POST-HIERARCHICAL ANALYSIS · 008

Decolonize Not Only Minds, but Decision Architecture

A post-hierarchical analysis of Aistis Žekevičius’s “First, We Should Decolonize Our Own Minds”

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Aistis Žekevičius’s interview “First, We Should Decolonize Our Own Minds” begins with an uncomfortable question for Lithuania: what does a historical experience in which we primarily recognize ourselves as victims of colonization do to the way we see the present? This memory is real and important, yet it can also become an optical filter that prevents us from noticing that today we ourselves participate in global economic, political, and cultural systems whose benefits are distributed unevenly and whose prosperity has, in part, been historically produced through colonialism, extraction, and racial hierarchies.

Žekevičius brings together several dimensions that Lithuanian public discourse often treats separately: the history of coloniality, racism, Michel Foucault’s biopolitics, Achille Mbembe’s insights into the relation between race and the psyche, critiques of the Anthropocene, and the distribution of ecological responsibility. The text therefore matters not as another moral appeal to “be more tolerant,” but as an attempt to show that exclusion is not embedded only in individual attitudes. It can be built into institutions, economic exchange, historical narratives, conceptions of the human, and even the way we define the subject of the climate crisis.

From a post-hierarchical perspective, this diagnosis is highly productive, but it invites one further question. If coloniality is not merely an error of individual thought, is decolonizing our minds enough? What happens when changed ideas have to become decisions: school curricula, cultural funding criteria, migration policy, public procurement, climate commitments, or institutional rules? This is where decolonization must extend beyond consciousness to the architecture of decision-making itself.

Text analysed: Aistis Žekevičius, “Pirmiausia reikėtų dekolonizuoti savo mintis” [“First, We Should Decolonize Our Own Minds”], Literatūra ir menas, 19 June 2026.
Source: Literatūra ir menas, 2026-06-19
Context: Aistis Žekevičius’s lecture “The Anthropocene and Race, or Why We Have Never Lived in One World,” Vilnius University Faculty of Philosophy, 2026-04-16.

Context: colonized memory and participation in the present system

Lithuania is genuinely difficult to place on a simple post-colonial map. Rule by the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union left a real political, cultural, and psychological experience of colonization. The national narrative was therefore naturally constructed around the defence of language, statehood, culture, and political subjectivity. Such a narrative was, and remains, necessary for understanding Russification, occupation, repression, and the Soviet rewriting of history.

Žekevičius nevertheless asks us not to remain inside this role alone. He recalls historical links between Lithuania, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and imperial ambitions, but more importantly points to Lithuania’s present integration into the Western economic world. Even if the modern Lithuanian state never governed overseas colonies, today we consume goods, energy, metals, agricultural products, and technologies whose supply chains extend through regions paying far higher social and ecological costs.

This produces an important conceptual shift. Coloniality is no longer only a past event that can be assigned to lists of culprits and victims. It becomes a structure of relations: who receives the benefit, who experiences the harm, who controls resources, whose labour remains invisible, whose experience is treated as universal, and whose as local or secondary.

Žekevičius applies the same shift to the concept of the Anthropocene. If we say that “humanity” altered the Earth’s geological processes, it becomes easy to overlook the fact that not all people contributed equally to the climate crisis, benefited equally from it, or suffer its consequences equally. In the context of Žekevičius’s lecture, the Anthropocene is criticized because the abstract category of humanity can conceal concrete complexes of exploitation - slavery, plantation economies, colonialism, racial capitalism, and industrial extraction.

What Žekevičius’s text does particularly well

It turns victim identity into a question rather than an indulgence

One of the strongest features of the text is its refusal to assume that historical violence automatically grants a society moral immunity from new asymmetries of power. A nation can have been colonized in one historical configuration while simultaneously occupying a more privileged economic or geopolitical position in another. This does not make earlier violence any less real. It simply means that historical identity is insufficient for describing present relationships.

It presents racism as a technology of power

The biopolitical perspective used by Žekevičius makes it possible to see racism as more than an individual’s bad opinion about another person. In a Foucauldian frame, racialization helps divide populations into hierarchized groups and justify unequal protection, visibility, or even claims to life. This perspective matters because a moral injunction to “not be racist” does not reach the procedures through which some people’s voices become more credible, their living environments more protected, their labour more cheaply purchased, while risks are more easily transferred to others.

It does not reduce psychological reactions to personal vice

In the context of Mbembe’s insights, the text also connects racism with fears, traumas, affects, and repressed social content. This productively complements structural analysis. A person may search for an “other” onto whom social problems can be projected not only because of conscious ideology. A scapegoat makes it possible to avoid a much more difficult question: what economic, social, and psychological conditions produce insecurity within society itself?

