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BY FELIPE VIVEROS
I speak here of poetry as the revelation or distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean - in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.
-Audre Lorde
We are in the midst of a civilizational breakdown, living in the ‘age of consequences’. The polycrisis(1) is already dawning on us, a series of interlocking and converging crises, ecological collapse, climate change, species extinction, pandemics, institutiona racism, inequality and poverty is the logical outcome of our operating system. At the very roots of the polycrisis lies an outdated but highly adaptive system, namely capitalism. Climate change is not man made – it is capital made. For every dollar of wealth that is created heats up our planet, because we have an extractive and fossil fuel based economy. Capitalism however is just a story that has only existed for 200 years, whereas neoliberalism has only existed for less than 50 years.
Contrary to the perception that humans are naturally selfish, a central tenet of capitalism, human nature is neither always good or bad; rather we contain multitudes. We are but a product of our milieu and the laws, culture, social conventions, and belief that surround us. While romanticizing hunter-gatherer lifestyles is not our goal here, we now know that during most of human history there have been a plurality of social structures that include highly egalitarian societies, and the freedom to move, to disobey and to change our social arrangements(2). Bone marrow samples indicate that our calorie intake was essentially the same—and that the social structure rewarded those who provided stability, peace, and happiness to the group. Excessive avarice and self-glorification were penalized by social punishments. Although no one is advocating that we return to a hunter gatherer lifestyle, it is an indicator of what’s possible for human nature – in fact, 90,000 years of inspiration of what is possible.
In 1992, we discovered mirror neurons, and what the research shows us is that we arehardwired for empathy since birth. Furthermore, game theory and behavioral economics show us that we are hardwired for justice and fairness. Nonetheless, we also know that our current way of living is making us deeply unhappy, that depression and addiction is on the rise, that in the US suicide is a leading cause of death. Children of the West are on Prozac and Ritalin, spiraling into existential angst and plagued by spiritual ennui – we are told meaning comes from what we have, and the bankruptcy of this notion is felt viscerally inside every heart that longs for something more. There is a global epidemic of unhappiness and loneliness. Perhaps the solutions we need to tackle the meta-crisis lie in upgrading the global operating system rather than tinkering with the insatiable machinery of modernity? In the words of Vanessa Andreotti, renowned academic and author: “Modernity’s violence and unsustainability are usually interpreted within modernity as complicated problems that can be solved rather than complex predicaments that need to be confronted” (Andreotti, V. 2021).
Perhaps the answers to the meta crisis are closer than we think, in the words of beloved Octavia Butler come to mind: there's nothing new under the Sun, but there are new suns. Maybe it is a matter of people racialised as white to acknowledge the harm they have done, acknowledge the embedded supremacy culture. Or it could be that there are multiple more colorful ways to look at the current conundrum, look at our shared humanity..
The future is a social construct that fits neatly within a western concept of [linear] time, it entails forecasting possible scenarios, based on probability. The dominant vision of a ‘techno-future’ involves “recreating the same ‘power relations and ways of living." (Hong, S. 2022). In these techno-futures, technologies are infused with magic-like capabilities that supposedly better our lives and environment. The future though, according to American Media Theorist Douglas Rushkoff is ‘less a noun than a verb, a thing we do (2019)’.
Liberated futures need action in the present. They need a multitude of ways of knowing, doing and being. They need a multitude of black and red and yellow and white suns. The present is a mix of the past and what’s becoming, the continuum of life. A place where the future and the past meet and dance. The present moment is pregnant with multiple future worlds, made out of infinite combinations and possibilities, combining both collapse and flourishing. It is crucial that we investigate and question our epistemology; in simple terms how we know what we know. By and large, most [online] knowledge currently is accessible only through colonial languages, predominantly English and Chinese (Whose Knowledge?. 2020). This fundamental imbalance of content and knowledge creation is deeply embedded in the very structure of the internet itself. Most importantly, those of us who are the primary consumers of digital content and infrastructure—75% of the world's online population comes from the Global majority (3)—are neither its producers nor the decision-makers when it comes to its content, design and experience. Epistemic colonialism is likely the less well-known type of colonialism; an invisible foe (Sengupta. A, 2022). But what would happen if epistemologies of the south and many ways of knowing and being that centre care and reciprocity were embedded in the way we reimagine the world?
According to writer and activist Sarah Van Gelder (2023), to imagine a different, more just world, a reckoning must take place first. Beginning by acknowledging the ways certain peoples have benefited from a long history of labor and land theft, exploitation and extraction, enforced by violence and oppression. The more than human world, bodies of cultures (4) and other marginalized peoples, deserve apologies and reparations. In her own words:
“When we stop the harms, lift up the truth, acknowledge and apologize, and seek to repair the damage, we have created the preconditions for fruitful
collaboration across races and cultures. And, in the process of undertaking these steps, we have already started the work of building a creative future.
Failure to engage in this process with sincerity and integrity risks re-traumatizing those already traumatized and reproducing the wrongs that got
us to this point. Without these steps, the old oppressions are simply reformulated into new ones.”
For generations, bodies of cultures have been protesting, demanding and encouraging us to engage in the pursuit of justice and collective liberation. Despite the fact that nowadays white people have perhaps more awareness than ever before, on their role in perpetuating racism, and other systemic oppressions we still have a very long way to go for intersectional equity to be achieved.
Our generational task is to dismantle systems of oppression and create post-capitalist futures.
Born in a dictatorship, I grew up in Wallmapu, the ancestral land of the Mapuche people in Chile. The Mapuche are one of the largest First Nations in Latin America and have remained in a state of ‘permanent rebellion’ (5) against colonization and acculturation. A hot spot for biodiversity, the Mapuche people and their vast territories have resisted occupation, epistemicide and ecocide. And yet, despite all this, their allegiance to the Earth community remains unwavering. Indigenous peoples globally are custodians of 80% of the world remaining biodiversity. Indigenous peoples are not a homogeneous group either; their cultural complexity is as diverse as the territories they inhabit.Throughout millenia Indigenous peoples have developed a broad knowledge of the complex relationships and dynamics of their respective terrains, preserving ecosystems as well as enhancing biodiversity with their Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) (6).
TEK recognizes there is a continuum between humans and the Earth, where life is an interconnected whole, intertwined with our human bodies, with the rainforest, the whisper of the river and our thoughts. This continuum between humans and the whole can also be found in pre-Christian Europe, Sufi mysticism of Islam, and in Hindu, Buddhist and Taoist traditions (Calicott 1994) instead of being exclusive to Indigenous people alone. Berkes calls the unity between humans and the environment; ‘Sacred Ecology' (1993). Human beings are not just able to adapt and survive, but to thrive-with the more than human world.
As a young person I spent time connecting to my blood and spiritual ancestors, learning from them how to take care and the ceremonies that sustain all life. For weeks I sat around the fire late at night listening to myths and stories of old, passed down from generation to generation on how to care for and re-enchant the land. How to remain in good relation to one another, and to honor the ancestors and future generations. From my indigenous mentors and friends, I learned how to care for the land, and to imagine a future where all peoples can flourish. Indigenous people have kept a wisdom of place, safeguarding the myth and stories that over millennia have allowed people and the more than human world to speak to one another.
Everything exists in relationships, we are made-with-others - in "sympoiesis.” (Haraway, 2009). For instance, the Mayan people use the word inlakech, which translates to "I am another you" when they welcome one another. Realizing our kinship and interconnectedness is one of the shifts we have to do, to move towards more regenerative cultures. This can assist us in making the transition from dominance to respect, centering empathy and reverence for life.
Restitution and repair work, carried out under the guise of those most affected, will help the rebalancing of broken power dynamics. People of color, who comprise the world's majority, ought to be part of co-creating utopian visions of the future. New worlds being formed rely on the creativity of all cultures, creating a world founded on equity, rather than exploitation and pain. All we are lacking right now is the confident imagination to see beyond the constraints the dominant system has put in place to protect itself.
We must commit ourselves to a life-time of decolonization and the transcension of subject-object dualities. This means moving from materialism to animism, from rationalism to relationalism, from private property to radical hospitality, from certainty and knowing to humility and wonder, from monoculture to polyculture and many ways of knowing and being.
We may find that the union of spirituality and politics, of mysticism and anarchism, may provide us with a pathway to begin the necessary work of reconciliation, recuperation, redemption, and rewilding.
We may find that there is no remaining distinction between an activist and a shaman.
We may find that our ancestors, the elements, the plants, and other emissaries for a living universe conspire to speak to us in new and timely ways.
May we find ways to be the ancestors we dream of becoming.
Footnotes
1 polycrisis: originally coined by French theorist Edgar Morin, refers to the various crises in economics, politics,
geopolitics and the environment which are feeding into each other, exacerbating already difficult circumstances.
2 From The Dawn Of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_majority
4 Bodies of culture: according to Resma Manakem bodies of culture refer to all human bodies not considered white.
5 The permanent rebellion: An interpretation of Mapuche uprisings under Chilean colonialism
https://uclpress.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14324/111.444.ra.2021.v6.1.012
6 Roles of Traditional Ecological Knowledge for Biodiversity Conservation
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/234657468.pdf
References
The Age of Consequence
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-03-02/review-the-age-of-consequences-by-c
ourtney-white/
Bodies of Culture. Resma Menakem:
https://resmaa.com/2023/02/13/bodies-of-culture-and-two-forms-of-soul/
The Human Quest for Fairness & Equality
https://www.su.se/polopoly_fs/1.624407.1662106906!/menu/standard/file/FEHR%2
0A%20-%20Heterogenous%20Human%20Quest%20for%20Fairness%20%26%20E
quality%20%28Nobel%20Symposium%29%20PUBLIC.pdf
The Science of Empathy https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5513638/
The permanent rebellion: An interpretation of Mapuche uprisings under Chilean
colonialism
https://uclpress.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14324/111.444.ra.2021.
v6.1.012
Chile-Biodiversity Facts
https://www.cbd.int/countries/profile?country=cl#:~:text=Chile%20possesses%20aro
und%2030%2C000%20species,and%20among%20the%20most%20threatened.
Van Gelder, Sarah (2023). Creative Futures Begin with Reckoning with and Unjust Past.
Routledge Handbook for Creative Futures.
https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbook-for-Creative-Futures/Donnelly-Mont
uori/p/book/9780367897185
Haraway, Donna (2016) Staying with the Trouble
I speak here of poetry as the revelation or distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean - in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.
