Laager Mentality

What is it like to be a bat? Thomas Nagel asked this in an essay exploring the limits of our ability to understand things beyond human concepts. We can’t be a bat. Even other humans are hard to understand. The world we see, and understand, is cumulative. Words get shared meaning. Sentences reflect experience. Big ideas tie small learnings together. Conversations build on each other. Which makes it hard/impossible to understand people without that work. A “Laager” is a fort made of a circle of wagons. Laagers were used by the Boers during the Great Trek of the 1830s. After the Napoleonic Wars, the British took control of the former Dutch Colony on the South West tip of Africa. Clashing worlds led to a mass migration of Dutch-inhabitants to avoid British administration. When the wagons came under attack, they would draw into a circle with the cattle and horses on the inside. A Laager Mentality is a defensiveness, however valid the complaint, to circle around your own to protect them. To protect the world you understand. Right or wrong. Bat or man.