Deconstructing the Hegemony; Reconstructing the Pluriverse — III

Active Hope is the antidote to Hegemony

Art work by Shilo Shiv Suleman

There are times in life when the firmament of our being seems to collapse, taking all the light with it, swallowing all color and sound into a silent scream of darkness. It rarely looks that way from the inside, but these are always times of profound transformation and recalibration — the darkness is not terminal but primordial; in it, a new self is being born, not with a Big Bang but with a whisper. Our task, then, is only to listen. What we hear becomes new light. —Maria Popova

We stand on the edge of a time when the very firmament of our civilization is shifting. The tectonic shifts in geopolitics are redrawing the contours of our civilizational trajectory although that may not be immediately apparent from within this moment. History is being made. Recalibration of what it means to be human, to be a global community, to hold each other in the center of our being, to eschew the human-made boundaries of nations and countries, and rise like a tidal wave of hope is unfolding. Social contracts are being rewritten, rejuvenated, crafted anew. As Gaza crossed 100 days of relentless bombing, it has become a litmus test of our humanity and a harbinger of transformation.

Even as Western mainstream media ‘invisibilized’ South Africa's presentation on behalf of Palestine at the International Court of Justice, we have the Game of Thrones stars read it out, using their platform to amplify the counter-hegemonic voices as an act of solidarity:

The struggle for justice should never be abandoned because of the apparent overwhelming power of those who have the guns and the money and who seem invincible in their determination to hold onto it. This apparent power has again and again proved vulnerable to moral fervor, determination, unity, organization, sacrifice, wit, ingenuity, courage, patience…” ~Howard Zinn, quoted in Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit

The hegemony would like us to believe that it is invincible, inevitable, and immutable. However, its desperation is evident. The Eurocentric hegemony is visibly stumbling and stuttering, it's narrative becoming increasingly incoherent and paranoid. “All we seem to be left with now is paranoid gibberish about a War on Terror whose whole purpose is to expand the War, increase the Terror, and obfuscate the fact that the wars of today are not aberrations but systemic, logical exercises to preserve a way of life whose delicate pleasures and exquisite comforts can only be delivered to the chosen few by a continuous, protracted war for hegemony—Lifestyle Wars” ~Arundhati Roy, Things That Can and Cannot be Said: Essays and Conversations, Arundhati Roy and John Cusack

The paranoia of profit and capital accumulation has led to ludicrous levels of insanity. It's evident in the bombing of Yemen, in the razing of Gaza. The countries have billions of barrels of oil that the hegemony wants. So, a delay in shipping becomes reason enough to bomb one of the poorest countries … but all this is no longer hidden. A deadly and fallacious combination of Supremacy, Separation, and Secrecy has kept the hegemony going. But let me clarify a few points about hegemony before proceeding further.

By hegemony, I refer to the nexus of Western nation-states led by the government of the USA aided by big money, big tech, and surveillance mechanisms and other enabling bodies like the Pentagon, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and regulations like the Structural Adjustment Programs. The USA has a long history of meddling in other countries, toppling governments to install ones of their choice and destabilizing countries for decades. The 1% billionaires who have the ability to shape geopolitics, economics, education and everything in-between are of course close allies. “In a startling revelation coinciding with the World Economic Forum in Davos, Oxfam has reported that the combined fortunes of the world's five wealthiest men have soared from $405 billion in 2020 to a staggering $869 billion last year”.

We have either disappearing democracies or staged ones, and performative politics with citizens as vote banks. ‘Trickle-down’ economy has been an utter failure; but ‘gush-up’ has definitely worked. Mass Media functions to manufacture consent through propaganda, misinformation, omissions, and elisions. A tightly woven web of all these aspects are necessary for the maintenance of this hegemony.

The hegemony is morbidly fearful of alternative narratives that demonstrate human solidarity, community, and love. Nonetheless, they continue to exist proving rather inconvenient for the hegemony while becoming harbingers of hope to many. The many movements that define the past decade from Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, from Extinction Rebellion to Black Lives Matter, from Farmers Movement in India to Anti-CAA protests, and many many more appear like nodes of light spanning the globe. Seemingly disparate, nonetheless they are indelibly connected through their counter-hegemonic narratives, defiance of corporatization and state powers, and an overarching call for justice, equity, and dignity for all, human and more-than-human. Therefore, it is our responsibility as acts of sacred activism, to amplify such narratives, to draw attention to the movements of solidarity rising across the globe because they hold the seeds of pluriversality.

