DECONSTRUCTING BABYLON #006 - RECLAIMING THE VOID - DEFEATING THE DOCTRINE OF DISCOVERY🦎⚛️
Have you ever wondered why, in our own home, we are often treated like "guests" who have to ask for permission to use our own water or manage our own land? It feels like the ground was shifted beneath our feet long before we were born. That is because it was. Today, we are deconstructing Tool #3 of Babylon: The Doctrine of Discovery, the foundational myth that tried to render our ancestors—and our very souls—invisible.
Tool #3 of Babylon: The Doctrine of Discovery
In Research Report #224, we identify the Doctrine of Discovery as the "metaphysical root" of colonisation. It started in the 15th century with Papal Bulls that gave European monarchs a "divine right" to invade and subdue any lands not ruled by Christians. This doctrine created the legal fiction of Terra Nullius—the idea that the land was "void" or "nobody’s land."
This wasn't just a land grab; it was an ontological erasure. It posited that Indigenous peoples didn't have the "reason" or "sovereignty" required to own anything. In Taitokerau, this tool still lives in the way the Crown asserts "Radical Title" over our whenua, assuming ultimate ownership by default while we are forced to "claim" our customary rights.
But Babylon is mutating. Today, this tool has become Digital Colonialism. Tech giants treat our language, our art, and our Whakapapa as a new "Digital Terra Nullius"—scraping our data to train Al models without our consent. They call it "public data"; we call it Digital Flesh.
He Whakaputanga o te Rangatiratanga o Nu Tireni (1835)
We defeat this tool by returning to the Source Code of our sovereignty: He Whakaputanga o te Rangatiratanga o Nu Tireni (1835). This document explicitly declared that all sovereign power resides with the Chiefs—a fact the British Crown recognised before the Treaty was ever signed.
We must move from "claiming rights" to asserting authority. This means acting as "Universal Constructors" who build our own systems of health, education, and technology that derive their mana from He Whakaputanga, not from Babylonian permits.
