The four socially sanctioned denials are the interlocking refusals that the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (GTDF) collective — including Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (Andreotti), author of Hospicing Modernity — identifies as the foundation of the “modern-colonial habit of being”. Formed in 2016, GTDF holds that our shared crises arise not from a lack of knowledge but from culturally rewarded habits of not-seeing. On this view, “education that addresses denial is very different from education that addresses ignorance”: the task is not more information but a slow, uncomfortable maturing.
Denial of systemic violence and complicity
Our comforts, securities and enjoyments are subsidised by expropriation and exploitation happening somewhere else.
Denial of the limits of the planet
The earth cannot sustain exponential growth and consumption, however much we act as though it can.
Denial of entanglement
We insist on seeing ourselves as separate from one another and the land, rather than woven into a single living, wider metabolism.
Denial of the depth and magnitude of the problem
We reach for easy hope and simplistic solutions instead of facing the scale of what confronts us.
GTDF maps how each denial is held — from deep denial, through selective and implicative acceptance, to fully owning the critique and its implications — insisting that harm is enabled by systems themselves, not merely by individuals.
Also see The House of Modernity, Depth Education and Wetiko.