Gerhard’s Reviews > The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options > Status Update

'But there are many who do not like to live in a developed and capitalist society. And what is wrong with that?'

'Your location in the colonial matrix of power shapes the way you look at the world. A related question concerns your location in the colonial matrix of power.'

'To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.'

'The cycle of search for universal models for world order are over ...'

A common topic of conversation today, after the financial crisis on Wall Street, centers on “how to save capitalism.” A decolonial question would be: “Why would you like to save capitalism and not to save human beings?”

'As we know it: the First World has knowledge; the Third World has culture; Native Americans have wisdom; Anglo Americans have science.'

While we cannot consider Descartes guilty for doing what he felt he was supposed to do, we should not take for granted that 80 percent of the population of the world, beyond Europe, shall be jumping for joy because Descartes discovered that “one thinks, therefore one is.”

'Classification of the global population by skin color was not undertaken by blacks, yellows, reds, and browns. Nor were they consulted. The process of classification was initiated and sustained by white men of letters and scientists who were the gatekeepers of Western and modern knowledge.'

'Consumer-subjects live in a special world and possess a certain psychology: they live to work and work to consume, instead of working and consuming to live. Working and consuming to live is a basic principle of the decolonial option, moving toward and building psychologies and subjectivities consistent with communal and pluriversal futures.'

'The fact that Western civilization was the most recent civilization in human history doesns't mean that it was the best, that the rest of the world should follow suit.'