Our Civilizational Trajectory and the Dangers of a Single Story

End-of-year review and reflections

A screenshot of a Banksy artwork in Gaza

As we enter the penultimate day of 2023, I prepared to collate some of the key themes from my essay series, The Dangers of a Single Story—the hegemonic monomyth I have been trying to unpick and unravel for a long time. I tried to read through, see what had been on my mind and heart, and what flowed through me in my essays.

But I could not proceed without acknowledging the terror, trauma, and troubles of besieged Gaza—a microcosm of the hegemony in action. There are countries like Sudan, Congo, and other parts of the world also being ravaged and savaged by the brutalities of necro-capitalism and its flagbearer, the Western hegemony, but they are largely hidden from view and the voices of resistance silenced. Most of these fly under the radar, in the far away corners of forests and tribal lands, away from the gaze of the mainstream media, social or otherwise.

Gaza’s annihilation is unfolding on our screens in real-time, and has become a metaphor for colonial oppression the world over—connecting our colonized pasts and dreams of decolonized futures in a collective uprising of human consciousness. It is an inflexion point in our civilizational trajectory, and ordinary people across nations and countries are out on the streets, scripting the new narratives of a very different world order. World-building is happening in real-time through the voices of folks and feet on the streets. This, I believe, is the emergence of a Pluriversal World. It won’t happen overnight but the seeds are planted, the soil is ready, and the tender but tenacious roots are already sprouting.

I had taken a couple of months of deliberate break with the intention to continue my research and compilations for a book I am writing. I am hesitant to use the word ‘writing’ but I will come back to that later. My break turned into a pause as the horrors and tragedies of babies, children, men, and women being mindlessly bombed escalated. I found myself—like many others—completely paralyzed, unable to write about seemingly mundane matters such as ‘reimagining our organizations and institutions’.

Gaza superseded everything else; its pain, helplessness, and terror driving out all else. Attaching labels to the unfolding crisis appeared strangely inadequate. Should it be called genocide, ecocide, or epistemicide? It is all rolled into one. How can labels capture the despair of grieving mothers, the desperation of doctors, the wanton desecration of their libraries, the ravaged soil that once nourished their cherished olive groves? “The ongoing war has turned Gaza’s beautiful olive groves into danger zones. Israel has adopted a “burned ground” policy during the war, including the destruction of ancient olive trees in Gaza. Venerable trees, some dating back hundreds of years, have been reduced to ashes. These acts have not only erased a part of Gaza’s cultural heritage but have also deprived families of their primary source of income.” ~Olives Won’t be Pressed This Year.

As writer, activist, and public intellectual, Arundhati Roy says:

“If we say nothing about Israel’s brazen slaughter of Palestinians, even as it is livestreamed into the most private recesses of our personal lives, we are complicit in it. Something in our moral selves will be altered forever. Are we going to simply stand by and watch while homes, hospitals, refugee camps, schools, universities, archives are bombed, a million people displaced, and dead children pulled out from under the rubble? The borders of Gaza are sealed. People have nowhere to go. They have no shelter, no food, no water. The United Nations says more than half the population is starving. And still they are being bombed relentlessly. Are we going to once again watch a whole people being dehumanised to the point where their annihilation does not matter?”

Gaza is being methodically and deliberately demolished and devastated. I am not condoning the Hamas atrocities; no one who values life can support it. However, seeing it in isolation without the context of 75-years of Israeli occupation is misleading. It is an outcome of brutal occupation and decades of dehumanization. Oppression always leads to rebellion; it was true in the times of Spartacus and equally valid today. All acts of resistance and rebellion from the oppressed is always perceived as ‘savage terrorism’ by the oppressor. Nelson Mandela was once a trained guerilla leader of the South African Black majority’s main resistance organization, the African National Congress. The 1857 Sepoy Mutiny of India was an uprising against the British East India Company, perceived as an act of terror by the British and the first step towards national liberation by the Indians.

I am neither a public intellectual nor a historian. I am merely a social observer, an occasional critique, and a synthesizer of patterns weaving disparate threads of events to highlight and reveal the underlying narratives and metaphors of the current hegemonic world order. I have been writing about the dangers of a single story—the hegemony—and its insidious ramifications for a wondrously diverse and pluriversal planet.