It replaces universal Anthropocene responsibility with differentiated responsibility

In the context of ecological crisis, it is especially important not to treat “the human” as a homogeneous actor. Historical contributions to emissions, benefits from industrialization, technological capacity to change, and vulnerability to climate effects are all unequal. Such an analysis protects us from two simplifications: the claim that “everyone is equally guilty,” and the inverse claim that responsibility belongs forever to one historical group.

It begins decolonization with self-reflection

The title of Žekevičius’s article precisely captures its methodological stance: begin not by accusing someone else, but by examining one’s own categories of thought. This is especially valuable in a society where geopolitical security rightly requires the clear naming of Russian imperialism, but where that naming should not become a reason to ignore other forms of domination. Self-reflection does not erase geopolitical differences; it prevents them from becoming a universal moral exemption.

The post-hierarchical question: who will decolonize decolonization itself?

This is where Žekevičius’s analysis can be extended. Critical theory is very good at recognizing hidden hierarchies, but diagnosis alone does not produce a decision procedure. Once decolonization moves from philosophical writing into a university, museum, school, state institution, or funding system, a practical question becomes unavoidable: who decides which interpretation has become “decolonized,” and which has not?

If the answer is “properly trained experts,” we may simply replace one epistemological centre with another. A new canon replaces the old canon, a new authority replaces the old authority, while everyone else is expected to accept a correct way of thinking delivered from above. If the answer is “the majority,” another problem emerges: the majority may know very little about minority experience and can easily reproduce the very logic of domination that decolonization seeks to criticize.

This is not an argument against expertise. On the contrary, questions of coloniality, climate, history, or racialization require very high levels of competence. But competence must have a defined function: to verify facts, expose causal relations, and model the consequences of alternatives. It should not automatically become the final right to decide what value trade-offs everyone else must accept.

From fixed identities to a concrete map of power relations

A post-hierarchical perspective proposes avoiding two symmetrical errors. The first is to pretend that historical asymmetries between groups no longer matter and that everyone enters a decision from the same starting position. The second is to turn a group’s historical position into a permanent moral ranking system in which a person’s argument is stronger or weaker in advance because of an identity category.

Instead, every concrete decision should begin with a map of power and impact. The same person or society can occupy different positions in different situations. In the history of Soviet occupation, Lithuania is a colonized society; within the European Union’s networks of consumption and resource use, it is simultaneously a participant in a relatively wealthy system; in the security politics of Eastern Europe, it is a frontline region; and in relation to some global supply chains, it is an end consumer that sees little of the price paid in extraction zones.

Such a multidimensional position cannot honestly be compressed into a single label such as “victim” or “privileged.” Post-hierarchy therefore moves from identity as rank to relation as the unit of analysis: who can affect whom, who receives what, who pays for what, and who has the capacity to change the rules?

Victimhood is not a licence to govern; guilt is not an eternal sentence

Historical memory must be protected, because without it present institutions appear to have emerged from nowhere. Yet within decision architecture, historical suffering cannot automatically become a privilege to decide on behalf of others. Otherwise hierarchy does not disappear; it simply acquires a new moral justification.

Likewise, inherited membership in a historically colonizing society cannot by itself become a verdict of individual guilt. Responsibility should be linked to what a person, organization, or state does now, what benefits it receives from existing systems, what effects it has the power to alter, and which historical debts can reasonably be repaired at the institutional level.

In this way, decolonization moves from moral sorting by identity to institutional work: changing rules, information flows, resource allocation, and decision rights wherever they produce unjustified asymmetry.

The Anthropocene as a problem of distributed responsibility

Žekevičius’s critique of the Anthropocene fits the post-hierarchical model especially well because here a single responsible subject is clearly inadequate. “Humanity” is too abstract, while identifying one guilty civilization or class is too coarse when concrete decisions have to be made about energy, infrastructure, consumption, transport, or supply chains.

In a post-hierarchical decision process, responsibility could be disaggregated along at least four dimensions:

Such a four-dimensional map does not generate a decision automatically, but it makes the decision more precise. It helps avoid abstract collective guilt while also preventing privileged participants from hiding behind the formula that “we are all equally human.”

How the problems raised in the article could be addressed in a post-hierarchical system

The essential post-hierarchical shift is this: instead of imposing one correct decolonized worldview on society, each real problem is converted into a clearly structured procedure for collective decision-making.