Hegemony wants us to forget our history of resistance, of community, of solidarity. It deliberately pits people against people, emphasizing differences, exacerbating grievances, weaponizing unhealed wounds, and widening fault lines. It constantly weaves tales of divisiveness to prevent the emergence of a collective ‘we’. Therefore, it is crucial to ask, ”Who benefits from keeping us fragmented, fighting, and fearful?” “Who benefits when billions of dollars are spent on warfare?” “Who benefits from the hegemony?”

It is definitely not the common people struggling to make ends meet. Ordinary people in their thousands are out in the streets, scripting new narratives, recalibrating in real-time what it means to be human, to be a global community, to hope in the face of devastating loss and grief. The propaganda has lost. Hope has risen. Patrisse Cullors, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, described the movement’s mission as to “Provide hope and inspiration for collective action to build collective power to achieve collective transformation, rooted in grief and rage but pointed towards vision and dreams.”

The Scream of Gaza by Tunisian artist Omar Esstar

Today, in these times of profound transformation, the screams rooted in grief and rage has become the guiding metaphor nudging us towards a different world. Hope, writes the inimitable Rebecca Solnit, is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists.

This is precisely what is unfolding as Gaza continues to resist annihilation; South Africa, in a profound act of poetic justice, stepped up to invoke the genocide convention against Israel at the International Court of Justice with most of the Global South countries joining in support. And Namibia’s support for South Africa and condemnation of [Germany for committing what is considered as 20th century's first genocide—the killing of the Herero and Nama people speaks volumes about the shifting narratives.

Whatever may be the outcome, this is a profound moment of civilizational import that may not be immediately evident. It heralds the breakdown of the hegemonic, unipolar order, and the emergence of a very different form of world-building. Will this happen overnight? Of course not. But the cracks and fissures are deepening, the old order is tottering, and the masses have risen from their propaganda-induced torpor. And once you see, you cannot unsee what was hitherto deliberately hidden.

In these moments of rupture, people find themselves members of a global community, a massive ‘WE’ throbbing with life and passion, an entity with agency and power. This ‘we’ had the power to abolish slavery, end segregation, win political enfranchisement for women, end British rule in India. This ‘we’ is rising again as the old dreams of a decolonized, humane, and just society reemerge.

This is active hope that refuses to surrender, that continues to sow the seeds of possible futures as yet unrealized but visible to the discerning heart. “It recalls that power comes from the shadows and the margins, that our hope is in the dark around the edges, not the limelight of center stage.” ~Rebecca Solnit

Active hope is an antidote to hegemony. “Its the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand”. This is perhaps what the hegemony fears most. They are afraid of our hope and resilience, of community and solidarity, of love and joy. Because hope implies a refusal to be crushed, a promise of return, a crack in the apparent invincibility of the hegemony. Colonization, therefore, is heavily dependent on crushing the spirit, eradicating culture, eliminating memories, and erasing all aspects of meaningful and meaning-making existence. Therefore, they go for universities, libraries, ancient archeological structures, artists, writers, poets, and teachers in a futile attempt to erase history and hope.

This has repeatedly failed. People have risen time and again literally from the ashes and rubbles of their razed homes to bring hope.

Perpetuating colonialism also requires decontextualization of events and actions. Histories are eradicated, rendered invisible. New indignations are manufactured as curtains are drawn on old atrocities. Resistance to the hegemony in any form is forbidden. They are seen as unforeseen attacks of terrorism by the ‘inherently violent Other’; hegemony’s response is always marked by overwhelming and disproportionate use of force, brutality, and mass killing. There is absolutely no acknowledgement of hegemony’s role in the perpetration of violence. This total decontextualization of and delinking from past atrocities is a tool to justify the mayhem, whether in Iraq or Syria, Palestine or Namibia. The list is endless.

Rudolf Steiner says that any perception or truth that is isolated and removed from its larger context ceases to be true. Hegemony thrives on this erasure of context, on fragmenting history, creating identity wars, and manufacturing new outrages. The beleaguered masses, crushed from the efforts to survive, are kept disjointed, polarized, insecure, and isolated—deeply alienated from others, from community, and from Self. This decontextualization creates an impression of incidents happening in a vacuum giving the hegemonic powers a free hand to propagate a narrative of their choice, leaving people bewildered and anguished. The Hamas atrocities of 7th October were painful and traumatizing for the sufferers. But removing the context of the previous 75 years of Israel’s occupation and harassment of Palestinians created further distress, dissonance, and fear laying the ground for escalating bitterness and brutality.

