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The masters house is burning

Reading the speech given by Arundhati Roy on the receipt of her PEN prize last week, and then this article by Pankaj Mishra where he says,

History has always been a clash between stories in which people aspire to recognise themselves. Our preferred story about the past orients us to the world as it is, offers us a place and an identity, and broadly explains our feelings of possibility. The widely used framework of Western journalism was built on Western triumphs—defeats of totalitarian regimes in two world wars, the postwar taming of Germany, Italy and Japan, and then victory over communism in the cold war, followed by the worldwide dissemination of western-style capitalism and democracy.

I am once again face to face with the stories of my life to this point. Raised in a Liberal family, taught that those people on unemployment benefits were ‘dole bludgers’ until I found myself as a single mother in extreme precarity, and that story of bludgers was shattered. To discover that those milking the system of taxpayer money are the wealthy as they dodge tax using sophisticated accounting and legal codes to do so. Their expropriation of money from public coffers only shames the pittance paid to those on welfare. To blame the poor is the classic obfuscation of the real theft.

As an educated woman, and an avid reader, I was raised on Western Philosophy. Only in the last few years have I noticed that Western Philosophy is entirely built from the narrative experience of white men. No matter how brilliant they are, their perspective is absent half the world.

Now I question the stories of Western Imperialism. Who are the terrorists? Do we simply swallow the line, or do we ask a deeper question?

Our Western history is over-stuffed with terrible atrocities and violence, done in our name. More violence and genocide than a single nervous system can cope with.

Yet those people are the bad guys. Particularly those black and brown people.

Perhaps we are the terrorists.

Every time I get a recommendation to read something or learn something, I look to the authors. Today on Twitter, someone I respect recommended another panel of the same ‘wisdom’ teachers. More of the same. Probably brilliant, but for me, increasingly unreadable and irrelevant. (Reference yesterday’s article on the pendulum.)

Audrey Lorde wrote, the master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house.

Until the voices of women, of black and brown people, of those who rarely find a platform, are raised with wholehearted deliberation, and given more than equal places at the table of wisdom, governance and leadership, we will still have the masters house.

The master’s house is burning, no one will survive.

Photo Taken October 18th 2024, Article written October 18th 2024

PS. Everything we do in Syntropic World is to create a new operating system in service to the increased well-being of all life. No more master's tools. This is what we teach in the Syntropic Foundations Masterclass and the Synergistic Accounting Workshop (you can join this workshop next week, here.)