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Column
Personal Roots: A View from the South
During my formative years as a student in Argentina, amidst self-taught readings and the teachings of my mother, a philosophy professor and education expert, I perceived a constant: the theoretical references that shaped us were, almost entirely, French, German, and Latin American (especially Argentinian and Brazilian). When North American authors arrived, they often struck us as superficial, more focused on consequences than causes, tied to an almost accounting-like logic of reality.
From our perspective, they were a kind of „intellectual shopkeeper,“ crafting theories to package what is plainly visible, without delving into roots or considering contexts. Compared to that, French postmodern philosophers, for example, were abysses of depth. European semiotics, Latin American critical epistemology, the pedagogy of liberation… all of that had depth and meaning. The United States, in contrast, seemed to view the world as if it were a problem of administration or public relations.
The Fascination with the Practical Machinery
However, for years now, I have been obsessed with the practical philosophy of the United States. Its apparent simplicity hides a formidable machinery. It’s a philosophy that seems to scorn abstract ideas, speculations, grand narratives. What matters is what works. What can be measured. What can be sold. And within that logic, everything becomes a commodity: from medicine to spirituality, from politics to emotions.
This obsession of mine—a mix of fascination and suspicion—intensified in 2016 when Donald Trump won the presidency. For many in Latin America, his rise was an anomaly, an accident, a historical vulgarity. For me, it was something else: the most coherent expression of that practical philosophy taken to its extreme. The logical result of decades of a culture that rewards effectiveness without ethics, pragmatism without memory, success without context. Trump was not an interruption of the system, but its most visible consequence. He embodies the myths of the self-made man, the outsider who arrives to „clean house,“ the billionaire who says what he thinks because he owes nothing to anyone. He is Hollywood, Wall Street, and Las Vegas all rolled into one. He is the bastard child of show business and deals. A character seemingly straight out of a comic strip—and that’s no casual metaphor.
Disney, Donald Duck, and Pop Colonialism
A particularly revealing book deeply marked me along these lines: How to Read Donald Duck by Armand Mattelart and Ariel Dorfman. Ostensibly a critique of Disney comics, it is fundamentally an autopsy of North American cultural colonialism. The text reveals how these seemingly harmless narratives function as symbolic mechanisms of domination, spreading a worldview functional to United States power.
One of the book’s most potent ideas is the absence of genealogy in the characters. There are no parents. There is no history. Donald Duck is an uncle, not a father. Huey, Dewey, and Louie have no traceable past. This lack of roots prevents thinking about social structures or historical responsibilities. Everything is reduced to functional relationships of consumption, competition, or exotic adventure. Furthermore, the book shows how countries of the Global South appear as exotic landscapes to be explored, exploited, or saved by characters from the North. Otherness is picturesque, never political or structural. The South exists for the North to have adventures, accumulate treasures, or exercise supposed generosity. The result is a naturalization of the imperial order, where inequality is not questioned: it is managed as part of the scenery.
Trump as a Symptom of a Culture
Within this cultural framework, Donald Trump is not a radical disruption. He is, in many ways, the heir to that simplified, self-centered narrative. His contempt for „shithole countries,“ his rhetoric of walls and borders, his „America First“ logic, is merely the explicit and brutal version of what Disney had already naturalized more subtly: that the world is an extension of American desire and perspective.
And it is here that American practical philosophy shows its most myopic and, ultimately, dangerous side. Its material success prevents seeing its ethical limits. Its technological efficiency takes no notice of its destructive cultural effects. Its capacity for expansion conceals its symbolic emptiness. There is no complex past. There are no others with their own agency. There is only the useful, the immediate, the controllable.
The arrival—or rather, the return—of Donald Trump to the center of political power in the United States fully reveals this dynamic. This is not a moral judgment on his person, but a structural look at the type of culture that produces, tolerates, and largely celebrates him. Trump is not an accident. He is a symptom. A visible emergent of a philosophy of power deeply rooted in dominant American culture. A culture that often does not seek to understand the world, but to dominate it. And if it cannot dominate it, it sabotages it. And if it cannot sabotage it either, it simply turns its back.
The United States: A Power That Doesn’t Learn from History
We have seen it many times in recent history, but today it is impossible to ignore: the United States has strained historical ties with traditional allies, abandoned hard-won global consensuses, and slid unabashedly towards practices that erode democratic norms. In its self-absorption, it even flirts with historical adversaries, like Russia, if it serves to reaffirm its own centrality or destabilize the board in its favor. And the rest of the world takes note.
American foreign policy often resembles a geopolitical reality show where patient diplomacy gives way to impulses and media tantrums. The withdrawal from international commitments (like the Paris Agreement or the Iran nuclear deal), the contempt for multilateral institutions, the „with me or against me“ logic. Nothing structurally new, perhaps, but executed today with alarming crudeness and lack of strategic vision.
The Language of Selective Moral Supremacy
In every conflict, in every crisis, the United States tends to exhibit its deepest philosophical matrix: a binary logic, often infantilized and moralistic, but applied selectively. In the war between Russia and Ukraine, the predominant discourse was one of an almost absolute moral crusade. In the tragedy of Gaza, however, selective omission, the blocking of resolutions, and unconditional support for one party prevail, despite the catastrophic humanitarian consequences. Justice and condemnation are meted out according to its geopolitical interests, and morality is invoked only when convenient. Everything else is considered noise or enemy propaganda.
