translated from Spanish: The dark mirror and a pale blue dot

In the United States, a rocket is sent into space and almost simultaneously a policeman murders an African-American person by suffocating him with his knee around his neck: before looking for intelligent life in space, he must be searched on earth. Western civilization, which prepares a journey to Mars, the same of hyperconnectivity and digital revolutions, hides deep secrets that it does not want or dare to look at.
On the back of what Europe called “modernity” is conquest and slavery: it was slave hands that cut the sugar canes, built the palaces of their masters, planted cotton, harvested coffee and tobacco. Digestiones, what Eduardo Galeano called the process by which the wealth of the few depends on the poverty of the many. Without the silver of Bolivia and Mexico, a silver bridge that crossed the sea, could Europe have been Europe? Without Brazil’s gold, the golden bridge that crossed the sea, would the industrial revolution in England have been possible?
Funds from the black business built the great English railway. James Watt, and his steam engine, were subsidized by merchants who made their fortune by trading slaves, manufacturing and sugar. The White House, built between 1792 and 1800, was built by black slaves. Without slavery could industrial society have existed and all the progress of England and the United States?
And because the Western civilizing project promises that time is an arrow, ranging from backward to modern, from barbaric to civilized, things have not changed much: the same ones that produced rubber, rice, coffee, sugar, now sell their arms at a low price to assemble computers, sneakers and all the products that globalization (or globality , because the process has an intention, there is someone who globalizes) demands.
The journey to space and the suffocated man: two faces of the same world. Just as white supremacists will start shooting at blacks who are not interested in seeing, but crushing, denying, silencing, and hiding.
Karl Jung said: what you’re hiding, he subdues you. What you accept transforms you. Will we ever accept that the idea of progress, as promised, depends on annihilating the biosphere to be real? What if the 1.four billion Chinese decided to have two cars and a beach house? What world would we have left? Perhaps it is there, in nature, that what we do not want to reflect in the mirror is most evident: it is looted because there is a civilisational project that grows as the environment is poisoned. It is the age of the Anthropoccenus, geologists say and repeat the parrots, blaming all humanity for the planetary disaster. Generalizing ecocide responsibility is the best way to omit it. And the paradox doesn’t end there, because the same ones who destroy it now say to defend it through the use of geoengineering, Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) and all those big lies that green capitalism gradually begins to install in the environmental imagination. Destroying or defending it, nature is still one thing out there, the other. If the wild and the black has been the lower of the West, nature is the outside, the problem is that the place of exteriority is also that of inferiority.
Yuval Noah Harari (who also carries his own paradox: is a historian and super-sales) popularized worldwide the idea that societies are built on myths and stories. The superiority of homo sapiens over other living beings is due to the ability to generate common stories and networks of cooperation underpinned by these stories invented with imagination and justified by the word. It is the one who best controls its domination (the same as Gramsci called hegemony and that Joseph Nye plagiarized and called it “soft power”). Sometimes, however, you can run away from history without justifying it. Racism is a good safe passage to escape it, Galeano himself said, because if the winners were born to win, the losers are born to lose. If fate is in the genes, wealth is innocent of five centuries of crime and looting, and the poverty of the poor is not a result of history, but a curse of biological. If winners don’t have to repent, losers don’t have to complain.
Racism exists because the idea that one biological entity is superior to another is justified. Joseph Bank, botanist who sailed with British explorer Cook to Nueva Zealand, half and weighed the maori’s skulls to prove that primitive minds were smaller than European ones. That’s how the science of cranymeometry was invented. Merata Mita defines it this way: “Throughout our history people look at the Maori with a magnifying glass in the same way that a scientist looks at an insect. Those who look give the power to define.”
Like racism, most socio-political hierarchies lack a logical or biological basis: they are nothing more than the perpetuation of random events sustained by myths (577; Harari). The western civilisational project, which collapses everywhere, needs these accounts that explain and justify biological and social differences. But as Picketty, one who has dedicated itself to studying inequality, said, “every human society must justify its inequalities: we must find reasons for which the entire political and social building threatens to collapse. Each era thus produces a set of contradictory discourses and ideologies that aim to legitimize inequality.”
I wonder what the earth looks like from the space station the American astronauts came to. Will you see the flags, armies, skin color, capitalism and socialism, and all the myths and stories that adorn us in the planetary cage? When Carl Sagan saw the earth captured by the Voyager 1 probe, from 6 billion miles away, he spoke of a small pale blue dot suspended in a ray of sunshine, and said that there is no better demonstration of the madness of human concepts than that distant image of our tiny world.

The content poured into this opinion column is the sole responsibility of its author, and does not necessarily reflect the editorial line or position of El Mostrador.

Original source in Spanish

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