The enormity of it all renders one mute, stricken. It is this deliberate and diabolical erasure of not only people but also their lands, histories, narratives, and culture that constitute the Archetype of Colonialism. It is a complete eradication of an entire people from the memory and trajectory of civilization. It has happened in the past. It is happening now. The difference being that the erasure is live-streamed into the most private recesses of our daily existence, and we ignore it at our collective peril. But is this the ideal our civilization set out to achieve with its much-vaunted technology, globalization, and all the predictions of progress and development. How vacuous it all seems; meaningless blather of charlatans.

But is this the ideal of man which we can look up to with pride: after centuries of civilisation nations fearing each other like the prowling wild beasts of the night-time; shutting their doors of hospitality; combining only for purpose of aggression or defence; hiding in their holes their trade secrets, state secrets, secrets of their armaments; making peace-offerings to each other’s barking dogs with the meat which does not belong to them; holding down fallen races which struggle to stand upon their feet; with their right hands dispensing religion to weaker peoples, while robbing them with their left—is there anything in this to make us envious? ~Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism, 1917

Colonialism (and neo-colonialism) rests on the three pillars of genocide, ecocide, and epistemicide ably supported by neoliberal capitalism (necro-capitalism) and its associated institutions and power brokers. The tentacles of the hegemonic Eurocentric Empire extend across continents, lands, and oceans. And as it approaches its own collapse and demise, its final dance of death is playing out in Gaza because of the desperate need to control the energy resources and accessibility in an energy-hungry and energy-depleting world where ‘who controls energy rules’.

Gaza has thus become a microcosm—an unfolding mirror, metaphor, and manifestation of all the concentrated powers of the Hegemony lashing out through its colonial outpost, Israel, and using the painful memories of a once-persecuted people, the Jews, as a facade. The tragedy is that the horrific actions of a nation-state are imperiling those they profess to protect, leaving them vulnerable to rising antisemitism. Violence can only beget violence. Peace cannot arise from blood-soaked soil.

The Empire has always survived and thrived through propaganda, distortion, and elimination of histories. Its far-reaching propaganda machines have always sought to build a veil of illusion and delusion to manufacture consent and portray the Empire as a beneficial harbinger of civilization, savior of the savages and barbarians (savages and barbarians being the red, brown, and black indigenous peoples of the lands they invaded). Gaza has ripped the veil of this manufactured consent and the haze of propaganda is fading. The Empire stands naked, imploding, and desperate. In its desperation and death throes, it is bringing down all that stands in its way of expansion, expropriation, and exploitation.

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7th of October was a turning point. A point of discontinuity much like Covid was for our entire civilizational trajectory. And as in 2020, the leaders of the global order and the most ‘powerful nations’ of the world have once again failed to measure up. Mired in the pettiness of power, profit, and politics, they have chosen the oft-trodden path of domination, vengeance, vilification, and venal partisanship. 7th of October could have been a decisive moment in global history if leaders and nations could have stepped into their humanity. In that space of tragedy, trauma, and pain also lay the seeds of connection and dialogues, truth and reconciliation for all the people of all sides. Imagine if world leaders had a moral compass, what decisions and actions would have ensued? What choices would have been made? Is this idealism? I don’t think so. This is realism.

Unfortunately, our current hegemonic civilizational order is being run by delusional leaders controlled by big money, big tech, big oil, and the military-industrial complex in a Faustian deal with the devil to stay in power. Now that the hegemony is visibly crumbling, the opportunity for a transformative shift lost, the world looks on aghast at the unfolding tragedy of Gaza. In this context, Charles Eisenstein writes,

These “forever wars” bankrupted America, not only of trillions of dollars that could have gone toward infrastructure, health, and the environment, but also of the respect and goodwill of other nations. The suffering it wreaked in Iraq — half a million casualties of men, women, and children from 2003-2008 — and throughout the region (perhaps 4.5 million deaths all told as a result of the War on Terror, plus countless families displaced), exceeded by several orders of magnitude the number who died on 9/11. And, needless to say, all but a handful of these deaths were of people utterly innocent of the crimes of that day. Thus it was that America swiftly squandered the sympathy and moral standing that it had gained after 9/11.

The tragedy lies not only in the dehumanization of the oppressed but the utter dehumanization of the perpetrators. Only by suppressing and obliterating one’s own selfhood can one become a mindless instigator and perpetrator of brutality. When I see videos of Israeli soldiers gloating over their killing sprees, I feel a tidal wave of sadness—for the babies wantonly slaughtered and for the wasted lives of these deluded young men who have become their own demons before they ever touched the humanity in the beat of their hearts. I wonder at the plight of our pitiful nations that call upon humans to surrender their humanity, that eschew peace for power, that embrace collective annihilation over collective healing.

If you want me to take to butchering human beings, you must break up that wholeness of my humanity through some discipline which makes my will dead, my thoughts numb, my movements automatic, and then from the dissolution of the complex personal man will come out that abstraction, that destructive force, which has no relation to human truth, and therefore can be easily brutal or mechanical. ~Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism, 1917

We are at an inflexion point—one that demands we go beyond ourselves, beyond manmade borders and myths of separation, and far beyond the societal fractures and fragments being deliberately fomented by state-sponsored propaganda machines to manufacture consent for monstrosities none of us would ever sign up for.

Horrors are perpetrated in our name; the labels may change but the instigators share the same traits of lust for power, obsession with domination, and a dystopic desire for revenge. This deadly combination has led to countless choices and actions that are in absolute contradiction to anyone’s interest. Therefore, we see nations imploding from within, living standards deteriorating, ecological crises knocking on our doors, global hunger rising, and global poverty is nowhere near decreasing.

On the other hand, tech bros and the venerated Silicon Valley boast of the next AI launch, the latest version of chatGPT, and other such apparently magical technology capable of reducing human labor (read, increase job losses for already beleaguered folks), increase productivity (of useless products), and generally create mashups of content existing anywhere on the Internet (read, plagiarize without consent). Am I cynical of tech? In general, no. The way it is currently being designed, developed, and disseminated? Yes!! We have entered an era of technocracy coupled with the absolute loss of moral compass in leaders, and this is a frightening combination with ramifications for our planetary and civilizational trajectory that are playing out in real time.

This is what the hegemonic monomyth premised on Separation from Self, Nature, and Others has succeeded in doing: render humans isolated, atomized, insecure, and fearful who can be easily manipulated and used as destructive forces in service to the military-industrial complex and its machine of production-consumerism to garner ever-increasing profit for a few at immense cost to self, society, and all sentient beings.

It is a form of extreme denial of Life—of its complexity, its abundance and interconnectedness, its indelible entanglements—all of which defy neat categorizations and standardizations so dear to the reductionist mind. This narrative lies at the root of the savagery in Gaza, of Colonialism and Capitalism.

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More than a hundred years ago, Rabindranath Tagore described the Western civilization thus in his 1917 book, Nationalism:

The political civilisation which has sprung up from the soil of Europe and is overrunning the whole world, like some prolific weed, is based on exclusiveness. It is always watchful to keep the aliens at bay or to exterminate them. It is carnivorous and cannibalistic in its tendencies, it feeds upon the resources of other peoples and tries to swallow their whole future. It is always afraid of other races achieving eminence, naming it as a peril, and tries to thwart all symptoms of greatness outside its own boundaries, forcing down races of men who are weaker, to be eternally fixed in their weakness. …

We had wars, pillages, changes of monarchy and consequent miseries, but never such sight of fearful and hopeless voracity, such wholesale feeding of nation upon nation, such huge machines for turning great portions of the earth into mince-meat, never such terrible jealousies with all their ugly teeth and claws ready for tearing open each other’s vitals.

The cult of the Nation, as practised by the nations of Europe, led inevitably to an escalating cycle of conflict, where ‘machine must be pitted against machine, and nation against nation, in an endless bullfight of politics’.

We have seen that with all its vaunted love of humanity it has proved itself the greatest menace to Man, far worse than the sudden outbursts of nomadic barbarism from which men suffered in the early ages of history. We have seen, under the spell of its gigantic sordidness, man losing faith in all the heroic ideals of life which have made him great.

