The answer is not more of the same
I was awake too early, a thought trying to take hold through dreaming.
As a active cultural anthropologist, I have spent the last few days scanning the edges for reflections on our current state of the world.
I listen to brilliant minds, people I admire, trying to find a thread that makes greater sense, knowing that every perspective, including mine, will hold partial truths.
Our world, this “Western” one, has been formed from the minds of intellectual white men. From the ancient Greeks, all the way to our current times. To this day they hold the stage, get the mic, and are listened to as if they are prophets.
While they have value to add, I am tired of my bones of their views being offered as the solution.
As Audrey Lorde said so elegantly, the master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house.
Our house is falling. The fester of hate, never healed, surfaces in full technicolour. The media is never to be believed. Money owns power and politics.
Collapse is inevitable, for the beast is corrupted to the core, and will consume itself in its frenzy to dominate. While the larger beast of ecological breakdown refuses to consider class or caste. Everyone is up for shredding.
This thought was pushing me awake just after 2 AM.
I got up and reached for Jeremy Lent’s The Patterning Instinct, and his writing on the Neo Confucian system of practice from 1000 years ago. Something was whispering to me that it is time now to stop the voices of the white male leading the discourse, even those who are good, true and brilliant. Their worldview is a fractal of the problem seizing our planet. It will not provide the path forward. I am mindful that even Neo Confucianism is a system created largely by the male, even though they are culturally very different to the West, and that at least, is a start.
I want to know the thinking of non Western minds. Of the indigenous. Of people who managed to survive culturally for 60,000 years. Of women.
I refuse to be spun in the web of fear of China. Or other cultures we have been told for so long are the enemy.
I want to find the voices of cultures that had women sit equally at the table, or even led the table.
The answer is not more of the same. Until worldviews, experiences and perspectives that carry wisdom beyond the Western White male philosophy and intellectualism are brought forward, we will keep this heartbreaking game spinning.
And to those wonderful, well-intentioned, super-smart men, I invite you to consider the privilege you have simply by being you, and how you might use that privilege to step back and bring the voices of those who are never given the mic an opportunity to speak.
Photo Taken November 9th 2024, Article written November 9th 2024
