Becoming Otherwise – ending an ethnocidal epoch.

One of the life challenges which faces us, as ‘we’ who live Western lives move away from ‘modern’ arrangements, is to creatively fashion the means by which we can relate with people with Ways different to our own.

What is necessary for this is a sense of ‘self’ which can realise that ‘we’ are those ‘others’ – and a sense which neither makes us feel obliged to change our other-selves to be like us nor for ‘us’ to abandon our Ways to become like ‘them’.

Exchanges need to be respectfully carried out between cultural partners, with the things being exchanged being of real value. There is no place for forms of capitalism which institutionalise – and invite us to regard as ‘normal’ - systematic short-changing of one trading partner to produce ‘profits’ for the other.

Co-existence is a fine art, and one not much practiced within ‘modern’ nation-state arrangements. Their alignment, in the West at least, with capitalism is regarded by Pierre Clastres as a root cause for their ethnocidal treatment of people in other Ways of life (having already relied on a more localised form of ethnocide to bootstrap themselves up).

The deal is this: People – other versions of ourselves - who are different from us have a ‘right’ to Be just as we too have a ‘right’ to be.

But it is nor merely a ‘right’ – this kind of thinking has to attain an ontological status – that is, to have that degree of privilege by being built into the core of the epistemologies by which we know our cosmos.

We are Earth-Beings.

And our cosmic composition is better characterised by a ‘yin-yang’ complementary-opposition than by the prefabricated senses of identity which come from membership of modern nation-states.

The task of earthing our Being – bringing a dangerously unstable civilisation safely back to ground – is one which requires us to find new senses of identity.

These new senses of identity, as we learn from life over some centuries now, must provide spaces for our Other-Selves.

We must become wise to the ways of Others – Otherwise.