Two main topics remain instructive in demonstrating that all European philosophy arrive at the same point: looting from others and concentrating wealth in the hands of a few. Put another way, all European philosophy have a common point of departure: looting wealth. The first topic that proves the point is located in the natural science (or what others call the physical sciences) and the second topic to buttress the point, is situated in the social science. The following paragraphs will illustrate the internal malfeasance of European thought geared towards capitalist myth-making for one purpose and one mission alone: the rise and maintenance of a wealthy European warring elite.
Weber is a foremost myth-maker for capitalism. A beloved icon on social thought and European myth-making, Weber introduced the myth-making of modernization. It states that given enough time, any nation outside of the blessed nations of Europe can—preferably with some European tutelage—become like Europe. For example, African nations can also grow, evolve, and modernize to become more advanced like European nations. Whatever the definition, if one must accept the paradigm that European nations are more “advanced,” one needs to also inquire about what the nature of that “advancement” entails. This is where the caveat, “preferably with some European tutelage,” lodged within the call for Africa to also advance like Europe, remains the key. The catch is that Africa must accept European guidance to reach modernization; in order to reach a higher state of advancement.
Of course, Weber’s myth-making was, perhaps, his honest attempt to provide a logical basis, a justification, a rational for European terrorism and colonization in Africa. All one needs to rationalize for colonialism to work and for Chattel Slavery in the Americas to appeal to the masses, is to justify European terrorism in Africa as a necessary evil towards the achievement of a higher purpose—modernization. Weber’s attempt at theory-making prescribes an arrow of positive time and defines modernization as a linear advancement towards good sociodemographic outcomes. Here the arrow of linear time points from the state of the so-called under-developed nations in Africa, towards the more advanced state, the developed nations of Europe. Since the progress of time itself is inevitable as one sees on the ticking clock, advancement is also inevitable, and hence Africa’s need for European tutelage is also inevitable.
In the physical science, pretty much every European educated scientist is a student of positive linear time, which is associated with the levels of advancement in science. In fact, many science students believe that newer theories improve older ones despite the work of Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions), who showed that scientific paradigms do not proceed in a positive time, or in a linear fashion towards more advancement. That the path followed by scientific paradigms are not linear, positive and they do not always move towards better theories. For the physicist or the engineer the idea of entropy (particularly the second law of thermodynamics) embraces this mythical arrow of European advancement. The law states that the entropy of the universe is always increasing, which means that the universe is moving towards unbridled chaos. This philosophy, without evidence, provides the basis for the arrow of time moving in the positive direction towards a goal—increasing entropy. Entropy itself is the measure of positive and linear time.
Since time is positive and linear (which means it is unidirectional), events cannot evolve backwards. Certainly this idea stands in stark disagreement with the ancient African philosophy of Ma’at (and probably all current traditional African philosophies) that has roots in Non-Linear Time (a popular one of which is Circular Time). Simply, the African theory holds that time is not always linear and/or positive, that it repeats itself in order to sustain some of the inner workings of the universe. Given any particular differential locus on the circle of time, one might wrongly assume that time was linear in the same way that some Europeans once assumed that the Earth was flat simply because the land on which they pissed was flat.
For instance, in Vodun and Sankofa philosophy in order to maintain Ma’at (the perfect world order), what has been built up can also be built down, and what has been destroyed can be built up. In fact, intelligent physicists, who are not swayed by European myth-making, can attest to what this philosophy requires. It requires that the entropy of the universe fluctuate about a constant value. That value, the ideal case (which is the perfect world order), the entropy of the universe remains rather constant, and the system is said to be in thermodynamic equilibrium. What equilibrium entails is a crucial point. Equilibrium implies negative and positive time oscillating about the averaged expectation (the constant). Ma’at explains observations in the universe, but which the European linear positive time philosophy does not. For example the African theory can explain away the physical observation that planets and stars are continually created (decreasing entropy; negative time) and destroyed (increasing entropy, positive time) in the universe. European myth-making has to fabricate more myths to attempt a plausible explanation of this phenomenon.
