The Big Picture: From individual trauma to becoming other

The neoliberal economies that have been put in practice since the 1980’s have taken modernism/coloniality to new levels of individualism, competition, privatization, and deregulation.  In 1987, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously claimed about society, “There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families…,” suggesting that people were to be personally responsible only for themselves and their own fixed identities.  If they failed it was because they were inadequate or damaged by trauma. Clinical psychology in this model focused primarily on self-care and interpersonal relationships. By the twenty-first century, sociologists were reporting on epidemics of isolation and alienation in industrialized societies. Decoloniality moves in the opposite direction from individualism and competition to connection and collaboration, considering effects of structural violence in societies, the need to transform relationships of care for environments, the possibilities for becoming-other in community.

Resource: Emergent Strategy by Adrienne Maree Brown