By Mauricio Escuela Orozco on September 20, 2024 from Cuba
Colonization is a complex process that expresses struggles for power and specifically the conquest of the mind and its cognitive functions….
The reality of the contemporary postmodern world is that of cultural colonization. It is easy to say, but we only have to analyze most of the products that appear on the shelves of the world market to realize that all of them allude to an immaterial universe, that is, our mind, and precisely from the conquest of that terrain, the matrices and mechanisms of chaining to the stupidization of people are given.
We are in an era in which the word of a youtuber weighs more than that of a scientist or a social researcher, in a world where politicians stopped talking to people to use social networks as colonial tools that enter the most emotional areas of the public and thus achieve a concrete result either electoral or full control of the masses. And this applies to everything and has repercussions in the shaping of ideas and actions.
This colonizing has its correlate in the reality of a world in which surplus value continues to be alluded to as that portion of wealth that is not distributed, but is the essence of the production and reproduction of capital.
Money is the form giving force, the commodity of commodities, and as such mediates human relations and makes them alienated in the sense of a possible unreality. In other words, it is not that we are talking about something new or that it is only characteristic of post modernity, since there was cultural colonization, for example, in the conquest of America by the Europeans or in previous processes in the world in which one civilization imposed itself on another and changed the canons of behavior to make them predictable, obedient and within a determined framework.
photo: Antonio Rolando Hernández Mena / Cubahora
For example, right now an idea shared millions of times on a social network carries more weight than a truth found after decades of research. This leads to the distortion of realities based on narratives and, in the end, neither science nor the certification of sources are what the public takes into account to form an opinion, a matrix, a daily action.
If at the beginning of the 20th century it was the radio with its massiveness and direct relationship with listeners, in this century we are talking about a collaborative web in which people are made to believe that the ideas they post, comment or propose are their own, when in fact they were conceived from opinion laboratories in which previous audience studies were conducted.
Cultural colonization is not only a matter of nations, of supra entities that are in a fight for supremacy or geopolitics; it is actually a cognitive battle in which people hand over the keys of their minds to external powers in exchange for gratifications.
Momentary pleasure as a game that envelops sensations and offers an ephemeral sense of life is the driving force behind the process of enslavement of ideas.
Rationality is left aside because we are sold the idea that this object is the philosopher’s stone of happiness and that only if we have a certain amount of money can we have access to it.
In this phenomenon of the commodity fetish, we are the commodity. In a famous story by Julio Cortázar, a man buys a watch and when he realizes that he will be tied to the object every day and that his existence is determined by his whims, he ends up concluding that the watch bought him. In other words, there is no more terrible truth than that of the fetish that converts our ontology into an unreality and introduces us into the universe of the inauthentic in which life is lost in terms of meaning.
Events that have been occurring in Cuban society point to the introduction of matrices that were previously alien to us and that are linked to notions such as property, individualism, attachment to the materiality of the world and disinterest in the cultivation of ideas.
In this process of reconversion of values, altruistic behaviors that were the basis of a proposal can be set aside and others that are based on violence, plundering, power or simply cruelty can be assumed. All this had to go through a cognitive battle in which people made a total renunciation of their sovereignty as human beings and therefore lost their decency and honest values. Because colonization is also about creating social problems, delinquencies that justify social alienation and cause people to isolate themselves and find pleasure in, for example, digital gratification.
If we do not take into account the complexity of the processes and the urgency for critical academic studies to be introduced in public policies and research plans, in a few years we will be at the gates of a large-scale colonizing process in which not only national geopolitics will be at stake, but also the very rationality of people as functional entities.
It is impossible to conceive of a career in journalism without the social and political sciences that give entity to the communication process. And that is what, unfortunately, we have been seeing when postmodern visions that are inscribed in a recent tradition of studying social networks from the point of view of a criticism and the assumption of liberal paradigms are privileged.
The introduction of a world of postmodernism and irrationality in studies is part of the colonization and renunciation of universities of the aspiration to truth. Cognitive biases are not only individual, but are present in many social processes at the macro level and are taken for certain and even paradigms are erected on the basis of this misconduct of conscience.
In Cuba, as in any country, the hegemonic counterculture will have to be created, but not by prohibiting, biasing or denying the world. There is in the conception of the national entity Marti’s vision that decolonizes and assumes cosmopolitanism from a cultured, critical position, with filters. And in that sense we must work, always seeking the balance of the world in our nation and not the elimination of discourses, which is an unreality of politics.
In his ideology, José Martí could not renounce the richness of the world’s cultural tradition, but neither could he ignore the urgency of conscience with itself nor the need to eliminate cognitive biases that enslave. Therefore, in the work bequeathed to us by the Cubans we can find the sap for the liberation of the cultural battle that takes place in a world shaped by social networks, in which everything seems to be within reach, democratic, cheap, and disposable.
The events linked to violence, to plunder, can only be fought from the full knowledge, from the dialogue of ideas; and not by enclosing the country in a glass urn. It is necessary to assume the ideological challenge of a universe in which contradictions, the struggle for meaning and narratives prevail.
The presumption that we are the guardians of a certain truth will no longer be the paradigm on which to build a social process. It is at this point that cultural colonization and decolonization become two concrete phenomena and come down from the Olympus of ideas in which we usually see them.
The very vitality of people, their sustenance, depends on the understanding of what we are and the functionality of a subject that has to exist in the real world and not in the matrixes of social networks.
Going to Martí makes us not only wiser, but cautious, and at least in that journey we will be able to know ourselves better, to value an identity that is under attack and that needs to drink its strength not only from an evident triumphalism, but from the breaks, defeats and disappointments.
Source: Network in Defense of Humanity – Cuba, translation Resumen Lationamericano – English