Nonetheless, the past has a way of showing up at the most inconvenient moments—at least for the hegemony. Namibia's memory of the genocide of their peoples is one such where they condemned Germany for supporting Israel, reminding Germany of their genocide against the Herero people because they dared to resist the takeover of their land. Because there is neither acceptance nor atonement, the wounds do not heal, and past patterns continue to play out.

The old toxic patterns are still being repeated but the facade has crumbled. The Western hegemony is struggling to come to terms with its own demise. Rather than opening up (the status quo is incapable of that), they are doubling down doing more of the same—more bombing, more surveillance, more silencing, more more more in a never-ending paranoia of control. They are annihilating Life so that Capital can flow unhindered.

Indoctrination is another tool that the hegemony uses profusely. The hegemonic narrative has infiltrated the education system, where children from a very young age are presented with the hegemony’s version of the world. For example, we are shocked when we see videos of very young Israeli soldiers barely out of their teens gloating over their massacres. Perhaps probing a little deeper will reveal how generations are indoctrinated into hate right from a very young age, fed falsehoods to deliberately stoke fear and anger against the Other (Arabs in this case), and their painful memories of Holocaust weaponized to keep the fires of vengeance burning. Because it serves the hegemonic powers to be in control of the Middle East through an outpost, Israel.

What happens to the children? Their humanity is sacrificed to the delusional aspirations of the political overlords. Therefore, on one hand, we have generations of orphans—destitute, displaced, and despairing who will grow up with memories of painful injustices. One the other are generations of dehumanized, soulless, indoctrinated youngsters who never got to be who they could be—beautiful, compassionate, loving humans. Instead they have been ruthlessly manipulated by the hegemonic powers to become ruthless killing machines. There are lost generations on both sides. Price of hegemony is high; its fruits are bitter; its roots, toxic; its shadow, kills.

Ecocide, epistemicide, and genocide are inevitable outcomes of hegemony as Gaza is demonstrating. It is an extermination of life—beyond human. The ancient olive groves of Gaza were home to numerous species of birds including ‘the Eurasian Jay, Green Finch, Hooded Crow, Masked Shrike, Palestine Sunbird, and Sardinian Warbler rely on the biodiversity provided by Palestine’s wild trees, six species of which are often found in native olive groves’. White phosphorus is completely decimating the land making it unfit for all purposes. The mad attempts to flush tunnels with seawater have already destroyed Gaza’s tiny number of depleted aquifers. Ecocide is another colonizer’s tool. In the midst of sixth mass extinction, we have a hegemonic power gone berserk. They are literally ‘killing the environment’.

Wild groves of olive trees have been harvested by inhabitants of the region for thousands of years, dating back to the Chalcolithic period in the Levant (4,300-3,300 BCE), and the razing of such groves has had calamitous environmental consequences. “[The] removal of trees is directly linked to irreversible climate change, soil erosion, and a reduction in crops,” according to a 2023 Yale Review of International Studies report. “The perennial, woody bark acts as a carbon sink … [an] olive tree absorbs 11 kg of CO2 per liter of olive oil produced.” The poisoning of Gaza — from above and underground

According to the study, which is based on only a handful of carbon-intensive activities and is therefore probably a significant underestimate, the climate cost of the first 60 days of Israel’s military response was equivalent to burning at least 150,000 tonnes of coal. ~Emissions from Israel’s war in Gaza have ‘immense’ effect on climate catastrophe

Hegemony doesn’t care about Life in any form. It is solely dedicated to Capital and Power. Therefore, deconstructing and dismantling the hegemony is not merely a decolonial act but also one of social justice, ecological justice, economic justice, and planetary justice.

