My baby / has always been another side of me / and yeah, I mean that, literally / and yeah, I mean that, figuratively / and the only contradiction is in YOUR false dichotomy . . .
–O. Malik Nash, Fractions
I made a passing observation recently that social media is like refined sugar, in that it consists of discourse industrially extracted from its natural context and boiled down to a high profit, addictive hyper-stimulant that’s added to everything. It’s manageable in small doses, but it’s extremely dangerous to your overall social and intellectual health in large quantities.
This observation was confirmed for me by some of the online responses that I saw to an article about Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie that was recently published in the Guardian. I found the article to be thoughtful, nuanced, and poignant. The headline for the article, on the other hand, was typically reductive clickbait. I recently learned that there is a reason for that. Apparently, it is standard editorial practice to separate article writing from headline writing, and it is commonplace for headline writers to aim for the maximum number of eyeballs, at the expense of accuracy and context. Headline writers make refined sugar.
Before I share my thoughts about the article and the responses to it though, I have to confess, with not a small amount of embarrassment, that I’ve never read one of Chimamanda Adichie’s books, a fault that I’m in the process of remedying. In the interim, I rewatched her TEDx talk, “We Should All Be Feminists” on which her book of the same title is based. That talk insightfully discusses the asymmetries of power that are embedded in our conventional concepts of gender, and proposes approaches to overcoming those asymmetries, particularly in the ways that we raise our children. Her observations are profound and compelling, and I regret that it’s taken me this long to begin to fully familiarize myself with her thinking.
That said, there is a concept in this talk that I want to take a moment to explore a bit more, and it is one that impinges on gender, African ancestry, and our conventional responses to inequity. It is the concept of symmetry itself. In Western culture, without even thinking about it, we automatically associate the concept of symmetry with Euclidean, bilateral symmetry. Think, for example, of two halves of a bisected square:
This is the symmetry of our faces, of our bodies, and of innumerable kinds of architectures and organisms. When that symmetry is off beyond a slight degree, we can easily discern it, and it intuitively unsettles us, and leads us to attempt to correct it. Generally, when we speak of equity and equality, we are speaking of this kind of symmetry.
There is, however, another kind of symmetry, one that is just as prevalent in our culture and our environment, and even within our bodies. However, we do not often name it, nor do we generally even have a language to describe it, even though it is omnipresent. This is the symmetry of self-similarity.
Self-similarity is a feature of fractal geometric patterns that appear throughout the natural world. Think, for example, of the veins in your body. Then think of the branching alveoli in your lungs. Then think of the veins in the leaves of a tree. Then think of the branches of that tree. Not only do they all contain the same underlying pattern, when you magnify that pattern, each piece of the pattern is a reproduction of the whole.
The distinction between these two kinds of symmetries may seem abstract and esoteric, but they are of profound consequence to the ways that we conceive of and respond to inequity. When we think of achieving equity in Euclidean terms, which is what we automatically do in Western culture, we think of it in terms of reducing the vertical distance between two points on a plane divided by a linear axis, i.e. “balancing the scales” (the axis can be whatever you care to name: race, gender, class, etc.) In short, equity, or balanced symmetry, is achieved through flattening any form of hierarchy.
When we think of symmetry in terms of self-similarity however, inequity consists of both the loss of individual distinction without which the whole cannot exist, as well as the loss of connection that allows the individual and the whole to fully reflect and embody one another. Thus, within a system of self-similar symmetry, equity is achieved through restoring the connections between the self and the collective, by restoring an internally coherent heterarchy. Heterarchy is more than the flat and homogenous absence of hierarchy that we have come to identify with equity and equality. Like the natural systems that model it, heterarchy is polycentric and polydimensional. Heterarchy cannot be measured, not even physically, using standard measures of linear symmetry and distance, nor can equity within a heterarchical system be achieved through merely treating heterarchical self-symmetry as a distorted and primitive form of hierarchical Euclidean symmetry that needs to be “modernized.” Thus, learning to think of equity in terms of self-similarity requires a shift from thinking of equality in terms of a process of eliminating hierarchical power-over, toward thinking of equality in terms of a process of restoring shared heterarchical power-with.
