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A Minifesto
milestones and markers
“The only dream worth having is to dream that you will live while you are alive, and die only when you are dead.
To love, to be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and vulgar disparity of the life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair.
To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power.
Above all to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”
~Arundhati Roy, Come September, 2002
The Context
Arundhati Roy urged us to seek joy in the saddest places. To never look away. This minifesto is an attempt to bear witness, to stay with, and to refuse to look away. The word manifesto means ‘a public declaration of intent.’ In its 14th Century usage, it also meant to be ‘manifest’ i.e., something that is readily perceived by the senses. I am using the word ‘manifesto’ in the latter sense here.
Our collective feeling of dissonance and an existential loss of meaning come from our civilization's denial of 'what is readily perceived'. The current hegemonic narrative goes to extraordinary lengths and employs arduous means to cast a veil of illusion and a facade of distraction on the reality of this abundant and wondrously diverse, interrelated world. The hegemonic powers with their formidable access to technology, geopolitical maneuvering, and obscene wealth have generated a narrative of growth and development while neatly hiding the costs.
The costs of this progress bourn by the pitifully vulnerable in the ‘wretched’ corners of the earth from Congo to Sudan, from Ethiopia to Libya, and the many colonized countries of this earth have been skillfully erased. Their stories annihilated, suppressed, delegitimized. The voices rendered deliberately invisible. The wealth of these nations have been used to garner geopolitical powers by the Imperialist countries. Today, as the world teeters on the brink of a polycrisis, and the crisis of profound meaningless permeate societies, a cabal of billionaires (trillionaires) are still trying to wrench the last drop of oil and that last iota of cobalt from the womb of this planet.
The ‘whitewashing of greenwashing’ can only be done by ignoring the cost of green technology. By willfully practicing ecological apartheid. By deliberately overlooking the atrocities. It is about ruthlessness of power. And the lust for unfettered accumulation of power.
This vision and dream of a pluriverse is not mine alone. Neither is it a novel discovery. I picked it up from the rallying cry of the Zapatistas as they protested against the imposition of the NAFTA and knew the devastation it would cause to the Chiapas. They called for a pluriversal world—a world where many worlds coexist. It is this readily perceived reality of our existence that I wish to recall and honor in this manifesto. Our world is a pluriverse. Our indelible interconnectedness, and our entangled and entwined world can never be a homogenous, standardized ‘universe’ of the imperial project
John Berger, that wonderful writer, once wrote: “Never again will a single story be told as though it’s the only one.” There can never be a single story. There are multitudes of stories wafting in the wind should we care to listen. This web of life that is so intricate, so delicately fragile, and yet magnificently strong is woven by many strands of life. Human and more-than-human. It’s hubris to think that humans are the sole creators of stories. The Earth is telling us her stories through fires, furies, and floods. Through the melting ice and acidifying oceans. Through depleting biodiversity and vanishing species. Through rising rivers and ravaged landscapes. This manifesto is a call for us to learn to listen to the stories uttered in tongues foreign to our ears. But deeply known to our souls.
We have become inured to these voices because of the fallacious hegemonic paradigms imposed on our senses. Speed, productivity, efficiency—the mantras of hegemony have emptied our souls and depleted our attention. When did you last hear your Self? That innermost voice deep within. The soul is a shy creature, much like a wild animal. It will only come out if you are absolutely still. And then, only then, out of the corner of your eye, you may catch a fleeting glimpse of this inner wizard trying to guide you, nurture you. Do we dare to slow down and listen? Slowing down is profoundly counter-hegemonic. As is listening.
This manifesto is many things but not a written in rock edict. It is my way of seeing, sensing, meaning-making, and bearing witness, and being with the unfolding. Technology has been corralled in the service of the status quo. Globe spanning supply chains keep this hegemonic machine running. However, this juggernaut can be stopped as it once was during the pandemic. We are at a point of discontinuity. The era of changes is moving to Change of Era.
