The Western world is much more priestly

One of the reasons why I still have a strong affection for the third world in relation to the first world is that in my experience ideology had less of a hold there. I speak merely of my experience, in this case, and things may have changed, and will continue to change.

Yet it was in the first world that I first came across the most outright manifestation of rampant ideology. It is -- as Nietzsche pointed out -- always with the priests that one can expect to find the most extraordinary lies. This point of time relates back to when I was 17. My family and I, at that time, were rather Christianised in something like the cold, Anglican sense. Suffice to say that religion did not go all the way down to the core of my being. My father's case, as I have suggested elsewhere, has always entailed a far more severe form of Christianisation. He is one of God's fool for whom black is white and up is down.

It was at the age of 12 that the first real way of misogyny kicked in. We'd lost the war, and stress seemed to bring out a misogynistic reaction in my father, as if it were women who had lost the war for him. There were other stresses, too. By the age of 16, it was the stress of feeding the family, which mingled back then with the idea that boys were worth something, but girls really had to be off-loaded into the hands of another male and why weren't they gone yet?

My sister and I bore the brunt of my father's greatest fury around this time of post-migration, although one of my younger brothers also came in for his rage attacks, although to a lesser degree. You could tell that in general there had been a shift towards directing the family's meagre love resources towards the two boys and pushing the two girls out into the cold. You could tell this in part by who won the family battles, and whose side was always taken -- it was never the side of a female.

At the beginning, when all of this was just starting to brew, and hadn't reached its magnificent peaks of hostility that it would later amount to, I went around, for some reasons unknown, and since forgotten, to drink tea and eat a biscuit with the priest of my parent's current church. I mentioned to him, during the exchange of niceties, that my parents were not fond of me at all. They seemed, I said, to hate me.

I had been brought up to consider all authorities to be potential mediators, not to take one side or another in a debate, but to uphold their authority by trying to get to the bottom of any significant matter. That is what my Rhodesian upbringing had taught me -- which is the proof, more than anything else could be, that my Rhodesian upbringing had not been thoroughly imbued with ideology. There was still some room in the culture for practical action based upon belief in actual truth values, rather than a descent into pure ideological practice.

This priest at that time, I am sorry to say, gave me my first tast of pure ideological practice, in a way that registered entirely false to me, even at that time. He responded to my expressed concern with a denial: "Of course your parents love you." As I had never been flat out contradicted in my perceptions before, this response registered as fairly nonsensical. I'd thrown an arrow and it had bounced off its target without penetrating it. Oh well, I thought, it doesn't really matter.

It remains worth it, all the same, to consider the kind of response I had been expecting, based upon my rather different cultural expectations. Having been well enough exposed to Christianity and its mannerisms, my expectations were already not too high, concerning what might effectively be done by appealing to a priest for anything. My anticipation was that the 'family priest' would have listened very carefully to what I was saying, and would have believed it to be accurate communication about my experiences. He would have kept it in the back of his mind to speak to my parents in the future, at some convenient moment, in order to see if the relationship might be improved somehow. In the meantime, he would have given me biblical platitudes, to keep me going. That would have been the Rhodesian way; the Third World way.

The Western approach is often much more flatly ideological, I found then, and have found since. There seems to be a disbelief in basic truth values. More often, one immediately feels combative when confronted with an unfamiliar truth, and accuses whomever is saying something of lying.

The Western world is much more priestly than Rhodesia ever was.