To value wisdom for liberation
What this value means to me:
- Reading is resistance. If empires wanted us to read well, we would have by now. To value wisdom is to recognise that in the age of the internet, the blueprints for our collective liberation are hanging out in plain sight.[1]
Ismatu Gwendolyn: "Your relationship with reading is fucked up because burning books is a bad look. The empire utilizes overt, violent oppression like that as a last resort, because it makes it near impossible to seamlessly convince people they are not oppressed. And to hide an empire like this? Of this size? People need to not know. The far easier route: traumatize the kids. Make them hate reading. Tie plenty of guilt, shame, and fear in the process of returning to reading in adulthood. Make them feel like it’s an innate talent— you have it or you don’t— rather than a skill you need to learn, hone, and practice. You never have to burn the books if no one ever wants to read them in the first place. And this means you can allow texts that chronicle blueprints for our collective liberation to hang out in plain sight. The internet age is the most collective access to information we have ever had as humans in every iteration of our timeline— and most of us cannot read it well enough to allow it to change our lives." See Ismatu Gwendolyn, you’ve been traumatized into hating reading and it makes you easier to oppress, 16 February 2024 https://ismatu.substack.com/p/youve-been-traumatized-into-hating ↩︎