-Audre Lorde
We are in the midst of a civilizational breakdown, living in the ‘age of consequences’. The polycrisis(1) is already dawning on us, a series of interlocking and converging crises, ecological collapse, climate change, species extinction, pandemics, institutiona racism, inequality and poverty is the logical outcome of our operating system. At the very roots of the polycrisis lies an outdated but highly adaptive system, namely capitalism. Climate change is not man made – it is capital made. For every dollar of wealth that is created heats up our planet, because we have an extractive and fossil fuel based economy. Capitalism however is just a story that has only existed for 200 years, whereas neoliberalism has only existed for less than 50 years.
Contrary to the perception that humans are naturally selfish, a central tenet of capitalism, human nature is neither always good or bad; rather we contain multitudes. We are but a product of our milieu and the laws, culture, social conventions, and belief that surround us. While romanticizing hunter-gatherer lifestyles is not our goal here, we now know that during most of human history there have been a plurality of social structures that include highly egalitarian societies, and the freedom to move, to disobey and to change our social arrangements(2). Bone marrow samples indicate that our calorie intake was essentially the same—and that the social structure rewarded those who provided stability, peace, and happiness to the group. Excessive avarice and self-glorification were penalized by social punishments. Although no one is advocating that we return to a hunter gatherer lifestyle, it is an indicator of what’s possible for human nature – in fact, 90,000 years of inspiration of what is possible.
In 1992, we discovered mirror neurons, and what the research shows us is that we arehardwired for empathy since birth. Furthermore, game theory and behavioral economics show us that we are hardwired for justice and fairness. Nonetheless, we also know that our current way of living is making us deeply unhappy, that depression and addiction is on the rise, that in the US suicide is a leading cause of death. Children of the West are on Prozac and Ritalin, spiraling into existential angst and plagued by spiritual ennui – we are told meaning comes from what we have, and the bankruptcy of this notion is felt viscerally inside every heart that longs for something more. There is a global epidemic of unhappiness and loneliness. Perhaps the solutions we need to tackle the meta-crisis lie in upgrading the global operating system rather than tinkering with the insatiable machinery of modernity? In the words of Vanessa Andreotti, renowned academic and author: “Modernity’s violence and unsustainability are usually interpreted within modernity as complicated problems that can be solved rather than complex predicaments that need to be confronted” (Andreotti, V. 2021).
Perhaps the answers to the meta crisis are closer than we think, in the words of beloved Octavia Butler come to mind: there's nothing new under the Sun, but there are new suns. Maybe it is a matter of people racialised as white to acknowledge the harm they have done, acknowledge the embedded supremacy culture. Or it could be that there are multiple more colorful ways to look at the current conundrum, look at our shared humanity..
The future is a social construct that fits neatly within a western concept of [linear] time, it entails forecasting possible scenarios, based on probability. The dominant vision of a ‘techno-future’ involves “recreating the same ‘power relations and ways of living." (Hong, S. 2022). In these techno-futures, technologies are infused with magic-like capabilities that supposedly better our lives and environment. The future though, according to American Media Theorist Douglas Rushkoff is ‘less a noun than a verb, a thing we do (2019)’.
Liberated futures need action in the present. They need a multitude of ways of knowing, doing and being. They need a multitude of black and red and yellow and white suns. The present is a mix of the past and what’s becoming, the continuum of life. A place where the future and the past meet and dance. The present moment is pregnant with multiple future worlds, made out of infinite combinations and possibilities, combining both collapse and flourishing. It is crucial that we investigate and question our epistemology; in simple terms how we know what we know. By and large, most [online] knowledge currently is accessible only through colonial languages, predominantly English and Chinese (Whose Knowledge?. 2020). This fundamental imbalance of content and knowledge creation is deeply embedded in the very structure of the internet itself. Most importantly, those of us who are the primary consumers of digital content and infrastructure—75% of the world's online population comes from the Global majority (3)—are neither its producers nor the decision-makers when it comes to its content, design and experience. Epistemic colonialism is likely the less well-known type of colonialism; an invisible foe (Sengupta. A, 2022). But what would happen if epistemologies of the south and many ways of knowing and being that centre care and reciprocity were embedded in the way we reimagine the world?
According to writer and activist Sarah Van Gelder (2023), to imagine a different, more just world, a reckoning must take place first. Beginning by acknowledging the ways certain peoples have benefited from a long history of labor and land theft, exploitation and extraction, enforced by violence and oppression. The more than human world, bodies of cultures (4) and other marginalized peoples, deserve apologies and reparations. In her own words:
“When we stop the harms, lift up the truth, acknowledge and apologize, and seek to repair the damage, we have created the preconditions for fruitful
collaboration across races and cultures. And, in the process of undertaking these steps, we have already started the work of building a creative future.
Failure to engage in this process with sincerity and integrity risks re-traumatizing those already traumatized and reproducing the wrongs that got
us to this point. Without these steps, the old oppressions are simply reformulated into new ones.”
For generations, bodies of cultures have been protesting, demanding and encouraging us to engage in the pursuit of justice and collective liberation. Despite the fact that nowadays white people have perhaps more awareness than ever before, on their role in perpetuating racism, and other systemic oppressions we still have a very long way to go for intersectional equity to be achieved.
Our generational task is to dismantle systems of oppression and create post-capitalist futures.
Born in a dictatorship, I grew up in Wallmapu, the ancestral land of the Mapuche people in Chile. The Mapuche are one of the largest First Nations in Latin America and have remained in a state of ‘permanent rebellion’ (5) against colonization and acculturation. A hot spot for biodiversity, the Mapuche people and their vast territories have resisted occupation, epistemicide and ecocide. And yet, despite all this, their allegiance to the Earth community remains unwavering. Indigenous peoples globally are custodians of 80% of the world remaining biodiversity. Indigenous peoples are not a homogeneous group either; their cultural complexity is as diverse as the territories they inhabit.Throughout millenia Indigenous peoples have developed a broad knowledge of the complex relationships and dynamics of their respective terrains, preserving ecosystems as well as enhancing biodiversity with their Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) (6).
TEK recognizes there is a continuum between humans and the Earth, where life is an interconnected whole, intertwined with our human bodies, with the rainforest, the whisper of the river and our thoughts. This continuum between humans and the whole can also be found in pre-Christian Europe, Sufi mysticism of Islam, and in Hindu, Buddhist and Taoist traditions (Calicott 1994) instead of being exclusive to Indigenous people alone. Berkes calls the unity between humans and the environment; ‘Sacred Ecology' (1993). Human beings are not just able to adapt and survive, but to thrive-with the more than human world.
As a young person I spent time connecting to my blood and spiritual ancestors, learning from them how to take care and the ceremonies that sustain all life. For weeks I sat around the fire late at night listening to myths and stories of old, passed down from generation to generation on how to care for and re-enchant the land. How to remain in good relation to one another, and to honor the ancestors and future generations. From my indigenous mentors and friends, I learned how to care for the land, and to imagine a future where all peoples can flourish. Indigenous people have kept a wisdom of place, safeguarding the myth and stories that over millennia have allowed people and the more than human world to speak to one another.
Everything exists in relationships, we are made-with-others - in "sympoiesis.” (Haraway, 2009). For instance, the Mayan people use the word inlakech, which translates to "I am another you" when they welcome one another. Realizing our kinship and interconnectedness is one of the shifts we have to do, to move towards more regenerative cultures. This can assist us in making the transition from dominance to respect, centering empathy and reverence for life.
Restitution and repair work, carried out under the guise of those most affected, will help the rebalancing of broken power dynamics. People of color, who comprise the world's majority, ought to be part of co-creating utopian visions of the future. New worlds being formed rely on the creativity of all cultures, creating a world founded on equity, rather than exploitation and pain. All we are lacking right now is the confident imagination to see beyond the constraints the dominant system has put in place to protect itself.
We must commit ourselves to a life-time of decolonization and the transcension of subject-object dualities. This means moving from materialism to animism, from rationalism to relationalism, from private property to radical hospitality, from certainty and knowing to humility and wonder, from monoculture to polyculture and many ways of knowing and being.
We may find that the union of spirituality and politics, of mysticism and anarchism, may provide us with a pathway to begin the necessary work of reconciliation, recuperation, redemption, and rewilding.
We may find that there is no remaining distinction between an activist and a shaman.
We may find that our ancestors, the elements, the plants, and other emissaries for a living universe conspire to speak to us in new and timely ways.
May we find ways to be the ancestors we dream of becoming.
Footnotes
1 polycrisis: originally coined by French theorist Edgar Morin, refers to the various crises in economics, politics,
geopolitics and the environment which are feeding into each other, exacerbating already difficult circumstances.
2 From The Dawn Of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_majority
4 Bodies of culture: according to Resma Manakem bodies of culture refer to all human bodies not considered white.
5 The permanent rebellion: An interpretation of Mapuche uprisings under Chilean colonialism
https://uclpress.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14324/111.444.ra.2021.v6.1.012
6 Roles of Traditional Ecological Knowledge for Biodiversity Conservation
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/234657468.pdf
References
The Age of Consequence
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-03-02/review-the-age-of-consequences-by-c
ourtney-white/
Bodies of Culture. Resma Menakem:
https://resmaa.com/2023/02/13/bodies-of-culture-and-two-forms-of-soul/
The Human Quest for Fairness & Equality
https://www.su.se/polopoly_fs/1.624407.1662106906!/menu/standard/file/FEHR%2
0A%20-%20Heterogenous%20Human%20Quest%20for%20Fairness%20%26%20E
quality%20%28Nobel%20Symposium%29%20PUBLIC.pdf
The Science of Empathy https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5513638/
The permanent rebellion: An interpretation of Mapuche uprisings under Chilean
colonialism
https://uclpress.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14324/111.444.ra.2021.
v6.1.012
Chile-Biodiversity Facts
https://www.cbd.int/countries/profile?country=cl#:~:text=Chile%20possesses%20aro
und%2030%2C000%20species,and%20among%20the%20most%20threatened.
Van Gelder, Sarah (2023). Creative Futures Begin with Reckoning with and Unjust Past.
Routledge Handbook for Creative Futures.
https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbook-for-Creative-Futures/Donnelly-Mont
uori/p/book/9780367897185
Haraway, Donna (2016) Staying with the Trouble
Felipe Viveros is a writer, researcher, artist, ecologist and strategist. His work focuses on the intersection of digital storytelling, policy and systems change. He is the founder of not-for-profit agency for systems change Culture Hack Labs.
