cathedral
Chapter 1

1. IN THE BEGINNING there was Justice in the world. 2. The world was like a garden, and it was full of people who were warring and enslaving, raping and conquering, murdering and killing, and committing of genocides and ruling of empires. This was Just because they were as equals, none with power over any other. Any power they could acquire was not systemic and could not last long, for each was as ignorant as every other. This was the Garden of Even, where all had the same amount of power.

3. Everyone in the world was at peace, amidst their warring, and all the rest, as their cultures rose, interacted, and fell, and the many diverse peoples of the world were happy. The Garden of Even, they saw, was inclusive and full of Justice, and they were content. 4. Their contentment included many strifes and conflicts, and every manner of woe and misery, but each culture saw each other as they were: equal and, most importantly, not oppressed. 5. The diverse cultures of the world in the Garden of Even were happy and content amidst their raping, their killing, and their enslaving because oppression they knew not. 6. "The world is difficult, and our neighbors want to take our lives and rape our women, but we are content! We are not oppressed!" they cried unto a Heaven they still believed in.

7. Among the diverse cultures of the world within the Garden of Even, there was one as prone to warring and enslaving, raping and conquering, murdering and killing, and committing of genocides and ruling of empires as all the rest, and this culture had remained mostly an unnoticed people in a northern clime just east of the sea they believed divided the world in two. 8. This culture, and its people, called themselves the Europeans, and due to the earliest injustices of history, they believed themselves mostly Christian. 9. Much like the others, their culture saw spreading their culture — Christendom — as the justification for their warring and enslaving, raping and conquering, murdering and killing, and committing of genocides and ruling of empires, and they were, in that way, at home in the Garden of Even.

10. The Europeans were not as were the other cultures in the Garden of Even, however, for they were curious. Their curiosity was so great that they looked back into history, and, idolizing the cultures in which their Christianity had been established, looked to recover the ancient knowledges they had previously burned. 11. It was in this way that the memory of the Greek culture, one great but laid low by the ravages of history under the rule of Justice, was revived for the Europeans, and it came upon them like a tempting serpent, whispering to them from within the branches of the Tree of the Renaissance, telling them a story from their own distant past. 12. "Do you not know that ye are free? Dost thou not realize the message of thy Magna Carta? Have thee forgotten there is a power called knowledge is in the world, which has been hidden from thee," it said unto them. "Look to this world and use your freedom and reason, and you will remember much that has been forgotten."

13. Tempted by this whisper, the Europeans looked, and they saw much that had been forgotten. "Yea," said they, "this is good. We are remembering much that has been forgotten and more that has been withheld from us." 14. "Yes, that is so," said the serpent of the Renaissance, "for this knowledge was thy birthright and was taken from thee by others and, in their downfall, has been rescued by thee. It is thus for thee. Study it, learn from it, and ye shall grow more powerful than any other culture." 15. And the Europeans took this fruit of knowledge from the Tree of the Renaissance and gathered the seeds of methodological rigor from it, and in that moment disobeyed Justice, for they would not long remain as ignorant as the other diverse cultures of the world.

Chapter 2

1. The Europeans, looking upon the temptations of the serpent in the Tree of the Renaissance, were moved, and they were tempted to pursue this knowledge that had been at one time self-removed from themselves, and they were intrigued. At that time, questions they had believed unaskable began to be asked, people were being set to flame for asking them for the sin of hegemony had already entered unto their people, and many true knowledges were being discovered in the despite. 2. From this pride, new social constructions destined to become hegemonic entered the world, and new strife arose among the European people as their culture grew. For the first time since the Beginning, there was injustice in the world, and Europeans could no longer remain in the Garden. All, at that time, was no longer Even.

3. The Europeans, in learning about the world, grew discontented with the Justice of the world and, in their pride and lust for power-knowledge, forsook the Garden, disclaiming it as barbarous and without culture. From that moment forward, they alone had culture, and culture became that which was reserved for the most important amongst them and no others. Injustice for the first time entered the world. 4. Thus, in their knowledge and their pride, they brought hegemony into the world, and they left the Garden of Even of their own accord and yet sought to make its entire expanse their own. 5. They had forgotten Justice, and sought to rule the world and render its diverse cultures like unto themselves, for the wages of hegemonic power are cultural fragility.

6. "With this knowledge we can acquire," they nevertheless said unto themselves, "we can advance our arts of warring and enslaving, raping and conquering, murdering and killing, and committing of genocides and ruling of empires. We shall wage war unlike any upon this Earth and enslave the rest. We will rape and conquer lands and their women, and we shall murder and kill any who oppose us. Genocides we shall commit, and empires we shall rule!" 7. Such was their pride that this was their declaration, and so began the European project of colonialism, the first systemic oppression to enter unto the world. 8. "All of the Garden shall thus be ours, and our culture shall be The Culture! Under our rule, we can do better than Even!" they declared as they set about establishing their dominance. "We will civilize all the rest of the world with our culture, the culture of our aristocracy," they declared as they marched forth in roughly the same kind of war that the diverse cultures of the world always had before.

