In 1788, a bunch of soldiers and aristocracy from the United Kingdom escorted a bunch of convicts to Australia and set the convicts to work at being mediaeval serfs, while most of the entire bunch set themselves to work misunderstanding and murdering Australia's Indigenous people - and ignoring the invaluable knowledge those same Indigenous people had built up as they were stewards of the land for around 80,000 years (around one third of our species entire existence - and when Burke and Wills' team starved to death, to the Indigenous people it was the equivalent of non-Indigenous people seeing someone starve in aisle three of our local supermarket).
Those convicts included a fair few people who were just trying to survive, quite a few people who were genuinely criminals (their peers in the juries were not always fools), and the occassional person with progressive politics - such as Chartists, and other "rebels" against the elites' imposed, artificial "order". Some of my ancestors were shipped out from Ireland for stopping English soldiers raping their mother - which, in the twisted thinking of the time, made them "rebels".
We still have that twisted thinking, and broadly three camps:
- the elites;
- those who want to be part of the elites so much (a relative who researched my birth family's history was perversely proud of the thought of one of our ancestors riding high up on a horse, a right royal superior git, when that unesteemed ancestor was the mayor of a regional town) they will sell their souls willingly and become mediaeval slaves (that is what a serf is, in effect) of spirit and soul, and, like a kapo, do the work of their masters at enforcing social conformity (with an especial emphasis on the preservation of money and things that indicate money, even if that destroys people, places, environment, culture, etc); and
- advanced thinkers - political and social progressives, and other advanced thinkers, who are seen as existential threats by the elites' kapos, and continue to be coerced (sometimes successfully, sometimes not, sometimes successfully only temporarily) into conformity and compliance, and often have to struggle with their work from a place of disempowerment.
Whenever I've tried to analyse non-Indigenous Australia's soul, I'd made the mistake of thinking it was two camps, but it is actually three, which makes more sense for me.