BY FELIPE VIVEROS
I speak here of poetry as the revelation or distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean - in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.
-Audre Lorde
We are in the midst of a civilizational breakdown, living in the ‘age of consequences’. The polycrisis(1) is already dawning on us, a series of interlocking and converging crises, ecological collapse, climate change, species extinction, pandemics, institutiona racism, inequality and poverty is the logical outcome of our operating system. At the very roots of the polycrisis lies an outdated but highly adaptive system, namely capitalism. Climate change is not man made – it is capital made. For every dollar of wealth that is created heats up our planet, because we have an extractive and fossil fuel based economy. Capitalism however is just a story that has only existed for 200 years, whereas neoliberalism has only existed for less than 50 years.
Contrary to the perception that humans are naturally selfish, a central tenet of capitalism, human nature is neither always good or bad; rather we contain multitudes. We are but a product of our milieu and the laws, culture, social conventions, and belief that surround us. While romanticizing hunter-gatherer lifestyles is not our goal here, we now know that during most of human history there have been a plurality of social structures that include highly egalitarian societies, and the freedom to move, to disobey and to change our social arrangements(2). Bone marrow samples indicate that our calorie intake was essentially the same—and that the social structure rewarded those who provided stability, peace, and happiness to the group. Excessive avarice and self-glorification were penalized by social punishments. Although no one is advocating that we return to a hunter gatherer lifestyle, it is an indicator of what’s possible for human nature – in fact, 90,000 years of inspiration of what is possible.
In 1992, we discovered mirror neurons, and what the research shows us is that we arehardwired for empathy since birth. Furthermore, game theory and behavioral economics show us that we are hardwired for justice and fairness. Nonetheless, we also know that our current way of living is making us deeply unhappy, that depression and addiction is on the rise, that in the US suicide is a leading cause of death. Children of the West are on Prozac and Ritalin, spiraling into existential angst and plagued by spiritual ennui – we are told meaning comes from what we have, and the bankruptcy of this notion is felt viscerally inside every heart that longs for something more. There is a global epidemic of unhappiness and loneliness. Perhaps the solutions we need to tackle the meta-crisis lie in upgrading the global operating system rather than tinkering with the insatiable machinery of modernity? In the words of Vanessa Andreotti, renowned academic and author: “Modernity’s violence and unsustainability are usually interpreted within modernity as complicated problems that can be solved rather than complex predicaments that need to be confronted” (Andreotti, V. 2021).
Perhaps the answers to the meta crisis are closer than we think, in the words of beloved Octavia Butler come to mind: there's nothing new under the Sun, but there are new suns. Maybe it is a matter of people racialised as white to acknowledge the harm they have done, acknowledge the embedded supremacy culture. Or it could be that there are multiple more colorful ways to look at the current conundrum, look at our shared humanity..
The future is a social construct that fits neatly within a western concept of [linear] time, it entails forecasting possible scenarios, based on probability. The dominant vision of a ‘techno-future’ involves “recreating the same ‘power relations and ways of living." (Hong, S. 2022). In these techno-futures, technologies are infused with magic-like capabilities that supposedly better our lives and environment. The future though, according to American Media Theorist Douglas Rushkoff is ‘less a noun than a verb, a thing we do (2019)’.
Liberated futures need action in the present. They need a multitude of ways of knowing, doing and being. They need a multitude of black and red and yellow and white suns. The present is a mix of the past and what’s becoming, the continuum of life. A place where the future and the past meet and dance. The present moment is pregnant with multiple future worlds, made out of infinite combinations and possibilities, combining both collapse and flourishing. It is crucial that we investigate and question our epistemology; in simple terms how we know what we know. By and large, most [online] knowledge currently is accessible only through colonial languages, predominantly English and Chinese (Whose Knowledge?. 2020). This fundamental imbalance of content and knowledge creation is deeply embedded in the very structure of the internet itself. Most importantly, those of us who are the primary consumers of digital content and infrastructure—75% of the world's online population comes from the Global majority (3)—are neither its producers nor the decision-makers when it comes to its content, design and experience. Epistemic colonialism is likely the less well-known type of colonialism; an invisible foe (Sengupta. A, 2022). But what would happen if epistemologies of the south and many ways of knowing and being that centre care and reciprocity were embedded in the way we reimagine the world?
According to writer and activist Sarah Van Gelder (2023), to imagine a different, more just world, a reckoning must take place first. Beginning by acknowledging the ways certain peoples have benefited from a long history of labor and land theft, exploitation and extraction, enforced by violence and oppression. The more than human world, bodies of cultures (4) and other marginalized peoples, deserve apologies and reparations. In her own words:
“When we stop the harms, lift up the truth, acknowledge and apologize, and seek to repair the damage, we have created the preconditions for fruitful
collaboration across races and cultures. And, in the process of undertaking these steps, we have already started the work of building a creative future.
Failure to engage in this process with sincerity and integrity risks re-traumatizing those already traumatized and reproducing the wrongs that got
us to this point. Without these steps, the old oppressions are simply reformulated into new ones.”
For generations, bodies of cultures have been protesting, demanding and encouraging us to engage in the pursuit of justice and collective liberation. Despite the fact that nowadays white people have perhaps more awareness than ever before, on their role in perpetuating racism, and other systemic oppressions we still have a very long way to go for intersectional equity to be achieved.
Our generational task is to dismantle systems of oppression and create post-capitalist futures.
Born in a dictatorship, I grew up in Wallmapu, the ancestral land of the Mapuche people in Chile. The Mapuche are one of the largest First Nations in Latin America and have remained in a state of ‘permanent rebellion’ (5) against colonization and acculturation. A hot spot for biodiversity, the Mapuche people and their vast territories have resisted occupation, epistemicide and ecocide. And yet, despite all this, their allegiance to the Earth community remains unwavering. Indigenous peoples globally are custodians of 80% of the world remaining biodiversity. Indigenous peoples are not a homogeneous group either; their cultural complexity is as diverse as the territories they inhabit.Throughout millenia Indigenous peoples have developed a broad knowledge of the complex relationships and dynamics of their respective terrains, preserving ecosystems as well as enhancing biodiversity with their Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) (6).
TEK recognizes there is a continuum between humans and the Earth, where life is an interconnected whole, intertwined with our human bodies, with the rainforest, the whisper of the river and our thoughts. This continuum between humans and the whole can also be found in pre-Christian Europe, Sufi mysticism of Islam, and in Hindu, Buddhist and Taoist traditions (Calicott 1994) instead of being exclusive to Indigenous people alone. Berkes calls the unity between humans and the environment; ‘Sacred Ecology' (1993). Human beings are not just able to adapt and survive, but to thrive-with the more than human world.
As a young person I spent time connecting to my blood and spiritual ancestors, learning from them how to take care and the ceremonies that sustain all life. For weeks I sat around the fire late at night listening to myths and stories of old, passed down from generation to generation on how to care for and re-enchant the land. How to remain in good relation to one another, and to honor the ancestors and future generations. From my indigenous mentors and friends, I learned how to care for the land, and to imagine a future where all peoples can flourish. Indigenous people have kept a wisdom of place, safeguarding the myth and stories that over millennia have allowed people and the more than human world to speak to one another.
Everything exists in relationships, we are made-with-others - in "sympoiesis.” (Haraway, 2009). For instance, the Mayan people use the word inlakech, which translates to "I am another you" when they welcome one another. Realizing our kinship and interconnectedness is one of the shifts we have to do, to move towards more regenerative cultures. This can assist us in making the transition from dominance to respect, centering empathy and reverence for life.
Restitution and repair work, carried out under the guise of those most affected, will help the rebalancing of broken power dynamics. People of color, who comprise the world's majority, ought to be part of co-creating utopian visions of the future. New worlds being formed rely on the creativity of all cultures, creating a world founded on equity, rather than exploitation and pain. All we are lacking right now is the confident imagination to see beyond the constraints the dominant system has put in place to protect itself.
We must commit ourselves to a life-time of decolonization and the transcension of subject-object dualities. This means moving from materialism to animism, from rationalism to relationalism, from private property to radical hospitality, from certainty and knowing to humility and wonder, from monoculture to polyculture and many ways of knowing and being.
We may find that the union of spirituality and politics, of mysticism and anarchism, may provide us with a pathway to begin the necessary work of reconciliation, recuperation, redemption, and rewilding.
We may find that there is no remaining distinction between an activist and a shaman.
We may find that our ancestors, the elements, the plants, and other emissaries for a living universe conspire to speak to us in new and timely ways.
May we find ways to be the ancestors we dream of becoming.
Footnotes
1 polycrisis: originally coined by French theorist Edgar Morin, refers to the various crises in economics, politics,
geopolitics and the environment which are feeding into each other, exacerbating already difficult circumstances.
2 From The Dawn Of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_majority
4 Bodies of culture: according to Resma Manakem bodies of culture refer to all human bodies not considered white.
5 The permanent rebellion: An interpretation of Mapuche uprisings under Chilean colonialism
https://uclpress.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14324/111.444.ra.2021.v6.1.012
6 Roles of Traditional Ecological Knowledge for Biodiversity Conservation
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/234657468.pdf
References
The Age of Consequence
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-03-02/review-the-age-of-consequences-by-c
ourtney-white/
Bodies of Culture. Resma Menakem:
https://resmaa.com/2023/02/13/bodies-of-culture-and-two-forms-of-soul/
The Human Quest for Fairness & Equality
https://www.su.se/polopoly_fs/1.624407.1662106906!/menu/standard/file/FEHR%2
0A%20-%20Heterogenous%20Human%20Quest%20for%20Fairness%20%26%20E
quality%20%28Nobel%20Symposium%29%20PUBLIC.pdf
The Science of Empathy https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5513638/
The permanent rebellion: An interpretation of Mapuche uprisings under Chilean
colonialism
https://uclpress.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14324/111.444.ra.2021.
v6.1.012
Chile-Biodiversity Facts
https://www.cbd.int/countries/profile?country=cl#:~:text=Chile%20possesses%20aro
und%2030%2C000%20species,and%20among%20the%20most%20threatened.
Van Gelder, Sarah (2023). Creative Futures Begin with Reckoning with and Unjust Past.
Routledge Handbook for Creative Futures.
https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbook-for-Creative-Futures/Donnelly-Mont
uori/p/book/9780367897185
Haraway, Donna (2016) Staying with the Trouble
I speak here of poetry as the revelation or distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean - in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.
