I will never cease to be amazed by the sheer power of the evolutionary monism that shapes the business elite and their army of little engineers, bean counters, paper-pushers and NGO/TEDx world-saviours.
Evolution as a one-directional, video-game ladder of progress, with white Westerners already at the top, already arrived.
A social-Darwinist ontological misery on steroids.
Not only the most radical form of ignorance of other ways of being, but also the imperial luxury of feeling legitimate while disqualifying the roughly 7 billion people living in “emerging markets”.
The one tribe that never figured out it was a tribe, mistaking its own rituals for the laws of physics.
The shit part: most of the left is on the same staircase.
It fights the right over who belongs at the top, not over the staircase itself. This is why it will keep losing to the Christian nationalists.
New Age is the masterpiece, the religion of neoliberalism. If the engineer disqualifies the Global Majority as backward, the New Ager fetishises it as sacred.
Both strip them of the one thing they are owed. Being living, political, contemporary worlds instead of either a failure that will catch up or a supply of dreamcatchers, tribal tattoos and exotic shortcut transformation for the Western soul.
It is colonialism in lotus position. Same extraction, now with gratitude.
NOTE
I write this from inside it. White, Swiss, Western, trained in the structure I am describing. I still catch the ladder below my feet, sometimes reading another world as a stage of my own. What taught me most is not the work. It is decades living inside a Vietnamese family. Not as research, as life. The unlearning was never easy.
I kept reaching for my own grammar of what a person owes, what is said and left unsaid, what care looks like. Being quietly wrong, year after year, in ways no field method would have shown me. You do not theorise your way out of evolutionary monism. You get worn out of it, slowly, by people who love you and do not run on your operating system.
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The term Global Majority was put into circulation by the Bangladeshi photographer and activist Shahidul Alam, who argued that labels like “Third World,” “developing” and “Global South” define most of humanity by its distance from a Western center. His point is arithmetic and political at once: these societies are the majority of the world and the framing that calls them marginal is a minority describing itself as the center.