Pull up your instagram feed. Go to your favorite online news source. Turn on the radio for headline news. If you’re like us, it is uncanny how the news today is like all the Hollywood disaster movies from a few years ago. Environmental disasters of floods, droughts, crop die-off, insect population collapse, bird population die-offs, ocean acidification. War in Ukraine, Iran, Yemen, DRC and more. Genocides in Gaza, Darfur, Uyghurs in China. Governments kill protesting citizens, detain and torture people for speaking or writing against the rulers and ruling class.

Frederic Jameson famously once said, “…it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” And capitalism is itself a byproduct of modernity which has brought us to this point of global crisis.

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 settler-colonial expansion, industrialization, and the rise of the nation-state. It isn’t just an era—it’s a worldview.

Part of BEHOLDEN’s goal with ancestors, land, and accountability is to explore the ways that we each have been integrated into these systems that have brought us to global crisis. Rather than more and “better” of the same systems that got us here, we need alternatives. The world asks for courage from us, the courage to change, to become different, to become something that existing systems won’t allow because it means the end of those systems. But it does mean the beginning of new modes of life. So we must decompose. De-composition breaks a complex system into its foundational elements that can become the nourishment for building what comes after. Decomposing ourselves is the work of being accountable to our ancestors, to the Earth, and the generations – of humans and all other-than-human - that come after us. It is the work of allowing new kinds of selves to emerge in order to end destructive selves of modernity.

BEHOLDEN’s new series of workshops and courses guide participants through decompositions. Through relinquishing attachments and unconscious perpetuations, we develop capacity to end our participation in entrenched systems and identities. We develop capacity to find new relational entanglements for new living possibilities. Our work of the future is now. Join us in this work. Sign up for upcoming workshops and courses.

Course examples: Disentangling The Nation-State And Citizenship; Can We Be Other Than A Cog Of The Corporation?; The After of Race and Racial Identification; …and more.