GTDF is actively collaborating on the upcoming book titled “Outgrowing Modernity: Navigating Complexity, Complicity and Collapse With Compassion and Accountability.” Over the summer of 2024, we plan to release brief excerpts from the book as test signals. We welcome responses to these signals that can help with our writing process.
Chapter “Molecular colonialism: Affective Patterns of Identity and Relationship Building (6As)
Our inquiry affirms Chief Ninawa Huni Kui’s description of the imposed sense of separation between humans and nature (aka separability) as a form of neurodegenerative impairment or dis-ease that has been accelerated by modernity/coloniality to potentially a terminal stage for humanity. This dis-ease not only makes us treat land as property, but also rank species, cultures, and individuals according to their perceived contribution to a particular single story of progress, development, and civilization. This hierarchical worldview undermines our senses and sensibilities, blocking our sense of belonging to the wider metabolism of Earth and beyond, and undermining our sense of capacity for restrain and responsibility towards sustaining the viability of life for future generations of human and non-human beings.
Cultural supremacy is not a distorted perception of the other, but a distorted and inflated perception of the self, which is culturally sanctioned, rewarded, and normalized and naturalized within a given context. Cultural supremacy is not only based on cognitive biases but is also structured libidinally and neurophysiologically around affective and relational patterns grounded in separability, which are more difficult to interrupt than cognitive biases. In modernity, it is common to observe the workings of white cultural supremacy; however, given modernity’s established parameters of legibility, challenges to white supremacy are often only intelligible and actionable if they also, strategically or not, reproduce the same traits.
In our educational and artistic experiments, we have observed and attempted to map the cognitive, relational, and affective patterns of cultural supremacy manifesting in active or reactive ways across different contexts and nested cultures within modernity.
Affective patterns of individual and collective identities
Regarding affective patterns, we have identified an assemblage of entitlements, which we call “the 6 As,” with the first 4 As providing the conditions for the last 2 As. In our tentative map, cultural supremacy is reproduced when people are wired to feel entitled to and to seek:
1. Moral and epistemic AUTHORITY as immunity from critique
2. Unrestricted and unaccountable AUTONOMY as freedom devoid of responsibility
3. The universal ARBITRATION of truth, lawfulness, justice, beauty and common sense
4. The statutory AFFIRMATION of benevolence, innocence, goodness, virtue, purity, and exceptional purpose
These four (first-order) entitlements create the conditions for the naturalization and normalization of the perceived entitlements to:
5. APPROPRIATE and ACCUMULATE different forms of capital through extraction, exploitation, and expropriation with impunity
6. ACCELERATE a single story of progress, development, and civilization, headed by those who embody the previous traits and place themselves at the apex of time and human evolution (while others are perceived to be lagging behind and in need of “advancement”).
When the norms and institutions of modernity heavily influence our approach to identity and relationship building, challenges to our perceived entitlements often provoke defensiveness or aggression. Typically, we are not aware of these defensive reactions because they have been normalized as a justified expression of righteousness. We are wired to the 6 As and socialized to treat them the same way we treat private property because they are essential for the legibility of our modern identities. Therefore, those who challenge our perceived entitlements to autonomy, authority, arbitration, and goodness-affirmation often receive significant pushback.
In our educational experiments, our collective has observed that when people try to come together to address specific global challenges or the poly/meta/perma-crisis, they generally get stuck in three traps related to the 6 As. The first trap is where people get stuck in a circular pattern of trying to build trust and connection only through the first 4 As, either competing or collaborating for a distribution of authority, arbitration, autonomy, and the affirmation of goodness within a specific group. The second trap is where people cannot overcome the difficulties, resistances, refusals, fragilities and polarizations that arise when cultural supremacies, particularly white cultural supremacy, are challenged. In this context, people get stuck in identity-based entrenchments. The third trap is where people place a caveat on their participation, requiring their contribution to be validated from the outset. This creates a context where the entire collective effort is placed in service of affirming a particular person’s or group’s sense of self-efficacy, achievements, or purpose, rather than being present to what the challenge at hand requires of us. These three traps often take up all the “air space,” time, and energy collectively available and hijack the collective process.
The 6 As also entrap us in a culture of political mobilization based on “the 6 Es” (which we will introduce in more detail our next excerpt). The 6 Es stand for exceptionalism, exaltedness, externalization of culpability, expansion of entitlements, emancipation as distinction and segregation, and escape from responsibility. Until we find ways to compost the 6 As and 6 Es, we will not be able to develop the relational intelligence, wisdom and maturity necessary to decenter our egos, disarm our conditioned defences and centre the challenges at hand (the shit to be composted), which often include, but are not limited to, historical, systemic and ongoing racial and colonial forms of violence.
Imagine you are experiencing each of the three entrapment scenarios presented above, and you can notice the 6 As at work. How would you gently guide each group towards towards possibilities of identity and relationship building beyond the 6 As?
Please note: Due to the intensive writing process for our upcoming book and our existing commitments, the collective is currently operating at full capacity and cannot take on new initiatives or requests for collaboration. If you would like to connect in 2025, please send an email to gtdfcollective(at)gmail.com.
Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures 