Empire gains power through limited, reductionist, single-issue, either/or, binary, individualistic thinking. It tries to tell us you are either good or bad, you are either left or right, you are completely right or you’re completely wrong.
When you magnify that with social media platforms like this one, it can contribute to further flattening what it means to be fully human.
It can lead to people believing that the person whose posts you follow, share, view, and even celebrate, is codified into that post. But by doing so you have made them stagnant, captured in a medium, frozen on a loop, or in a frame. You have, in essence, limited them.
This can also lead to us believing that people are always already fully formed in their analysis. This is dangerous.
And by “analysis,” we in the imperial core often take ours to be the absolute standard. But that standard is extremely limited too. We only have our analysis as people INSIDE of the imperial core. That is a modicum of what we actually need for collective liberation.
A narrow and limited analysis leaves no room for nuance, error, growth, feedback, criticism, or lessons.
The entire globe is going through its growth right now. Everyone’s analysis is growing right now. Everyone is learning right now. I have been doing this work for decades and am always learning.
For those of us in the imperial core, we have to think deeply about what it means to pull the rug out from underneath OURSELVES. We must topple the very system we are in. We must disrupt our very existence and everything we sit and stand upon.
Before we look to condemn the analysis of anyone outside of the imperial core, let us make more robust our own analysis within it.
In the end, we must all get to the place of liberation. In no way should we expect that we are all on the same learning trajectory. In fact, we are more complex and can learn from and with each other because we are not.
Remember, particularly for those of us inside of the imperial core, we are not free. We can speak, manifest, envision, and want freedom from the depths of our souls. But we ourselves are not speaking from a place of being free.
The most oppressed know what is most needed. But those who are more removed may have more material resources to support this need. And let us always think about this globally.
This is the very nature of capitalist imperialism that we must acknowledge. As advanced as we think our “analysis” is, no matter what, those of us within the imperial core have so much listening and learning to do.
None of us within the imperial core can dictate what liberation is without understanding the varied paces, complexities, and places of the globe. We will not get to liberation unless all of us get to liberation. All of us.
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