One way to put all this theory-making about time, and its direction into some perspective is that “advancement” is not unidirectional. It does not always point in the European direction. Advancement too can point in the African direction, no matter what definition one chooses for the term “advancement.” That is, modernization is not a unidirectional European ideal. That in many other respects African nations can be said to be more “modernized” than their European colonizers. That in many respects, African nations are more civilized that their European terrorists.
This ancient African principle of circular time—which has been taught to many students from around the world in many African universities, like Sankore in Timbuktu, way before the first colleges appeared in Europe—is hard to dispute, but it seems to change everything when it is carefully understood. Immediately, it tells us that no renewable resource should be used beyond its rate of replenishment. No non-renewable resource should be used that cannot be fully recycled and reused. This leads inexorably towards three major shifts: a circular economy from which materials are never lost; all land ownership necessarily precludes ownership by others; and the end of capitalism. This theory-making stands in contrast to European philosophical time, which asserts that modernization, advancement and civilization move only in one direction, as time moves, and as increased entropy of isolated systems enforce: According to Europe, the uncivilized become civilized, the cart becomes a car, and the hut becomes a skyscraper. Time, according to European myth-making leads to two major implications: time churns along a defined path, never bending backwards on itself producing linear modernization and (2) this advancement necessitates European tutelage in producing ever more stuff for primitive consumption and accumulation. European time pollutes and destroys the Earth, African time renews and replenishes the Earth.
When all this is examined—from both topics in the physical sciences and the social sciences—it is not difficult to see that the very organizational structure of European myth-making of time and modernization originates in the ideas of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Given enough time, “monkeys” can become “human-like.” In fact, many attempts have been made, and are still being made—in European labs, western labs, in Ivy League Schools—to teach monkeys how to talk, write, and perform menial tasks. Research and testing for the European capitalist ideals in robotizing the workforce probably begun here, in other primates. None of it has been successful, but alas the myth-making seeking evidence is resolute in bringing monkeys up to speed with European thinking. Drug discovery in European labs bends towards the idea that clinical trials administered upwards from a mouse, a goat, a donkey, a monkey would invariably lead to success in human clinical trials.
Other such examples exist that are even more disturbing but for the lack of time here’s one for perspective: Indeed it is the belief in western academia that clinical trials among African populations, or among Black populations, would lead eventually to successful use in humans (Caucasians). The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the U.S. Public Health Services quickly jumps to mind. The purpose of this study was to observe the natural history of untreated syphilis, however the African-American men in the study were misled by the U.S. Government (which was made up of European Americans). The Africans were told they were rather receiving free health care from the United States European government. Several instances of studies of this type have been reported by many sources to be ongoing in the United States at the moment.
The idea of the Tuskegee Experiment underscores how the European sees the world around him. Given enough time one species can morph into another species. A monkey can transmogrify into a perfect human being. One drug tried and tested successfully in lower primates needs only smaller tweaks to make them work in higher primates. One lower human can transmogrify into a higher human being given enough time. Given that one drug works in lower humans, the experiment can be scaled progressively to higher humans. Human existence then, especially in the west, is modeled according to positive linear time; on such myths about the European miracle. In all this, of course the European, the Caucasian occupies the final iteration of the evolutionary process. Europe remains the final iteration of the process of modernization. Nothing is more perfect than the Caucasian, nothing is more perfect than Europe—so claims Europe’s myth-makers.
In sum, according to European myth-making, given enough time a “backward” Africa can become like an “enlightened” Europe. Given enough time a “backward race” of Africans can become an “advanced set” of Caucasians.
