Mother’s Day has just passed. And because of the nature of my brain, I have a love-hate with the day. I love it because I love how people pay extra attention to mothering in all its many forms, and think about the work mothers do, and thank them for it. And I hate it because all I can think as I see dads everywhere taking their children on bike rides, effusive thanks on social media, gifts given, and mums getting time to themselves, is why the f*** are these things not happening ALL THE TIME. Why do we concentrate all the gratitude and appreciation and care-sharing into a discrete 24 hour period with a special name?
And then I remembered that our current government just took away the possibility of pay equity from hundreds of thousands of women.
Colonial patriarchy is alive and well and doing its best to keep us in our place so we don’t upset the white male apple cart.
We live in a system that is both colonial and patriarchal, and that’s what I want to say to all the white women who are horrified by this government—that the value system that devalues women and queer and non-binary folk is the same value system devaluing Māori and Pacific people and tauiwi of colour, and the same value system that is devaluing the planet on which we rely for life. We need to see the way these apparently different hierarchies of power are in fact singing from exactly the same songbook. And that joining in enthusiastically with some of the songs keeps us complicit in the whole destructive repertoire.
As the National and ACT party women MPs parade in front of us all, patronising and gaslighting us with their faux feminist discourse, and attempting to distract us from the blatant disadvantaging they are perpetrating on actual living women, my first question is, what gives rise to this behaviour? What is the ecosystem they are adapting to? How am I too part of that ecosystem? And how might that ecosystem be healed?
Many of us who have grown up in the Global North have been working on the understanding that if we just learn how to emulate powerful white men, we too can be powerful, wealthy and sorted, and that’s the way to save the world. We attend leadership workshops, we girlboss our way up the ladder, we screen out distractions, we prove our academic chops, we increase our assertiveness, we learn to say no, we stop apologising, we make tough decisions (about other people), we invest our money in ways that ignore the harmful industries we are investing in, we perform confidence and certainty, we squash self doubt, we pamper ourselves, we keep our family responsibilities outside of work hours, we demand our place at the table, we develop our sense of entitlement, we keep our feelings in check. This is how we internalise misogyny—by emulating patriarchal values in the hope of being accepted into the halls of power.
Like wanting a front row seat on the Titanic.1
It is time for us all to look at our values and ask whether the table at which we’ve been promised inclusion is the kind of table we want to be dining at. Whose values are being used as the yardstick for everyone, and are those values the ones that will bring about collective flourishing? Because those National and ACT MPs are in many ways the apotheosis of white corporate feminism—they’ve internalised the values of patriarchy so well that they’ve convinced themselves they are feminist exemplars because they have learned to use the master’s tools as skilfully as the master. They are reproducing the dynamics of dominance and superiority and entitlement and brittle egos that characterise both patriarchy and white supremacy. And that way does not lead to liberation for any of us. It is what got us into this mess in the first place, and it is what is keeping us here.
It really is time for us all to see that, as so many have been saying for so long, we cannot be free until all of us are free. And to recognise the ways we are each part of what is propping up the very power we rail against. We need to understand our entanglement in the harmful global structures that are hurting us all, to feel the ways we are part of the dominance machine that extracts from life (human and nonhuman) and elevates and insulates us, believing that if we just have more power, more control, more mastery, we at least will be ok.
But we won’t. Because we are interdependent, not independent. This is the truth. And that truth—that foundational truth—is what we’ve been acculturated to ignore. In fact, by virtue of a strange elevation of untethered abstract reason from grounded reality (thanks Western education system), we have turned that truth into a matter of opinion to be debated. It is not a matter of opinion. It is foundational to all life.
What this means is that we are part of a global ecology. All of us, no matter where we sit on the imagined ladder of worth/Great Chain of Being. And we are connected to everyone and everything else, whether we buy into the various caste systems that currently dominate our world or not. What we each do has consequences for others, and not only immediate consequences, but nth order (‘unintended’) consequences that we do not have control over. But the illusory monocultural worldview of separate individuals self-actualising the fuck out of ourselves, mastering our domain, competing for dominion over greater and greater proportions of what provides the conditions for life (and violently denying it to others in the process), has imposed itself without consent on us all. And it is continuing to shape us, insidiously, without many of us even realising it. This is to everybody’s detriment, even those who benefit in the short term. Because eating up, and shitting in, your own nest, no matter how gilded it is, leaves nothing for you in the end either.
Libertarianism and its allied ideologies are a threat to life as we know it. Because they are based on fantasy, not fact. And they are propped up by the unexamined value systems that sit underneath the monoculture that is so globally dominant—spread by Western colonial ‘civilisation’ in service of its self-defined ‘development’ and ‘progress,’ via multi-pronged vectors. These vectors include some things that many of us take for granted as inherently benign, such as the Western education system, the English language, ‘efficient’ bureaucracy, technological advancement, Western medicine, industrial agriculture, Western media and culture. But all of these are cultural and they all privilege a specific view of the world that is based on certain values and beliefs2. This is a frightening thing to realise and face—that so much of what we take for granted in our (good-intentioned, successful, educated) lives is also causing harm. But that too is part of a worldview that asks us to compartmentalise—to celebrate the achievements of so-called progress without looking at its shadows, to hide aspects of ourselves from us that do not conform to our story of heroism and goodness, to divide the world into ‘advanced’ us and ‘backward’ them. This worldview is accelerating us to extinction, because its foundations are abstract ‘rational’ (!?!) ideas invented by humans, not the grounded reality of our living biosphere and quantum universe, from which we emerged and on which we rely.