In his book African Fractals, Ron Eglash explains that self-similar heterarchical fractal patterns are present in multiple cultures across the African continent, in the form of art, architecture, clothing, cosmology, and social organization. He also explains that the methods for creating these patterns were consciously designed centuries before Western mathematicians had even invented a formal language to describe them. He emphasizes that this latter point is critical to understand. Fractal patterns aren’t created through unconscious intuition. They are profoundly complex, and they require a deep formal understanding of structure and theory in order to consistently reproduce them.
Understanding how these heterarchical patterns are created, the purposes they serve, and the meanings and identities they embody, is critical to evaluating questions of equity within their indigenous local contexts. All too often however, Western discourses around questions of equity and equality either disregard local African cultures that in many ways are far more complex and advanced than our own, or profoundly misrepresent and misinterpret them, and the approaches to equity that are based on these discourses often end up aggravating and reinforcing the root causes of inequity, rather than repairing them.
This brings me back to the responses to the aforementioned Guardian article. Most of them focused on the insufficiency and incorrectness of Chimamanda Adichie’s conception of gender within her public discourses on the subject. However, what I found most striking about the article, and likewise her talk, was the centrality of kinship and connectedness in her language, and her regret at the damage and estrangement that conventional conceptions of gender produce. I suspect that the disconnect between the complexity of the relationships that she is pointing to, and the reflexive hostility that she has received for attempting to articulate that complexity, is rooted in the profound cultural difference between a conception of gender as a spatial position within a kind of abstract Euclidean construct, and a conception of gender as one facet of a deeply rooted and profoundly complex system of communalism. From the former, we get a kinship of polarity, in which a man is what a woman is not, and vice-versa, an adult is what a child is not, and vice-versa, etc. From the latter, we get a kinship of self-similarity, in which we are all distinct aspects of the same whole, and we all ultimately contain one another.
This is not to say that the externalities of linear symmetry don’t matter. Pay equity, labor balance in the home, equal quality of medical care, equal access to education, to name just a few issues of gender equity, are matters that are as critical as having two functioning legs to balance on. Nevertheless, these external questions shouldn’t blind us to the critical importance of the deeper, systemic questions that impact the overall health of society as a whole. A bandage can’t remedy diabetes, nor can a change of diet halt critical bleeding. What is necessary is to understand how each condition impacts the other, and to move beyond artificial dichotomies in our approaches to healing.
However, a standard Western education does not equip us with the language, skills, nor even the concepts, to fluently move between hierarchical and heterarchical perspectives and to understand them in coherent relationship to one another. Instead, we do what we have been taught to do: we mechanically abstract, extract, and reduce, and present these two inter-embedded perspectives as irreconcilable opposites that we must choose between, and in so doing, defend the one against “the other” at all costs. This, in turn, spawns entire industries built around squeezing profit from the addictive short-term charge derived from participating in hyper-polarized conflict. In short, we make refined sugar.
My reference to sugar here is more than incidental or metaphorical. The rise of the West, to a degree that is perhaps not broadly understood, was dependent on the production and consumption of refined and addictive hyper-stimulants: tea, coffee, sugar, tobacco, and the leisure industries and cultures that were built around them. Think of the populations that were enslaved to produce these products. Think of the fantastical theories of race and gender used to justify such barbarism. Think of the environmental damage caused by monocultural plantation agriculture. Think of the health impacts caused by the excess consumption of hyper-stimulants. Think of the economic theories that accompanied the West’s hyper-stimulant fueled global expansion, theories built on a blind and irrational belief in the pursuit of infinite linear increase in the volume, variety, and velocity of industrial outputs. Then think of the journalistic, academic, and entertainment industries that we have built on this model. Arguably, from the long perspective, the American political crisis of 2025 started on a sugar plantation in Madeira, off the coast of West Africa, in 1452. And I think Chimamanda Adichie’s thoughts on both the origins of this crisis and the way forward through it are worth attending to, however different from their own lived experience and perspective some may find them to be.
