My screed in the current Adbusters (ironically posted on Facebook while decrying Facebook) describes the difficulty of addressing a monolithic view of value, knowledge, and teleology. The ability for the successful to numb themselves to the fallout of their “progress” creates a vicious circle of moral and sensory blindness. In order not to act with compassion towards the environment and people destroyed because of your actions, especially those that make your life ever more plush and appearing “secure,” demands a tremendous amount of learned selective desensitization. It requires reprogramming the natural instinct of your cells and mirror neurons to feel empathy, reach out a hand, sigh, and lend some muscle and coin to repair a broken life. It requires hating oneself enough to treat strangers with contempt based on superficial differences. It requires inner fascism.
Thus, the oppressors, are also the oppressed. But they are not oppressed by real material conditions exogenous to them as much as from the clutches of their own insatiable ego, ever defensive, ever vigilant, ever insecure.
The call I make then, is to support with solidarity the evolution already underfoot:
We need to shut the 10,000 Pandora’s boxes opened by technology, and doing that will require technologies. But those technologies must be different from the single, aggressive one we have. An indigenous science, a feminist science, a postcolonial science — all are needed for any hope of change.
We need to go where scares us to know our courage. May we be humbled by the sublime, overwhelmed before the creations which created us. May we work in inner and outer service only towards the true liberation of all beings.
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