-Audre Lorde
We are in the midst of a civilizational breakdown, living in the ‘age of consequences’. The polycrisis(1) is already dawning on us, a series of interlocking and converging crises, ecological collapse, climate change, species extinction, pandemics, institutiona racism, inequality and poverty is the logical outcome of our operating system. At the very roots of the polycrisis lies an outdated but highly adaptive system, namely capitalism. Climate change is not man made – it is capital made. For every dollar of wealth that is created heats up our planet, because we have an extractive and fossil fuel based economy. Capitalism however is just a story that has only existed for 200 years, whereas neoliberalism has only existed for less than 50 years.
Contrary to the perception that humans are naturally selfish, a central tenet of capitalism, human nature is neither always good or bad; rather we contain multitudes. We are but a product of our milieu and the laws, culture, social conventions, and belief that surround us. While romanticizing hunter-gatherer lifestyles is not our goal here, we now know that during most of human history there have been a plurality of social structures that include highly egalitarian societies, and the freedom to move, to disobey and to change our social arrangements(2). Bone marrow samples indicate that our calorie intake was essentially the same—and that the social structure rewarded those who provided stability, peace, and happiness to the group. Excessive avarice and self-glorification were penalized by social punishments. Although no one is advocating that we return to a hunter gatherer lifestyle, it is an indicator of what’s possible for human nature – in fact, 90,000 years of inspiration of what is possible.
In 1992, we discovered mirror neurons, and what the research shows us is that we arehardwired for empathy since birth. Furthermore, game theory and behavioral economics show us that we are hardwired for justice and fairness. Nonetheless, we also know that our current way of living is making us deeply unhappy, that depression and addiction is on the rise, that in the US suicide is a leading cause of death. Children of the West are on Prozac and Ritalin, spiraling into existential angst and plagued by spiritual ennui – we are told meaning comes from what we have, and the bankruptcy of this notion is felt viscerally inside every heart that longs for something more. There is a global epidemic of unhappiness and loneliness. Perhaps the solutions we need to tackle the meta-crisis lie in upgrading the global operating system rather than tinkering with the insatiable machinery of modernity? In the words of Vanessa Andreotti, renowned academic and author: “Modernity’s violence and unsustainability are usually interpreted within modernity as complicated problems that can be solved rather than complex predicaments that need to be confronted” (Andreotti, V. 2021).
Perhaps the answers to the meta crisis are closer than we think, in the words of beloved Octavia Butler come to mind: there's nothing new under the Sun, but there are new suns. Maybe it is a matter of people racialised as white to acknowledge the harm they have done, acknowledge the embedded supremacy culture. Or it could be that there are multiple more colorful ways to look at the current conundrum, look at our shared humanity..
The future is a social construct that fits neatly within a western concept of [linear] time, it entails forecasting possible scenarios, based on probability. The dominant vision of a ‘techno-future’ involves “recreating the same ‘power relations and ways of living." (Hong, S. 2022). In these techno-futures, technologies are infused with magic-like capabilities that supposedly better our lives and environment. The future though, according to American Media Theorist Douglas Rushkoff is ‘less a noun than a verb, a thing we do (2019)’.
Liberated futures need action in the present. They need a multitude of ways of knowing, doing and being. They need a multitude of black and red and yellow and white suns. The present is a mix of the past and what’s becoming, the continuum of life. A place where the future and the past meet and dance. The present moment is pregnant with multiple future worlds, made out of infinite combinations and possibilities, combining both collapse and flourishing. It is crucial that we investigate and question our epistemology; in simple terms how we know what we know. By and large, most [online] knowledge currently is accessible only through colonial languages, predominantly English and Chinese (Whose Knowledge?. 2020). This fundamental imbalance of content and knowledge creation is deeply embedded in the very structure of the internet itself. Most importantly, those of us who are the primary consumers of digital content and infrastructure—75% of the world's online population comes from the Global majority (3)—are neither its producers nor the decision-makers when it comes to its content, design and experience. Epistemic colonialism is likely the less well-known type of colonialism; an invisible foe (Sengupta. A, 2022). But what would happen if epistemologies of the south and many ways of knowing and being that centre care and reciprocity were embedded in the way we reimagine the world?
According to writer and activist Sarah Van Gelder (2023), to imagine a different, more just world, a reckoning must take place first. Beginning by acknowledging the ways certain peoples have benefited from a long history of labor and land theft, exploitation and extraction, enforced by violence and oppression. The more than human world, bodies of cultures (4) and other marginalized peoples, deserve apologies and reparations. In her own words:
“When we stop the harms, lift up the truth, acknowledge and apologize, and seek to repair the damage, we have created the preconditions for fruitful
collaboration across races and cultures. And, in the process of undertaking these steps, we have already started the work of building a creative future.
Failure to engage in this process with sincerity and integrity risks re-traumatizing those already traumatized and reproducing the wrongs that got
us to this point. Without these steps, the old oppressions are simply reformulated into new ones.”
For generations, bodies of cultures have been protesting, demanding and encouraging us to engage in the pursuit of justice and collective liberation. Despite the fact that nowadays white people have perhaps more awareness than ever before, on their role in perpetuating racism, and other systemic oppressions we still have a very long way to go for intersectional equity to be achieved.
Our generational task is to dismantle systems of oppression and create post-capitalist futures.
Born in a dictatorship, I grew up in Wallmapu, the ancestral land of the Mapuche people in Chile. The Mapuche are one of the largest First Nations in Latin America and have remained in a state of ‘permanent rebellion’ (5) against colonization and acculturation. A hot spot for biodiversity, the Mapuche people and their vast territories have resisted occupation, epistemicide and ecocide. And yet, despite all this, their allegiance to the Earth community remains unwavering. Indigenous peoples globally are custodians of 80% of the world remaining biodiversity. Indigenous peoples are not a homogeneous group either; their cultural complexity is as diverse as the territories they inhabit.Throughout millenia Indigenous peoples have developed a broad knowledge of the complex relationships and dynamics of their respective terrains, preserving ecosystems as well as enhancing biodiversity with their Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) (6).
TEK recognizes there is a continuum between humans and the Earth, where life is an interconnected whole, intertwined with our human bodies, with the rainforest, the whisper of the river and our thoughts. This continuum between humans and the whole can also be found in pre-Christian Europe, Sufi mysticism of Islam, and in Hindu, Buddhist and Taoist traditions (Calicott 1994) instead of being exclusive to Indigenous people alone. Berkes calls the unity between humans and the environment; ‘Sacred Ecology' (1993). Human beings are not just able to adapt and survive, but to thrive-with the more than human world.
As a young person I spent time connecting to my blood and spiritual ancestors, learning from them how to take care and the ceremonies that sustain all life. For weeks I sat around the fire late at night listening to myths and stories of old, passed down from generation to generation on how to care for and re-enchant the land. How to remain in good relation to one another, and to honor the ancestors and future generations. From my indigenous mentors and friends, I learned how to care for the land, and to imagine a future where all peoples can flourish. Indigenous people have kept a wisdom of place, safeguarding the myth and stories that over millennia have allowed people and the more than human world to speak to one another.
Everything exists in relationships, we are made-with-others - in "sympoiesis.” (Haraway, 2009). For instance, the Mayan people use the word inlakech, which translates to "I am another you" when they welcome one another. Realizing our kinship and interconnectedness is one of the shifts we have to do, to move towards more regenerative cultures. This can assist us in making the transition from dominance to respect, centering empathy and reverence for life.
Restitution and repair work, carried out under the guise of those most affected, will help the rebalancing of broken power dynamics. People of color, who comprise the world's majority, ought to be part of co-creating utopian visions of the future. New worlds being formed rely on the creativity of all cultures, creating a world founded on equity, rather than exploitation and pain. All we are lacking right now is the confident imagination to see beyond the constraints the dominant system has put in place to protect itself.
We must commit ourselves to a life-time of decolonization and the transcension of subject-object dualities. This means moving from materialism to animism, from rationalism to relationalism, from private property to radical hospitality, from certainty and knowing to humility and wonder, from monoculture to polyculture and many ways of knowing and being.
We may find that the union of spirituality and politics, of mysticism and anarchism, may provide us with a pathway to begin the necessary work of reconciliation, recuperation, redemption, and rewilding.
We may find that there is no remaining distinction between an activist and a shaman.
We may find that our ancestors, the elements, the plants, and other emissaries for a living universe conspire to speak to us in new and timely ways.
May we find ways to be the ancestors we dream of becoming.
Footnotes
1 polycrisis: originally coined by French theorist Edgar Morin, refers to the various crises in economics, politics,
geopolitics and the environment which are feeding into each other, exacerbating already difficult circumstances.
2 From The Dawn Of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_majority
4 Bodies of culture: according to Resma Manakem bodies of culture refer to all human bodies not considered white.
5 The permanent rebellion: An interpretation of Mapuche uprisings under Chilean colonialism
https://uclpress.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14324/111.444.ra.2021.v6.1.012
6 Roles of Traditional Ecological Knowledge for Biodiversity Conservation
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/234657468.pdf
References
The Age of Consequence
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-03-02/review-the-age-of-consequences-by-c
ourtney-white/
Bodies of Culture. Resma Menakem:
https://resmaa.com/2023/02/13/bodies-of-culture-and-two-forms-of-soul/
The Human Quest for Fairness & Equality
https://www.su.se/polopoly_fs/1.624407.1662106906!/menu/standard/file/FEHR%2
0A%20-%20Heterogenous%20Human%20Quest%20for%20Fairness%20%26%20E
quality%20%28Nobel%20Symposium%29%20PUBLIC.pdf
The Science of Empathy https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5513638/
The permanent rebellion: An interpretation of Mapuche uprisings under Chilean
colonialism
https://uclpress.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14324/111.444.ra.2021.
v6.1.012
Chile-Biodiversity Facts
https://www.cbd.int/countries/profile?country=cl#:~:text=Chile%20possesses%20aro
und%2030%2C000%20species,and%20among%20the%20most%20threatened.
Van Gelder, Sarah (2023). Creative Futures Begin with Reckoning with and Unjust Past.
Routledge Handbook for Creative Futures.
https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbook-for-Creative-Futures/Donnelly-Mont
uori/p/book/9780367897185
Haraway, Donna (2016) Staying with the Trouble
Felipe Viveros is a writer, researcher, artist, ecologist and strategist. His work focuses on the intersection of digital storytelling, policy and systems change. He is the founder of not-for-profit agency for systems change Culture Hack Labs.
