When people talk about colonization, the conversation usually begins with ships, borders, flags, and dates. With empires expanding, land taken, cultures suppressed, and lives destroyed. All of that matters. None of it should be minimized.
But if history is approached only at the level of events, something essential is missed.
Colonization did not begin with Europe. It did not belong to any one culture, skin color, or century. And it does not end simply because empires fall or borders change.
Colonization begins with a mentality.
A way of seeing that divides the world into self and other, owner and owned, civilized and uncivilized. Once that division feels real, domination no longer appears cruel—it appears logical. Sometimes even benevolent.
This deeper pattern is part of the broader exploration in the hub article on why the world feels so loud. What follows here is not an argument about who was right or wrong, but an examination of how the same mentality keeps resurfacing across history, regardless of who holds power.
Every Colonizer Was Once Colonized
History is filled with cycles that are easier to see in retrospect than in the moment.
Empires rise, expand, fracture, and fall. Those who dominate in one era were often subjugated in another. The Romans conquered vast territories, yet were once absorbed and reshaped by earlier powers. The Mongols colonized through force across continents, then fragmented into regions later controlled by others. Arab empires expanded across North Africa and parts of Europe, while earlier Arab tribes had themselves been shaped by domination. Indigenous empires in the Americas conquered neighboring peoples long before Europeans arrived.
Colonization, historically, is not an anomaly. It is a recurring human pattern.
What repeats is not the costume or the language, but the underlying worldview: the belief that some people exist fundamentally apart from others, and therefore can be ruled, improved, displaced, or used.
When that worldview is active, power does not need to justify itself for long. It feels natural.
When People Are Seen as Less Than Fully Human
One of the most revealing aspects of colonial history is not what was done, but how it was described.
In the journals of Christopher Columbus, Indigenous peoples were repeatedly framed as childlike, naïve, and easily controlled. In one well-known passage, he wrote that they “would make fine servants” and noted that they “have no religion,” a statement that, at the time, implicitly placed them outside full humanity.
This kind of language was not unusual. It was foundational.
Across colonial histories, those being colonized were routinely described as:
- less rational
- closer to animals
- incapable of self-governance
- in need of guidance or salvation
Once people are seen this way, domination stops feeling like violence and starts feeling like responsibility.
This pattern did not require hatred. It required distance.
Colonization as a Way of Seeing
The most enduring legacy of colonization is not borders or buildings. It is a way of perceiving reality.
At its core is a conceptual split:
- We are here.
- They are over there.
- The land is something between us, available to be claimed.
This split makes ownership seem obvious.
Land becomes property.
People become labor.
Cultures become assets.
And eventually, even the self becomes something to manage, defend, and improve.
What is rarely acknowledged is that this way of seeing is not self-evident. It is learned. And once learned, it spreads.
When the Mentality Spreads
One of the quietest and most unsettling consequences of colonization is what happens after the colonizer leaves.
The worldview often remains.
Over time, even those whose ancestors did not experience land as something that could be owned begin to speak its language. The argument becomes “give us our land back,” rather than “this land was never owned by anyone.”
That shift makes sense. It is pragmatic. It is often necessary within existing legal and political systems.
But it also reveals something deeper: the ownership lens has already taken hold.
The mentality has been inherited.
This is not a moral failure. It is a perceptual one.
Why We Can’t Go Back
In moments of cultural reckoning, there is often a longing to return to older traditions—ways of living that felt more connected, grounded, and relational.
But there is a problem that rarely gets named.
Those traditions did not arise from belief systems alone. They arose from direct perception—from experiencing land not as an object, but as relationship. From living within systems that did not conceptualize self and world as fundamentally separate.
Once perception is replaced by abstraction—maps, borders, deeds, narratives—tradition becomes symbolic rather than lived.
We can inherit the stories.
We can preserve the rituals.
We can repeat the language.
But if the way of seeing that gave rise to them is gone, what remains is a representation of something no longer directly known.
This is why returning to the past does not resolve the present.
We are no longer standing on the ground those traditions were rooted in.
We are standing on ideas about the ground.
The Ripple Effect Never Ends
Colonization does not end when flags are lowered.
It continues as:
- inherited trauma
- internalized inferiority or superiority
- chronic distrust between groups
- identity defended through opposition
And perhaps most importantly:
the same mentality reappears under new names.
Victims can later become dominators.
Liberation movements can harden into control.
Revolutions can reproduce the structures they opposed.
Because the role changed—but the worldview did not.
This Is Not About Blame
To see this pattern clearly requires something uncomfortable: setting aside the search for villains.
Blame keeps attention on characters.
Patterns require attention on structure.
Colonization, at its root, is what happens when separation feels real and fear governs identity. When the world is experienced as fragmented, domination appears as security.
This does not excuse harm.
But it explains repetition.
And explanation is the only thing that interrupts cycles.
What Changes History Isn’t a Better Narrative
History does not change because we adopt more accurate stories about the past.
It changes when the mentality that produces those stories is seen through.
Not rejected.
Not replaced.
Seen.
The same way an individual begins to suffer less when thoughts are no longer mistaken for reality, collective suffering begins to loosen when identity and separation are no longer taken as fundamental truths.
We don’t heal history by choosing better maps.
We heal it by remembering that maps were never the territory.
If this exploration resonates, Proof That You’re God looks at this same pattern from the inside out—how separation arises in thought, how identity hardens around fear, and how clarity returns when those divisions are seen for what they are. The book isn’t about fixing the world, but about recognizing the mentality that keeps recreating it.
