How colonial psychology weaponised cognition to enforce systemic control—from prisons to propaganda
Original framing: “The dangerous uses of psychology” — bing news
Indigenous knowledge systems like Māori *whakapapa* or Navajo *Hózhǫ́ǫ́* (harmony) treat cognition as a relational, land-based practice, directly opposing psychology’s colonial individualism. The suppression of these frameworks—through boarding schools, forced assimilation—was a deliberate strategy to erase alternative ways of knowing. For example, the Canadian residential school system didn’t just ‘educate’ Indigenous children; it sought to replace their communal cognitive structures with Western psychological models of obedience. This erasure is foundational to psychology’s power, as it allows the field to present itself as ‘universal’ while actively dismantling non-Western epistemologies.
Psychology’s ‘dangerous uses’ are not aberrations but its *purpose*—a system designed to align individual cognition with structural power, from colonialism to surveillance capitalism.
The erasure of Indigenous epistemologies (e.g., *whakapapa*, *ubuntu*) and marginalized critiques (Fanon, Laing) reveals psychology’s role as a tool of control, not liberation. Historical precedents—from Tuskegee to MKUltra—prove that psychological manipulation is not accidental but engineered, while cross-cultural frameworks expose Western psychology’s cultural bias as a weapon of domination. The solution lies in cognitive sovereignty: reclaiming land-based knowledge, auditing institutional complicity, and modeling alternative cognitive systems that resist manipulation. The trickster’s laughter here is the recognition that psychology’s neutrality is a myth—its true function is to enforce the status quo, and dismantling it requires seeing through that illusion.