Many years ago, in the ruins of Sacsayhuaman in Peru’s Sacred Valley, I first encountered a way of looking at the world that I had never known before.
Walking among the majestic Inca stones, a television crew from a European country talked about the origins of this ceremonial site and discussed endless delusions about extraterrestrials. Faced with my tentative attempt to turn the conversation to the real past of these lands and their peoples, they looked at me as if I were mad and condemned me: “You are not telling us that you believe that these poor little creatures were able to build cities?
After that I understood that all the esoteric literature about aliens wandering among the pyramids and temples of ancient peoples is due to one thing and one thing only: the racist gaze of the white man, who is deeply convinced that the only creative capacity in the universe can be his or that of the aliens, because for him the only possibility of true civilization is that of HIS civilization.
Centuries ago, the gigantic educational, historical, and media machinery told us the story of a world seen from the point of view of a handful of European empires, which first put their countries on the fat navel of maps and then told other people’s tales of their “great discoveries” of Africa, Asia, America, and Oceania.
Of course, in discovering other lands populated by inferior beings, they also discovered civilizations built by the devil or by aliens. European supremacism as the basis of Western civilization has little to do with the media ‘shows’ of the Black Lives Matter type system but is something much more subtle.
It is a cultural horizon that has become a mass belief from which the view of the world is born, a heavy anchor of a galleon full of foreign gold, sunk in a port of departure to other lands under the flag, hoisted since the dark Middle Ages, that reads ‘Europe = Civilization’.
In its long and painful interaction with the rest of the human world, European civilization has been the only one that has been based exclusively on the extortion of material goods from others, never accepting any negotiation with those others, for the obvious reason that it has always felt superior and, worst of all, using as a shield and excuse the Christian dogma that has always denied the spirituality of those others.
That is why it is so logical that it was precisely in the Europe of a century ago that German fascism had to conclude this long spiritual quest for its racial superiority, and now neo-liberalism, the legitimate child of the embrace of finance capital with the corporate elite of the civilized world, is once again putting the whole world under nuclear control, even from the heart of Europe, the cradle of our civilizational illusions.
Modern Western civilization, which grew out of the barbarian conquest of ancient Rome, the cult of technological superiority as synonymous with ‘progress’, with a ‘spirituality’ always in the service of power and business, which are ultimately the same thing, became the sole basis of this archipelago of loneliness and follies that Western society has become today.
If one day some sage suddenly realized that the West had created the world’s first spiritless society, its defenders would, as always, shrug their shoulders and say that talk of spiritualities was surely a conservative and patriarchal narrative to be overcome by the new generation.
In the alienating work of the system, the system is now finally aiming to fulfill ancient human dreams of equality by turning us all equally into a single lumpen mass. Junk food and ‘no places’ for everything and in place of everything: food, culture, faith, sexuality, and political choices, make us part of a grand industrial experiment to become add-ons to the digital programs that run our lives. And the only force that can counter this incubator of stupidity is human spirituality.
But spirituality is part of traditional, value-preserving societies, something irrational and dangerous from the point of view of the system’s militant ignorance.
A Western person, created within rational stories, may feel a great attraction or curiosity towards other kinds of knowledge, but his clear cultural differentiation of life between ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy’ will always prevent him from understanding the complexity of a universe that exists within each of us, and where all material, spiritual and energetic elements are part of the same structure that also connects the external with the internal.
I am not idealizing traditional societies, which are always in the process of overcoming the old with the new, and which are open systems that can influence and be influenced. I am simply saying that without a spiritual element, not necessarily religious, human society is like a living being without a heart.
That is why, under the pretext of the ‘struggle for universal human rights’, the owners of economic and media power attack societies that are incapable of understanding and impose the Western consumerist paradigm on their new generations, castrating their imaginative cultural capacity.
The serious problem of the world is that, as a result of the computer and digital revolution of the last few decades, large masses of young people in the most diverse countries, regardless of their religion or language, are already Western, that is to say, reprogrammed towards a single type of development that has already failed.
Today’s human society, which is experiencing the worst crisis in its history, can only recover and move forward by recognizing its current defeat. But the only thing that is defeated is the spiritual. To realize this, one must apply the optics of cultures and not of technologies, which do not take into account the essential, the intangible, the invisible to the eye, according to the most human of all extraterrestrials, the Little Prince.
The war of neo-liberalism against ancestral cultures is not only a war for the natural resources of their peoples but a war for the eyes of their children. It is for the quality of dreams, which are the raw material with which we will build the most solid of realities, the one that will have, instead of four walls, a great circle of the horizon, and for a ceiling, the black light of infinity with a few thousand stars, not all of which will be those of the European Union.