Healing or Harming, Changing or Perpetuating; We're Facing a Choice
The atrocities, chaos, and violences erupting globally are not an accident. They're not a bug. They are a feature by design of modernity and its systems as they approach collapse. In order to understand these symptoms we have to understand what modernity is. Modernity is the name for a way of organizing life, time, identity, and meaning that has shaped the world over the last 500 years—especially through European colonial expansion, industrialization, financialization, and the rise of the nation-state.
It isn’t just an era—it’s a worldview.
Modernity teaches us:
That humans are separate from nature
That the self is individual, fixed, and should be perfected
That ‘progress’ is good—even if it costs lives or ecosystems
That certain kinds of people, knowledge, and cultures are superior
That we can solve every problem with more control, logic, or tech innovation
You’ll recognize it’s permeation and absorption of you if:
You feel pressure to be productive to feel worthy
You’ve been told to “succeed” by leaving your community or culture behind
You’ve learned to measure value in money, degrees, or visibility
You’ve felt ashamed for depending on others
You’ve been taught that healing means moving on, not grieving
The global crises of our time are the result of centuries finally arriving at what happens when modernity begin to collapse. Here is how the nation-state and capitalism work together:
The Nation-State Machine sets up borders, laws, schools, police, and elections. It gives us a sense of belonging and control—but it mostly exists to protect its own structure and the flow of power.
The Capitalism Machine moves money, goods, and resources around the world. It rewards profit and efficiency, often at the expense of people, ecosystems, and relationships.
These two machines work together, even though they often pretend to be separate. Here's how:
Capitalism wants speed and freedom—so it moves money, jobs, and technology wherever it's cheapest or most profitable for the ruling class.
Nation-states provide the rules and force (violence)—they create policies, police borders, suppress dissent, and give legitimacy to harmful actions in the name of “progress” or “security.”
Together, they trap people—keeping them stuck in systems that extract their labor, suppress their voice, and destroy the living systems they rely on. But they enable the consolidation of wealth and power (read violence) in the hands of a tiny global ruling class.
The two mechanisms of greatest chaos and atrocity of the last 500 years have been the nation-state and capitalism. Notice if that sentence made you flinch; we’ve been taught to think that ‘citizenship’ and ‘patriotism’ are the highest form of belonging while profit/labor/growth are our moral responsibility.
But keep in mind Jameson’s famous quote, “…it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” There’s a reason schooling never taught you a definition of capitalism and an analysis of how it functions nor forms of organized living other than that of a country.
If this makes you nervous, dust off your intellectual humility and curiosity to test it. Use this analysis as a frame to analyze each crisis – natural or human (notice how language forces me into this distinction of modernity) – that you read or view on a daily basis. Consider for instance:
The flood in Texas
The protests and violent state responses in United States, United Kingdom, Brazil, South Korea, Kenya, Sudan, …
The wars, conflicts, genocides in Palestine, Ukraine, India/Pakistan, Iran, US, ...
The omnipresence of microplastics, bird population collapses, bee colony collapses, droughts, crop die-offs…
Laws that dominate and oppress women and control of women’s bodies
The persistence of race and racial identifications as modern inventions of division, conflict, and violence,
Continue making your own list...
Pay close attention that the response by the global holders of state power (violences) and global capital is to increase and do more of the things that got us here. The future needs responses now that move away from our 500 year-old modern addictions to the fantasy of perfecting modernity. We must disinvest, disentangle, grieve, and decompose the ways we're participant to extractions, divisions, violences, exploitations, annihilations, accumulations and on and on. The crucible is our willingness to be accountable to all with which we are entangled for the healing and well-being of all.
Noël, Aláwo Orísàn