When a civilization decides to destroy or subjugate another, it first needs a theory. Not a justification — justifications are for diplomats and budget requests. A theory: something that makes the destruction feel, to those ordering it and to those paying for it, like a natural inevitability rather than a political choice.
Take, for example, Lord Cromer’s Oriental mind. Cromer was Britain’s effective ruler of Egypt from 1882 to 1907, and in 1908 he published his explanation for why Egyptians and Arabs required colonial administration: they were, he wrote, constitutionally incapable of logical reasoning. Not uneducated. Not oppressed. Biologically unfit to govern themselves.¹
Or consider the antebellum South’s Samuel Cartwright and his cruel idea of insensible nerves. Cartwright was a Louisiana physician who published a medical journal thesis in 1851 arguing that Black patients, due to thicker skin and less sensitive nerve endings, felt less pain than white patients — which meant that operating on Black patients without anesthesia could be called science rather than the torture it was. He also diagnosed Black people’s desire to escape slavery as a clinical mental disorder he named drapetomania: the disease that made enslaved people run.²
Now, Washington and its commentariat, in 2026, have a brilliant new idea: The High Iranian Pain Threshold. Bloomberg headlined it on March 4.³ Fortune magazine repeated it two months later, on May 8, 2026.⁴ So the vocabulary has been modernized to fit the new purpose. The function, however, is the same — making incessant destruction and relentless embargo feel like a response to a natural anomaly of native people rather than a political choice to break a people’s desire for freedom and force a civilization into total subjugation.
This essay argues that The High Iranian Pain Threshold is not a neutral analytical tool but a racial doctrine with a documented history, a recognizable function, and a known destination. It tests that claim against comparable cases — Ukraine, Israel — and finds the framing deployed exclusively where race provides the cover that political expediency requires. And it traces the operational logic the doctrine produces: a self-perpetuating cycle in which the failure of coercion to dominate becomes the justification for more coercion, with no stopping point short of a people’s physical elimination or total cultural and spiritual surrender.
The roots of this doctrine are not rhetorical. They are clinical. A 2016 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that half of white medical students and residents in the United States held false beliefs about biological differences between Black and white patients — including the belief — strikingly unchanged from what Cartwright published in 1851 — that Black skin is thicker and Black nerve endings less sensitive. Doctors who held these beliefs rated their Black patients’ pain as lower and prescribed less medication accordingly.⁵ The New England Journal of Medicine traced this directly to 19th-century slaveowner ideology — not as a historical footnote, but as a belief still operating in American hospitals.⁶ The American Medical Association’s own Journal of Ethics found that these misconceptions contributed directly to the systematic undertreatment of Black and Hispanic patients — a gap documented across twenty years of clinical data showing Black patients 22% less likely than white patients to receive any pain medication at all.⁷ The science of whose pain counts is not a new science. It is a very old one.
When a population endures sanctions, bombardment, 67% annual inflation, a currency that has lost 60% of its value, and cancer patients who cannot access chemotherapy — and still does not produce the political outcome Washington ordered — the commentary class does not ask what that resistance means politically. Rather, it masks the heroism of resistance by asking what it reveals biologically. The failure to break a body becomes proof of a different kind of body. A body that absorbs what others could not is not testament to a people’s commitment to determine their own fate, but an ailment that needs more pain and suffering.
The selectivity is not subtle. Ukraine has been under sustained Russian bombardment since February 2022 — cities reduced to rubble, eight million people displaced, civilian infrastructure systematically destroyed. The vocabulary deployed by the same commentary class has been: heroism, defiance, the will of a people. No analyst has proposed that Kyiv’s continued resistance reflects a biological quirk of the Slavic nervous system. The suffering was legible. It produced empathy, weapons shipments, and refugee resettlement programs. When Israel absorbed the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023 — a single day of violence, catastrophic and deliberate — the international response was immediate: trauma, grief, the unbearable weight of loss. No one reached for a pain threshold. No one suggested Israelis had an unusually high tolerance for suffering that explained their government’s continued prosecution of the war. The suffering was, again, legible. The same commentators who find Iranian endurance biologically remarkable find Ukrainian and Israeli endurance politically comprehensible. The difference is not methodological. It is racial wrapped in dehumanizing narrative.
The deeper problem is not what the argument gets wrong. It is where the argument goes. If a population can absorb more pressure, the logic demands that more be applied. If they absorb that too, the logic demands more still. The argument turns the failure of coercion to dominate into a reason for more coercion — a closed loop with only one way out: either the people are physically destroyed, or their civilization is broken so completely that it stops resisting. A population framed as pre-rational and impervious to pain cannot be negotiated with or appeased. It can only be silenced. This is not a distortion of the pain threshold argument. It is its logical conclusion. The “pacification” campaigns waged against Native American and colonized populations throughout the 19th and 20th centuries were built on the same foundation: peoples whose suffering did not register, and whose elimination was framed not as atrocity but as the inevitable outcome of their “pathological” refusal to yield.
Both destinations — physical annihilation and total cultural capitulation — are, within this logic, equally acceptable. One silences the body. The other silences the civilization. The threshold thesis licenses either, and remains indifferent to which arrives first.
Footnotes
¹ Lord Cromer (Evelyn Baring), Modern Egypt, Macmillan, 1908.
² Samuel A. Cartwright, “Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal, 1851.
³ “Iran Strikes: Tehran Tests Pain Threshold in Survival Battle With US and Israel,” Bloomberg, March 4, 2026.
⁴ “Iran may have a higher tolerance for economic pain — but the pain is excruciating,” Fortune, May 8, 2026.
⁵ Hoffman, K.M., Trawalter, S., Axt, J.R., Oliver, M.N., “Racial bias in pain assessment and treatment recommendations, and false beliefs about biological differences between blacks and whites,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(16), 2016.
⁶ Ordiway, T., “Taking Black Pain Seriously,” New England Journal of Medicine, 383(20), 2020. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMpv2024759.
⁷ “Pain and Ethnicity,” AMA Journal of Ethics, 15(5), May 2013; Meghani, S.H., Byun, E., Gallagher, R.M., “Time to Take Stock: A Meta-Analysis and Systematic Review of Analgesic Treatment Disparities for Pain in the United States,” Pain Medicine, 13(2), 2012, pp. 150–174.