Outgrowing Modernity

<b>The inevitable is coming fast. We know it in our bones—and it’s past time to face it.<br><br> The highly anticipated follow-up to Hospicing Modernity: how we activate responsibility, nurture care, and grow up in the face of collapse—includes reflections, exercises, and prompts</b><br><br>Climate collapse, social crisis, the decline of modernity: colonialism, capitalism, and our full-faced denial have ushered in an urgent new era. <i>Hospicing Modernity</i> asked us to grow up, step up, and show up for our communities and the living Earth. <i>Outgrowing Modernity</i> helps us make sense of where we’re going—and deepen what’s possible—in a time of endings.<br><br>Vanessa Machado De Oliveira helps us face the logics and workings of modernity, bringing us to clear-eyed terms with its expiration. She explores the impacts of colonialism as <i>neurocolonization</i>: an oppressive function of modernity that rewires how we think, act, imagine, and adapt. These impacts are wide-ranging and run deep: they cut us off from our natural ways of building community and seeking pleasure. They choke our ability to cope with trauma and embrace complexity. And they trap us in a state of artificial comfort and denial that keeps us from collectively growing up—even when our existence demands it.<br><br>This book invites you to interrupt 5 lies that neurocolonization instills in us—beliefs (and behaviors) that have condition us to think we’re <i>owed</i> the following, regardless of others or the planet:<br><br><ul><li>Moral and epistemic <b>self-righteous authority</b></li><li>Unrestricted, <b>unaccountable autonomy</b></li><li><b>Arbitrating truth, law, and common sense</b></li><li><b>Affirming one''s virtues</b>, innocence, and purity</li><li><b>Exploitative appropriation and accumulation</b> of various forms of capital</li></ul><br>In moving away from these ingrained worldviews, we can choose instead to develop 4 capacities necessary to our—and Earth’s—survival: <b>sobriety</b>, <b>maturity</b>, <b>discernment</b>, and <b>responsibility</b>.<br><br>Machado De Oliveira moves beyond critique into a praxis of strategic disinvestment: one that invites us to recognize what no longer serves us and reinvest in nurturing structures and lifeways that restore our knowledge in the value of life for life’s sake.