It is not only about a geopolitical shift in the global order from unipolarity to multipolarity. The latter is also state-led and doesn’t really challenge the economic monomyth. There are just more contenders for the top post. The shift we are witnessing goes beyond geopolitics and is arising from the voices of the people. Those voices that have remained unheard, unseen, and unacknowledged for centuries. Those words are arising from very different epistemologies and ontologies. With this context in mind, I invite you to read the Minifesto.
A Minifesto
We are living in what the Greeks called the καιρóς (Kairos) – the right time – for a “metamorphosis of the gods,” i.e. of the fundamental principles and symbols.’ ~C. G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self (1958).
This web of life is rising in all its tenacious resilience, in its glorious strength, calling out in multitudes of voices—through art, music, dance, plays, songs, and marches. They are their in the farmers movement in India. In the Black Lives Matter marches in the USA. In the Students’ Encampments for Palestine. In the community kitchens. In the street cafes. In the by lanes and alleys.
I believe that our pluriversal world is readily perceived. This abundant and myriad diversity have been deliberately obscured and often suppressed to create a homogenized world for the benefit of the hegemonic status quo.
Individualism is a myth. This manifesto is a rejection of the hegemony's premise of individualism and the destructive notion of an atomized, isolated individual in the name of ‘freedom’. Hegemony deliberately creates divisions and separations to keep each one fearful, anxious, and lonely. A pluriverse acknowledges our indelible interconnectedness, and our profoundly enmeshed lives. And upholds the power of communities. It is only through communities and our interrelatedness that we find our agency as well as our collective vision and wisdom.
Radical imagination is a necessity. It is a call to refuse to let our imagination be stunted and stolen by the hegemonic narrative. The power of fearless imagination and radical imaginaries to not only shirt paradigms but to co-create more beautiful, harmonious, and equitable worlds is immense. Hegemony fears unfettered imagination of the people. It employs various insidious ways to keep us from imagining radically different and possible futures. Therefore, hegemony uses the tools of distraction, propaganda, advertisements, mindless celebrity worship, and other inane and banal ways to instill impossible desires, mindless consumerism, and abject anxiety. Refuse your invest your attention. Refuse to give your time. Refuse your energy.
Borders are manmade. What we pay attention to matters. And in these history-reshaping times, it matters exponentially more. Hegemony is a cynical manipulator of people’s anxieties, emotions, griefs, and fears. These become tools for managing our attention, making sure we don’t stray beyond hegemony-defined boundaries. The time has come for us to stray. To pay attention to the hidden currents, the silenced voices, and unseen corners of the planet. Much as hegemony wants to create barricades and borders, nature does not follow manmade rules. The agricultural wastelands in Bangladesh will bring climate refugees. Blue boats will haunt the shores of hegemony in search of safety. And they will all say, “We are here because you were there.” The Earth is once again reclaiming pluriversality. Demographic shifts are going to escalate; global population will become Earth citizens. Boundaries are conflating into bioregions.
Monomyth is a colonial imposition. We all know in our innermost hearts that a Eurocentric, hegemonic, and economic monomyth does not represent our gloriously entangled world. It’s a fallacious and fabricated imposition, a relict of imperial-colonialism, and an outcome of the perceived superiority of the western civilization. The pluriverse is not a grand design or a monomyth. It is a tapestry of myriad narratives, diverse cultures, and different civilizations intersecting and meeting, not in confrontation and collision. But in cooperation and collaboration. This seems utopian and impossible only when viewed through the hegemonic optics of power differentials, control, and privilege. However, viewed through lenses of many stories that exist in the edges and margins, that are arising from the cracks and crevices and from the fault lines of the hegemony, it is possible to envision a world beyond borders and cartographies.
