thoughts

ON THE INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY OF EUROPEANS AND AFRICANS - WHAT FORMS THE SUPERSTRUCTURE?

I recall reading briefly an article some time ago which mentioned a story I do not well recall. A group of British (or American?) "socialists" were writing to "socialists" in another first world country, regarding Dr Kwame Nkrumah, who was coming to see them. In this story, they spoke highly of Dr Nkrumah but ultimately referred to him as "slow" ("stupid"). It is clear to me, having read a limited amount of Nkrumah's writings and being somewhat familiar with his policies that the man was by no means stupid, so I wondered how it is that they could have come to this conclusion.

Since then, I've become generally more aware of a tendency in academic (including academic "socialist") circles to view third world people, and particularly Africans in an infantilised way, or as "slow". While some of this may be attributed to a class-based western chauvinism, I've wondered if the reasoning behind this is perhaps deeper for a little while.

Comrade Leon Scisov and I discussed this in detail recently, and building off each other’s hypothesis, we constructed what I believe to be a much more developed hypothesis on the issue which ties in economic and historical analysis, in order to create an understanding of individual psychology which I believe offers real “scientific” (that is, predictive and explanatory power) on the issue regarding the mentalities of both Europeans and Africans. Be aware that this hypothesis and the conclusion reached is very much incomplete. This is another semi-article which will take a “rambling” character, as much more discussion is needed on the subject, and I am fully open to criticism from comrades who feel there are inaccuracies present. I am hoping that aside from perhaps offering some predictive/explanatory power, this will hopefully open to the door to further discussion and critique on the subject.

A few things I want to note here: This hypothesis is strictly limited to Western Europe/Western European offshoots, and particularly Anglo societies, as well as Africa “broadly”. Anything outside Africa or Western Europe is outside the scope of this initial hypothesis. What’s more, the purpose of this hypothesis is not to argue either that Europeans are inherently “evil”, or that African societies before colonialism were somehow perfect, or enlightened ie “?noble savage” myth. Africa has been fundamentally changed by its common historicity under colonialism in ways that perhaps we do not fully understand today. There can be no return to a pre-colonial “Africanness” because a pre-colonial commonality between the people of Africa did nor truly exist. The tribes, cultures, nations of pre-colonial Africa did not yet share common historicity of oppression and exploitation under colonialism, and as such would not have viewed each other as “the same people” as Africans who possess revolutionary consciousness do today. While cultural similarities exist between then and now, particularly wihin Individual tribes and ethnic groups, African society – from the level of economics to culture, and individual psychology have been fundamentally warped by the collective African experiences under colonialism, as Europe has been warped by its experiences of cycling collapse and apocalypse under the last 2000 years (which I will go into shortly) as well as the fundamental changes brought by Industrialisation.

The way forward for Africa is not a “return to the old” but instead a new African renaissance. The development of a new, revolutionary, pan-African and proletarian rooted culture in place of the hodgepodge and mess of colonized, maldeveloped culture which exists today.

The same could be said about Europe – there can be no return to “tradition”, as the tradition is neither preferable nor salvageable in light of fundamental changes in European society and culture. For “westerners” to live as human beings, the west, western society, western culture, must be crushed, burned to ash, and something new built in its built-in its place.

First, to understand the brutality of European colonialism I want to delve into the individual psychology of Europeans, and the reasons behind the development of this psychology. A fundamental concept in Marxism is the concept of superstructure and base. To simplify, the “base” of a society is the physical, material conditions at its core. That is to say, physical environmental conditions, and the economic system. We can say that under certain physical environments, different economic systems will evolve. In a society where there is a stable, mild or warm climate capable of sustaining stable systems of plant growth throughout the year, as well as significant fertile soil and plants capable of being planted and used as staple foods (eg, grains, potatoes, corn) we are more likely to see Agriculture develop at some stage. The development of Agriculture will generally lead to the development of “private property” – that is, physical ownership of land, which will tend to favour men as the landowning class, as men possess greater upper body strength and are thus better suited to tilling and working fields.

