Second nature

One can, with lip service, say that one is anti-imperialist and decolonial, even calling oneself "devotee of a world other»; but, deep down, keep modern/colonial subjectivity intact and continue reproducing destructive ideal models of life. The reason? There is a belief system rooted in our subjectivity, which is like “second nature”… and that is what is difficult to change.

Change is not a matter of what you know, but of what you believe. The coloniality of knowledge is a consequence of a previous coloniality, which has invaded people's subjectivity and formatted it in a certain configuration. That is the reason why the Bolivian decolonial teacher Rafael Bautista Segales exhorts us to put everything we know on hold, since everything we know is sustained by everything we believe. Our horizon of expectations comes from our belief system, that is, we only expect what we want! Decolonizing ourselves, then, is it difficult?

To assume the civilizational crisis and dispute is to understand that we are also in crisis; That is to say: much of what constitutes us, what we believe, what we aspire to is in check. Indeed, modern society is in crisis; but this diagnosis is not enough to bring about a definitive change. Here, following Rafael Bautista, the assertion made by the writer Larken Rose, in his book The most dangerous superstition (The most dangerous superstition): «Most people would rather die than objectively reconsider the belief system in which they grew up (...); If it were suggested to them that it is their own beliefs that contribute to the misery that causes them so much, they would certainly deny it, without thinking twice. That is why, Rafael Bautista points out, capitalism, which creates crises and lives off the crisis, does not die; because the world is also a state of consciousness. In other words: if social consciousness is equivalent to the objective world, even in its complete decay, the world still stands. Because? Because that equivalence is the belief that the world is offered and needs, as energy food, for its replacement.

That is the modern/colonial/capitalist belief system, in which we have grown up, as egocentric individuals, and which, today, begins to collapse along with the world that, as objectivity, is the reflection of a social, modern, capitalist subjectivity. This system of beliefs and feelings constitutes our subjectivity; Therefore, even if we see the modern/capitalist world falling apart, we continue to believe in it.

Modernity has been responsible for naturalizing its prejudices, its myths and its ideological horizon in our dispositions, customs, expectations, illusions. «It is in the system of beliefs, certainties and expectations where that second nature is rooted, which consumption produces in us – Rafael Bautista elaborates –: and what consumption produces in us is a specific type of subjectivity, which is not yet the rational logical universe, but the beliefs that constitute a world system. This system of beliefs, perceptions and feelings has made us naturalize injustice in such a way that we not only endure it, but we even desire it. Today, most of us want to "live well" and we demand levels of matter and energy that exceed the limits of a finite planet, from the perpetual dissatisfaction that capitalism causes. Today, under capitalist logic, we destroy the Earth; but, so that it does not seem like destruction, we call it "consumption." ¡Rationality is the formalization of a worldview!

Modernity has had the ability to make the logic of inverted reality (others would say: the world upside down) a methodology of acceptance. This second nature is so strong that even emerging powers - although they adhere to the pluripolar world - do not know how to think outside the margins of the modern/colonial project. Although these powers demand a new post-Western order, in practice they continue to reproduce a single life project: "modernization", which has "development" and "progress" as its horizon and reason for existence. As Rafael Bautista explains, under the mask "of an alternative world and a new humanity" they consecrate the horizon of beliefs, prejudices and values ​​of the modern/capitalist project itself, as the only one possible, despite the fact that it has dominated us for five years. centuries.

Modernity/coloniality is so cunning that it has made us believe (and makes us believe) that the anti-imperialist struggle is enough to build a world other. We do not take the anti-systemic leap, because, unfortunately, we are colonized, down to the neurotransmitters, with that second nature that constitutes and controls our subjectivity. Recognizing this truth is not an act to chasten the guilty, but rather so that - Rafael Bautista insists - we become aware of the historical and theoretical limits of the perspectives that have already been overcome by the facts: "We have to think everything again, because reality has changed and is changing. The concepts and categories that we usually use to interpret and transform reality correspond to the world of the XNUMXth century. For this reason, many intellectuals and politicians on the left today do not know what to do or what to say, in the face of the multiplied global crisis that this new century is going through.

Seeing the decline of a world-system that is beginning to show us its limits does not mean that everything that has made possible that imperial preeminence and the geopolitical determination of modern domination will give rise to a transmodern order (like the one described by maestro Enrique Dussel) that does not have modernity as a reference, without the historical mediations and contradictions of the human condition itself, present in the processes of building alternatives.