Technology is a facilitator. Hegemony wishes to make technology the master of the masses so that their control remains absolute. Emanating from the centers of hegemony and created from a worldview of power and privilege, technology is becoming a tyrannical force. From surveillance to drone warfare, the military-industrial-technological complex is a destructive force. This is by design. Technology is never ever values-neutral. Therefore, who designs tech matters. What are the foundational questions and who is asking them matters. I believe technology can and must be designed to facilitate the meeting of cultures, in collaboration and creation, in listening and sharing. In sharing the narratives of possibilities, in bringing the world closer in solidarity and community. It is entirely possible as students across the world are showing us. Reject the tyranny of technology. Use it in ways the hegemony never meant us to.
Fault lines are places of potential. Today, societies and communities are fragmenting and fracturing. In the midst of globe-spanning supply chains and uber-tech connectivity, polarization and fascism are on the rise. Echo chambers and cults are proliferating. The fault lines are being used to manufacture discontent, pitting one poor community against another. Pluriversal worlds welcome fault lines. They are places of entanglements, of entwined cultures and many stories, of overlapping rituals and myriad melodies. Hegemony will desperately try to block our vision from encountering the possibilities. Seeing and sensing this pulsating, vibrant, and diverse colliding of cultures is deeply counter-hegemonic. Once we lean into this convergence, potentials for the emergence of radically regenerative, elegantly resilient, and new ways of being abound.
It is time to remember that we are Earth Citizens, Storytellers, Imagineers, and Planetary Stewards.
"The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory." Howard Zinn, The Optimism of Uncertainty (2004)
The Liminal Space
We stand on the precipice of a new era, one that requires a seismic shift in the way we perceive our organizations, our societies, and ourselves. In this time of exponential technology and destructive forces, we must reject the outdated narrative of growth and profit, and replace it with a vision of regeneration, pluriversality, and a world beyond anthropocentrism.
We are in a space between stories where the old world, the known hegemonic world is collapsing. And a new world is painfully being born. This new world is being painfully midwifed with blood, sweat, and tears. No pun intended. The sacrifices at the altar of hegemony has been huge and it is still continuing as the hegemony lashes out in dying fury and its fear of becoming futile. Nonetheless, its death knell can be clearly heard across many lands.
‘This liminal space is a time of monsters’ wrote the inimitable Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks. He didn't use the word liminal. Instead he wrote, ‘interregnum.” Interregnum was the term used in ancient Rome to refer to the moment of legal and political in-betweenness that followed the death of the sovereign and preceded the enthronement of his successor. Old hegemonies were crumbling. The ruling order had lost its capacity to lead through consent. The masses had drifted away from traditional ideologies and toward a structure of feeling that awaited full articulation. The horizon was open.
We are once again at such an interregnum of momentous proportions. This time, wars are being fought not only over land and resources but over narratives. This is a quintessentially narrative warfare. Hence, the hegemony is pitting the last of its military might and oppressive laws against citizens holding placards and wearing slogan-filled t-shirts. They have lost the war. Nonetheless, this is not the time for complacency. Many other narratives—equally insidious and deceptive are wafting up to fill the gaps. They range from totalitarianism and fascism to messianic fundamentalism and toxic nationalism. This liminal space is indeed a time for monsters.
Therefore, staying in this liminality and befriending the uncertainty inherent therein requires us to refrain from reacting. It is an undeterred commitment to stay with the questions and the discomfort of uncertainty, to sit with the emotions, and to distill them into the next possible action from a place of deep empathy and radical reimagination. We cease to imagine when we react. The monstrous powers will continue to provoke and trigger to keep us in a constant state of anxiety or anger. Refuse them your attention.
The liminal space is map-less, unknown territories of possibilities and potentials. It needs our spacious and curious hearts, our listening and learning souls, and our patience. When we collectively hold the vision of pluriversal futures, of beautiful worlds we know we can co-create, the old narrative lose its hold over us. We can’t traverse this path alone. Communities of intention become the imaginal cells for traversing liminality. In these communities, we build transformative capacities much as a larva does in its cocoon. Then, we can collectively step forth prepared to midwife and nurture different possible futures.
What intellectual, affective, and relational capacities do we need to hold space for the emergence of life-affirming futures?