However, stories, narratives and documentaries about ancient Black Brits, ancient Black Swedes and Black Nordics now crop up every now and then in European media to provide evidence to buttress this myth-making philosophy that, once upon a time all the current “progressive” Caucasians were a bunch of “backward” breeds of Blacks, with blue eyes, from Africa. What is fascinating is that the inherent twists in logic is now backfiring on the European academic elite. For so long the European Miracle has maintained that nothing good could emerge from Africa, unless it had been colonized, terrorized and Christianized by Europeans. How then were the first Swedes Black? Who colonized them to bring them up to speed with advancement?
The large masses of Nordics, not understanding the import of the European myth-making project, which is to cook up evidence for the European Miracle of positive linear time streaming in the direction of advancement, and more advancement, march against such new documentaries for they feel a certain internal contradiction: As “better” races, the ordinary Swedes certainly do not like the characteristic idea that they have descended from a “backward” race. The Swedes have been taught for so long that nothing good came out of Africa (not even the good Swedes). If the Swedes had bad African ancestors, how can the ordinary good Swede have emerged from such a bad species? Ordinary Nordics, and ordinary Brits feel cheated that as “good” humans they couldn’t have possibly emerged from an inferior race of people from Africa.
The contradictions abound and they are the direct consequence of parochial European myth-making at all cost. All data hence, about our physical and social word are interpreted within the European myth-making framework of positive time, in which moves the European Miracle towards unbridled advancement. Europe is enlightened, i.e. the good, and Africa is savage, that is the bad. Africa needs European colonialism. Caucasians are a higher race and Africans are a lower race set on the path to one day possibly evolve into fully human Caucasians, but not until the inferior races of Africans can be taught, educated and mentored into new white men.
Kill the African and save the man. So goes the European miracle carefully framed by social scientists like Weber and carefully installed by European physical scientists in almost every science text. This scientific paradigm, as wrong and as racist as it shows, remains pervasive in western academic thought and expression. Huge sums of African resources, looted from Africa by European governments, are then spent on western academics to study Africa and to study African populations in a bid to hone teaching materials to set African on the path to modernization.
Of course, none of this makes much sense. What western governments engage in is the violent transfer of African resources into the hands of the European elite. Nothing more. This is what European myth-making entails, this is what it supports and maintains. All European philosophy is based in this very myth-making project: to provide the justification, the rational for looting African resources by any means necessary.
To gain a broader, and more holistic understanding of this myth-making paradigm of the transfer of resources from Africa to Europe, one needs only look no further than in the African Diaspora.
The European capitalist myth-making paradigm is properly setup in the New World. On American soil the experiment that is European myth-making can be observed in real time. For example, in search of an argument to exterminate natives from the land and grab it for themselves, the newly arriving Europeans to America invoked John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. Locke simply claimed that one acquires the right to own natural wealth by mixing his labor with it: the fruit you pick, the minerals you dig and the land you till become your exclusive property, because you put in the work.
This myth-making stood in stark contrast again with the African imagination of property rooted in the principles of Ma’at (equilibrium): that land, for instance, cannot be owned by an entity outside of the land itself, that land belonged on its own, that land itself held intrinsic rights for its own (person-)hood. Land is a person, and a person has inalienable rights. But in order to commit genocides and hoard land solely for European use, the European myth-makers sought after Locke’s incantation and jumped straight into native American lands, as they had done in South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.
Fast forward from Locke to the twenty-first century and the ideas of Locke published in 1689 remain the gold-standard of European geopolitical relations with Africa. In Ghana, particularly in Kewunor, Ada, a terrorist by the name of Ian Morris, from “Nothing Village,” England, the CEO of the real estate firm, Tresacco, together with Hilton Hotels of the United States of America (buoyed forth by USAFRICOM’s presence in Ghana), have gathered their armies outside the gates of Kewunor, and are plotting to unleash their well-known violence of displacing the people and forcibly grabbing their lands for use in building mass tourism destinations for Europeans visiting Ghana.
