The Enclosure of Knowledge

Something strange happens when people want to do good in the world. They research. They cite peer-reviewed studies. They defer to experts. They build arguments on the foundation of institutional authority rather than lived experience.

Even movements for social justice fall into this trap - spending more time citing studies about police violence than listening to Black communities who've been naming these realities for generations. Environmental activists quote climate scientists while ignoring farmers who are already adapting to changing weather patterns. Community organizers seek academic validation for practices that have been working on the ground for decades.

Why do we do this? Why do we trust people in offices over people living with the consequences of their own knowledge?

The answer lies in understanding how knowledge itself was colonized. Just as physical commons were enclosed - turning shared land into private property - intellectual commons were enclosed too, turning wisdom into a commodity controlled by institutional gatekeepers.

The university system, peer review, academic publishing, professional licensing - these create artificial scarcity around knowledge that should be abundant. They establish hierarchies of knowing that systematically delegitimize:

There's something deeply colonial about demanding that Indigenous knowledge systems prove themselves according to Western scientific methods. As if thousands of years of successful relationship with land means nothing until validated by people in lab coats who've never touched soil.

This is the violence of credentialism - not just excluding certain voices, but requiring them to translate their wisdom into the language and methods of their colonizers to be considered legitimate.

When we say "show me the peer-reviewed study" or "trust the experts," we're unconsciously reinforcing the idea that only certain kinds of people, with certain kinds of training, speaking in certain institutional languages, can know truth.

Even literacy itself - the foundation of academic knowledge - creates a form of cognitive colonialism. Once you learn to think primarily through text, you begin to mistrust knowledge that comes through other channels:

The written word becomes the only "real" knowledge, while the vast majority of human wisdom - passed down through story, song, ceremony, and lived practice - gets dismissed as "anecdotal" or "unscientific."

People default to academic sources partly because it feels safer. If you cite a peer-reviewed study and you're wrong, you can blame the experts. If you act on your own observation and common sense and you're wrong, you have to take responsibility.

But there's a deeper issue: in our fragmented communities, many of us genuinely don't have access to the elders and place-based practitioners who could teach us. The books feel like our only option because the living relationships have been severed.

The system has organized itself to prevent exactly those kinds of relationships. Suburbanization separates us from food systems. Economic pressures force constant mobility. Scheduling makes it impossible to follow seasonal rhythms or spend time with people across generations.

This way of validating knowledge is also deeply rooted in colonialism and western exceptionalism: who are the experts? Where are the universities?

This over-reliance on institutional authority comes with devastating costs:

Someone like Aaron Swartz also confronted the cost of credentialism quite directly.

The alternative isn't anti-intellectualism or rejecting institutional knowledge. It's about rebalancing - recognizing that different kinds of knowledge serve different purposes, and that lived experience deserves as much respect as academic research.

This means:

But here we must pause and acknowledge the shadow side of this critique. In our justified anger at institutional gatekeeping, we risk forgetting why some forms of knowledge validation evolved in the first place.

We are told we are modern, rational, enlightened - that we have moved beyond "primitive" beliefs and superstitions. (Though what is rational about worshipping the faceless god of capitalism?) This creates a peculiar anxiety: any knowledge that feels too embodied, too intuitive, too "unscientific" gets labeled as dangerous irrationality.

So we swing between two extremes - either trusting only institutional experts or rejecting all forms of collective knowledge validation. Neither serves us well.

And now we're seeing the dangerous backlash. People who correctly sense that official knowledge systems are compromised swing completely in the opposite direction - toward unhinged, untethered beliefs chosen not for their wisdom but for their convenience.

They reject being told what to think by institutions, only to follow influencers who tell them exactly what they want to hear. They distrust pharmaceutical companies (rightfully suspicious of profit motives) but then trust someone selling $200 crystals who promises to cure cancer with "ancient wisdom."

They'll do yoga to heal their cancer while refusing medical treatment - except it's not even yoga, it's a bastardized version repackaged by someone who mixes chakras and kabbalah and quantum physics into a convenient spiritual smoothie that requires no real practice, no community accountability, no genuine relationship with tradition.

This is perhaps the most insidious form of knowledge enclosure - taking sacred practices, stripping them of their cultural context and disciplined community oversight, and selling them as individual consumer products to people desperate for meaning.

The same forces that enclosed traditional land commons have enclosed traditional wisdom commons. Ancient practices that were embedded in community structures, seasonal rhythms, and generations of collective discernment get packaged as individual lifestyle choices.

Traditional Chinese Medicine becomes a weekend workshop. Indigenous plant medicines become ayahuasca retreats for wealthy Westerners. Meditation becomes a productivity app. The embedded safeguards - the elders, the protocols, the community accountability - are stripped away, leaving people vulnerable to both charlatans and their own wishful thinking.

This isn't a return to embodied wisdom - it's the final colonization of it. The transformation of sacred relationship into consumer experience.

So how do we navigate between institutional capture and spiritual materialism? How do we reclaim embodied wisdom without falling into convenient delusions?

The deeper question is: How do we rebuild the social fabric that allows us to trust each other's knowledge again? How do we create communities where wisdom can flow horizontally while still maintaining collective discernment about what is helpful and what is harmful?

This is ultimately relational work, not informational work. It requires: