The Mainstream Western Worldview Pretends The Global South Does Not Exist

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

Mainstream western politics and culture pretend the rest of the world does not exist. The mainstream western worldview shrinks the earth down to US-aligned countries and acts as though the billions of people who live in the global south do not share a planet with us.

You really see this illustrated in US presidential election season, when debates will feature five or six minutes on “foreign policy” with the remaining two hours dedicated to “domestic policy” and culture war wedge issues despite the the White House’s relationship with foreign countries having orders of magnitude more significant real-world consequences. Americans discuss election results as though the whole thing revolves around them and their feelings and how much more convenient or inconvenient the next president might make their lives, while Europeans discuss what the results might mean for NATO expenses and trade agreements. The fact that the next US president will be committing genocide, starving people with economic sanctions and increasing Washington’s stranglehold on earth’s population by any amount of violence and tyranny necessary barely ever enters into the conversation.

Whenever you hear western officials talking about how “the international community” views a particular issue, they’re almost always talking about the US, Canada, Europe, Australia, and maybe a few US-aligned Asian countries like Japan and South Korea — while pretending the rest of the world just isn’t there.

You see it in politics, but you see it throughout our culture too. In our movies, our shows, our conversations, our thoughts. We don’t really think about all the exploitative imperialist extraction of resources and labor that makes our lifestyles possible, even though it directly affects damn near every waking moment of our lives. You wouldn’t be reading this sentence right now had not this exact dynamic led to a highly complex electronic device making its way into your field of vision.

We just conduct ourselves from moment to moment like this relationship isn’t happening. It’s as though we’re all walking around with living people strapped to our feet like slippers, but we’re just laughing and talking about the weather and celebrities and how we’re feeling about this and that without ever acknowledging the existence of the human beings we’re standing on top of.

The global south is omitted from our thinking and our conversations in this way all the time, leaving us in this fractured, redacted mental universe where we pretend we’re the only people living in this rapidly shrinking world. Our lives are no less significant or valuable than those of people in Africa or Asia, but we live as though they don’t exist, even when their labor may affect our moment to moment reality far more than the white-skinned person we’re paying attention to in this instant.

This is going to have to change if we’re to become a conscious species and create a healthy world together. Our perception of the world is going to have to reflect the actual world, not just the small cloistered segment which exists within the confines of western civilization. We’re going to have to start thinking about humanity as a whole and stop living the lie that we are not intimately interconnected with the lives on every populated continent.

Until we open up our worldview and begin taking into account the needs and struggles of our fellow human beings around the world, it will be like we’re at a dinner party that’s being waited on by slaves. We’re all looking at each other and talking about our lives and our families as the slaves clear our plates and refill our drinks, never acknowledging them or discussing the fact that they’re being kept as material property and forced to do what they’re doing to avoid punishment and torture. Until we demand their freedom and invite them to come and dine with us, we’re going to be in a highly dysfunctional and abusive relationship with them, and nothing will ever feel quite right — because it won’t be.

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