Eventually, to better, more efficiently work the fields, the need for more advanced tools is created, which gives birth to metallurgy, and primate smelting and smithing. 20’000 years ago, the climate on earth was generally not suitable to sustain agriculture on most of the planet, but as the climate generally warmed up, we saw agricultural societies pop up in the Neolithic era. This then eventually developed into the Bronze age, and then the Iron age as tools gradually developed.
As society became increasingly larger, which was allowed by sedentary, rather than small nomadic societies and the storage of food and resources, as well as a need for “more hands” in the fields, society by necessity became increasingly complex. Rather than small hunter-gatherer tribes of less than 100, human society evolved into villages and towns of hundreds, and even thousands of people. We begin then to see the development of a complex “superstructure”, which is the culture of society. This increase in human population not only led to a greater exchange of memetic ideas, which became one of the basis of cultural trends, spurred also by the development of increasingly complex language which was necessary to manage larger amounts of human beings in a more complex economic environment, but also the need for formalized leadership and management of these societies. States and governments formed, and with the legal systems. These tie in with the already existing memetic culture and increasingly complex superstitions to form cultural and social norms and morality. Complex superstition, social norms and legal systems, combined with a need to understand and explain phenomena well out of our ability to previously explain for, gave birth to the first form of early, organized science – that is, religion. The need to pass down property ownership between the land workers, that is, the need to control the means of reproduction led to a legal distinction between men and women, with women eventually becoming the property, or wives of the landowners (men) and more successful, wealthier men possessing more wives, and more wealth. These people and their oldest sons would become the first ruling class in human society.

So this is an example of how the “base” – first physical environmental conditions, gave birth to economic conditions, which then formed the “superstructure” – the culture, legal system, religious views and memetic ideas, which in turn forms the individual psychology of a person in a given society.
Now, let us compared European and African society. Contrary to the European chauvinistic view of “great European” society, Europe was until the 1500s, largely a backwater of the world, and one which was poisoned by constant cycles of apocalyptic collapse, disease, and competition in the form of the tribal, city-state and feudal warfare. Multiple large scales collapses occurred in Europe in the last 2000 years of European society – First the Collapse of the Western Roman Empire, a great human Empire which was already abnormally plagued with cycles of instability. The collapse of the Western Roman Empire – then, one of the most advanced civilizations on Earth, comparable with the ancient African Egyptian Empire, the Chinese Empires, Khmer or Inca, was devastating. Western Europe went through massive depopulation as a result of famine, general economic collapse and the bickering over resources which followed. Rome went from a city over around a million human beings into a city smaller than 20’000 people, almost overnight. The “skyscrapers”, aqueducts, modern roads and primitive factories of the Western Roman Empire collapsed, and as society simplified and shrunk, the large class of intellectuals and thinkers could not be sustained, which led to a massive loss of ideas and thoughts. This gave birth to an era known as the dark ages, of European Feudalism, and constant warfare. Life in this era for a European peasant was hell, marked by nearly constant warfare over resources, bickering, and disease. Whole villages would be burned down, raped and murdered regularly, and the collapse of sanitation would cause constant outbreaks of illness. The infant mortality rate was extremely high, and most people lived a miserable, squalid and meagre existence.

As the dark ages developed in the mid and high middle ages, we saw two more great apocalypses, first in the form of the first great black, or black death, which is thought to have killed up to 60% of Europe’s population, and depopulated entire cities, towns, and regions. Then, we saw a third great apocalypse in the form of the collapse of the Eastern Roman Empire. Following this, there would be further cycles of small scale apocalypse and collapse, eg, the great plague of the 1600s. Other tremendously destructive events included the inquisitions and purges of Pagans in Eastern Europe, Southern France and modern Spain, and the various great wars and civil wars - eg, the 100 years war between England, France and Burgundy, the English civil wars, etc.

This cycle of constant collapse, war, and disease created a political/economic environment of constant competition – competition over resources, overland, over labour, in various forms. From the more mild purely economic competition between the merchant cities and states of Italy, or the landed knights and lords over the dwindling peasants following outbreaks of disease and famine, to the more brutal competition of war between feudal rulers over resources and land – often these wars would occur within an individual “country” or feudal state. Eg, kings, dukes, counts and barons within what we now think of as “individual countries” who despite sharing a common lord, would intentionally sabotage the economies of his neighbouring region, or rape and ransacking his neighbouring lord’s village. This competition would extend to the colonial period, with individual companies, states, and settlers even from the same country competing over the most choice and fertile lands for settlement.
In short, a human being who grows up in an environment of constant competition on the micro and macro level, of extreme violence, of disease, and fear/paranoia over other competitors on a constant level is going to be a human being who not only has a hyper-competitive and paranoid mindset, but who is also desensitized to mass violence, and also to the social violence of perpetually “screwing over” your neighbour for the best deal. In short, a generally awful, and mentally disturbed adult is created by this kind of environment. An adult who is more narcissistic, individualistic, competitive, paranoid and manipulative to survive.

