Predators | Us and Them: Part Twelve
In Part Twelve of Us and Them, Shahid Bolsen continues the direct address to so-called white people and extends the philosophical diagnosis into the structural pathologies of the civilization — the ones that produce the behavior without requiring conscious cruelty. The materialist framework cannot perceive moral causation — not because it lacks intelligence, but because the framework was built to filter it out before it reaches the conscious mind. The person who warns of consequences looks naive. The person who insists on principle regardless of outcome looks impractical. The person who says right and wrong are real, objective, external forces looks like an extremist. You are not failing to see. You were built not to. Then Bolsen turns to short-termism — not as a policy failure but as a cultural inheritance. Four-year political cycles, quarterly corporate reports, minute-by-minute social media. Every institution optimized for the shortest possible time horizon because short horizons are more profitable and easier to manipulate. This is the survival mentality of medieval European poverty — nothing to hunt tomorrow, half the children won't survive, plan for grandchildren you say? — calcified into institutional architecture and called economic rationality. Contrast it with the Islamic waqf, built explicitly to serve generations not yet born. Then the disconnection from consequence — the operating principle of your entire economy: internalize the profit, externalize the damage. Keep the gains, have someone else absorb the loss. There is a word for consuming resources that belong to others without their consent. Between individuals you call it theft. Between generations you call it economic policy. Then zero-sum thinking — every gain by someone else is your loss, every interaction a competition, every situation reducible to winning or losing — the logic of a predator that works if you are a jackal but is catastrophic for a civilization trying to navigate a complex world. And finally, the universalization: your particular experience of the world presented as the universal experience of all people everywhere. Your corruption as a law of human nature. Your dysfunction as the human condition. You cannot conceive that you are a marginal side story in human history. You can never read the room unless it is a house of mirrors.
In Part Twelve of Us and Them, Shahid Bolsen continues the direct address to so-called white people and extends the philosophical diagnosis into the structural pathologies of the civilization — the ones that produce the behavior without requiring conscious cruelty. The materialist framework cannot perceive moral causation — not because it lacks intelligence, but because the framework was built to filter it out before it reaches the conscious mind. The person who warns of consequences looks naive. The person who insists on principle regardless of outcome looks impractical. The person who says right and wrong are real, objective, external forces looks like an extremist. You are not failing to see. You were built not to. Then Bolsen turns to short-termism — not as a policy failure but as a cultural inheritance. Four-year political cycles, quarterly corporate reports, minute-by-minute social media. Every institution optimized for the shortest possible time horizon because short horizons are more profitable and easier to manipulate. This is the survival mentality of medieval European poverty — nothing to hunt tomorrow, half the children won't survive, plan for grandchildren you say? — calcified into institutional architecture and called economic rationality. Contrast it with the Islamic waqf, built explicitly to serve generations not yet born. Then the disconnection from consequence — the operating principle of your entire economy: internalize the profit, externalize the damage. Keep the gains, have someone else absorb the loss. There is a word for consuming resources that belong to others without their consent. Between individuals you call it theft. Between generations you call it economic policy. Then zero-sum thinking — every gain by someone else is your loss, every interaction a competition, every situation reducible to winning or losing — the logic of a predator that works if you are a jackal but is catastrophic for a civilization trying to navigate a complex world. And finally, the universalization: your particular experience of the world presented as the universal experience of all people everywhere. Your corruption as a law of human nature. Your dysfunction as the human condition. You cannot conceive that you are a marginal side story in human history. You can never read the room unless it is a house of mirrors.