An Era of Discontinuity
We are at a point of discontinuity where one world is ending, and a new one is painfully being born.
“Remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within.” ~Ruha Benjamin
We live in a profoundly damaged world, a wounded and bleeding planet. The ‘great acceleration’ of the Anthropocene founded on the hollow human hubris of seeking to control and subdue nature, the lust for infinite growth driven by extraction and ecocide, and a hegemony with a deeply colonial and imperial mindset has brought us to this cusp of simultaneous systems collapse — of economies, polities, societies, communities, ethics, values, and spirituality.
A polycrisis is rapidly devolving into a metacrisis. A profound sense of meaninglessness and dissonance pervades the atmosphere in spite of (also, because of) the avalanche of shiny tech apparently at our fingertips.
Polarization, fracture, and fragmentation are manifesting in all their devastating dimensions within and between nation-states. The ostensibly boundary-less, ubiquitously connected globalized world is erecting boundaries within national borders — between its own citizens, driving neighbors against neighbors, turning citizens into vigilantes, universities into police strongholds. Growing injustice and inequality coupled with social, racial, communal, and religious rifts are tearing apart the fabric of most nations. Totalitarian fascism is rearing its ugly head everywhere.
The hegemonic narrative of growth, development, and modernity imposed through the imperial project of colonization — Eurocentric and Western — has not only been running the show for centuries but has ‘invisibilized,’ delegitimized, and eradicated other epistemologies and ontologies. Donna Haraway called it ‘playing the god trick’ which the hegemony led by the USA excels at. Now this god trick has spectacularly failed as it must. The brutal ineffectuality of this totalitarian worldview is starkly visible. The hegemony is flailing and failing as millions take to the streets, students’ encampments rise in universities across the globe, and especially in the heart of the hegemony.
We have reached a point of discontinuity, irreparable ruptures are springing up in the seams and the shiny surface of the hegemonic facade. No amount of propaganda, misinformation, disinformation, distractions (like Met Gala), and diffractions are working. Ordinary people have seen through the illusions. The myths of democracy, freedom, and human rights emanating from the hegemonic metropole as righteous lectures for ‘lesser civilizations and inferior cultures’ stand exposed in all their hypocrisy. The world within the hegemonic metropole now sees what the colonized periphery always knew. In its dying throes, the hegemonster has now turned against its own people, its students and citizens. It is collapsing and resisting its demise violently and viciously.
This demise of the hegemony had been coming for a long time. Through many big and small steps within the metropole from Occupy Wall Street to Extinction Rebellion, from Black Lives Matter to small pockets of resistance. Finally culminating in the Students’ Encampments for Palestine. What many might see as disparate and discrete events actually speak of a growing fissure in the hegemony’s monomyth. The narrative has long been defunct; and now the entire premise of this imperial-colonial-supremacist hegemonic order is being challenged. Palestine has united the world in an unprecedented manner — becoming a mirror, metaphor, and manifestation of the impact of colonialism.
Once colonized nations, now suffering through decades of arm-twisting neocolonialism in the forms of Structural Adjustment Programs, IMF, World Bank, WTO, and random sanctions now clearly see the ‘rules-based order’ for what it is. As Trita Parsi notes cryptically, “When the Biden administration is talking about a ‘rules-based order’, it is talking about an order in which the US rules; not an order based on rules.”
The illusions are no longer working. As the world tilts towards multipolarity, there is another undercurrent running in tandem. One that is moving us towards pluriversality. It is this move — gradual, often invisible, but inexorable that I want to focus on here. Pluriversality will benefit from a multipolar world, but its premises and narratives are different.
Palestine has reinforced the need for a pluriversal world — a world where many worlds fit. The students’ encampments have become microcosms of such worlds — an entanglement and interweaving of many cultures, narratives, solidarity, safety, and sheer love. For strangers in faraway lands. Radical reimagining of worlds beyond hegemonic control is unfolding in real time. History is being rewritten and reshaped.
The point of discontinuity grows ever stronger as all over the world hitherto silent and invisible voices coalesce to express solidarity and allyship. They stand on behalf of Palestine and a world beyond extractive economy, expropriation, exploitation, and exclusion. Once colonized nations find allegiance in their historical experiences.
As the hegemony flounders, unable to change course, run by men who have failed upwards from the Iraq War, the Afghanistan debacle, Libya, Syria and other failed endeavors, ordinary people have had enough. The tired tropes of power means nothing to the millions of powerless citizens of the hegemony. As they see their lives unraveling, the dissonance exacerbates.
Flashback to 2020
2020 will also be remembered by many as a point of discontinuity, an anomalous data point. This was the year when a tiny, invisible virus ripped across the planet — a planet already reeling from floods, fires, and furies. The delusions of separation from other sentient beings and this planet that we humans harbored were shredded to bits, indelibly stressing our inextricable entanglements with all sentient beings.