Moving on to Africa –Because it is harder to talk of a generalized “African” due to pre-colonial Africa was extremely broad economically and socially will need to simplify and generalize somewhat in my example. Unlike Europe, and particularly Northern Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa is a continent both fertile and rich in resources, but also extremely large. The largeness of the territory, and the abundance of resources along with a higher degree of isolation from the world imposed by the Sahara (which is not to say total Isolation. It is now believed the East-African trade kingdoms traded as far as South East Asia and Australia, and the West-African kingdom of Mali most likely made it to Central America years before Europeans) meant that disease and hostile forces could not as readily venture into the continent. For an invading force to cross the Sahara would have been unfeasible until quite recently on anything other than small scale skirmishes and raids, so invasions as such didn’t occur as they did between the various states of the Americas or the “old world” of the rest of Eurasia. As such, the competition was far more muted. While the small scale and wars competition may have occurred occasionally over resources and land (or livestock, as occurred in parts of northern East and West Africa), they were far more sparse, and far less brutal than Europe. As there was no constant economic and political competition between states as existed in the “old war” the drive for the same military and economic technologies did not exist. If you live in relative abundance and safety, then why would you need to develop weapons of war to defend yourself? If local access to resources manufacturing is sufficient, then why develop manufactories?

None of this is to say that precolonial African cultures were perfect, or should be emulated in a modern sense. Many deep problems existed. But in general, you had healthier, more collectivistic and arguably more egalitarian human societies, which in turn created human beings which were more functional, more mentally healthy, and less inclined toward competition, paranoia and manipulation.

So while African societies generally produced collectivistic/generally egalitarian, far more trusting, less manipulative and less paranoid people, European society created people who were manipulative, individualist, paranoid, mentally unstable, and desensitized to social and physical violence. While Europeans were subtly “trained” from a young age to manipulate and act in a conspiratorial way simply to survive, Africans lacked the psychological “antibody” to recognize and combat this conspiratorial, manipulative approach to socialization.

Thus, in the mind of the European, the African, being not immunized by thousands of years of brutal social economic and political competition on the social, political and economic levels, appears individually “slow” and easy to manipulate. To the pre-colonial or colonial Africa however, the European is simply unstable and bizarre. Coming from a less complex economic and political order, his motivations seem simply bizarre.

When Europeans came to west Africa, they came as states, as individual companies and merchants. The European strategy for conquest was not simply to come in guns blazing, and take over a village. Instead, it was to gradually, slowly weaken the people by turning them against each other – manufactured and semi-manufactured infighting, promoted by exploitation already existing grievances and amplifying them by stoking further cultural and religious differences (In India, this strategy is called “Communalism”). Individual companies, states, and merchants would offer different tribes advanced weapons and trades deals so they would be better suited to wipe each other often. Often multiple force in the same country or even the same group would arm both sides in a conflict – both to reap in profits from weapon sales and also to weaken down the people. But to understand why this was happening, it was necessary both to understand the logic of competition within a complex market society and also the complex relationships between merchant companies, European states and individual actors within them. To an African at the time, the Europeans would seem schizophrenic and disturbed. Without the understanding of the economic, political and social environment in Europe, it would be very hard to understand why what was happening was happening, and this was made worse by the individual predisposition away from paranoia and towards trusting.

An example Leon Scisov provided was this. Let’s reduce the economic system to the level of a single-family Imagine in Africa, a group of three brothers go down to the river each day to pick apples from an apple tree. They all cooperate and help each other to reach the higher apples, they come home and then share the apples with their family. The mother and father then praise the boys for doing a good job picking apples.

In Europe, the parents first tell the brothers that each day whoever brings home the most apples will get a bigger dinner. The brothers who bring home the least will instead receive a beating and no dinner. The brothers rush down to the river, tripping each other over, bickering and shouting all the while. Forced to compete daily, the tactics of the brothers in bringing home more apples gradually grows more aggressive and malicious. To bring home more apples, the brothers begin sabotaging each other. First, they steal each other’s apples, then they begin beating each other. Maybe one brother will find a way to put rancid meat into his tallest brother’s food, so he is too stick to pick apples for a while. The tallest brother in turn tears down the lowest ranches, ensuring only he can reach the apples, so the middle brother than poisons his apples. The shortest brother at this point sneaks out at night and tears down the entire apple tree – ensuring that for a day, he gains the most apples, but making it impossible for more apples to grow. The brothers grow up hating each other, seeing each other not as siblings but as competitors over limited resources (in the form of parental affection, energy and food)

