Unwellness Empire: The Politics of Mind, Body, and Earth
We are living in an age of unwellness. Our minds are haunted by anxiety, our bodies marked by disparity, our communities fractured by violence, our planet burning. We are told these are separate crises: a mental health epidemic, a public health failure, a criminal justice problem, an environmental disaster. But what if they are all symptoms of the same underlying disease?
This disease is not a virus or a genetic flaw. It is a political and economic condition, a system that has been engineered. We are living in the Unwellness Empire: an architecture of power that actively produces sickness—in our psyches, our relationships, and our ecosystems—as a necessary cost of doing business. Its foundational logic, the concrete that holds its walls in place, is dehumanization.
Dehumanization is the process of stripping a person or a people of their full humanity, reducing them to a problem, a resource, or a threat. It is the mechanism that allows a child’s grief to be diagnosed as a disorder while ignoring the siege that caused it; that allows a forest to be clear-cut without a thought for the life it sustained; that allows a police officer to kneel on a man’s neck for nine minutes. To understand the tangled roots of our present suffering, we must trace them back to their source: the capitalist colonial logic that fractures our identity, severs our connection to nature, and trains us to see certain lives as disposable.
The use of dehumanization in society is not an accident; it is a tool. For systems of domination to function, they must first create a hierarchy of human value. This requires constructing a binary where dominant powers are positioned as civilized, rational, and entitled, while subjugated populations are framed as savage, irrational, and expendable.
As Aimé Césaire argued in his seminal work, Discourse on Colonialism, this process doesn’t just brutalize its immediate victims, it also “decivilizes the colonizer.” To dominate others, you must first numb your own capacity for empathy. You must learn to see atrocity as administration, and cruelty as necessity. This is the original crack in the foundation, a moral rot that, as Césaire warned, would eventually “boomerang” back to enable fascism and violence at home.
But the primary assault is against the mind and soul. Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist and anti-imperialist revolutionary, laid bare this psychological warfare. He explored the notion of colonialism as not just a military and economic project, but as a project of the psyche; one that systematically destroys a people’s cultural and spiritual reference points, imposing what he called an “arsenal of complexes“—a deep-seated sense of inferiority and self-hatred. The colonized are taught to see themselves through the eyes of their oppressor, to view their own traditions as backward, their own bodies as primitive. This is the first and most fundamental fracture: an alienation of the self from the self.
The Pillars of the Architecture
The foundational logic of the Unwellness Empire is upheld by five pillars.
Pillar 1: Fracturing Identity
The first and most fundamental act of dehumanization is the deliberate dismantling of identity. This goes beyond mere discrimination—it is a systematic project to erase entire ways of being and knowing.
In Palestine, the struggle to maintain identity occurs daily against the ongoing Nakba and genocide. The uprooting of ancient olive trees, the demolition of homes, the restriction of movement, and the suppression of Palestinian narrative in educational materials all serve the same purpose: to erase a people’s connection to their land, history, and future.
Meanwhile, across the African diaspora, the trauma of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the colonialism initiated a form of “social death“—the systematic stripping of ancestral names, languages, and spiritual practices. This created what W.E.B. Du Bois termed “double consciousness,” that sense of “always looking at oneself through the eyes of others.”
To control a people, you must first make them strangers to themselves. A people who cannot remember who they are cannot effectively resist being told what to become.
Pillar 2: Seizing the Land, Severing the Connection
The Unwellness Empire cannot abide sacred relationships to the land. A river is not a relative; it is a resource to be dammed. A forest is not a community; it is lumber to be extracted. The colonial project was, from the start, an environmental project. It reshaped entire continents to feed imperial economies, displacing not only people but the complex ecosystems that sustained them.
This may at times manifest as “slow violence“—a violence that occurs gradually, out of sight, its catastrophic effects delayed across time and space. The poisoning of a water source, the desertification of farmland, the rising sea levels—these are often not instantaneous explosions but a creeping stranglehold. Yet, even the notion of slow violence is framed through the colonial gaze; this violence is anything but slow for those living at the frontlines of climate catastrophe. It is a profound form of dehumanization; it tells a community that their future does not matter, that their children’s home is not worth preserving. To dehumanize a people, you must first de-sacralize their land.
Pillar 3: The Spectacle of Suffering
An often inescapable, pervasive pillar sustains the Unwellness Empire: the weaponization of empathy. Through our screens, we are made passive witnesses to genocide in Gaza, police violence against the Black community, ICE terrorists kidnapping families from their homes. This is not neutral observation—it is a curated system that dictates whose pain is worthy of our grief and whose is rendered invisible or justified.
