Fascinating

It is indeed fascinating in which – and easily overlooked – ways claims of superiority prevail. It took a long time to overcome slavery in the US. And if we take it as overcome by now, there had been still the – outspoken or not – claim of superiority – to mention but one example: the Parsonian AGIL(Adaptation, Goal Attainment, Integration, Latency)-scheme and its further development and ‘translation’ into an especially anti-communist strategy of modernisation, not least inspired by Walt Whitman Rostow’s submission of A Non-Communist Manifesto on The Stages of Economic Growth which proposed and subordinated development as necessarily following one way, namely that of ‘capitalist modernisation’ and with this the measurement of progress as measuring GDP-growth.

And while there is now some consideration on going Beyond GDP (an article I wrote on some perspectives of this discussion will be published in the International Journal of Social Quality), the pattern of superiority of the American’s is maintained and lurks in some hidden corners. E-bay’s “Human remains and body parts policy” has something to tell. we read under “allowed items”

• Items that contain human scalp hair (such as lockets or wigs)

• Clean, articulated (jointed), non-Native American skulls and skeletons used for medical research

Well, one may try positive thinking: don’t engage in buying/selling part of a people that sold itself and had been sold to the devil. But as that has for me personally a link too close to Christianity (no devil without that) I leave it simply by looking at the American Dream – it remains being obviously a true nightmare.