Who Gets to Imagine
This short, seemingly innocuous question strikes at the roots of hegemony. Who gets to imagine? is a rallying cry for a pluriversal world where many worlds coexist. One of hegemony’s biggest tool has been epsitemicide. Boaventura de Santos described this as, “The killing, silencing, annihilation, or devaluing of a knowledge systems. Epistemicide happens when epistemic injustices are persistent, systematic, and collectively work as a structured oppression of particular ways of knowing.”
The universalization of essentially Eurocentric values, beliefs, and cultures was an integral part of modernity and propagated through brute force and colonization of the Global South. This led to massive erasures of not only ways of living and livelihood but also cultures, knowledge and value systems, as well as ecocide and genocide.
This process of epistemicide has had long-lasting impacts on non-Western cultures and has contributed to the marginalization and oppression of Indigenous peoples and other communities. The consequences of epistemicide have been far-reaching, affecting not only non-Western cultures but also the natural world. The loss of traditional knowledge and practices has led to the degradation of ecosystems and the loss of biodiversity, as Indigenous peoples and other communities have been forced to abandon their traditional ways of life in favor of Western economic and political systems.
“Who gets to imagine?” therefore questions the very premise of hegemonic narrative of economic growth and modernity. Colonialism erased many local scientific traditions by declassifying them as primitive and folklore and substituting what was perceived as Southern superstition with Northern science. Western epistemology sought to name and categorize the world according to its own heuristic schemata and interest, thus “inventing and enforcing such binaries as modern/traditional, progressive/backward, and civilized/primitive.”
Walter Mignolo argues that the time is ripe to debunk the idea that there is one truth and one law to be discovered. The universalist claims of today were preceded by many ways of being in, relating with, and sensing the world—each way responding to different place-bound environments and challenges. These were destroyed by the onslaught of colonialism. European colonization went hand in hand with ecocide, genocide, and epistemicide. It is time to replace this hegemony with a plurality of fairer and more egalitarian local systems.
Pluriversal worlds are co-created from many imaginaries and myriad narratives. It is neither a monomyth nor does it lay claim to nay superiority. Pluriversality is also a call for peace. Not the ‘peace’ that demands quiet acquiescence and a refusal to see. Not the peace that seeks conformity and continuity. Not the peace the asks us to go on with BAU and continues to hide beneath the facade of the normal. But the Peace that comes with justice, liberation, dignity, and recognition of the worth of all lives.
That Peace cannot arise from an imperialist worldview. For that Peace, we see voices rising across the world in movements large and small, local and global. These movements embody a pluriversal world. The students encampments are microcosms of pluriversality. They have become the peacemakers and bridge-builders, scribes and witnesses to an unfolding of history. Standing up for peace always required a firm backbone, an abiding vision, and faith in the ultimate goodness of humanity and life. This is what led Gandhi towards non-violence. Krishna Kripalani asserts "Gandhi was the first in Human history to extend the principle of nonviolence from the individual to social and political plane.”
Peace and peacemakers are as disruptive to the hegemony as radical imagineers. The alternative narratives and visions they offer are serious threats to the monolithic hegemonic matrix of power. Hence, the imperial-colonial forces have always—through the centuries—decimated indigenous cultures, narratives, seats of education, rituals, and practices. And destroyed their artifacts, pulverized their history. Entire cultures were wiped out. Lest they offer visions of worlds more alluring and enchanting, more meaningful and magnificent than the mechanical monster of efficient production that the hegemony offered. Therefore, epistemicide has always been an integral part of colonization.
This brings me back to “who gets to imagine?” It is the unseen, unheard, deliberately delegitimized voices from the periphery once again coalescing, and coming together. Now they are not isolated indigenous folks who can be surreptitiously wiped out. They are proudly proclaiming their right to be co-creators. Myriad strands are being woven together, and the web of life is regenerating.
Forthcoming book:
Reimagining Pluriversal Futures
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