BY FELIPE VIVEROS
I speak here of poetry as the revelation or distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean - in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.
-Audre Lorde
We are in the midst of a civilizational breakdown, living in the ‘age of consequences’. The polycrisis(1) is already dawning on us, a series of interlocking and converging crises, ecological collapse, climate change, species extinction, pandemics, institutiona racism, inequality and poverty is the logical outcome of our operating system. At the very roots of the polycrisis lies an outdated but highly adaptive system, namely capitalism. Climate change is not man made – it is capital made. For every dollar of wealth that is created heats up our planet, because we have an extractive and fossil fuel based economy. Capitalism however is just a story that has only existed for 200 years, whereas neoliberalism has only existed for less than 50 years.
Contrary to the perception that humans are naturally selfish, a central tenet of capitalism, human nature is neither always good or bad; rather we contain multitudes. We are but a product of our milieu and the laws, culture, social conventions, and belief that surround us. While romanticizing hunter-gatherer lifestyles is not our goal here, we now know that during most of human history there have been a plurality of social structures that include highly egalitarian societies, and the freedom to move, to disobey and to change our social arrangements(2). Bone marrow samples indicate that our calorie intake was essentially the same—and that the social structure rewarded those who provided stability, peace, and happiness to the group. Excessive avarice and self-glorification were penalized by social punishments. Although no one is advocating that we return to a hunter gatherer lifestyle, it is an indicator of what’s possible for human nature – in fact, 90,000 years of inspiration of what is possible.
In 1992, we discovered mirror neurons, and what the research shows us is that we arehardwired for empathy since birth. Furthermore, game theory and behavioral economics show us that we are hardwired for justice and fairness. Nonetheless, we also know that our current way of living is making us deeply unhappy, that depression and addiction is on the rise, that in the US suicide is a leading cause of death. Children of the West are on Prozac and Ritalin, spiraling into existential angst and plagued by spiritual ennui – we are told meaning comes from what we have, and the bankruptcy of this notion is felt viscerally inside every heart that longs for something more. There is a global epidemic of unhappiness and loneliness. Perhaps the solutions we need to tackle the meta-crisis lie in upgrading the global operating system rather than tinkering with the insatiable machinery of modernity? In the words of Vanessa Andreotti, renowned academic and author: “Modernity’s violence and unsustainability are usually interpreted within modernity as complicated problems that can be solved rather than complex predicaments that need to be confronted” (Andreotti, V. 2021).
Perhaps the answers to the meta crisis are closer than we think, in the words of beloved Octavia Butler come to mind: there's nothing new under the Sun, but there are new suns. Maybe it is a matter of people racialised as white to acknowledge the harm they have done, acknowledge the embedded supremacy culture. Or it could be that there are multiple more colorful ways to look at the current conundrum, look at our shared humanity..
The future is a social construct that fits neatly within a western concept of [linear] time, it entails forecasting possible scenarios, based on probability. The dominant vision of a ‘techno-future’ involves “recreating the same ‘power relations and ways of living." (Hong, S. 2022). In these techno-futures, technologies are infused with magic-like capabilities that supposedly better our lives and environment. The future though, according to American Media Theorist Douglas Rushkoff is ‘less a noun than a verb, a thing we do (2019)’.
Liberated futures need action in the present. They need a multitude of ways of knowing, doing and being. They need a multitude of black and red and yellow and white suns. The present is a mix of the past and what’s becoming, the continuum of life. A place where the future and the past meet and dance. The present moment is pregnant with multiple future worlds, made out of infinite combinations and possibilities, combining both collapse and flourishing. It is crucial that we investigate and question our epistemology; in simple terms how we know what we know. By and large, most [online] knowledge currently is accessible only through colonial languages, predominantly English and Chinese (Whose Knowledge?. 2020). This fundamental imbalance of content and knowledge creation is deeply embedded in the very structure of the internet itself. Most importantly, those of us who are the primary consumers of digital content and infrastructure—75% of the world's online population comes from the Global majority (3)—are neither its producers nor the decision-makers when it comes to its content, design and experience. Epistemic colonialism is likely the less well-known type of colonialism; an invisible foe (Sengupta. A, 2022). But what would happen if epistemologies of the south and many ways of knowing and being that centre care and reciprocity were embedded in the way we reimagine the world?
According to writer and activist Sarah Van Gelder (2023), to imagine a different, more just world, a reckoning must take place first. Beginning by acknowledging the ways certain peoples have benefited from a long history of labor and land theft, exploitation and extraction, enforced by violence and oppression. The more than human world, bodies of cultures (4) and other marginalized peoples, deserve apologies and reparations. In her own words:
“When we stop the harms, lift up the truth, acknowledge and apologize, and seek to repair the damage, we have created the preconditions for fruitful
collaboration across races and cultures. And, in the process of undertaking these steps, we have already started the work of building a creative future.
Failure to engage in this process with sincerity and integrity risks re-traumatizing those already traumatized and reproducing the wrongs that got
us to this point. Without these steps, the old oppressions are simply reformulated into new ones.”
For generations, bodies of cultures have been protesting, demanding and encouraging us to engage in the pursuit of justice and collective liberation. Despite the fact that nowadays white people have perhaps more awareness than ever before, on their role in perpetuating racism, and other systemic oppressions we still have a very long way to go for intersectional equity to be achieved.
Our generational task is to dismantle systems of oppression and create post-capitalist futures.
Born in a dictatorship, I grew up in Wallmapu, the ancestral land of the Mapuche people in Chile. The Mapuche are one of the largest First Nations in Latin America and have remained in a state of ‘permanent rebellion’ (5) against colonization and acculturation. A hot spot for biodiversity, the Mapuche people and their vast territories have resisted occupation, epistemicide and ecocide. And yet, despite all this, their allegiance to the Earth community remains unwavering. Indigenous peoples globally are custodians of 80% of the world remaining biodiversity. Indigenous peoples are not a homogeneous group either; their cultural complexity is as diverse as the territories they inhabit.Throughout millenia Indigenous peoples have developed a broad knowledge of the complex relationships and dynamics of their respective terrains, preserving ecosystems as well as enhancing biodiversity with their Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) (6).
TEK recognizes there is a continuum between humans and the Earth, where life is an interconnected whole, intertwined with our human bodies, with the rainforest, the whisper of the river and our thoughts. This continuum between humans and the whole can also be found in pre-Christian Europe, Sufi mysticism of Islam, and in Hindu, Buddhist and Taoist traditions (Calicott 1994) instead of being exclusive to Indigenous people alone. Berkes calls the unity between humans and the environment; ‘Sacred Ecology' (1993). Human beings are not just able to adapt and survive, but to thrive-with the more than human world.
As a young person I spent time connecting to my blood and spiritual ancestors, learning from them how to take care and the ceremonies that sustain all life. For weeks I sat around the fire late at night listening to myths and stories of old, passed down from generation to generation on how to care for and re-enchant the land. How to remain in good relation to one another, and to honor the ancestors and future generations. From my indigenous mentors and friends, I learned how to care for the land, and to imagine a future where all peoples can flourish. Indigenous people have kept a wisdom of place, safeguarding the myth and stories that over millennia have allowed people and the more than human world to speak to one another.
Everything exists in relationships, we are made-with-others - in "sympoiesis.” (Haraway, 2009). For instance, the Mayan people use the word inlakech, which translates to "I am another you" when they welcome one another. Realizing our kinship and interconnectedness is one of the shifts we have to do, to move towards more regenerative cultures. This can assist us in making the transition from dominance to respect, centering empathy and reverence for life.
Restitution and repair work, carried out under the guise of those most affected, will help the rebalancing of broken power dynamics. People of color, who comprise the world's majority, ought to be part of co-creating utopian visions of the future. New worlds being formed rely on the creativity of all cultures, creating a world founded on equity, rather than exploitation and pain. All we are lacking right now is the confident imagination to see beyond the constraints the dominant system has put in place to protect itself.
We must commit ourselves to a life-time of decolonization and the transcension of subject-object dualities. This means moving from materialism to animism, from rationalism to relationalism, from private property to radical hospitality, from certainty and knowing to humility and wonder, from monoculture to polyculture and many ways of knowing and being.
We may find that the union of spirituality and politics, of mysticism and anarchism, may provide us with a pathway to begin the necessary work of reconciliation, recuperation, redemption, and rewilding.
We may find that there is no remaining distinction between an activist and a shaman.
We may find that our ancestors, the elements, the plants, and other emissaries for a living universe conspire to speak to us in new and timely ways.
May we find ways to be the ancestors we dream of becoming.
Footnotes
1 polycrisis: originally coined by French theorist Edgar Morin, refers to the various crises in economics, politics,
geopolitics and the environment which are feeding into each other, exacerbating already difficult circumstances.
2 From The Dawn Of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_majority
4 Bodies of culture: according to Resma Manakem bodies of culture refer to all human bodies not considered white.
5 The permanent rebellion: An interpretation of Mapuche uprisings under Chilean colonialism
https://uclpress.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14324/111.444.ra.2021.v6.1.012
6 Roles of Traditional Ecological Knowledge for Biodiversity Conservation
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/234657468.pdf
References
The Age of Consequence
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-03-02/review-the-age-of-consequences-by-c
ourtney-white/
Bodies of Culture. Resma Menakem:
https://resmaa.com/2023/02/13/bodies-of-culture-and-two-forms-of-soul/
The Human Quest for Fairness & Equality
https://www.su.se/polopoly_fs/1.624407.1662106906!/menu/standard/file/FEHR%2
0A%20-%20Heterogenous%20Human%20Quest%20for%20Fairness%20%26%20E
quality%20%28Nobel%20Symposium%29%20PUBLIC.pdf
The Science of Empathy https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5513638/
The permanent rebellion: An interpretation of Mapuche uprisings under Chilean
colonialism
https://uclpress.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14324/111.444.ra.2021.
v6.1.012
Chile-Biodiversity Facts
https://www.cbd.int/countries/profile?country=cl#:~:text=Chile%20possesses%20aro
und%2030%2C000%20species,and%20among%20the%20most%20threatened.
Van Gelder, Sarah (2023). Creative Futures Begin with Reckoning with and Unjust Past.
Routledge Handbook for Creative Futures.
https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbook-for-Creative-Futures/Donnelly-Mont
uori/p/book/9780367897185
Haraway, Donna (2016) Staying with the Trouble
I speak here of poetry as the revelation or distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean - in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.
