Disabled | Us and Them: Part Nine
In Part Nine of Us and Them, Shahid Bolsen delivers the most direct diagnosis of the lecture. You can be oppressed and still have the colonizer's mind. You can be marginalized, discriminated against, locked out of upward mobility, anti-capitalist, anti-establishment, revolutionary in your self-description — and none of it matters, because the vehicle is disabled. Changing your political lane doesn't move a car with no engine. The West planned ahead. First it gave you the wrong road, and then — knowing you would eventually figure out it wasn't going anywhere — it slashed your tires, cut your wires, drained your battery, and locked your doors. So now it doesn't matter whether you know you've been lied to. Knowing you were punched in the face is not a profound insight. The question is whether you have the cognitive tools to understand why, and what to do. And the answer, for most people inside that system, is no. Then Bolsen turns to the values — democracy, liberty, rule of law — and does what almost no one does: interrogates them as concepts, not just as hypocrisies. Not merely that the West doesn't practice these values, but that the values themselves are vague, contradictory, metaphysically ungrounded, and unserious as a framework for organizing human life. The decolonial thinkers who came before got halfway there and stopped — they dug out the Western power structure but kept the Western foundations. Those foundations have to come out too. And for Muslims who have absorbed these values as self-evidently superior to what their own tradition offers — that is not moderation. That is the damage talking.
In Part Nine of Us and Them, Shahid Bolsen delivers the most direct diagnosis of the lecture. You can be oppressed and still have the colonizer's mind. You can be marginalized, discriminated against, locked out of upward mobility, anti-capitalist, anti-establishment, revolutionary in your self-description — and none of it matters, because the vehicle is disabled. Changing your political lane doesn't move a car with no engine. The West planned ahead. First it gave you the wrong road, and then — knowing you would eventually figure out it wasn't going anywhere — it slashed your tires, cut your wires, drained your battery, and locked your doors. So now it doesn't matter whether you know you've been lied to. Knowing you were punched in the face is not a profound insight. The question is whether you have the cognitive tools to understand why, and what to do. And the answer, for most people inside that system, is no. Then Bolsen turns to the values — democracy, liberty, rule of law — and does what almost no one does: interrogates them as concepts, not just as hypocrisies. Not merely that the West doesn't practice these values, but that the values themselves are vague, contradictory, metaphysically ungrounded, and unserious as a framework for organizing human life. The decolonial thinkers who came before got halfway there and stopped — they dug out the Western power structure but kept the Western foundations. Those foundations have to come out too. And for Muslims who have absorbed these values as self-evidently superior to what their own tradition offers — that is not moderation. That is the damage talking.