The rupture between humanity and the Whole did not occur suddenly, nor can it be understood as the result of a single historical event. Rather, it has been constructed progressively through political, economic, spiritual, and cultural processes that reorganized human existence according to the logic of the coloniality of power. These processes transformed the ways in which societies understood life, spirituality, nature, and even human relationships themselves.
One of the clearest examples of this transformation can be found in the modern state. Today, the state is conceived as the central political institution through which almost every aspect of human life is administered, regulated, and organized. Questions concerning education, health, territory, law, economy, and social coexistence are concentrated within this institutional structure. In this regard, Rita Segato has described this phenomenon as the “hijacking of politics,” referring to the way in which political life became absorbed and centralized within state institutions (Segato, 2018).
As a consequence, many forms of communal organization and relational understandings of existence were progressively displaced. Political life ceased to emerge organically from collective bonds and increasingly became dependent on bureaucratic and institutional mechanisms. This concentration of power contributed to the fragmentation of ancestral ways of living and understanding the world.
At the spiritual level, a similar process occurred through the expansion of the Church and missionary institutions during colonization. Indigenous and ancestral spiritualities that existed throughout Latin America were systematically marginalized, transformed, or eradicated. Sacred rivers, mountains, forests, celestial bodies, and ancestral deities were gradually replaced by anthropomorphic religious figures and institutionalized forms of spirituality imposed through colonial structures.
This transformation was not accidental. It formed part of a broader historical process linked to the establishment of anthropocentrism within the framework of the coloniality of power. Humanity increasingly positioned itself as separate from and superior to nature, reducing the sacred dimensions of existence to systems centered exclusively on human domination and control.
At the same time, the expansion of global capitalism became one of the most aggressive forces intensifying this rupture. Industrial production and mass consumption emerged as two interconnected dimensions of the same economic system. On one side, productive logics promoted the large-scale extraction of what came to be conceived merely as “natural resources,” subjected to industrialization and exploitation. On the other side, consumption became a cultural and social imperative that reshaped desires, values, and ways of living.
Within Latin America, many social struggles historically focused on disputes over the ownership of the means of production — whether these should belong to private capital, the state, or collective sectors. However, less attention was given to the logic of consumption itself. While societies debated who should control production, the expansion of consumer culture continued to deepen dependency on capitalist systems and reinforce the rupture between humanity and the Whole.
Consumption requires not only economic participation, but also the construction of certain principles, aspirations, and values. Ideas such as development, progress, and modernization became central discourses shaping the social imagination of Latin America during the twentieth century. In this regard, Arturo Escobar analyzed how concepts such as “development,” “poverty,” and the “Third World” were historically constructed as discursive categories after the Second World War. These concepts were not neutral descriptions of reality, but geopolitical instruments that reorganized territories and populations according to the interests of dominant global powers.
From this perspective, the relationship between North and South should not be understood merely as a geographical division. Rather, these are dynamic and shifting categories that describe the global distribution of power within capitalist modernity. The “North” represents positions of political, economic, and cultural dominance, while the “South” refers to spaces historically subjected to dependency and subordination within these global structures.
Thus, the coloniality of power continues to operate not only through institutions, but also through systems of thought, consumption, spirituality, and development that shape contemporary life. The rupture with the Whole is therefore political, economic, spiritual, and symbolic at the same time. Understanding these interconnected processes becomes essential for imagining alternative ways of relating to life, nature, and existence beyond the structures that have historically fragmented them.
Based on the information presented in the YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuWXqFPtfLE&t=340s