I actually consider this the most honest critical reply, even if it runs counter to my values – so I upvoted it. I don’t believe that the policies were unenlig

I actually consider this the most honest critical reply, even if it runs counter to my values – so I upvoted it. I don’t believe that the policies were unenlightened, or accidental, or coincidental. I think they were the result of immense effort and cunning, driven by a different set of values that are intrinsic to and still maintained by a certain class today. I believe they originated in the class system as a way to justify the privilege, and I don’t think they ever went away. The level of ingenuity to pull off what was done, and then to create an ideology and a set of scriptures to justify and entrench it for centuries is absolutely fascinating at both a historical and anthropological level. It’s also a in a context of immense human suffering and loss of life that it cannot be separated from. I find the woke culture an almost comical clash between the overt and implicit values of globalism and neoliberalism. I view it with a fascination, and it’s not from some position of superiority. I’d like to believe in the ideology, because I think I’d be so much happier, but I’ve always asked too many questions. Again, I consider the possibility I’m intellectually incapable of understanding some fundamental truth. The supremacist angle – not meant as a pejorative – seems the closest I can get to it, but I find that nearly all paths rely on post hoc ergo propter hoc, and it again puts me in a position of being better than others. And yet, fundamentally, do we all not have a sense of superiority: does our own individual survival not come ahead of another’s – outside of kin? I don’t believe we are qualified to know the impact of imperialism without knowing what the world would have looked like without. From a cybernetic point of view, imperialism appears as though it can only have reduced the variety of the planet, and seems to me a negative – but this is assuming that industrialisation would have happened by another means. Imperialism also arose in multiple forms, leading me to believe it was inevitable, and I suspect other imperialist powers may have seized the opportunities left behind – but this seems a weak justification for what I consider amoral behaviour. I wonder, however: if the asymmetry were reversed would maintain your position? Were you on the receiving end of might-is-right imperialism, would it still be a position you would hold? Kudos if so, but it’s not for me. I realise that I was fortunate to be born into an imperialist country, and to be able to be an immigrant in another imperialist country. I drive a car. I can live with that and not agree with the things that ostensibly led to what I benefit from, and put me in the position of privilege to be able to even think about these things.