Dismantling the hegemony requires recalibration of what countries mean, what happiness means, and what love and joy mean. It's a recalibration of what construes life. Most importantly, it is a recalibration of what Power means. The power that resides in the collective ‘we’ is far greater than hegemony’s oppression and fear induced power. The power of the ‘we’ arises from a profound consciousness of our indelible interconnectedness from our deepest selves. It is a resounding cry of belonging to a greater humanity, to all that is life-affirming and life-giving. This apparent power [of the hegemony] has again and again proved vulnerable to moral fervor, determination, unity, organization, sacrifice, wit, ingenuity, courage, patience…

We see people organically coming together, showing up in droves for a beleaguered country thousands of miles away. Because, in our inmost being, we know. We know that hegemony cannot bomb peace into existence. We know that the hegemony’s power lies in our willingness to buy into their propaganda. The moment we cease to believe, see through the charade, and debunk their fabricated narratives, their power dissolves. And as Maya Angelou said, let’s remember,

Each child belongs to all of us and they will bring us a tomorrow in direct relation to the responsibility we have shown to them. ~Maya Angelou

The Narrative is Shifting

Only a failure of our imaginations can prevent us from stepping into this liminal space. Yes, morbid symptoms abound. Just as Gramsci predicted they would when the old world is dying and the new is struggling to be born. Bombing of Yemen is one such globally visible morbid symptom manifesting itself.

Nonetheless, this liminal space holds possibilities, potentials, and power. The power to shift our civilizational narrative is gathering force. It's in the voices of people rising across countries and nations, it's in the rubbles of Gaza and in the solemn dignity of South Africa's legal team. It's in the relentless coverage by journalists and dedication of doctors. This power doesn't seek to conquer or control, doesn't seek to oppress or dehumanize, doesn't seek to weaponize and abuse. This power is that quiet indomitable grit that rises from the depth of one's being and says, Yes. It's a resounding affirmation of the sanctity of life, of dignity, grace, and beauty.

Rainer Maria Rilke expressed it beautifully in Let this Darkness Be a Bell Tower:

Quiet friend who has come so far,

feel how your breathing makes more

space around you.

Let this darkness be a bell tower and

you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your

strength.

Move back and forth into the change.

What is it like, such intensity of pain?

If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to

wine. In this uncontainable night,

be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,

the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,

say to the silent earth: I flow.

To the rushing water, speak: I am.

However, it will be another fallacy of reductionist, binary thinking to say that the emerging narratives will be about Global South vs Global North. That would indeed be misguided and erroneous thinking, a mirror image of the current order. The new narratives will arise and are emerging from existing cracks and crevices, from the borders where cultures, contexts, and countries merge, from the fluid edges where there is no ‘this is it’.

They embody border thinking, border sensing, and border existing where there is no certainty but many possibilities, no guarantee but myriad openings. The new narratives eschew domination in all its forms; it is not ensnared by ‘isms’ and avoids the trap of homogenization. They embrace the power and potentials of diversity without the need to ‘know it all’. Context, culture, and creativity merge with past wisdom, tribal knowledge, and a yearning for justice. Therefore, everything is in flux, fluid, forming, and unforming in an endless dance of dialogic conviviality. No one tries to play the ‘god trick’.

Joanna Macy called this juncture in our civilization, The Great Turning—a shift from the Industrial Growth Society to a Life-Sustaining Civilization. I will take this a step further; we are poised on the brink of a momentous shift from a Hegemonic world order to a Pluriversal one. This may not be immediately apparent as the apparatuses of control are still in the hands of the Eurocentric hegemony. Nonetheless, tectonic shifts are already underway as nation-states reorient themselves in hitherto unprecedented ways.

Having suffered intense apartheid, South Africa has chosen to turn their historical injustices into healing. Is everything perfect? No. And it will never be because ‘perfection’ is another myth imposed on us. Who defines perfect? What is the benchmark? Who are the judges of perfection? Moving beyond all of these tortuous reasonings, South Africa has gone directly to the heart of the matter. The absolute imperative to stop atrocities and honor all lives.

We are witnessing decolonization in action. And in the space that has opened up, millions of people are stepping in with their voices. Defying the hegemony, demonstrating the power of the ‘WE”.

---

Conclusion

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, I focused on unraveling the The Playbook of Hegemony and highlighting some of the tools it uses to create a web of illusion, manufacture consent, and control the dominant narrative—the monomyth of endless profit and ever-rising GDP as the path to redemption. Here, I will wrap up the deconstruction of the hegemonic monomyth with a few more examples to tie up some lose ends before moving on to the reconstruction of the Pluriverse.

Colonization in myriad forms precede the establishment of hegemonic control, and is therefore innate to any form of hegemony. As a corollary, hegemony can neither be deconstructed nor dismantled without decolonizing our imagination and worldviews.

