West Papua: Ontological Cages and Colonial Consent: Myth, power, and the colonial structuring of perception and reality

ABSTRACT This essay presents, expands, and concretises the central theoretical arguments advanced by Yamin Kogoya in We Are All Inmates: The Cage Just Has Different Names, situating it within the broader Psycho-Cosmocide framework as developed by Kogoya. The essay opens with a critical clarification that the framework does not romanticise pre-colonial or Cosmobian worlds as conditions of paradise. Those original natural worlds contained suffering, conflict, mortality, and unresolved existential difficulty no less than any other human formation on this… planet — borrowing Fanon’s word “wretched”. What they possessed, distinctively, was the capacity to dwell within unresolved existence without constructing totalising systems of false certainty around it. From this clarification, the essay develops the framework’s foundational structural distinction between two existential cages—the primordial cage of irreducible physical and biological being, and the civilisational cage manufactured through symbolic systems, institutional power, and ideological conditioning. It then draws on mythological archetypes from Gilgamesh, Plato, Camus, Ecclesiastes, and Beckett to demonstrate that civilisational consciousness has persistently attempted to deny the first cage while rendering the second invisible. The essay applies these structural analyses concretely to West Papua, examining how Indonesian colonial occupation has deployed the second cage with particular brutality against Papuan consciousness, and how a stratum of colonially-formed Papuan elites has been produced who function as donkeys on Pleasure Island, Pinocchios in the belly of the beast, appointed kings and queens of Neverland, and slow-boiling frogs—psychologically enclosed within the very system that is consuming them. It concludes with the Procrustean principle as the operational mechanism of civilisational forced violence and Wonesis as the framework’s proposed ontological response. The essay draws on comparative mythology, decolonial philosophy, and ontological analysis as mutually reinforcing methodological registers.