The argument for this kind of displacement in this century was developed by the American racist jurist, William Blackstone, in the 18th century, whose books were immensely influential in England, America and throughout the violent European Colonial Diaspora. Blackstone contended that a man’s right to “sole and despotic dominion” over land was established by the person who first occupied it, to produce food. This right could then be exchanged for money. At first reading one may think that Blackstone was actually sane. Except Blackstone’s idea of “man” in his definition did not include natives, or Africans, or Africans kidnapped into Chattel Slavery by Europeans. Blackstone is not actually sane. Furthermore, Blackstone’s idea of “money” was whatever the European pirates offered the natives: clothes, paper, alcohol or even the hypocritical idea of saving the turtles of Kewunor. Either way, Blackstone invariably contended (although in a verbose expedition) that whatever the European wished, so long as he wielded the means of violence, he could accomplish it.
Blackstone and Locke both assume positive linear time, the central dogma of European myth-making. At year zero, a person could step onto a piece of land, mix his labor with it and claim that it is his. Many Europeans justified their taking of native lands in Southern Africa, Australia, New Zealand and in the Americas in this way. But the land (as Blackstone admitted) only became a blank slate through the extermination of the natives who lived there. More insane is the further implication of this myth-making that robs even future generations of land. What this complete possession of land by a person implies is that land remained entirely for that person’s use, unless of course he sold it or passed it on to another person who took on the ownership of the land. Recall that in the African imagination, the land cannot be owned. African common law implied that future generations had as much right to the land as the current generation. In many African societies the assignment of land for use was done through common law, and through actual hearings at the office of appointed custodians of land (usually under the King and Queenmother’s auspices).
However, within the framework of European myth-making, not only could the colonialist erase all prior rights of natives to the land; not only could Ian Morris erase all prior rights of Kewunor inhabitants to the land, he could also erase all future rights by purchasing the land. By mixing his labor with the land once, Ian Morris and his descendants could acquire all of Kewunor’s land rights in perpetuity, until they decide to sell it. This rational prevents all future claimants from gaining natural wealth by the same means. Of course Ghana’s constitution does not currently allow the ownership of land past a ninety-year lease, but European governments, particularly the British and American governments, have been lobbying the government of Ghana to change land leasing laws hewn from the traditional African setup.
More recently, Ghana, under the Nana Akufo-Addo government, was coerced by the US Government to cede land in perpetuity to the United States Africa Command (USAFRICOM) just outside of the capital, Accra. This terrible event in the history of the nation, overseen by a president who claims he received a law degree from Cambridge University (but has yet to provide proof), sets the first precedent for future claims to traditional (stool) lands in Ghana by private entities and foreign firms that are fully engaged with European myth-making.
What is so unique about European labor, one might ask, that magically turns anything it touches into its private property? Europeans are all like King Midas’s, whatever they touch becomes their private property. And so why not establish their right to natural wealth by peeing around the territory as a cat would mark his sphere of influence with urine? The arguments defending the European economic system—which are borne out of European myth-making project—are weak and outrageous. Inspect the paralogism, and what one finds is that the whole structure of European thought and myth-making is founded on looting: looting from Africa, looting from Africans, looting from African nations, looting from other species, and looting from the future. And to what goal? For the continued amassment of resources in the hands of the European elite. Put another way, the goal of European myth-making, or what they call philosophy, is primitive accumulation in the hands of the European elite, and by consequence, the trickle down of this privilege to the white masses in Europe and in the European Colonial Diaspora.
The more accumulation, the better. Here too, under European philosophy, time flows unidirectionally towards more, and more advancement, towards more and more primitive materialism. The idea further holds that Africa has nothing, Europe has more, Blacks have nothing, whites have more stuff, and therefore whites and their Europe are more advanced than Blacks and their Africa. This is the defining dogma of European myth-making.
