“The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.”
George Orwell
Let’s go back some hundred years. Two global wars and numerous uprisings all over the world, paved a way for change in the 20th and continuing to the 21st century. Colonialism was losing its charm, and there was a new currency in the market, it was called "freedom", and yet nothing really changed. Colonialism only found a back door entry into the countries that were pillaged for the past 400 years. With the leaps in Science, a new tool was now accessible to a select few. Now, you need not kill or torture people to follow and subvert, this new tool did the trick without any of that. Experiments in behaviour modification were not only done by the likes of Hitler, but also by many other colonial powers- long before Hitler’s ideas came to light. Now, the idea was to enforce it within their own states, to have an obedient populace. England was the first country which was "colonized" in the new sense of the term. Now it meant to modify behaviour, in order to domesticate people, animals and agriculture. This was a slow transition that British people gracefully went through. Media; then it be radio, later television were blasting out information each day, which cemented a colonial mindset within the population. The divide between the rich and the poor was increasing, and yet suddenly people did not seem to complain. Then came the domestication of agricultural land; the monocrops, flattening of forestland, big corporations, hybrid seeds and supermarkets. All this destroyed the industrious people who once knew how to grow their own crop. Land was unevenly distributed, with big corporations, multinational companies, upper class and lords owning large agricultural fields. It is no wonder that George Orwell envisioned a dystopian future for Britain - the country in his novel "1984" was highly based on obedience, surveillance and subverted thoughts, even language was distorted which he aptly mentioned as "double-speak". All of that is true for today's Britain.
The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
George Orwell
Then emerged a new super power from the ashes of two brutal wars. A country which itself had snatched and grabbed most of the native land by cunning treaties, genocides and straightforward lies and deception. Now America was the new colonial powerhouse of the world and it wanted to show its power. Meanwhile, technology had taken a huge leap into the future, but luckily the knowledge was still secretive and had its mouth and ears spread to only a handful of institutions. Psychology was merged with behavioural studies and a perfect mixture was created. One that did not need years upon years of beating and swearing. It did not require malnourishing the slaves, instead the slaves wanted this slavery. It was just through a simple technique of behaviour modification. Radios, television advertisements sold a capitalist dream en masse; it also sold the idea of superpower nations and third-world countries. It sold the might of the colonial powers as beacons of hope for the poorer nations. The collective forces which fought the world wars were now in a position to push their agendas, very silently, onto the rest of the world. How?
You guessed it, through treatises and organisations. They were now able to deprive progress of countries that were defiant by pushing embargos on them. Corporations were gaining much more power and they were lobbying the government to gain more capital. Corporate bosses were getting more powerful, even more powerful than the Presidents. They swayed the President elect and held the funds needed for political campaigns. Thus, puppet governments were put in many South American and African countries. Wars were raged against the middle-east for oil. Deals and laws were passed through a legal system that made African and South-American countries open for mineral and labour exploitation while destroying their culture, one step at a time. Nothing had changed and yet people felt that they were free, because they voted in governments. It was this illusion of freedom that was manufactured by those behaviour modification tools. Corporates created billionaires which formed a handful of people who now run our world. They control everything, our food, land, money, future agendas, power, even our health. Try to search for this information and it will be marked under conspiracy theory. Populations were yet again divided into this infighting on whether it is a conspiracy or not.
