Tara Westover’s memoir, Educated, grabs me hard because her story resonates so deeply with mine. So today I use both of our stories to explore mental abuse or epistemic abuse—attacking the mind of another, trying to control how and what they think. It’s key to authoritarianism. And we explore the 2000-year-old form of authoritarianism in Western history and how it rests on a religious idea that took hold as Rome was crumbling. The fixes we need today run even deeper than education because the academy too is rooted in authoritarian patterns, as Indigenous thinkers such as Daniel Wildcat (Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma) and Ilarion Merculieff (Unangan) remind us. We need a new worldview—one that begins with the knowing inside us, honoring the waters of life within each one.

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