Without the worldview and supporting structures of colonization, it wouldn’t have been possible to impose the Eurocentric geopolitical dominance on a large part of the planet. Colonialists have always offered, with the smug self-assurance arising from a supremacist mindset, the preposterous inducement that colonization, and ultimately the usurpation, of their land by strangers would benefit the people of that country. This absurd conviction rests on three interconnected beliefs: Separation (from Nature, Self, and Others), Supremacy (over Nature and Others), and Patriarchy (the right of a handful of men to call the shots).

A combination of all these aspects of colonization can be seen in the example of exploitative mining in the DRC, where “the expansion of industrial-scale cobalt and copper mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has led to the forced eviction of entire communities and grievous human rights abuses including sexual assault, arson and beatings.” In the name of energy transition, the poorest and the most vulnerable are being rendered homeless and forced into horrendous slave-like labor conditions. This isn’t really all that different from the plantation slavery of the 17th and 18th Centuries—a colonization of land, bodies, resources, and culture.

As always, the most vulnerable who have the least to do with the impending climate crisis pay the price while e.g., in 2019, the super-rich 1% were responsible for more carbon emissions than 66% of humanity (5 billion people). This emphasizes the absolute necessity and the imperative for a decolonial vision of social justice and pluriversality when envisioning regenerative world-building.

A hegemonic, unipolar world driven by a mechanistic monomyth of free market and globalization controlled by a handful is in absolute contradiction to the vision of regeneration and pluriversal futures. In a dystopic manifestation of this worldview, the peripheral parts of the world, away from the gaze of the metropole, continue to be colonized in the name of industrial agriculture, energy transition, carbon credit, open cast mining, deep-sea trawling, and much more.

Today, the global 1% forms the power center—the unipolar entity. Even in self-proclaimed democracies, the voice of the people are rendered powerless as politics, big money, and big tech form a seamless nexus of control. They span countries and nations, but their overarching interests are the same—expropriation, extraction, exploitation, and consolidation of power. Their modus operandi are aligned.

I have briefly summarized the overarching impact of the colonial belief system below:

On Nature. It is manifested in the form of ecocide (mindless destruction of nature for profit), eco-apartheid (the deliberate use of the environment to marginalize racially defined groups, as well as the subsequent consequences of that marginalization**)**, and biopiracy (also known as scientific colonialism and defined as the unauthorized appropriation of knowledge and genetic resources of farming and indigenous communities by individuals or institutions seeking exclusive monopoly control through patents or intellectual property).

On Others. According to Edward Said, "othering" is the invention of difference (an "Us versus Them") to separate a dominant culture or group from a supposedly inferior "other." Said further explained that European and American powers use "othering" in order to justify their ongoing colonization. Colonization in its varied forms have thus been inflicted on the Other through centuries—overtly and explicitly in the form of invasions and capture, and then covertly and implicitly through appropriate bodies like the World Bank and the IMF.

On Self. The colonized suffer the ignominy of loss of freedom over their resources, their bodies, their culture, their very way of being, and are often annihilated when deemed too inconvenient for the colonizer. However, the colonizers, in the process of exterminating others annihilates themselves. Their humanity is extinguished, their disconnection from the Other permeates all aspects of their own beings, rendering them fragmented and diminished.

Rabindranath Tagore summarized this eloquently in his seminal work Nationalism, 1917:

…the western nations are following that path of suicide, where they are smothering their humanity under the immense weight of organisations in order to keep themselves in power and hold others in subjection.

But now, where the spirit of western nationalism prevails, the whole people is being taught from boyhood to foster hatreds and ambitions by all kinds of means—by the manufacture of half-truths and untruths in history, by persistent misrepresentation of other races and the culture of unfavourable sentiments towards them, by setting up memorials of events, very often false, which for the sake of humanity should be speedily forgotten, thus continually brewing evil menace towards neighbours and nations other than their own. It is holding up gigantic selfishness as the one universal religion for all nations of the world.

To imbue the minds of the whole people with an abnormal vanity of its own superiority, to teach it to take pride in its moral callousness and ill-begotten wealth, to perpetuate the humiliation of defeated nations by exhibiting trophies won from war, and using these in schools in order to breed in children’s minds contempt for others, is imitating the West where she has a festering sore, whose swelling is a swelling of disease eating into its vitality.