Now, it was only some 200 years in which entire societies were stripped away from their status as dignified human beings, Gods creating and experiencing their own unique experiences, and anthropologists made a great effort to put every society who acted differently than the west as "primitive", "unintelligible". Now, everything rested in the hands of these powerful people who managed and shaped each person's experience. People, all around the world, were ingenious. They had all the tools and materials that sustained them. Interdependent societies were collapsing in each direction and there were hundreds if not thousands of them spread all over. Tribes living in the hills of Peru or the tribes living in the crevasses of Himalayas were growing their own food and building their own houses in the most environmentally-friendly way; long before the Spanish, English, Swiss and Americans arrived on the scene to teach them the right way of doing things; telling them how their ancestral methods were wrong.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
George Orwell
So what is this colonial mindset and is it only the British? Absolutely not. The commoners living on the British Isles were amongst the first people to face this monster. Paul Kingsnorth writes a great deal about this. The people did revolt but all these revolts were brought down and these memories were wiped out from history books. The main issue with this colonialist mindset is that it negates every other advances in the parts of the world which it calls "primitive". It also negates its own pagan and native past - filled with magic, witchcraft and spirits - which it overcame by driving the "others" out to extinction. The colonial mindset is an animalesque mindset. It is always fighting for dignity and superiority. It carries within it anger, fear, hatred, jealousy, animosity against anymore who doesn't look, dress or think like them. Colonial mindset thrives on ideological victories. A "colonial" will hate and go against anyone who puts out ideas that speak of love, affection and freedom. It demands power, material power.
On the other hand, the natives of each land, the tribes, the many different kinds of people who were dispersed throughout the islands inhabiting Mother Earth, were not at all stupid and ignorant as they are often painted. The colonialists made the whole world believe - through education - that the Africans were savages, primitive, animalesque; the Aborigines were wanderers who spoke an Alien tongue, who did not understand the concept of ownership; that the South-American indigenous tribes were cannibals, so on and so forth. But, these very people were living the most spiritual lives. They were imagining a world into being. They were respectful of nature and they did not consider nature as something that needs control. They let nature do its own thing, while taking only as much as they needed from her. In India the colonial mindset wasn’t imported from the British, it had its own social structure brought in by the Aryans which created a caste system that was and is no less colonial in its mindset.
“We are living in a world in which nobody is free, in which hardly anybody is secure, in which it is almost impossible to be honest and to remain alive.”
George Orwell
It’s no wonder then that all these tribes living in every part of the world finds itself totally lost. They have lost their language, their culture, their jungles, their dream time. None of the ideas that this colonial mindset sets makes any sense to them, but having no other way to sustain their old world, they are given into the cheapest drug - Alcohol. Today, aborigines, American Indians, Kaatkaris and Adivasis in India and South American tribes are considered useless and a bunch of drunkards while completely ignoring the fact that it is because this colonial mindset does not understand their way of their life, which was deeply rooted in nature.
But here’s the thing, nature knows how to rebuild that which it has destroyed. Humans are nature. Humans are a part of this ecosystem that is currently going through a prolonged period of disturbance. The tribal intellect will hold much more value in the years to come, because in many parts of the world they are still connected to nature. They see, feel and sense the nature around them, unlike the colonised mind. Nature loves balancing things out.
What does a rain tree do all its life?
Breathe in and out. It doesn’t like to complicate things. Humans complicate things and the colonial mindset has over-complicated these things.
Aldous Huxley, after writing dystopian books himself, was absolutely sure about this tribal brain making a lasting impact. He wrote about a place called Savage Reservation in A Brave New World and a forbidden island in the Island. In both these plots, the ancestral mind which was connected with nature, lasted all the impacts of this colonial-mechanistic-egotistic societies. Huxley did not shy away from stating the importance of nature throughout his work.
“We shall be permitted to live on this planet only for as long as we treat all nature with compassion and intelligence.”
Aldous Huxley
So, if at the end of this essay you feel like there is anything that you could do, it is this, leave for a walk. No, I am serious..
Notice things that are always around you, but you have totally forgotten.
Remind yourself of who you are.
No one owns this land. It is nature who controls it.
Try to connect with the ancestral mind.
Rise up early for sunrises. Stay late after sunsets.
Stay away from your phones and all other devices whenever you can.
See the nakedness within yourself.
Leave the madness of this world for long enough and you will remember that none of that really matters.
The colonial mind can only control you as long as you let it control you. So, if you want to be free, realise this, the choice is and was always up to you…
Write down your realisations and thoughts in the comments below. I would like to hear your nature stories. Lets keep this conversation going.
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