#3 Paradigm shifts

FREE issue: 5 paradigm-shifting essays/videos 🦋🌻🍄

1. How the cult of confidence individualizes structural/societal problems

I enjoyed this essay by Professors Rosalind Gill and Shani Organ on “the cult and culture” of confidence. The idea that the answer to being systemically, socially, and culturally oppressed is to be more confident is so wild and heinously dishonest. What I also dislike is how it’s typically privileged white women selling this kind of confidence to everyone else and profiting from the vulnerabilities of other women imposed by capitalism, consumerism, racism, harmful beauty standards and much more. I just remembered that last year I posted a Substack voice note titled You Don’t Need to be More Confident that you can find here. I can’t remember what I said but I know I said things ;).

2. Self-love, similarly, individualizes a structural problem

The essay above makes a similar argument to Da’Shaun Harrison’s take on self-love in their book, Belly of the Beast, which is very powerful. Highly recommend the book if you haven’t read it yet. They are also a wonderful and prolific podcast guest and you can listen to a podcast on their work by searching for their name wherever you listen (great hack in general when you’re interested in a book but don’t have the time/energy/space [yet? ever?] to read it).

Last year,

Ismatu Gwendolyn

wrote an incredible essay summarizing and reflecting on Da’Shaun’s thesis on self-love, titled “Self love literally can never save us”. That self-love individualizes a structural problem, placing the burden of the solution on the individual rather than the society and social structures that creates, maintains, and necessitates the harm.

12| Self love literally can never save us.

3. McMindfulness: When Capitalism goes Buddhist

I really enjoyed this video by YouTuber @elliotsayshello discussing how mindfulness has been appropriated and co-opted to serve a capitalist western agenda. I particularly loved how he breaks down the three core tenets of Buddhism, and how the West has rejected all related to ethical action, being of service to the community and to the earth. I had been thinking about this and I love that this video found me at the right moment. I’m adding the book that the video summarizes, McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality by Ronald Purser, to my TBR. Here’s a quote from the book:

4. The downsides of self-control

I enjoyed this essay by Samantha Lapka on some of the downsides of too much self-control, which is usually seen as an inherently good thing. In particular I found it interesting that much of our humanity is tied to our inability or refusal to “control ourselves”. And the idea that we often regret times when we choose “discipline” over fun and freedom. What’s missing from this essay to me is how religion and western philosophy have shaped the gospel of self-control and self-discipline to begin with. The self-controlling, self-disciplined white European is contrasted to the unhinged “savage” native who needs the white European to bring control and order (seen as virtues) to the wild native subject. Self-control should be understood within the context of coloniality.

5. What is coloniality?

Source: Radical Moments Substack by Master See

I enjoyed this overview by

Radical Moments with Master See

on core theses on coloniality by the Latin-American scholars who defined and elaborated the concept such as Peruvian decolonial sociologist Aníbal Quijano and Puerto Rican de-colonial philosopher Nelson Moldonado-Torres. The self-control essay lead me to think about the hidden paradigm implicated within it that is never named. Coloniality passes through us wearing an invisibility cloak. The essay takes for granted that “most studies say self-control is a good thing” — never questioning who produces knowledge (coloniality of Knowledge), and for what purposes (coloniality of Power). Here is another resource on coloniality by FutureLearn, based on the work of the same Latin American decolonial school:

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