Science pits this faith against fact. Accepting science (in the colonial worldview) is not believing truth: on the contrary, it is being unfaithful, questioning Authority. It is disbelieving Truth. When truth lives for a person as faith, facts that violate religious materialism can't coexist with faith, they must displace it, leaving one unfaithful, an unbeliever. This is a horrible, traumatic experience to one living in the world of colonialism, even today. This conflict has upset Europeans for centuries, at least since Pythagoras, and especially Galileo, who demonstrated facts that made Truth a lie. They soon put a stop to that. Well, they tried.
Colonial education is indoctrination. I and my Nigerian classmates wrote down exactly what the missionaries said, and were tested on how well we memorized it. I was interested to discover that Sani Abacha, perhaps the worst of a succession of corrupt dictators since the sixties, attended that same school a couple of years after I had returned home to "the States." I wonder if he was one of the little kids I saw there. I wonder if he saw me. We were both part of a deeply abusive indoctrination system. I hope I got free; it did take years of recovery. "Recovery" is the part where you're paying it forward. You pay something forward, whether it's recovery or abuse. I only had to endure it for a year.
In the colonial worldview, education seems like confusion and corruption, not enlightenment. Dissolution, not resolution. In the Indigenous worldview, colonials seem unfeeling, emotionless, psychopathic. Not to put too fine a point on it, genocidal. I think that will turn out to have been true, and not just an interpretation, if we evolve past this deadlock. Mazin Qumsiyeh has pointed out that the colonial worldview has a much smaller population. I see my ancestral worldview as a mass mental illness, brought about by some unimaginable trauma, like moving to Vermont in the spring, completely unprepared for what happens three months later.
Encountering people living outside one's world(view) is like meeting ET. There can be no comprehension, much less affinity. The brain constructs what reality it can from what it already has in memory. The startle response kicks in. The results, as we know, after thousands of years of bloodshed, are usually catastrophic (unless a four-year-old Drew Barrymore meets the creature first. But that was in the movies).
However, every inside must have an outside. The trick is to know you're inside something. To a chick, there is no outside until a crack appears in the eggshell. But after that there is no returning to its singular existence. Robin Williams used to say people just want to find Out.
Humans do not stay the same, we evolve. Long ago, evolution consisted of filtering out individuals that could not withstand conditions. Crocodiles and Coelacanths and jellyfish lasted a very long time. But as Professor Pollack points out, we have long overridden natural selection. We took over the controls by sheer numbers, crudely but so effectively that we have brought the Sixth Great Extinction. Colonials, typically, call this "Dominion." If a bear seized us by the leg and was dragging us off, the last our friends heard would be: "I caught a bear!" Dominion, indeed. How'd we survive this long? Especially when sex has been so despised and disrespected all this time? Does this add up, somehow? Not in any arithmetic I've seen.
Is it our political upheaval so surprising, then, given our apparent blindness to the fact that our brains construct reality in myriad variations, each appearing so seamless and self-consistent as to account for all experience, in total disregard for actuality? Of course not. But our automatic (colonial-worldview-consistent) assumption is that we were "meant to be" this way. Intelligently Designed. What exists for us is assumed to be purposeful, evidence for our vengeful, three-headed god.
Fortunately, we still evolve, but now we evolve by cultural evolution. So with a lot of luck, we may live to see, and be able to see, this delusion resolved by the overwhelming obviousness now arising as billions of us see each other face to face in the new medium of interactive videoconferencing. It's the size of it that holds real possibility of a collective awakening. This is going on now, at an unprecedented scale, in the billions. Nobody knows how that will change our brains, but we know that it is, and we know it will.
We don't know what it will be like, to have our worldview suddenly shown to be incomplete, just one possible world among many. But it will not be the first such transformation of experience. We may not even notice, such is the brain's plasticity. The cracks in that seamless eggshell have already appeared. There isn't anything to do about this, and nothing we can do, to accelerate it or slow it down, if we don't drop the Big One. But it may help to accept it. The alternatives may be extremely painful. People are not doing this, the most we can do is to be.
Harmony with the universe is not really something we could have avoided for long, and we've certainly made a good run at it. It's more like we have been insane, and the question is whether our mental illness is terminal, or not. It looks like we're about to get that answered.
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