually feeling all that good that whole time. You know, I ditched a lot of my friends, I felt really guilty about that. I felt quite fake during the whole process. And I had to become really egocentric and then quite a big winner to get through all of that. So, because of all of that, that whole process just started to be [transparent]. I thought that was really interesting to learn the truth about that and actually be able to look back at that time and be like, “Oh, wow, this is what really happened to me. And this is how everything went.” And I’ve been able to give it a place because of that, and really work through that to the point where I can now just put that aside and not have that have any form of control over my life anymore, I guess.

I think the better way to say it is that I was very fierce and competitive, especially fierce and competitive. And the way I viewed the world was that I think on a deep subconscious level, I did very much realise that there was something wrong with the world. So I was watching a lot of people like Jordan Peterson and similar influencers and stuff on Instagram, which all kind of fiercely fight the current regime of the world. And I was very anti-Leftist, which is difficult because my girlfriend is quite Left, to say it like that. I had a lot of conversations as well, where my girlfriend would say things like, “White males and toxic masculinity is such a big problem right now”, and that “They’re mostly still responsible for all the upset and everything that went wrong in the world.” And I remember—it’s extremely condemning, of course, all of that—and I remember, from that becoming very aggressive and ferocious and having a really hard time arguing against that because I think you deep inside feel that that condemnation is extremely undeserved. I mean, she was, of course, right to see all the upset and stuff, and then we did have some good conversations about that in that way. But I used to always have very much a problem just accepting those ideals, those “Left-ist” ideals of the world and of how things are, the way that it is viewed a lot these days, especially in my generation, because you felt to some aspect that it just wasn’t true. So I think reading Death by Dogma was a great book for me to read because I could finally...I could really put some really great understanding to why I have positioned myself this whole time, but then why again, have some of the other people positioned themselves the exact opposite. I think that really comes about really well explained in Death by Dogma. And through that I was like, “Ah, okay!” I kind of understand how all of that worked now and why everybody’s in it a bit like this. And that that whole battle, just having that discussion isn’t going to solve everything, that’s an everlasting discussion that’s only going to get worse and worse. And it’s going to go deeper and deeper. And it’s not going to solve anything unless you solve the core issue at hand [of the human condition].

Over the last two years, to realising how all of this works and to really taking that transformation myself now, I can just see how this truly shows how all human behaviour came to be and I can see how having this knowledge will over the next couple of generations bring about the transformed world [for more on the transformation of ourselves and the world see The Transformation page on the WTM’s website]. I can really see people being happy and people working through their upset, therapising themselves, people being honest to each other the whole time and just basically being like in a perpetual state of just being immensely relieved and reconciled with each other, and just in this whole world that nobody’s understanding, where everybody’s head is basically pure chaos just being the sea of madness, being like an island of serenity, growing up to becoming a sea of serenity. In comparison to the world now, which is so extremely fuelled with anger and egocentricity and alienation, and especially also in my generation where I notice so many things are not as they should be and nobody’s really truly being able to admit, so nothing is being discussed really. It’s extremely superficial. Nothing is really helping and therefore nothing changes even though we can all feel it’s really necessary.

I can see how all of this will bring about a truly beautifully transformed world. Once you get that, it’s a whole new realisation, it’s a whole new thing to fight for. It’s not about you, your life, what happens next year, what you want to eat tomorrow, what you want to be in a year, but you’re thinking about the completion of a two million year journey of the human species to a point where we get to be selfless, loving and cooperative again and live in cohesion with our instincts in a perpetual state of happiness. And that’s just… it’s a profoundly more interesting thing to live for than things I used to live for before!

So I think right now, because the transformed state is logically a 180 degree turnaround from our current world, it’s just so far away for most people from everything they’re living right now. And it can be just really confronting and quite condemning to think about yourself, your upset, and to think truthfully about all of that and about how everything worked for you in your whole life. And I’ve noticed that there’s just not a lot of people around me when I try to talk to them about this information, you can actually deal with this and have the potential to look inward. And therefore just to become truly transformed and really just help realise this information is just something I feel “I can do it!”, and because I feel like I can do it, I feel now like I have to do it.

I think it’s a bit like with Jeremy, when he said that the first moment he started to realise how big this problem actually is and the moment he started to see like, “Oh crap, I can actually think about this and think about it honestly and confront it and it doesn’t depress the hell out of me like it does with everybody else.” And then that’s when he started to realise the massive importance of the fact that he then actually had to spend his time on it because if the people who can actually confront it are not trying to confront it and deal with it, then nobody is. And that would actually mean that we don’t manage to save the world and it just dies from terminal alienation. And just because of how massive the impact can be of one person, if you spend your entire life focused on this, like you see with Jeremy, and then the fact that you actually have the potential to complete our two million year journey to enlightenment, I think it’s just a step I feel like I have to take. And then when it comes down to all of that, one of the first best things to do is opening a WTM Centre, because that actually is one of the things I could do right now that really can help. So it’s a beautiful step and I hope in the next five, 10, 20, 50 years it can be a whole lot more beautiful steps and right now it’s this one.