In Part Thirteen of Us and Them, Shahid Bolsen argues that what many people casually label as racism is often something deeper and more pervasive. He is not primarily concerned with the obvious form—the conscious prejudice of an openly racist individual. While that type certainly exists, he suggests it is not what most powerfully shapes civilization. The more influential force is something quieter: a kind of emotional absence, a void where recognition of another person's humanity should naturally occur.
Bolsen contends that a society whose historical experience conditioned it to view suffering as an unavoidable feature of life—captured in Thomas Hobbes' description of existence as "nasty, brutish, and short"—developed a limited emotional response to the pain of others. Rather than reacting instinctively, people often wait for cues about what they should feel, when they should feel it, and toward whom those feelings should be directed. Compassion, in this framework, can become performative, transformed into a social contest in which individuals compete to display the greatest grief or concern.
He then introduces the metaphor of the lion and the hyenas. For non-white individuals who recognize these patterns within themselves, Bolsen suggests they have, in part, become products of someone else's historical conditioning—a lion that spent so much time cackling with hyenas that it forgot it was capable of roaring.
The discussion then turns to the mechanisms that protect these assumptions from scrutiny. Bolsen describes habits of deflection, obfuscation, endless argumentation, and moving the goalposts. In his view, many people approach difficult conversations not as investigators seeking truth but as prosecutors constructing a defense. Evidence is evaluated less by its accuracy than by whether it supports a predetermined position.
From there, he critiques modern therapeutic culture, portraying it not as a vehicle for healing but as a system that reinforces existing norms. Rather than addressing root causes, it can function like bringing a flamethrower to a house fire—an excessive response that often intensifies the problem.
Underlying all of these dynamics, Bolsen identifies a central drive: the need to dominate. Equality itself can provoke profound discomfort because genuine learning requires humility. To learn from another person, one must temporarily accept that they possess knowledge or understanding one lacks. According to Bolsen, the cultural operating system he is describing was specifically designed to resist that experience. The result is a civilization that struggles not only to coexist with others, but even to reconcile its own internal contradictions.