But *luckily*, we have powerful wealthy white men, and those who want what they have, explaining to us all how if we just emulated their values, and the behaviours those values give rise to, we too could have riches beyond our wildest dreams. That any poverty we are in, any oppression we experience, any lack of success we have, any mental health issues we face are due to our ‘own’ flaws—our inherent deficiency—and this has been baked in societally because of the success-to-the-successful systems archetype, where those who are successful in early rounds receive the means to determine the rules in subsequent rounds for everyone else. Our societal values are then internalised by us. And, insidiously, we become the means of our own oppression—we believe we are not good enough, and need to do, be, and get more, because this is reinforced every single day of our lives, across every dimension. And, crucially, we lose our sense of agency—our trust in our own embodied knowing that has been educated out of us. Our internal capitalist patriarchal colonisers and their propaganda machines are running the show. We really need to tell them to fuck off.3
Whose values are underpinning our societal systems, and who do those values serve?
Who makes the rules? Who sets the norms? Who defines success? Whose knowledge is privileged? Whose behaviour is lauded?4
This is an issue of paradigm not politics.
The value system that says certain types of work are worth less than others is the same value system that says certain forms of expression are more civilised than others. It is the same value system that says that a small group of people should be able to determine, and police, what is normative for everyone else. It is the same value system that creates loopholes in accountability for the consequences of our actions for others and the planet5. It is the same value system that intellectualises obvious genocide. And it is the same value system that says property is more important than life. It is a value system that is untethered from the relational fabric of our entangled world.
It takes a lot of courage to have the stomach for facing the full messiness of our existence6. It is so much easier to numb ourselves and not have to experience the nausea of uncertainty, ambiguity, and complicity in the crises we are enmeshed in. To be able to point to a culprit, feel our righteousness, and carry on with what we are doing. But this is the work that is required of us all in these times—to feel more than we are comfortable with. Because that is what will move us. It is what has always moved us; our internal sensations that impel us to action. And the work right now is to be with the full complexity of things (including our messy selves)—to hold space for the both-and of it all, and not try and reduce the complexity to reductive answers that beguile us with their reassuring promises of certainty. We need to take the time to metabolise and process collectively, eschewing the life-ring of our own innocence, and no longer wait for a hero to save us.
The only way is through. To disinvest from limiting cultural beliefs, to compost the shit that we’ve been ignoring for far too long, to deeply understand our interdependence in space and time, and become open to expansive multidimensional learning in communion, outside the doctrine of supremacy and mastery and universal answers and hyper-individualism, all while still engaging with the world we have inherited here and now. We can’t escape our entanglement. We must instead tend to it with full compassion and with full patience for the different kind of growth that it requires of us.
Happy Mother’s Day to the mother of all mothers—may we remember our indebtedness to her.
Bayo Akomolafe always disturbs our categorical assumptions. https://www.democracyandbelongingforum.org/forum-blog/black-lives-matter-but-to-whom-part-1
I realise that this statement will feel jarring, but I am not saying these aspects of culture are categorically ‘bad’—they clearly come with many benefits—but that when they become the imposed uniform standard for everyone in the world, when we lose the ability to see and critique what they (a) leave out or actively suppress and (b) propagate incidentally alongside their benefits (unintended consequences), then we become imprisoned in a flattened world of limited imagination and limited pathways to flourishing. Monoculture is a pathway to extinction. For an introductory eye-opener on this, see the documentary Schooling the World (2010) (you can watch it on YouTube). I really want to stress that this is about being able to look at our world with clear eyes and an open mind and heart, and see the light and shadows together, as many non-Western knowledge systems are adept at and many spiritual traditions teach. It is not about saying “all this is right and all this is wrong” but it is about saying “wow, there are some real downsides to this way of understanding the world alongside its gifts, and how might we hold them too in our awareness rather than plough on with our assumed supremacy.”
Thanks Louise Marra, who taught me about my superego and how to recognise it.
This is blindingly obvious in the decision by the aptly named Privileges Committee of the NZ Parliament to apply over-the-top (and what appear to be vindictive) punishments to Te Pati Māori MPs for their viral haka.
The ridiculous ‘war on woke’ and the Regulatory Standards Bill are both perfect examples of this.
I want to acknowledge Vanessa Andreotti and the research team of Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, together with Teias das 5 Curas, for their extraordinary work on how we might understand this paradigmatic predicament we are in. This has helped me find the words to express the inexpressible. See: https://decolonialfutures.net/ https://www.t5c.com.br/en and Machado de Oliveira, V. (2021). Hospicing modernity: facing humanity's wrongs and the implications for social activism. North Atlantic Books.
‘Reassuring promises of certainty’. I love reading your Substack Rebecca!
Thank you for refusing to tidy up the mess ❤️