This is, of course, a simplification, but it is an example of what an environment of hyper-competitiveness can do, and the kinds of mentalities and the individual psychology it creates.
A part of living in an environment of individualistic hyper-competitiveness and constant manipulation is that as an individual, will both become normalized to environments of hyper-competitiveness (think of a person who lives by the ocean, and who gradually learns not to notice the constant crashing of the waves, or crying of the seagulls) and you will develop immunity to the constant, passive forms of manipulation and competitiveness around you, in much the same way as somebody becomes immunized to a virus. Human interaction generally evolves a degree of passive, benevolent and sometimes malicious manipulation, but the degree is cranked up massively in the day to day life of those who have grown up under western hyper-competitiveness and individualism. Those of us who grew up in this environment have adapted, and almost form of social interaction complex a layer of competitive manipulation that is not seen elsewhere. This has been further exaggerated with the advent of the western social science of marketing/advertising – which is essentially the “science” of emotional manipulation via advertising propaganda to drive consumption. The Western Imperialists states understand emotional manipulation to a degree that has never before been understood in history. This is partly how they were able to out-compete the socialist states on the level of culture. This is how they have been able to mentally colonize the intelligentsia and academics of Eastern Europe and the third world using vacuous, substantive pure emotional manipulation. The various anti-imperialist and socialist states of the world were, and are today simply unable to compete, with exception to one unique example – The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or DPRK/North Korea, which due to the very particular environment it was forced into both during the cold war and today, possess a deep cultural paranoia, a sense for non-individualist competition and as a result possesses a very developed understanding of emotional manipulation (albeit in a benevolent rather than malicious and individually self-serving way). This is why I say that a lot can be, and must be learned from the example of the DPRK in internal and external propaganda and realpolitik – but that is a different topic altogether.

To go back to the topic of Dr Nkrumah, we can begin to see why the European “socialists” may have seen him as “slow”. Because Dr Nkrumah had, despite being of exceptional intelligence, grown-up away from the hyper-competitiveness and toxicity of European and American capitalist society in his formative years, he was not “immunized” to the constant, subtle forms of manipulation which those who are raised in the environments which exist in North America and Europe, etc, are passively exposed to since birth. As such, his naturally collectivistic and egalitarian background formed a “psyche” that appeared as perhaps “impressionable” or “overly trusting” to the Europeans, which in European and America society is attributable to primarily those Europeans and Americas who are developmentally delayed or “slow”. The Europeans, in all likelihood, were not even fully aware of why they perceived him as “slow” like this for them was an unconscious assessment of Dr Nkrumah. I believe this phenomenon also exists more broadly and may be part of the backbone behind the unscientific assessment of European chauvinists and Xenophobes toward Africans as broadly ” stupid” or “inferior”.

While today, many conscious African revolutionaries are being produced who understand the the motive behind imperialism, inter-imperialist competition and how they affect conditions locally, from the perspective of Africans who do not possess revolutionary consciousness, who do not possess an understanding of Marxism and systemic analysis, who instead trend toward third positionist institutional analysis or 1st positionist individualist analysis of conditions in the world (which both tend to be the “default position” of most human beings) the contortions of the western Imperialists must seem nonsensical or bizarre, even schizophrenic. It would be very hard to make sense of the constant backflipping of the Western Imperialists. Deprived of an analysis rooted in economic, historical and systemic analysis, these people instead adopt one of two positions: A sense of individual and collective inferiority compared to the European/American Imperialists (most common among the comprador class) which is made worse, and seeming “justified” by the fact that Europe and America are so much more developed, and seeming enlightened than Africa – or, an analysis rooted in conspiracy theories, often of a racial characteristic. Eg, Satanic style conspiracies, conspiracies revolving around the idea of whites possessing an inhuman, demonic or “supernatural” nature. For instance, the conspiracy theories around whites being products of the mad scientist Yakub, promoted by “National of Islam” in the United States, of whites being some kind of artificially produced, or naturally evolved non-human primate, of possessing some kind of conspiratorial mission to wipe out Africans (or non-white people) broadly.

I’ve come to believe this is what is meant on an emotional level when African third positionists denounce Marxism as a “white man’s ideology”, and insist on a need to develop an “African ideology”. When they say “white man’s ideology” they mean something deceptive, something confusing and sold merely to further divide the African people. It is not that it is produced by whites is a bad thing, but that it is produced by whites to obfuscate and confusing. This narrative was enforced by the soviet-sino split, when communists and “communists” are funding and arming different sides in the same struggle, which to African third positionists seems uncomfortably similar to the strategy of the European Empires who sold guns to bickering tribes, and claimed to possess a “great idea” (in the form of religion, or of capitalism, or white supremacy) in order to “save the African people” (from themselves).

(INCOMPLETE/DRAFT - TO BE EXPANDED UPON FURTHER)