~Nationalism, 1917

At least for more than five centuries, our civilization has been controlled by this cannibalistic model running rampant, unhindered and unhinged. I have been writing about this imperial-colonial project for a while. This project has worn many labels—progress, development, growth, human rights, rules-based order (RBO), and even democracy; worn many faces—from blatant colonization spanning more than five centuries to neocolonialism of the modern era. Through it all, the underlying paradigms have remained unchanged, unfettered, and uncontested. The almost invisible frameworks and beliefs have been so effectively embedded in all the systems—from education to healthcare, from bureaucracy to businesses, from ecology to economy, from politics to societies—that the subsystems, strategies, polices, and governance models arising from these paradigms have continued to do the work of the Empire under different facades, new guises, and novel tools.

Yes, the proponents will speak of the evolution of science, eradication of diseases, advances in technology, and all the other glories of modernism/colonialism. Let’s pause and ask: Was it really essential to devastate the planet to truly share knowledge and walk the path of development? I believe science lost its sheen and incorruptibility the day the first atomic bomb, named Little Boy, was dropped on Hiroshima from the Enola Gay, a B-29 bomber, at 8:15 AM on August 6, 1945. Today, technology is used by the military-industrial complex to decimate lands and people, to rig algorithms and overthrow democracies, to spy on and surveil citizens, to ravage oceans and mountains. I could go on. But what a sad denunciation of our civilization! What a waste of science, intelligence, and billions of research dollars!

Colonialism, in all its avatars, always was, is, and will be a dominating force. It is predicated on control and competition; it was never meant to be a confluence of cultures. Today, as the world stands on the cusp of planetary collapse, a metacrisis engulfing us, the draft text of COP28 omits fossil-fuel phase out. “We are a society of altruists governed by psychopaths,” says George Monbiot.

All of these are intrinsically linked and entangled outcomes of the Eurocentric monomyth imposed on the rest of the planet as a colonial-imperial project predicated on supremacy, Otherisation, entitlement, and lust for power. The Western world strove to maintain its hegemony and the unipolar world order by any means necessary. Arms and ammunitions flowed through the same channels that also professed to supply humanitarian aids to war-torn, ravaged, beleaguered countries. Immigrants by the thousands throng the borders of those nations perpetuating wars in their countries hoping for asylum—safety for their children, peace for the elderly.

This is a world where big money, big tech, big oil, big pharma, and big data are collectively weaving a suffocating net of monstrous proportions. However, the narrative has now gone out of their control. Propaganda is spectacularly failing. The hegemony is literally collapsing brick-by-brick like a house of cards. The bulwarks of the narrative stand exposed for all to see.

From the rubbles and ravages spawned by this hegemony are arising voices that have long been suppressed, delegitimized, and rendered unseen, unheard, and unacknowledged. These voices hold the seeds of emergent narratives, nurture dreams forged in diverse worldviews, foster connections and communities having survived the trauma and onslaught of the hegemony. These narratives intersect, overlap, diverge, converge, and merge in an entangled, enmeshed fabric of resilience, hope, pluriversality, and joy. They are repairing the web of life as alternatives to the civilization imposed on the planet by the monomyth.

To the status quo, these narratives have many names—resistance, rebellion, anti-nationalism, and even terrorism. To the hopeful, these narratives are seeds of possible futures that go beyond multipolarity to pluriversality, beyond anthropocentrism to biocentrism and ecocentrism, beyond growth to degrowth and post-growth, beyond sustainability to regeneration, and beyond reductionism to a profound recognition of our entangled, enmeshed beings. They speak “of a kind of federation of nations in which each contributes its own characteristic philosophy”—a dream harbored by Tagore more than a century ago.

Nations meet not in ‘the spirit of conflict and conquest’ but in a true confluence of cultures where ontologies, epistemologies, and worldviews connect—not to become homogenously uniform but to celebrate the diversities and wisdom from all corners, to become woven into many strands in the pluriverse of narratives. These narratives—predicated on our relationality, entanglement, and affirmation of life—become our compasses and guide our consciousness beyond globalization (an economic ideology propagated by neoliberal capitalism) towards true globalism (a celebration of all life and our indelible interconnectedness). Only through collective reimagining and nurturing of the seeds being planted in the ravaged soils of Gaza, Sudan, Congo and other places can we redirect our trajectory.