How Christian-on-Christian Violence Perfected the Binary and Prepared the Modern Mind for Its Final Enclosure

Note: This is a follow up to The Finite Creed by E.M. Burlingame. More unsettling history. We really need to know how we got to where we are today.

Before proceeding, it is important to understand what enclosure is and why it’s so critical to our understanding of all that’s been, all that is occurring and all that follows. Enclosure is the oldest instrument of power — the fencing-off of what was once common and open, free, a field or a forest or a people’s shared ground, into parcels that can be owned, counted, and governed; and the enclosure of the mind is that same act turned inward, the conversion of the boundless open field of what a person might think into a narrow set of fenced and permitted positions among which they remain free only to choose. This is the one enclosure worth any price to a power that lives by owning people, for a fence around a field still needs a guard and a chain around a body still needs a jailer, but a wall built inside the mind is patrolled by the very prisoner it contains — which is why such powers will spend whole treasuries and whole centuries to raise it: the mind that encloses itself is the only subject who never has to be watched, never has to be paid for, and never tries to escape, because it has mistaken the wall for the world and the warden’s voice for its own.

This work follows the refinement of that enclosure across five movements, from Constantine’s pivot at the Milvian Bridge in 312 to the founding of the Bank of England in 1694. Most of its claims are structural rather than conspiratorial, and I’ll keep that distinction in view: an institution carrying a particular logic, applied generation after generation by administrators trained in that same logic, produces consistent results without needing a single guiding hand. Correlation of interest isn’t conspiracy. Institutions carry logic the way rivers carry water — not by intention, but by the shape of the channel. Where the argument does claim intention — and at one point it will, plainly — I’ll say so.

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