It's racism that fuels this comparison with value. I'm living in a yurt and would gladly trade it for a mud hut. Humans are currently threatening most life (including our own species) on the surface with extinction in multiple ways. That's not value and it is an inevitable conclusion to any form of binary thinking at scale. That includes the thinking that says "this way of life has more value than that way of life." We're living in the curse of the Greeks, whereby we've grown away from connection with our environments in the same ways they did by pedestaling their ways, including a form of logic that's too constrained to model reality.
Here's a paper on uncertainty logic to expand from. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1506.03123
Thank you for saying it. The racism is so embedded into western society it’s intractable
And saying so will get you downvoted on here most times. To anyone downvoting, show us the depth of your reasoning for it?
The fact that while racism exists, Western society is certainly not at the forefront of it? If anything the collective "West" is the most sensitive about race and racial issues.
It's performative because resolving it would require the end of the governments within the "West" and replacing with reindigenizing governance. Supremacy is at the foundation of the whole "West" and racism will always exist while that's in play. The racism is systemic and cultural. Sensitivity isn't sufficient; there needs to be actual systemic shifts that help drive cultural shifts and vice-versa. Not simply language changes, either. Rooting out binary thinking is key to it all. Nondual animist views are more aligned with how things work in the cosmos than dualism/nonanimism.
> Supremacy is at the foundation of the whole "West" and racism will always exist while that's in play.
If this is indeed the case, then it is very much not unique to the West, nor is it most tightly ingrained in the West. I'm not sure in how many different countries you'd live, but I can tell you this from lived experience. It could well be that most of the West is above average on a global scale in terms of belief in supremacy. I too have not lived in a 100 countries so I can't place "the West" as a block with accuracy. What I can tell you is that it does not land at #1.
Unless you call any vaguely US-aligned high-HDI country "The West" regardless of ethnicity, but that would be completely opposed to how any reasonable person would interpret your stance given the mentions of racism.
I'd say Greek culture heavily influenced colonization of the world & this has, in large part, led to dualism being implemented systemically , which drives supremacy-based thinking. Not saying ancient Greece invented it, but definitely helped in formalizing the basis for it.
That's a very different claim, and no one reading your first comments would've interpreted "The West" as "The Western style of thinking" (which is hardly tractable) rather than "The bloc that is the West in 2026".
It would be in a sense Eurocentric and patronizing to suggest that supremacy-based thinking all the way from the Middle East to East Asia stems from Greek culture. And if you're trying to say that dualism is universal and arises everywhere, then Greece becomes almost irrelevant and there's no real point to be made that the West has particularly relevant unique or exaggerated characteristics when it comes to the pervasive supremacy-based thinking.
You might be mixing my comments with someone else's. I'm not focusing on the "West", just addressing what someone else brought in. And it's neither all "the West's" responsibility nor is its responsibility irrelevant. The educational indoctrination used by European/American colonization practices has focused around teaching "Greek logic", and this includes how academic science and math has evolved and spread. The comment this one is in response to even presents a binary as a misrepresentation of what I've written before.
Dualism is not universal. And its wide spread in this world was brought about in large part through brutal colonization carried out by Europeans and their descendants with the help of various Christian denominations. They used Christian spirituality and forcing their own languages on people to disconnect them from the land (which includes the people themselves, as we are all land).
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