The Metaphysics of Power: Indigenous Survival and Lani Cosmology

This paper argues that the deepest determinant of civilisational survival is neither military force nor economic wealth, but trust-based concentrated power rooted in ontological foundations. Drawing from the Psycho-Cosmocide framework and the cosmological vocabulary of the Lani people of West Papua, the paper develops a comprehensive theory of metaphysical power that distinguishes between coercive, symbolic, epistemic, and ontological dimensions of power, while demonstrating how trust integrates these dimensions into the most durable form of collective force across civilisational history. The paper grounds this argument in Lani ontological architecture—AP, Ap-ap, Oʼgur, Muʼnggar, Aʼnggena, and Kugi—and traces the operation of the Civilisational Psycho-Cosmocide Virus (CPCV) as a mechanism through which colonial power systematically destroys the internal conditions necessary for trust formation, converting the cosmologically intact Ap into Ap-ap: an ontological counterfeit that unknowingly performs the colonial order. The argument is situated in comparative engagement with the work of Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, Walter Mignolo, Ibn Khaldūn, Enrique Dussel, Achille Mbembe, Martin Heidegger, Vine Deloria Jr., and Ubuntu philosophy. It argues that the Lani ontological framework both converges with and exceeds existing decolonial theory by providing a positive ontological architecture grounded in a living Indigenous tradition. The paper concludes that the Papuan experience of ontological dispossession reveals a wider civilisational crisis, and that the reconstruction of trust-based cosmobian life (a term coined within this framework and defined in the Key Conceptual Definitions section below) constitutes both a specifically Papuan liberation project and a contribution to the broader survival of civilisation itself.