Europe’s Genius Lies In Getting Everyone Else To Believe The Worst About Themselves

Adebayo Adeniran
4 min readJun 14, 2023

The rest of the world, low self-esteem and the luxury goods market.

Image via Twitter

That millions of Africans, Asians and Latin Americans have very low self-esteem is not in dispute.

Not for a nanosecond.

The revelation here isn’t about the low self-esteem of Nigerians, Indians, Russians, Chinese or the Brazilians but how you can create a multi-billion dollar conglomerate on this line of thinking among those who were previously colonized.

Colonialism and imperialism was never about the inferiority of non-whites to the European, even though it was the perfect cover story; we are talking about the perfect cover story which in turn produced vast amounts of literature, art and images which was enough to ensure that the colonized had fully internalized the message that the European was keen on getting across.

So if colonialism and imperialism wasn’t about racial inferiority, what was it really about then?

Money.

It was about extracting the valuable minerals which Africa had in superabundance while steadily gaslighting them to believe that they were a bunch of savages who had never invented or created anything of value to the rest of the world.

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Adebayo Adeniran

A lifelong bibliophile, who seeks to unleash his energy on as many subjects as possible