-Audre Lorde
We are in the midst of a civilizational breakdown, living in the ‘age of consequences’. The polycrisis(1) is already dawning on us, a series of interlocking and converging crises, ecological collapse, climate change, species extinction, pandemics, institutiona racism, inequality and poverty is the logical outcome of our operating system. At the very roots of the polycrisis lies an outdated but highly adaptive system, namely capitalism. Climate change is not man made – it is capital made. For every dollar of wealth that is created heats up our planet, because we have an extractive and fossil fuel based economy. Capitalism however is just a story that has only existed for 200 years, whereas neoliberalism has only existed for less than 50 years.
Contrary to the perception that humans are naturally selfish, a central tenet of capitalism, human nature is neither always good or bad; rather we contain multitudes. We are but a product of our milieu and the laws, culture, social conventions, and belief that surround us. While romanticizing hunter-gatherer lifestyles is not our goal here, we now know that during most of human history there have been a plurality of social structures that include highly egalitarian societies, and the freedom to move, to disobey and to change our social arrangements(2). Bone marrow samples indicate that our calorie intake was essentially the same—and that the social structure rewarded those who provided stability, peace, and happiness to the group. Excessive avarice and self-glorification were penalized by social punishments. Although no one is advocating that we return to a hunter gatherer lifestyle, it is an indicator of what’s possible for human nature – in fact, 90,000 years of inspiration of what is possible.
In 1992, we discovered mirror neurons, and what the research shows us is that we arehardwired for empathy since birth. Furthermore, game theory and behavioral economics show us that we are hardwired for justice and fairness. Nonetheless, we also know that our current way of living is making us deeply unhappy, that depression and addiction is on the rise, that in the US suicide is a leading cause of death. Children of the West are on Prozac and Ritalin, spiraling into existential angst and plagued by spiritual ennui – we are told meaning comes from what we have, and the bankruptcy of this notion is felt viscerally inside every heart that longs for something more. There is a global epidemic of unhappiness and loneliness. Perhaps the solutions we need to tackle the meta-crisis lie in upgrading the global operating system rather than tinkering with the insatiable machinery of modernity? In the words of Vanessa Andreotti, renowned academic and author: “Modernity’s violence and unsustainability are usually interpreted within modernity as complicated problems that can be solved rather than complex predicaments that need to be confronted” (Andreotti, V. 2021).
Perhaps the answers to the meta crisis are closer than we think, in the words of beloved Octavia Butler come to mind: there's nothing new under the Sun, but there are new suns. Maybe it is a matter of people racialised as white to acknowledge the harm they have done, acknowledge the embedded supremacy culture. Or it could be that there are multiple more colorful ways to look at the current conundrum, look at our shared humanity..
The future is a social construct that fits neatly within a western concept of [linear] time, it entails forecasting possible scenarios, based on probability. The dominant vision of a ‘techno-future’ involves “recreating the same ‘power relations and ways of living." (Hong, S. 2022). In these techno-futures, technologies are infused with magic-like capabilities that supposedly better our lives and environment. The future though, according to American Media Theorist Douglas Rushkoff is ‘less a noun than a verb, a thing we do (2019)’.
Liberated futures need action in the present. They need a multitude of ways of knowing, doing and being. They need a multitude of black and red and yellow and white suns. The present is a mix of the past and what’s becoming, the continuum of life. A place where the future and the past meet and dance. The present moment is pregnant with multiple future worlds, made out of infinite combinations and possibilities, combining both collapse and flourishing. It is crucial that we investigate and question our epistemology; in simple terms how we know what we know. By and large, most [online] knowledge currently is accessible only through colonial languages, predominantly English and Chinese (Whose Knowledge?. 2020). This fundamental imbalance of content and knowledge creation is deeply embedded in the very structure of the internet itself. Most importantly, those of us who are the primary consumers of digital content and infrastructure—75% of the world's online population comes from the Global majority (3)—are neither its producers nor the decision-makers when it comes to its content, design and experience. Epistemic colonialism is likely the less well-known type of colonialism; an invisible foe (Sengupta. A, 2022). But what would happen if epistemologies of the south and many ways of knowing and being that centre care and reciprocity were embedded in the way we reimagine the world?
According to writer and activist Sarah Van Gelder (2023), to imagine a different, more just world, a reckoning must take place first. Beginning by acknowledging the ways certain peoples have benefited from a long history of labor and land theft, exploitation and extraction, enforced by violence and oppression. The more than human world, bodies of cultures (4) and other marginalized peoples, deserve apologies and reparations. In her own words:
“When we stop the harms, lift up the truth, acknowledge and apologize, and seek to repair the damage, we have created the preconditions for fruitful
collaboration across races and cultures. And, in the process of undertaking these steps, we have already started the work of building a creative future.
Failure to engage in this process with sincerity and integrity risks re-traumatizing those already traumatized and reproducing the wrongs that got
us to this point. Without these steps, the old oppressions are simply reformulated into new ones.”
For generations, bodies of cultures have been protesting, demanding and encouraging us to engage in the pursuit of justice and collective liberation. Despite the fact that nowadays white people have perhaps more awareness than ever before, on their role in perpetuating racism, and other systemic oppressions we still have a very long way to go for intersectional equity to be achieved.
Our generational task is to dismantle systems of oppression and create post-capitalist futures.
Born in a dictatorship, I grew up in Wallmapu, the ancestral land of the Mapuche people in Chile. The Mapuche are one of the largest First Nations in Latin America and have remained in a state of ‘permanent rebellion’ (5) against colonization and acculturation. A hot spot for biodiversity, the Mapuche people and their vast territories have resisted occupation, epistemicide and ecocide. And yet, despite all this, their allegiance to the Earth community remains unwavering. Indigenous peoples globally are custodians of 80% of the world remaining biodiversity. Indigenous peoples are not a homogeneous group either; their cultural complexity is as diverse as the territories they inhabit.Throughout millenia Indigenous peoples have developed a broad knowledge of the complex relationships and dynamics of their respective terrains, preserving ecosystems as well as enhancing biodiversity with their Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) (6).
TEK recognizes there is a continuum between humans and the Earth, where life is an interconnected whole, intertwined with our human bodies, with the rainforest, the whisper of the river and our thoughts. This continuum between humans and the whole can also be found in pre-Christian Europe, Sufi mysticism of Islam, and in Hindu, Buddhist and Taoist traditions (Calicott 1994) instead of being exclusive to Indigenous people alone. Berkes calls the unity between humans and the environment; ‘Sacred Ecology' (1993). Human beings are not just able to adapt and survive, but to thrive-with the more than human world.
As a young person I spent time connecting to my blood and spiritual ancestors, learning from them how to take care and the ceremonies that sustain all life. For weeks I sat around the fire late at night listening to myths and stories of old, passed down from generation to generation on how to care for and re-enchant the land. How to remain in good relation to one another, and to honor the ancestors and future generations. From my indigenous mentors and friends, I learned how to care for the land, and to imagine a future where all peoples can flourish. Indigenous people have kept a wisdom of place, safeguarding the myth and stories that over millennia have allowed people and the more than human world to speak to one another.
Everything exists in relationships, we are made-with-others - in "sympoiesis.” (Haraway, 2009). For instance, the Mayan people use the word inlakech, which translates to "I am another you" when they welcome one another. Realizing our kinship and interconnectedness is one of the shifts we have to do, to move towards more regenerative cultures. This can assist us in making the transition from dominance to respect, centering empathy and reverence for life.
Restitution and repair work, carried out under the guise of those most affected, will help the rebalancing of broken power dynamics. People of color, who comprise the world's majority, ought to be part of co-creating utopian visions of the future. New worlds being formed rely on the creativity of all cultures, creating a world founded on equity, rather than exploitation and pain. All we are lacking right now is the confident imagination to see beyond the constraints the dominant system has put in place to protect itself.
We must commit ourselves to a life-time of decolonization and the transcension of subject-object dualities. This means moving from materialism to animism, from rationalism to relationalism, from private property to radical hospitality, from certainty and knowing to humility and wonder, from monoculture to polyculture and many ways of knowing and being.
We may find that the union of spirituality and politics, of mysticism and anarchism, may provide us with a pathway to begin the necessary work of reconciliation, recuperation, redemption, and rewilding.
We may find that there is no remaining distinction between an activist and a shaman.
We may find that our ancestors, the elements, the plants, and other emissaries for a living universe conspire to speak to us in new and timely ways.
May we find ways to be the ancestors we dream of becoming.
Footnotes
1 polycrisis: originally coined by French theorist Edgar Morin, refers to the various crises in economics, politics,
geopolitics and the environment which are feeding into each other, exacerbating already difficult circumstances.
2 From The Dawn Of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_majority
4 Bodies of culture: according to Resma Manakem bodies of culture refer to all human bodies not considered white.
5 The permanent rebellion: An interpretation of Mapuche uprisings under Chilean colonialism
https://uclpress.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14324/111.444.ra.2021.v6.1.012
6 Roles of Traditional Ecological Knowledge for Biodiversity Conservation
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/234657468.pdf
References
The Age of Consequence
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-03-02/review-the-age-of-consequences-by-c
ourtney-white/
Bodies of Culture. Resma Menakem:
https://resmaa.com/2023/02/13/bodies-of-culture-and-two-forms-of-soul/
The Human Quest for Fairness & Equality
https://www.su.se/polopoly_fs/1.624407.1662106906!/menu/standard/file/FEHR%2
0A%20-%20Heterogenous%20Human%20Quest%20for%20Fairness%20%26%20E
quality%20%28Nobel%20Symposium%29%20PUBLIC.pdf
The Science of Empathy https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5513638/
The permanent rebellion: An interpretation of Mapuche uprisings under Chilean
colonialism
https://uclpress.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14324/111.444.ra.2021.
v6.1.012
Chile-Biodiversity Facts
https://www.cbd.int/countries/profile?country=cl#:~:text=Chile%20possesses%20aro
und%2030%2C000%20species,and%20among%20the%20most%20threatened.
Van Gelder, Sarah (2023). Creative Futures Begin with Reckoning with and Unjust Past.
Routledge Handbook for Creative Futures.
https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbook-for-Creative-Futures/Donnelly-Mont
uori/p/book/9780367897185
Haraway, Donna (2016) Staying with the Trouble
Felipe Viveros is a writer, researcher, artist, ecologist and strategist. His work focuses on the intersection of digital storytelling, policy and systems change. He is the founder of not-for-profit agency for systems change Culture Hack Labs.
