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🗝️ Sanity Classics: The 'idiots' fight back. Or, why being incurious is awesome.

What's the relationship between curiosity, colonialism, and 'idiocy'?

Tanmoy Goswami
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Dear Friend of Sanity, please don't ignore this message.

This little platform we have together built with so much love is facing an emergency. Starting June 1, every single international subscription to Sanity has been failing because of a new financial regulation. Combine that with a slew of declined payments because High & Mighty Bank in the west suddenly decided that payment to a 'mental health newsletter' based in India is obviously 'fraud', and it's the stuff of my nightmares.

I am no stranger to battling regulatory and tech chaos as a solo creator in the global south. But it's now getting exhausting. All I want to do is write for you. Instead, I find myself frantically chatting with various tech support teams and staying up nights looking up obscure cross-border payment technology. I feel angry and helpless :/ My heart goes out to fellow global south creators stuck in this unholy mess.

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Now enjoy today's Sanity Classic on how colonialism weaponised 'curiosity' against the colonised whom they called 'idiots' - and how said idiots struck back.

Love,
Tanmoy

On April 28, 1770, the British Royal Navy research vessel HMS Endeavour made its way into a calm, deep bay on the eastern shore of New Holland. We now know this place as Australia. Endeavour became the first European vessel to reach this remote corner of the world, giving its commander, a 42-year-old explorer named James Cook, a hallowed place in the history books.

But something else happened on that fateful April day that's missing from mainstream history. As they disembarked from the ship, Cook's men were in for a rude surprise. One of them, a naturalist named Joseph Banks, spotted four small canoes inside the bay, from which indigenous inhabitants of this 'new' land were catching fish. To Banks's puzzlement, they completely ignored the imposing ship and its important-looking occupants, staying focused on the fish instead.

"These people seemed to be almost totally engag'd in what they were about," Banks wrote in his journal. "[T]he ship passed within a quarter of a mile of them and yet they scarce lifted their eyes from their employment."

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