This logic has, we argue, a philosophical underpinning. Decades of hegemony of pragmatism, of an empiricism wary of metaphysics, of a positivism that reduces the complex to the measurable, of theories of knowledge that often despise the symbolic, the historical, the relational in favor of the instrumental. The dominant academic and political culture in the United States has cultivated a perspective that privileges control over understanding, immediate success over long-term meaning, power over relational ethics.
China: The Contrast Without Romanticism
Faced with this, China emerges as an eloquent contrast. Not because it is an ideal model—far from it, with its own forms of authoritarianism and expansion—but for exhibiting a different strategic wisdom, a historical patience anchored in its own philosophical tradition, and a less short-term rationality in its global movements.
Contemporary Chinese may not be great exporters of abstract philosophical theory in the Western style. But they possess millennia of strategic thought, a deep understanding of the longue durée, and a systemic reading of world power. They don’t need to invade militarily to dominate economically or technologically: often it suffices for them to wait, observe, adapt, invest, and measure. They do not act this way out of inherent goodness, but from a different form of strategic intelligence. And the world takes note of this too.
The Rest of the World: Between Amazement and Strategic Orphanhood
The rest of us, the non-empires, watch this global reconfiguration with amazement. A bit orphaned from the old order (however predictable it was), a bit cynical about grand narratives. We know well that neither pure morality nor international law nakedly governs relations between nations. But there are moments when the cynicism and myopia of American power become grotesque, almost cartoonish. And this, although it may not change the global order immediately, slowly but surely erodes the legitimacy of that power which for decades perceived itself (and was perceived by many) as a beacon of freedom and democracy.
More and more voices in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and even within Europe are beginning to express this discomfort more openly. More and more citizens and leaders are starting to question the narrative of freedom exported by bombs, of world leadership based on a supposed American exceptionalism. Because deep down, what often underlies it is an imperial gaze without a formal empire, a pedagogy of domination disguised as humanitarian aid or democracy promotion.
Philosophy, Education, and Power: A Revealing Triangle
All this is not a casual drift of the moment. It is deeply linked to how hegemonic thought has been formed in the United States. The type of philosophy privileged in universities and think tanks, the pedagogies applied in the education system, the language legitimized in public debate. Where Europe (and also Latin America, with its own critical traditions) historically cultivated the symbolic, the tragic, the dialectical, the contradictory, the United States predominantly chose the functional, the instrumental, the practical-problem-solving.
And that produces concrete results. A country that tends to believe that every problem has a quick technical solution, that every deep difference is an existential threat, that all ambiguity is a defect to be eliminated. A country that educates en masse to produce and consume efficiently, not necessarily to think critically or question the foundations of the system.
So Now What? Possible Paths Without Drama or Naivety
From theoretical reflection, perhaps it is time to dust off old critical texts and discover new voices that help us rethink the foundations of power, the bonds between peoples, global justice, and mutual respect beyond stark pragmatism. Authors like Martha Nussbaum with her human capabilities approach, Enrique Dussel with his ethics of liberation from the periphery, or Boaventura de Sousa Santos with his sociology of absences and epistemologies of the South, offer valuable conceptual tools to escape monolithic thinking without falling into paralyzing relativism or nihilism.
From political and social action, perhaps the most urgent challenge for the Global South is to reimagine and build forms of real autonomy, without falling into the obsolete logic of opposing blocs or repeating old patterns of dependency or sterile confrontation. The history of the South is full of attempts to build its own paths, some more visible, others brutally silenced. Today, more than ever, the need arises to devise collective strategies that do not reproduce economic or cultural dependence, nor limit themselves to short-sighted opportunism. Autonomy not as autarkic isolation, but as collective lucidity and sovereign bargaining power.
But from the South—with our own contradictions, with our historical wounds—it is possible to see that imperial arrogance with different eyes. Because we have lived it firsthand. Because we have suffered it. Because, let’s admit it, we have also often imitated it. And because, perhaps, collectively, we are ready to start moving beyond it.
Ultimately, there is no longer room for naivety. But neither is there room for the eternal lament that leads nowhere. By now, we should have understood that history has no predetermined end, the hegemonic hero can fall, the villain recycles himself in new forms, and the complex tapestry of human history continues…
References and Suggested Readings:
- Dorfman, Ariel & Mattelart, Armand. (1971). Para leer al Pato Donald: Comunicación de masa y colonialismo. Siglo XXI Editores. [English edition: How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic. International General, 1975].
- (The foundational book you analyze on Disney and cultural colonialism).
- Dussel, Enrique. (1998). Ética de la liberación en la edad de la globalización y de la exclusión. Editorial Trotta. [Relevant English work: Ethics of Liberation in the Age of Globalization and Exclusion. Duke University Press, 2013].
- (A key work by one of the liberation philosophers you mention as an alternative).
- Nussbaum, Martha C. (2011). Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
- (A representative text of her capabilities approach, offering an ethical framework alternative to purely economistic or utilitarian ones).
- Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. (2014). Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. Routledge.
- (Presents his influential critique of Western epistemic domination and the need to value knowledge from the Global South).