Majority Cultures

From Gothpoodle

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Revision as of 01:56, 19 June 2010

Finally, while Transhumanists and Preservationists fought their ideological war on Earth and in deep space, a third movement gained momentum in the developing world. The so-called “Majority Cultures” movement had its roots in Mao-Communism and the Non-Aligned Nations movement of the 20th century. In the developing world, it encouraged the rejection of Western cultural ideas and consumer goods, along with the development of indigenous folkways. The movement claimed that Western ideas were inherently anti-democratic, since they held dominance in world affairs all out of proportion to the numbers of people living in the Western nations. Justice and democracy demanded that non-Western cultures dominate the world’s political and economic systems. (The point that democracy and the notion of the “public will” were essentially Western inventions was generally ignored.)

Meanwhile, the movement also attained some popularity in the developed nations themselves, mostly in academia and among disaffected youth. Academics who embraced the movement called for an end to the dominance of “hierarchical, linear, logocentric, scientistic” modes of thought. They went beyond even the Preservationist ideal in their rejection of almost all scientific inquiry.

While the Majority Cultures movement failed to set off the same kind of social upheaval as the Transhumanists or Preservationists, it did inspire nationalist sentiments in many parts of the world. As the 2060s came to a close, many developing nations used the movement to drive their own “independence struggles,” rejecting the influence of Western-dominated world institutions and multinational corporations. Many in the developed world were inspired by the movement to withdraw from Western society, forming independent communes or moving to the developing countries.