The Seven A's and E's: How Colonial Desire Structures Modern Politics
Every savior wears the same grammar.
Modern politics — left and right alike — runs on a hidden operating system of colonial desire: seven drives (Authority, Arbitration, Autonomy, Affirmation, Appropriation, Accumulation, Acceleration) that translate into predictable political patterns (Exceptionalism, Exaltedness, Externalization, Expansion, Emancipation from entanglement). Any movement blind to this architecture will reproduce it.
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The Source
Reality-Hinging and Artificial Intelligence, with Vanessa Andreotti, Sharon Stein & Jonathan Rowson
The Observer
The Translation
AI-assisted summaryFamiliar terms
This framework identifies a structural grammar underlying contemporary political formations across the ideological spectrum. It names seven ontological drives — the seven A's — that constitute the architecture of colonial desire: Authority (claims to moral and epistemic superiority), Arbitration (the power to determine what counts as truth and common sense), autonomy (unaccountable freedom derived from that authority), Affirmation (the need for validation that sustains the entire structure), Appropriation and Accumulation (entitlements to extraction flowing from the above), and Acceleration (the drive to advance a teleological vision of progress with oneself at the apex). These are not incidental features of colonialism but its generative code.
The political translation of these drives produces seven E's: Exceptionalism (the claim that one group or leader holds unique legitimacy), Exaltedness (the demand that this group be elevated beyond contradiction), Externalization of culpability (innocence as the foundation of moral authority), Expansion of entitlement (politics reduced to rights-claims without relational responsibilities), and Emancipation from entanglement (a politics of separability rather than accountability). The critical move here is showing that these patterns operate symmetrically across reactionary and progressive formations.
The framework's sharpest edge cuts against progressive movements themselves. The romanticization of indigenous peoples or other marginalized groups reproduces the same exaltation dynamic: the moment a group is placed beyond complexity — beyond paradox, internal disagreement, and contradiction — the structure of colonial desire is already operative. Support becomes conditional on the exalted group performing its assigned role. This analysis insists that any emancipatory politics unaware of this architecture will inevitably reproduce it, regardless of its stated commitments to justice, decolonization, or liberation.