This is exactly the vital reason we wonder why the vast masses of whites in Europe—and in the European Colonial Diasporas of the Americas, Australia, Southern Africa and New Zealand—however, are merely representatives of average humanity, muddling along with their own affairs, enjoying the benefits accruing to their invested privileges in white supremacism. We wonder why these whites scarcely can be expected to take seriously the affairs of Black people whom they partly fear and partly despise. The answer lies in the European myth-making project. For many decades it was the theory in Africa, and in the African Diaspora that white supremacist attitudes among whites was the result of insensibility of ignorance and inexperience, that white people around the world did not know of or did not realize the continuing plight of Africans in Africa and in the European Colonial Diaspora.
Accordingly, for the last century, African scholars have striven by book and periodical, by speech and appeal, by various dramatic methods of agitation, to put the essential facts before the white European masses in Europe and America. Today there can be no doubt that white people know the facts about the primitive foundations of European myth-making; and yet they remain for the most part, incorrigible, resolute, indifferent and unmoved. And this is simply because the average white person plays an intrinsic role in perpetuating the white supremacism he is fed by his elite, by maintaining it and by passing its essential tenets down to the next generations through birth and cultivation.
Africans and Blacks in the Diaspora are also coming to face the fact quite calmly that the European myth-making that whites engage in, will not change, and most white people do not like Blacks, and are planning neither for their survival, nor for their definite future if it involves free, self-assertive modern manhood or womanhood. What must now change is African attitudes to European myth-making. What must now begin is the refutation of the primitivism of European myth-making, and with that the refutation in Africa and in the African Diaspora of all European philosophy. All European Philosophy serve no inherent good. Africa and the rest of the world are better off without a single idea originating from Europe or from the minds of Europeans, proper.
Congrats and thanks for the text.
Wow, what a thought! I will read it again…
Most nice read of the weekend. It is a eye opener and, mind broadening tool for taking back what belongs to the African Man – Perspicacity.
Great! Narmer you’ve taken us on the path of the European oppressive science to the current land grabbing, the mischievous green eco saving, to the real danger we becoming landless in our own land because Europeans are working their labour on it!
Narmer, the breadth and depth of your essay is mind-blowing. Forgive me, but I must needs confess that I have something little to add. (Who am I to think I could drink from the same cup as the great Narmer himself?) But add I must. What I would like to contribute here in order to emphasize your point, is another myth-making book by Matt Ridley in the Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters is a 1999 popular science book. In this book Ridley claims that bacteria that inhabit hot springs, for instance, and which are less complex structurally and organizationally than other bacteria, are more advanced than their counterparts living in more plush conditions. Matt Ridley alleges positive and linear time for advancement as well. Since hot-spring-bacteria appeared later than (or evolved from) other bacteria, they must be more advanced, no matter that they are less complex.
European myth-making such as Ridley’s engages in the following ensuing trickery: It accepts that the basis of evolution theory points from less complex organisms (unicellular organisms) to more complex ones. Only when it comes to these particular hot-spring-bacteria, the arrow of evolution changes direction without warning. Somehow, more complexity no longer depicts better species. Only time, which is that the later one species appears in the evolutionary chain, the better the species.
What Ridley tries to claim is the same positive linear time myth-making of Europe, proper. And in this instance, Ridley bestows a higher level of “advancement” on less complex organisms only because these organisms appeared historically later, evolutionarily later (with respect to time), than the rest.
The implication is that Matt Ridley wishes the rest of the world outside of European myth-making to believe that Europeans (who are genetically less complex) than Africans (because the genomes of Africans are the most complex and diverse in the world), are somehow more “advanced” than Africans despite the fact of lesser genetic complexity in Europeans. Again, where the myth-making leads is that since Europeans appeared much later than Africans in evolutionary time, then Europeans are by default, and according to Ridley’s myth-making, more advanced.
This contradicts the prior logic that less complex organisms yield to more complex forms. Indeed what the data shows about human beings in the world is not what European myth-making wants to accept, or even believe. European myth-making is bent on one thing and one thing alone: to make the European the Chosen People, and to make the rest of humanity, especially Africans, the 2,200 slaves that each Chosen (European) Person must have in the Promised Land. This is myth-making at the highest. It is rooted in everything but the facts.