1. Formulate a concrete decision. Not “Is Lithuania colonial?”, but, for example, “How should the school history curriculum change?”, “What ecological and social criteria should apply to public procurement?”, or “How should access to cultural funding be redistributed?” An abstract ideological conflict becomes a solvable problem.
2. Separate facts, experiences, and value choices. Historians and other specialists verify events and causal links; affected groups provide experiences and consequences; the normative layer explicitly identifies the values and risks between which a choice is being made. None of these domains should pretend to be another.
3. Identify all affected stakeholders. Not only through identity labels, but through real relations to the decision: who bears costs, who receives benefits, who has specialized knowledge, who may be displaced, and who has implementation power.
4. Create several justified alternatives. Experts and affected participants do not compete for a single doctrine; they propose different solution designs, stating the benefits, risks, and assumptions of each. Critique must therefore move into design.
5. Evaluate alternatives anonymously and across multiple dimensions. In a collective-intelligence environment, participants would first see the proposal rather than the author’s name, institution, or status. Evaluations would use transparent, pre-agreed criteria: factual validity, reduction of inequality, proportionality, side effects, minority protection, ecological impact, and reversibility.
6. Measure competence by contribution rather than position. An expert’s voice matters not because they permanently belong to an expert class, but because in the specific question their judgments are well-founded, accurate, and confirmed by other competent participants. The weight of competence can change from one problem to another.
7. Keep the decision reviewable. After implementation, results are collected: did unjustified asymmetry decrease, did new discrimination emerge, did predicted consequences materialize? If not, the procedure is reopened. Post-hierarchy does not create a final ideological victory; it creates the capacity for correction.

Anonymity here does not mean that lived experience or degree of impact becomes irrelevant. On the contrary, the system should record how a person is related to the decision - for example, whether they are a worker, consumer, member of a local community, historian, supplier, or directly vulnerable person. But that relation should not automatically become a prestige rank. In this way, situational experience can be preserved while reducing the influence of names, positions, institutional capital, or public popularity.

flowchart LR
    A["Historical identity and one correct narrative"] --> B["Permanent moral or expert centre"]
    B --> C["Decision handed down to others"]
    D["Concrete decision question"] --> E["Facts + experiences + map of power and impact"]
    E --> F["Several justified alternatives"]
    F --> G["Anonymous collective evaluation"]
    G --> H["Expert reality check"]
    H --> I["Decision and implementation"]
    I --> J["Results feedback"]
    J -.-> D
    classDef old fill:#f4f1ea,stroke:#8e877c,color:#191916;
    classDef post fill:#fff,stroke:#a93b2b,stroke-width:2px,color:#191916;
    class A,B,C old;
    class D,E,F,G,H,I,J post;

Two practical examples

History curriculum: not a new canon, but a multi-perspectival architecture

If schools are deciding how to teach Lithuania’s experience of colonization in relation to global colonialism, the worst option would be to replace one closed narrative with another. Historians could prepare several factually grounded curriculum structures: one might focus more heavily on Russian imperialism and Soviet occupation; another could additionally integrate power relations in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the peripheries of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the history of Western colonialism, and contemporary supply chains. Teachers, students, historians, and representatives of different communities would evaluate which structure best preserves factual accuracy, the visibility of Lithuania’s historical experience, and the capacity to understand global context at the same time.

Such a model does not create a “ministry of correct memory.” It creates an infrastructure of historical memory that remains open to continuous examination.

Public procurement and climate: the critique of coloniality becomes a measurable decision

If a state institution purchases computers, coffee, construction materials, or energy, the principle of decolonization can be translated from a symbolic statement into criteria. Experts identify labour, ecological, and human-rights risks in the supply chain; suppliers provide data; users and budget managers see the price implications; information from affected regions is incorporated into the evaluation. What then competes is not abstract moral positioning, but concrete procurement scenarios with different costs and consequences.

At this point Žekevičius’s argument about Western prosperity resting on unequal resource chains gains an institutional continuation. Responsibility becomes not a feeling of guilt, but the capacity to choose differently.

Post-hierarchical conclusion: decolonize the right to decide

Aistis Žekevičius’s text is valuable because it does not allow Lithuania’s experience of colonization to become a comfortable moral shelter. It shows that the experience of victimhood and present participation in more privileged systems can coexist; that racism is not only an attitude but also a technology of power; that the climate crisis cannot honestly be attributed to an abstract “humanity”; and that coloniality can persist after political flags have changed.

A post-hierarchical perspective proposes going one step further. A decolonized consciousness is necessary, but insufficient. A reflective person entering a hierarchical institution still has to act through centralized decision rights, closed circles of expertise, prestige signals, and fixed roles. Long-term decolonization must therefore transform not only what we think, but how we decide together.

Post-hierarchy does not propose neutrality or the erasure of identities. It proposes a different principle for organizing power: facts are tested through competence, experience comes from people actually affected, alternatives are generated in plurality, decisions are evaluated anonymously and transparently, and no status grants a permanent right to remain at the top.

Decolonizing minds matters. But genuine institutional decolonization begins when we decolonize the very right to decide for others.

In a post-hierarchical system, decolonization does not mean changing who speaks from above; it means abolishing the permanent top. Competence helps verify facts and design alternatives, affected people bring lived experience and value priorities, and the shared decision emerges from transparently organized collective interaction while remaining open to correction.