BY FELIPE VIVEROS
I speak here of poetry as the revelation or distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean - in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.
-Audre Lorde
We are in the midst of a civilizational breakdown, living in the ‘age of consequences’. The polycrisis(1) is already dawning on us, a series of interlocking and converging crises, ecological collapse, climate change, species extinction, pandemics, institutiona racism, inequality and poverty is the logical outcome of our operating system. At the very roots of the polycrisis lies an outdated but highly adaptive system, namely capitalism. Climate change is not man made – it is capital made. For every dollar of wealth that is created heats up our planet, because we have an extractive and fossil fuel based economy. Capitalism however is just a story that has only existed for 200 years, whereas neoliberalism has only existed for less than 50 years.
Contrary to the perception that humans are naturally selfish, a central tenet of capitalism, human nature is neither always good or bad; rather we contain multitudes. We are but a product of our milieu and the laws, culture, social conventions, and belief that surround us. While romanticizing hunter-gatherer lifestyles is not our goal here, we now know that during most of human history there have been a plurality of social structures that include highly egalitarian societies, and the freedom to move, to disobey and to change our social arrangements(2). Bone marrow samples indicate that our calorie intake was essentially the same—and that the social structure rewarded those who provided stability, peace, and happiness to the group. Excessive avarice and self-glorification were penalized by social punishments. Although no one is advocating that we return to a hunter gatherer lifestyle, it is an indicator of what’s possible for human nature – in fact, 90,000 years of inspiration of what is possible.
In 1992, we discovered mirror neurons, and what the research shows us is that we arehardwired for empathy since birth. Furthermore, game theory and behavioral economics show us that we are hardwired for justice and fairness. Nonetheless, we also know that our current way of living is making us deeply unhappy, that depression and addiction is on the rise, that in the US suicide is a leading cause of death. Children of the West are on Prozac and Ritalin, spiraling into existential angst and plagued by spiritual ennui – we are told meaning comes from what we have, and the bankruptcy of this notion is felt viscerally inside every heart that longs for something more. There is a global epidemic of unhappiness and loneliness. Perhaps the solutions we need to tackle the meta-crisis lie in upgrading the global operating system rather than tinkering with the insatiable machinery of modernity? In the words of Vanessa Andreotti, renowned academic and author: “Modernity’s violence and unsustainability are usually interpreted within modernity as complicated problems that can be solved rather than complex predicaments that need to be confronted” (Andreotti, V. 2021).
Perhaps the answers to the meta crisis are closer than we think, in the words of beloved Octavia Butler come to mind: there's nothing new under the Sun, but there are new suns. Maybe it is a matter of people racialised as white to acknowledge the harm they have done, acknowledge the embedded supremacy culture. Or it could be that there are multiple more colorful ways to look at the current conundrum, look at our shared humanity..
The future is a social construct that fits neatly within a western concept of [linear] time, it entails forecasting possible scenarios, based on probability. The dominant vision of a ‘techno-future’ involves “recreating the same ‘power relations and ways of living." (Hong, S. 2022). In these techno-futures, technologies are infused with magic-like capabilities that supposedly better our lives and environment. The future though, according to American Media Theorist Douglas Rushkoff is ‘less a noun than a verb, a thing we do (2019)’.
Liberated futures need action in the present. They need a multitude of ways of knowing, doing and being. They need a multitude of black and red and yellow and white suns. The present is a mix of the past and what’s becoming, the continuum of life. A place where the future and the past meet and dance. The present moment is pregnant with multiple future worlds, made out of infinite combinations and possibilities, combining both collapse and flourishing. It is crucial that we investigate and question our epistemology; in simple terms how we know what we know. By and large, most [online] knowledge currently is accessible only through colonial languages, predominantly English and Chinese (Whose Knowledge?. 2020). This fundamental imbalance of content and knowledge creation is deeply embedded in the very structure of the internet itself. Most importantly, those of us who are the primary consumers of digital content and infrastructure—75% of the world's online population comes from the Global majority (3)—are neither its producers nor the decision-makers when it comes to its content, design and experience. Epistemic colonialism is likely the less well-known type of colonialism; an invisible foe (Sengupta. A, 2022). But what would happen if epistemologies of the south and many ways of knowing and being that centre care and reciprocity were embedded in the way we reimagine the world?
According to writer and activist Sarah Van Gelder (2023), to imagine a different, more just world, a reckoning must take place first. Beginning by acknowledging the ways certain peoples have benefited from a long history of labor and land theft, exploitation and extraction, enforced by violence and oppression. The more than human world, bodies of cultures (4) and other marginalized peoples, deserve apologies and reparations. In her own words:
“When we stop the harms, lift up the truth, acknowledge and apologize, and seek to repair the damage, we have created the preconditions for fruitful
collaboration across races and cultures. And, in the process of undertaking these steps, we have already started the work of building a creative future.
Failure to engage in this process with sincerity and integrity risks re-traumatizing those already traumatized and reproducing the wrongs that got
us to this point. Without these steps, the old oppressions are simply reformulated into new ones.”
For generations, bodies of cultures have been protesting, demanding and encouraging us to engage in the pursuit of justice and collective liberation. Despite the fact that nowadays white people have perhaps more awareness than ever before, on their role in perpetuating racism, and other systemic oppressions we still have a very long way to go for intersectional equity to be achieved.
Our generational task is to dismantle systems of oppression and create post-capitalist futures.
Born in a dictatorship, I grew up in Wallmapu, the ancestral land of the Mapuche people in Chile. The Mapuche are one of the largest First Nations in Latin America and have remained in a state of ‘permanent rebellion’ (5) against colonization and acculturation. A hot spot for biodiversity, the Mapuche people and their vast territories have resisted occupation, epistemicide and ecocide. And yet, despite all this, their allegiance to the Earth community remains unwavering. Indigenous peoples globally are custodians of 80% of the world remaining biodiversity. Indigenous peoples are not a homogeneous group either; their cultural complexity is as diverse as the territories they inhabit.Throughout millenia Indigenous peoples have developed a broad knowledge of the complex relationships and dynamics of their respective terrains, preserving ecosystems as well as enhancing biodiversity with their Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) (6).
TEK recognizes there is a continuum between humans and the Earth, where life is an interconnected whole, intertwined with our human bodies, with the rainforest, the whisper of the river and our thoughts. This continuum between humans and the whole can also be found in pre-Christian Europe, Sufi mysticism of Islam, and in Hindu, Buddhist and Taoist traditions (Calicott 1994) instead of being exclusive to Indigenous people alone. Berkes calls the unity between humans and the environment; ‘Sacred Ecology' (1993). Human beings are not just able to adapt and survive, but to thrive-with the more than human world.
As a young person I spent time connecting to my blood and spiritual ancestors, learning from them how to take care and the ceremonies that sustain all life. For weeks I sat around the fire late at night listening to myths and stories of old, passed down from generation to generation on how to care for and re-enchant the land. How to remain in good relation to one another, and to honor the ancestors and future generations. From my indigenous mentors and friends, I learned how to care for the land, and to imagine a future where all peoples can flourish. Indigenous people have kept a wisdom of place, safeguarding the myth and stories that over millennia have allowed people and the more than human world to speak to one another.
Everything exists in relationships, we are made-with-others - in "sympoiesis.” (Haraway, 2009). For instance, the Mayan people use the word inlakech, which translates to "I am another you" when they welcome one another. Realizing our kinship and interconnectedness is one of the shifts we have to do, to move towards more regenerative cultures. This can assist us in making the transition from dominance to respect, centering empathy and reverence for life.
Restitution and repair work, carried out under the guise of those most affected, will help the rebalancing of broken power dynamics. People of color, who comprise the world's majority, ought to be part of co-creating utopian visions of the future. New worlds being formed rely on the creativity of all cultures, creating a world founded on equity, rather than exploitation and pain. All we are lacking right now is the confident imagination to see beyond the constraints the dominant system has put in place to protect itself.
We must commit ourselves to a life-time of decolonization and the transcension of subject-object dualities. This means moving from materialism to animism, from rationalism to relationalism, from private property to radical hospitality, from certainty and knowing to humility and wonder, from monoculture to polyculture and many ways of knowing and being.
We may find that the union of spirituality and politics, of mysticism and anarchism, may provide us with a pathway to begin the necessary work of reconciliation, recuperation, redemption, and rewilding.
We may find that there is no remaining distinction between an activist and a shaman.
We may find that our ancestors, the elements, the plants, and other emissaries for a living universe conspire to speak to us in new and timely ways.
May we find ways to be the ancestors we dream of becoming.
Footnotes
1 polycrisis: originally coined by French theorist Edgar Morin, refers to the various crises in economics, politics,
geopolitics and the environment which are feeding into each other, exacerbating already difficult circumstances.
2 From The Dawn Of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_majority
4 Bodies of culture: according to Resma Manakem bodies of culture refer to all human bodies not considered white.
5 The permanent rebellion: An interpretation of Mapuche uprisings under Chilean colonialism
https://uclpress.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14324/111.444.ra.2021.v6.1.012
6 Roles of Traditional Ecological Knowledge for Biodiversity Conservation
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/234657468.pdf
References
The Age of Consequence
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-03-02/review-the-age-of-consequences-by-c
ourtney-white/
Bodies of Culture. Resma Menakem:
https://resmaa.com/2023/02/13/bodies-of-culture-and-two-forms-of-soul/
The Human Quest for Fairness & Equality
https://www.su.se/polopoly_fs/1.624407.1662106906!/menu/standard/file/FEHR%2
0A%20-%20Heterogenous%20Human%20Quest%20for%20Fairness%20%26%20E
quality%20%28Nobel%20Symposium%29%20PUBLIC.pdf
The Science of Empathy https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5513638/
The permanent rebellion: An interpretation of Mapuche uprisings under Chilean
colonialism
https://uclpress.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14324/111.444.ra.2021.
v6.1.012
Chile-Biodiversity Facts
https://www.cbd.int/countries/profile?country=cl#:~:text=Chile%20possesses%20aro
und%2030%2C000%20species,and%20among%20the%20most%20threatened.
Van Gelder, Sarah (2023). Creative Futures Begin with Reckoning with and Unjust Past.
Routledge Handbook for Creative Futures.
https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbook-for-Creative-Futures/Donnelly-Mont
uori/p/book/9780367897185
Haraway, Donna (2016) Staying with the Trouble
I speak here of poetry as the revelation or distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean - in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.