As argued in Noam Chomsky’s “propaganda model,” corporate media functions to manufacture consent by directing our moral outrage along acceptable channels. This system performs a double violence. First, it inflicts Race-Based Traumatic Stress on marginalized communities by forcing them to endlessly consume images of their own dehumanization. Second, it desensitizes the broader public through overexposure, transforming profound human tragedy into just another piece of content in our endless scroll. The person on the screen ceases to be a person—they become a “casualty,” a “statistic,” a “content warning.”
This is the weaponization of empathy: our innate capacity for compassion is exploited, overloaded, and strategically drained until we are left numb. The system teaches us to care intensely about some victims while accepting the destruction of others as inevitable, thus making our very empathy a tool that reinforces the hierarchies of the Unwellness Empire.
Pillar 4: Pathologizing and Medicalizing Resistance
When the psychological distress of this fractured existence manifests—as depression, addiction, or rage—the system has a ready-made response: call it a disease. The pain of oppression is neatly re-packaged as personal pathology, shifting the blame from the toxic system to the “disordered” individual.
This represents the ultimate medicalization of normal human responses to abnormal, oppressive conditions, where grief becomes “Major Depressive Disorder” and righteous anger at injustice becomes “Intermittent Explosive Disorder.” The profound violence of this framework lies in its ability to pathologize survival itself. A child living under constant surveillance and military occupation who develops hypervigilance is not displaying a rational response to danger—they are diagnosed with “Antisocial Personality Disorder.” A Black mother’s anguish after her son is killed by police becomes “Complicated Grief.” This diagnostic relabeling serves to individualize what are fundamentally collective, political, economic problems. By framing these responses as pathological, the system obscures their origins in structural violence and instead locates the problem within the individual’s neurochemistry or psychology.
This medicalization has deep roots in social control, from racialized experiments such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study to today’s diagnoses of children reacting to systemic neglect. The diagnostic manual becomes a tool for managing dissent, transforming legitimate responses to injustice into treatable conditions that require professional intervention and pharmaceutical management.
The ultimate effect is to absolve the system of the harm it creates. When suffering is framed as individual pathology, the need for political change is replaced by the demand for personal adjustment. The revolution need not be crushed—it can be prescribed away.
Pillar 5: The Dehumanization of the Dominator
The final often overlooked pillar is the dehumanization of the colonizer, the imperialist, and the capitalist themselves. To sustain a system of domination, one must also sacrifice their own humanity. This is the imperial boomerang in its most intimate form.
bell hooks, in The Will to Change, provides the framework for understanding this: patriarchal capitalism trains men—and by extension, all who wield power in its image (female, queer, non-binary, trans, or otherwise)—to deny vulnerability, to equate worth with control, and to see domination as proof of strength. This is a profound emotional and spiritual lockdown. The capacity for intimacy, for nurturing, for empathetic connection—the very capacities that make us fully human—must be suppressed. Through this suppression of humanity, the violence of patriarchal capitalism is released in the form of imperialism, fascism, police brutality, and domestic abuse. No one is one safe; the violence is unleashed abroad, within our nation, in our communities, and in our homes.
The capitalist, too, becomes a victim of their own system. Trapped in a worldview that reduces life to monetary value and relationships to transactions, they become alienated from the communal, the sacred, and the ecological. They inhabit a world of profit-over-people, where shareholder value and quarterly reports matter more than living, breathing communities. This is a different kind of “empty self“—one filled not only with longing, but with the cold calculus of profit and loss, a spiritual sickness that masquerades as success.
Conclusion: Cracks in the Foundation
To name this system is the first act of resistance. The architecture of dehumanization is powerful, but it is not unbreakable. In the stubborn resilience of communities thriving against all odds, in the mutual aid networks that rise where the state has abandoned its people, in the fierce love that refuses to see any child as disposable, we see the cracks.
The Unwellness Empire insists that some of us are less than human. Our healing begins with the radical, defiant, and political refusal of that lie. It begins by recognizing that our wellness is inextricably linked—that no one is well until all are well, and that the health of our souls is bound to the health of our soil. This includes the healing of the dominator, not through sympathy, but through the dismantling of the system that cripples them, too.
This 10-part series will journey through the grim realities of this empire, from the scars of generational trauma to the propaganda that keeps us numb. But it will also seek out the blueprint for a vibrant, life-affirming future for all. It is a journey from diagnosis to prescription, from dismantling the architecture of our dehumanization to building the foundation of our collective liberation.
The next step is to look squarely at the legacy of this violence, not as a historical abstract, but as a living inheritance. In Part 2: Scars of Oppression, we will explore how the architecture of dehumanization etches itself into the colonized psyche and is passed down through generations, living on in the mind, body, and Earth.