9. In this way as Cain did become the European nations, and as Abel the remainder of Even and all the diversity of the world, and with their ships and their steel, their fire and their cannons, and their stolen wealth and their wretched disease did the Europeans set to subjugating the Earth to "civilize" it with their culture, which they just called "culture," forgetting the diversity of the world in their pride. And, as was their wont, just as Cain did slay Abel in the field with a stone, the European empires grew and subjugated the world. 10. In this way, systemic oppression spread throughout the world at the point of their swords and by their infected blankets, and the diverse cultures of the world for the first time knew subjugation, which no other culture before had ever been competent enough to make systemic. 11. For this evil and by it the Europeans were themselves also afflicted, for as they wrought upon others, they wrought upon themselves, and poverty and lack, hatred and malice, racism and misogyny followed them in their wake, and the Europeans could not themselves escape them, for all their culture and their growing knowledge.

12. Time in this way wore on, and the domination of the Europeans was unmatched by any culture of the world. This is because they had taken upon themselves the mantle of systemic power, called knowledge, and with it they could lay low any who opposed them with the power it granted them. For them, the world was less mysterious, and this was a great injustice. 13. So it came to pass that at this time, their warring and enslaving, raping and conquering, murdering and killing, and committing of genocides and ruling of empires became systemic, and none could oppose them. This change, however, did nothing to temper their lust for knowledge and the power it provided them. In their depravity, they wanted to know ever more, and so they continued to study.

Chapter 3

1. As they grew in knowledge, the Europeans forsook the many other knowledges of the world, including much of what they had called their own, and they decried it as ignorant and bereft of culture. "We alone have knowledge, and we alone have culture," they declared, and in their pride, they believed it. "Culture is what we aspire to and reserve for our most elite," they spake unto themselves, and they believed this also. 2. "We must bring our culture and our knowledge to the world, for we are the bearers of philosophy and of science," they declared. With this philosophy and this science, they knew themselves as one culture that was no longer ignorant, and Justice was forced to flee and fall before them wherever they went. 3. The Garden of Even was nearly subdued as they went forth, destroying all those in the world who warred and enslaved, raped and conquered, murdered and killed, and committed genocides and ruled over empires in relative ignorance and Just contentedness until that time. With their philosophy and their science, the Europeans became colonizers and by taking slaves they became masters, and so the world was subdued by disease, by force, and by the curse of understanding physical laws.

4. In this way, injustice spread for the first time fully throughout the world. Some lands were conquered and stolen, and injustice so entered unto them. At other times lands were colonized and corrupted with European law and its mocking imitation of Justice, and so injustice so entered them. In some times lands were left untouched except for the seduction of the knowledge of the Europeans, and so injustice also entered even these. 5. The mark of knowledge became the color white upon the skin, the virility of great men and their turgid white penises, and the very name "Western," which the world learned to covet as the West slowly spread its depravity from one culture to another. 6. "We alone are cultured, and you are uncultured, so it is for your own good," they said to all those they conquered, whether by death, by force, or by the subtle seduction of knowing what they were talking about and getting results. 7. Systemic oppression thus became the norm of the world, replacing the warring and enslaving, raping and conquering, murdering and killing, and committing of genocides and ruling of empires that previously was Just, and its mark was ever after to be that of the white, Western man.

8. In their great pride, the white, Western man arose alone amongst the many diverse peoples of the world and declared himself the default man. "It is natural that we rule you all, you primitive screwheads," they declared unto all the world, "for we alone are cultured, and you are uncultured; we alone have knowledge, and you are all ignorant; we carry boomsticks, and you have naught that can resist them; and it is in the greatness of our whiteness and our very masculine penises that we rule over you for your own good. Your women we will not honor, but they will we also not deny, for they are hot enough for the needs of our loins, and we do not even honor our own women," and so misogyny and rape culture, and racism and misogynoir became the hegemonic standards of the world. 9. "It is for your own good that you all bow to our superiority," they declared, and in so doing, they established the white, Western male as the one right and proper dominant power of the world and so oppressed everyone else with their knowledge, of which they were proud, and their rapacious virility, which they only pretended to suppress in their claim to a higher and more noble culture. 10. In this way, and through his judgments, the systemic oppressions of racism, sexism, misogyny, ableism, and Eurocentrism dominated the world and gained hegemony through the high culture of white, Western men, and Justice retreated and was lost to the Fall for what seemed to be for-ever.

11. And in his pride and in his arrogance, the white, Western male did declare his own superiority natural and thus did conceal it from himself. 12. "Look at all I know," he spake unto himself, echoing the voice of the serpent, "of course it is because I am superior. It is because I alone have remembered what was forgotten, that there be truth in the world and men can be free to find it." And so his vanity grew, and he used this claim upon his own superiority to make law and to call it just, to claim lands as his own and to call this just, to declare what is and is not so about the world and to call this "truth," so that he might name reliance upon his own knowledge, and no other, just. 13. And so Justice was completely deposed from the world and replaced with the hegemonies of white, Western man, which are but an idol called "justice" in the vanity of domination. Then, with his Rule of Law and objective standards did he remove Justice from the world except in its most remote, least touched corners, where he could not yet conquer. 14. This, the white, Western man did look upon and call just and right, noble and cultured, reasonable and sensible, and rooted in the best science of the day, and he forwent his ability to believe that he might be wrong because that might cost him his power. His own dominance, he did then internalize, and with it he conquered and enslaved the world. 15. Justice, he believed to his own satisfaction, was not to be found in the world again, for it had been, under his domination, "civilized."
An American-born author, mathematician, and political commentator, Dr. James Lindsay has written six books spanning a range of subjects including religion, the philosophy of science and postmodern theory. He is the co-founder of New Discourses and currently promoting his new book "How to have impossible conversations".