-Audre Lorde
We are in the midst of a civilizational breakdown, living in the ‘age of consequences’. The polycrisis(1) is already dawning on us, a series of interlocking and converging crises, ecological collapse, climate change, species extinction, pandemics, institutiona racism, inequality and poverty is the logical outcome of our operating system. At the very roots of the polycrisis lies an outdated but highly adaptive system, namely capitalism. Climate change is not man made – it is capital made. For every dollar of wealth that is created heats up our planet, because we have an extractive and fossil fuel based economy. Capitalism however is just a story that has only existed for 200 years, whereas neoliberalism has only existed for less than 50 years.
Contrary to the perception that humans are naturally selfish, a central tenet of capitalism, human nature is neither always good or bad; rather we contain multitudes. We are but a product of our milieu and the laws, culture, social conventions, and belief that surround us. While romanticizing hunter-gatherer lifestyles is not our goal here, we now know that during most of human history there have been a plurality of social structures that include highly egalitarian societies, and the freedom to move, to disobey and to change our social arrangements(2). Bone marrow samples indicate that our calorie intake was essentially the same—and that the social structure rewarded those who provided stability, peace, and happiness to the group. Excessive avarice and self-glorification were penalized by social punishments. Although no one is advocating that we return to a hunter gatherer lifestyle, it is an indicator of what’s possible for human nature – in fact, 90,000 years of inspiration of what is possible.
In 1992, we discovered mirror neurons, and what the research shows us is that we arehardwired for empathy since birth. Furthermore, game theory and behavioral economics show us that we are hardwired for justice and fairness. Nonetheless, we also know that our current way of living is making us deeply unhappy, that depression and addiction is on the rise, that in the US suicide is a leading cause of death. Children of the West are on Prozac and Ritalin, spiraling into existential angst and plagued by spiritual ennui – we are told meaning comes from what we have, and the bankruptcy of this notion is felt viscerally inside every heart that longs for something more. There is a global epidemic of unhappiness and loneliness. Perhaps the solutions we need to tackle the meta-crisis lie in upgrading the global operating system rather than tinkering with the insatiable machinery of modernity? In the words of Vanessa Andreotti, renowned academic and author: “Modernity’s violence and unsustainability are usually interpreted within modernity as complicated problems that can be solved rather than complex predicaments that need to be confronted” (Andreotti, V. 2021).
Perhaps the answers to the meta crisis are closer than we think, in the words of beloved Octavia Butler come to mind: there's nothing new under the Sun, but there are new suns. Maybe it is a matter of people racialised as white to acknowledge the harm they have done, acknowledge the embedded supremacy culture. Or it could be that there are multiple more colorful ways to look at the current conundrum, look at our shared humanity..
The future is a social construct that fits neatly within a western concept of [linear] time, it entails forecasting possible scenarios, based on probability. The dominant vision of a ‘techno-future’ involves “recreating the same ‘power relations and ways of living." (Hong, S. 2022). In these techno-futures, technologies are infused with magic-like capabilities that supposedly better our lives and environment. The future though, according to American Media Theorist Douglas Rushkoff is ‘less a noun than a verb, a thing we do (2019)’.
Liberated futures need action in the present. They need a multitude of ways of knowing, doing and being. They need a multitude of black and red and yellow and white suns. The present is a mix of the past and what’s becoming, the continuum of life. A place where the future and the past meet and dance. The present moment is pregnant with multiple future worlds, made out of infinite combinations and possibilities, combining both collapse and flourishing. It is crucial that we investigate and question our epistemology; in simple terms how we know what we know. By and large, most [online] knowledge currently is accessible only through colonial languages, predominantly English and Chinese (Whose Knowledge?. 2020). This fundamental imbalance of content and knowledge creation is deeply embedded in the very structure of the internet itself. Most importantly, those of us who are the primary consumers of digital content and infrastructure—75% of the world's online population comes from the Global majority (3)—are neither its producers nor the decision-makers when it comes to its content, design and experience. Epistemic colonialism is likely the less well-known type of colonialism; an invisible foe (Sengupta. A, 2022). But what would happen if epistemologies of the south and many ways of knowing and being that centre care and reciprocity were embedded in the way we reimagine the world?
According to writer and activist Sarah Van Gelder (2023), to imagine a different, more just world, a reckoning must take place first. Beginning by acknowledging the ways certain peoples have benefited from a long history of labor and land theft, exploitation and extraction, enforced by violence and oppression. The more than human world, bodies of cultures (4) and other marginalized peoples, deserve apologies and reparations. In her own words:
“When we stop the harms, lift up the truth, acknowledge and apologize, and seek to repair the damage, we have created the preconditions for fruitful
collaboration across races and cultures. And, in the process of undertaking these steps, we have already started the work of building a creative future.
Failure to engage in this process with sincerity and integrity risks re-traumatizing those already traumatized and reproducing the wrongs that got
us to this point. Without these steps, the old oppressions are simply reformulated into new ones.”
For generations, bodies of cultures have been protesting, demanding and encouraging us to engage in the pursuit of justice and collective liberation. Despite the fact that nowadays white people have perhaps more awareness than ever before, on their role in perpetuating racism, and other systemic oppressions we still have a very long way to go for intersectional equity to be achieved.
Our generational task is to dismantle systems of oppression and create post-capitalist futures.
Born in a dictatorship, I grew up in Wallmapu, the ancestral land of the Mapuche people in Chile. The Mapuche are one of the largest First Nations in Latin America and have remained in a state of ‘permanent rebellion’ (5) against colonization and acculturation. A hot spot for biodiversity, the Mapuche people and their vast territories have resisted occupation, epistemicide and ecocide. And yet, despite all this, their allegiance to the Earth community remains unwavering. Indigenous peoples globally are custodians of 80% of the world remaining biodiversity. Indigenous peoples are not a homogeneous group either; their cultural complexity is as diverse as the territories they inhabit.Throughout millenia Indigenous peoples have developed a broad knowledge of the complex relationships and dynamics of their respective terrains, preserving ecosystems as well as enhancing biodiversity with their Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) (6).
TEK recognizes there is a continuum between humans and the Earth, where life is an interconnected whole, intertwined with our human bodies, with the rainforest, the whisper of the river and our thoughts. This continuum between humans and the whole can also be found in pre-Christian Europe, Sufi mysticism of Islam, and in Hindu, Buddhist and Taoist traditions (Calicott 1994) instead of being exclusive to Indigenous people alone. Berkes calls the unity between humans and the environment; ‘Sacred Ecology' (1993). Human beings are not just able to adapt and survive, but to thrive-with the more than human world.
As a young person I spent time connecting to my blood and spiritual ancestors, learning from them how to take care and the ceremonies that sustain all life. For weeks I sat around the fire late at night listening to myths and stories of old, passed down from generation to generation on how to care for and re-enchant the land. How to remain in good relation to one another, and to honor the ancestors and future generations. From my indigenous mentors and friends, I learned how to care for the land, and to imagine a future where all peoples can flourish. Indigenous people have kept a wisdom of place, safeguarding the myth and stories that over millennia have allowed people and the more than human world to speak to one another.
Everything exists in relationships, we are made-with-others - in "sympoiesis.” (Haraway, 2009). For instance, the Mayan people use the word inlakech, which translates to "I am another you" when they welcome one another. Realizing our kinship and interconnectedness is one of the shifts we have to do, to move towards more regenerative cultures. This can assist us in making the transition from dominance to respect, centering empathy and reverence for life.
Restitution and repair work, carried out under the guise of those most affected, will help the rebalancing of broken power dynamics. People of color, who comprise the world's majority, ought to be part of co-creating utopian visions of the future. New worlds being formed rely on the creativity of all cultures, creating a world founded on equity, rather than exploitation and pain. All we are lacking right now is the confident imagination to see beyond the constraints the dominant system has put in place to protect itself.
We must commit ourselves to a life-time of decolonization and the transcension of subject-object dualities. This means moving from materialism to animism, from rationalism to relationalism, from private property to radical hospitality, from certainty and knowing to humility and wonder, from monoculture to polyculture and many ways of knowing and being.
We may find that the union of spirituality and politics, of mysticism and anarchism, may provide us with a pathway to begin the necessary work of reconciliation, recuperation, redemption, and rewilding.
We may find that there is no remaining distinction between an activist and a shaman.
We may find that our ancestors, the elements, the plants, and other emissaries for a living universe conspire to speak to us in new and timely ways.
May we find ways to be the ancestors we dream of becoming.
Footnotes
1 polycrisis: originally coined by French theorist Edgar Morin, refers to the various crises in economics, politics,
geopolitics and the environment which are feeding into each other, exacerbating already difficult circumstances.
2 From The Dawn Of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_majority
4 Bodies of culture: according to Resma Manakem bodies of culture refer to all human bodies not considered white.
5 The permanent rebellion: An interpretation of Mapuche uprisings under Chilean colonialism
https://uclpress.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14324/111.444.ra.2021.v6.1.012
6 Roles of Traditional Ecological Knowledge for Biodiversity Conservation
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/234657468.pdf
References
The Age of Consequence
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-03-02/review-the-age-of-consequences-by-c
ourtney-white/
Bodies of Culture. Resma Menakem:
https://resmaa.com/2023/02/13/bodies-of-culture-and-two-forms-of-soul/
The Human Quest for Fairness & Equality
https://www.su.se/polopoly_fs/1.624407.1662106906!/menu/standard/file/FEHR%2
0A%20-%20Heterogenous%20Human%20Quest%20for%20Fairness%20%26%20E
quality%20%28Nobel%20Symposium%29%20PUBLIC.pdf
The Science of Empathy https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5513638/
The permanent rebellion: An interpretation of Mapuche uprisings under Chilean
colonialism
https://uclpress.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14324/111.444.ra.2021.
v6.1.012
Chile-Biodiversity Facts
https://www.cbd.int/countries/profile?country=cl#:~:text=Chile%20possesses%20aro
und%2030%2C000%20species,and%20among%20the%20most%20threatened.
Van Gelder, Sarah (2023). Creative Futures Begin with Reckoning with and Unjust Past.
Routledge Handbook for Creative Futures.
https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbook-for-Creative-Futures/Donnelly-Mont
uori/p/book/9780367897185
Haraway, Donna (2016) Staying with the Trouble
Felipe Viveros is a writer, researcher, artist, ecologist and strategist. His work focuses on the intersection of digital storytelling, policy and systems change. He is the founder of not-for-profit agency for systems change Culture Hack Labs.