It exposed the fault-lines across societies and countries, underlining the disparities and discriminations lurking beneath the surface of tawdry gloss and glitter. It underscored the embedded complicity of Big Tech, Big Pharma, and Big Money with the hegemonic powers, and exposed the self-serving nature of these industries. It emphasized the extractive, exploitative, and exclusionary socio-economic policies and politics at play across the globe — barring a few countries. It essentially ripped off all hypocrisy and pretenses.
But we missed the possibilities of this Great Pause when the entire world had juddered to a halt. Humans sheltered in place, roads emptied of traffic, global supply chains crashed; the sky was left to the clouds and the birds. And over the birdsongs was heard the continuous wail of sirens as ambulances hurtled through empty streets — beacons of hope as well as despair. Four years have passed since then. The hegemonic powers have doubled down since the pandemic to shore up their wealth and privileges, inflicting devastation on faraway lands from Congo to Palestine, Sudan to Syria. In a frantic bid to get back to BAU and the haunting fears of survival, we collectively became entrapped in the old narrative.
Many insightful geopolitical analysts are writing about the shift from unipolarity to multipolarity, and how the USA is losing its head and behaving like a spoilt bully because it can’t bear to not be the dominant power. I am neither a journalist nor an analyst, I am a social observer living through history-shaping times, poised on the brink of a Change of Era, and trying to bear witness and be a scribe.
We are literally seeing in real time the fragmentation and dissolution of the hegemonic Eurocentric narrative. While this narrative had ceased to make sense for a very long time, it is literally dissolving in front of our eyes — fragmenting and fracturing and drifting away.
The unipolar world is not only becoming multipolar but also definitely pluriversal. A multipolar world has many centers of power, all vying for control, ascendance, and dominance. As major nation-states rise across the globe moving the world towards multipolarity, the underlying narrative of infinite growth will not shift from within the new Axis of Power. Not as long as GDP and economic growth remain the primary measure of nation’s impact and influence in the global arena.
A pluriversal world is a decentralized world of many interweaving, entangled narratives and cultures encountering each other and coming together to share, learn, cooperate and co-create.
What I sense happening simultaneously and in parallel is a global movement towards pluriversality. This is mostly flying under the radar because this shift is led by movements and marches, by sit-ins and teach-ins of ordinary people. And this has become a global phenomenon exponentially increasing in the last decade — almost as an antidote to the rising fascism and state authoritarianism across the globe.
Whether it is the Farmers Movement or the anti-CAA sit-ins in India by more then 100,000 citizens of India led by the Shaheed Bagh dadis (grandmother) — an 82-year old Indian woman, Bilkis who was was on Time magazine’s list of 100 “Most Influential People of 2020”. From Democracy for Myanmar to girls protesting for their Right to Education in Afghanistan to many other small and big movements that have been on the rise. Some have received public attention and some have stayed hidden within local contexts.
Those with vested interests in upholding the old, extractive paradigms are becoming desperate in the face of unforeseen courage, imagination, and coherence from ordinary women, men, and children. From women in Iran to Afghanistan, from farmers in India to climate activists in the USA, from doctors to journalists taking extraordinary risks in Gaza to heal and bear witness — ordinary citizens without vested power are rising in tidal waves across the globe against the forces of brazen, entitled colonialism.
What these foretell and presage is a world reimagined and reconstituted along very different lines. The underlying narratives and metaphors are shifting from a world predicated on Hierarchy and Supremacy to one that is Relational, Dialogic, and Participatory. Increasing number of citizens are reclaiming their sovereignty and agency, making their choices known. The marches are uniting people across manmade barriers of race, culture, and nationality. Carefully erected borders and boundaries are giving way to solidarity in action. As people step out and occupy public spaces, these discrete movements are becoming nodes in a larger web that is being woven with many strands of narratives, many voices, and many songs pouring forth from the edges and margins.
We are at a distinct point of discontinuity. A portal has opened up beckoning us towards possible futures. It is a journey of transformation at many levels that we are being asked to undertake — personal, political, social, and spiritual. Now is the time to slow down and sense what is wanting to emerge. However, just coping with the turmoil and upheaval of daily life can render us incapable of sensing what wants to emerge.
The breakdown of the old order and its edifices are asking us to slow down, to connect with our inner wisdom, to lean into this liminal space of uncertainty and ambiguity, to widen our peripheral vision, and listen to Earth’s invitation to co-create a thriving, flourishing Planet — ‘a world where many worlds fit’. And maybe, just maybe — we will catch a glimpse of the shoots of the possible futures amidst the debris and decay of the dying.
- How can we become harbingers of a world that is emerging?
- What skills and capacities do we need to develop to reconstitute and rebuild pluriversal futures?
- What does a pluriversal world mean to you?
How do we inhabit this liminal space between stories and possibilities matter. We have to make a leap of faith over a crevice, an abyss that many have traversed. This stepping beyond the known, the certain requires fearlessness and compassion — for self and others. However, not stepping forth is no longer an option.
To cling to the old shores of certainty means to keep feeding a destructive, degenerative, and hegemonic system that finally owes no allegiance to anyone except its cabal of billionaires and the military-industrial-political nexus. It is up to us to reimagine and reconstitute our worlds, to interweave the many narratives rising from the edges.
