Confusion Confusion is not only an individualistic inability to cohere and process one’s thoughts under the “swarming” overwhelm of power, as Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian describes. Rather, Fanon poignantly tells us that confusion is central in creating and maintaining the naturalness of ideology’s hegemony, the naturalness of living in the “compartmentalised” and “divided” world between colonised and coloniser. In capitalist societies, education, whether secular or religious, the teaching of moral reflexes … those aesthetic forms of respect for the status quo, instill in the exploited a mood of submission and inhibition which considerably eases the task of law and order. In capitalist countries a multitude of sermonisers, counselors, and “confusion-mongers” intervene between the exploited and the authorities … [agents of the state] bring violence into the homes and minds of the colonised subject. Tellingly, as with all psychic intrusions, confusion is curated, implanted, and stoked ...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51