Serfs | Us and Them: Part Thirteen
In Part Thirteen of Us and Them, Shahid Bolsen names what most people getting this wrong call racism, and describes what it actually is. Not the overt, identifiable version — the conscious hatred of the bigot. That version exists but it is almost beside the point. The version that runs the civilization is subtler: blankness. The absence where other people's humanity should register. A people whose entire historical experience calibrated them to accept suffering as the natural state of existence — Thomas Hobbes articulated their baseline: life is nasty, brutish, and short — do not have natural emotional reflexes about pain and suffering. They wait for instruction. They wait to be told what to feel, and when, and about whom. And when they do perform compassion, it is exactly that — a performance, and like everything else in the culture, a competition. Who can out-grieve the room. Then the lion and hyena analogy: to every non-white person in that system who recognizes these pathologies in themselves — you became a product of someone else's history. A lion who cackled with the hyenas long enough to forget it could roar. Then Bolsen dissects the self-protection mechanism that seals all of this in place: the deflection, the obfuscation, the argumentativeness, the goalpost-moving. Your reflexive orientation is prosecutorial, not investigative. The evidence is not sorted by whether it is accurate but by whether it serves the defense. Then therapy — not as healing but as civilizational enforcement, a flamethrower brought to a house fire. And underneath everything: the imperative to dominate. Equality activates an anxiety that is almost intolerable. Genuine learning requires sustained humility, which requires the capacity to feel inferior to the person teaching you — a capacity this cultural operating system was specifically built to prevent. You can't even co-exist with your own spouses.
In Part Thirteen of Us and Them, Shahid Bolsen names what most people getting this wrong call racism, and describes what it actually is. Not the overt, identifiable version — the conscious hatred of the bigot. That version exists but it is almost beside the point. The version that runs the civilization is subtler: blankness. The absence where other people's humanity should register. A people whose entire historical experience calibrated them to accept suffering as the natural state of existence — Thomas Hobbes articulated their baseline: life is nasty, brutish, and short — do not have natural emotional reflexes about pain and suffering. They wait for instruction. They wait to be told what to feel, and when, and about whom. And when they do perform compassion, it is exactly that — a performance, and like everything else in the culture, a competition. Who can out-grieve the room. Then the lion and hyena analogy: to every non-white person in that system who recognizes these pathologies in themselves — you became a product of someone else's history. A lion who cackled with the hyenas long enough to forget it could roar. Then Bolsen dissects the self-protection mechanism that seals all of this in place: the deflection, the obfuscation, the argumentativeness, the goalpost-moving. Your reflexive orientation is prosecutorial, not investigative. The evidence is not sorted by whether it is accurate but by whether it serves the defense. Then therapy — not as healing but as civilizational enforcement, a flamethrower brought to a house fire. And underneath everything: the imperative to dominate. Equality activates an anxiety that is almost intolerable. Genuine learning requires sustained humility, which requires the capacity to feel inferior to the person teaching you — a capacity this cultural operating system was specifically built to prevent. You can't even co-exist with your own spouses.