The teacher Rafael Bautista Segales explains why we must reveal the core from which the mystery of domination emerges, if we do not always want to replace capitalism and the cultural horizon that has engendered it, modernity, with its worldly religiosity. «What the civilizational crisis is showing us is that what it is about, in reality, is the confrontation of meta-narratives, that is, of utopias; although neoliberal globalist utopianism is, in fact, an anti-utopian utopianism, that is, an annihilation of all utopias. […] When we talk about narratives, we talk about great ethical-symbolic stories, which are not only conceived and understood with theoretical categories and concepts, but with theology and mysticism.

It is easy to doubt everything, ultimately, the most difficult thing is to doubt what one believes in, Rafael Bautista reiterates. Doubting what we feel and even our own certainties hurts, as we explained in our “Thinking Deeply” about the challenges of decolonization. Redefining thinking is essential to build a political project that allows the reproduction of all life (human and non-human). Feeling is what makes us think! For Rafael Bautista, thinking is a reception that one makes and that is capable of being administered according to how it is assimilated into corporality. At this point, Rafael Bautista cites the theory of his brother Juan José: "What we consume determines how we think and what we believe." We consume not only sensations, but concepts. That experience sends information to our brain. To the extent that this type of consumption is reiterated, contingently, with what we live, they become part of the habitus (schemes that settle into structures and settle in us, in ways of thinking, feeling and acting). He habitus and cultural reproduction make us think about the need for production to produce more to satisfy the consumption that our body demands. This is how consumerist logic constitutes us. In fact, someone who may be speaking to us logically may be; But, even if he is right, we do not believe him, because our subjectivity is already constituted by that second nature, as invasive coloniality.

What emerges as a civilizational distinction is not persisting in the modern-capitalist project. Believing that modernity is different from capitalism is, at this point, inexcusable naivety, says Rafael Bautista. Getting rid of this second nature implies transcending the mythical horizon of modernity and proposing forms of existence that suppose a resignification of life, in terms of live good in community, as an alternative to the challenges to which the crisis caused by modernity itself has thrown us. But, be careful! We must be alert: modernity is capable of subsuming all critical thought and normalizing it as an academic offer, canonizing in it all the theoretical prejudices of the establishment intellectualoid. Rafael Bautista gives as an example how the concept of "living well" is currently distorted by the United Nations and linked to the reset of the energy transition; how the system uses Pachamama and the rights of Mother Earth to convince us that the pollutant is oil (and that, therefore, we must bet on "clean energy"), to cover up that the problem is consumption and belief that humanity, in the name of "development" and "progress", can blow up the Earth. The system today does what, in general, modern thought does, according to the denunciation of Juan José Bautista Segales: it appropriates the ideas and thoughts that question it, then transforms them, resemantizes them, gives them the content that It suits him and he returns them, but inverted, with another type of foundation and meaning. If it had been for liberation, it converts this option into its opposite: domination. Unfortunately, most of the time we return to modern margins or follow them closely, and we assume the imposed interpretations as natural, without realizing what maintains the content. As the Venezuelan teacher Simón Rodríguez would deplore, "out of love for certain words they repeat themselves, without discernment, until they become favorites and are changed indistinctly, believing that one is as valuable as the other." We forget that, behind each word, there is a horizon of beliefs and meanings.   

The question is: what saves us from falling into so many traps? The first thing: recognize our performative contradiction. The second: create conditions and dispositions for a thought committed to the transformation of reality, that delves into the denied history of the global Souths and begins to believe in what our ancestors believe, in order to communalize other horizons of political-historical meaning. …a genuine, original thought; contrary to the apparent thinking that makes instrumental use of this exercise to accumulate prestige, intellectual capital and generate circuits of receptivity. The third thing, and no less important: assume the crisis, that is, understand that we have the crisis simply wrapped around the neck; because, as long as we continue to believe that things are not so bad, we will continue to stand idly by.

We urgently need to rise to the challenge posed by the challenges that we must face as humanity, in this necessary civilizational transition. There is no escape from community consciousness! As Rafael Bautista reminds us, the apocalyptic nature of the times we live in today confirms that lor opposite to life is indifference.