The Decline of the West: Exploring the Narcissistic Nihilism in Modern Society
The Decline of the West: Exploring the Narcissistic Nihilism in Modern Society
Unmasking the Cultural Invasion and Threats to Western Civilization
Proportionate to the reckoning laid explicit by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a cultural, religious, historical, and racial assault on Western values, punctuated by a nihilistic-to-the-core uptick of narcissism.
A strong argument could be made that a virulent strand of the West’s self-hating narcissistic nihilistic death cult got substantial traction from Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, as documented in the well-worth-watching up to the first two episodes of the docu-series, Century of the Self. This era of the 1920s ushered in the worship of consumer goods and materialism in America; Bernays was a genius in exploiting the masses’ psychology and pioneered public relations.
In view of materialism and its attendant narcissistic emphasis on appearances, is the role of malicious envy, even self-envy, in this urge to destroy the West (the death drive as personified by Thanatos, Destrudo, and Mortido). Central to narcissism, especially covert narcissism, is envy. Material objects are dead, lacking libido or life force energy.
Narcissistic woke ideologues fervently desire to destroy any competition and level it to the ground under the pretense that it's some grandiose washing of original sin like racism. The “cleansing” motivations, ostensibly for others, are far more selfish, sinister, and civilization-threatening than meets the eye. Pretenses of pseudo-humility and false modesty provide cover for covert narcissists who are envious by nature. Covert narcissists have a victimhood orientation, being professional and perpetual victims; they also have an accompanying sadistic wish to destroy their betters. There is paranoid ideation that others are out to get the narcissist. Sadistic malicious envy is the number one characteristic of a covert narcissist. It drives the passive-aggressive urges of the covert narcissist. The covert narcissist compensates with fantasy, such as ideology, because s/he is not self-efficacious. The righteousness for the cause papers over destructive malicious envy.
Everything can be perceived as a threat to the narcissist, even the merits of civilization itself. The narcissist's objective is often to be superior to everyone and everything. Being zero-sum, the narcissist has every incentive and motive to pursue the ends of his nihilism as a reification of destrudo and a death drive.
Author, James Lindsay warns that widespread, systematized critiques and criticisms of any civilization over the course of up to three generations are all it takes to undermine and topple a civilization. Even if on the surface the narcissist believes himself to be acting prosocially as an anti-racist, it is the underlying relentless criticism, a lynchpin of narcissistic abuse, that erodes the fabric of civilization. This archetype of social justice warrior (SJW) finds racism in every nook and cranny and invents racism to be eradicated where none is to be found. Alarmingly, the West finds itself in the third generation out from when critical theories (emphasis mine) such as Critical Race Theory (CRT) gained such a foothold over Western culture. Lindsay advocates the squelching of the insertion of critical theories aka woke ideology in any and every intellectual domain of civilization, most crucially, engineering and medicine, as an “inclusive” emphasis on other ways of knowing (indigenous comes to mind) is nothing less than civilization compromising and upending that portends disastrous results. Lindsay anticipates a surge of medical malpractice lawsuits in the wake of the institutional legitimization of other forms of “knowledges,” which will undoubtedly wreak havoc with real-life consequences.
Over the past weekend, Douglas Murray, renowned author of War on the West, called for the deportation of Hamas-supporting residents/citizens of the UK. This recommendation sounded shocking and extreme at first blush; it's easy to ask oneself, has it come to this? But he has a point. Why should the West tolerate the intolerable especially when it endangers its citizenry? Perhaps the West has gotten too soft under the banner of inclusivity and tolerance. It's easy for murderous authoritarians to exploit our goodness in the form of tolerance, which is why Murray calls for a focus on Western civilization’s survival as paramount.
Pivoting to other Western civilization threats, the climate cult struck again, posted a couple of days ago—Just Stop Oil psychopaths took hammers and attacked Rokeby Venus, painted in 1651 ($90M) in the London National Gallery:
Also, we have a woke culture so enraptured and taken with the “oppressor vs. oppressed” ideology that LGBTQ+ adherents fail to remember, let alone appreciate, that the West afforded them their rights in the first place. They'd rather cut their nose off to spite their face where ideology/fantasy trumps reality and precludes thinking for oneself, as fantasy-based Marxist collectivist mindsets are on trend and bon ton.
Continuing to chronicle the decline of the West, hating old white men, aka misandry— aren't we supposed to respect our predecessors, ancestors, especially on the Left? Perhaps this idea of respecting our elders started off more tempered including the purview of white men and their now othered "knowledges" to borrow the obnoxious “inclusive” woke plural form of the word that was already both singular and plural to begin with; now Leftist ideology excoriates, excludes, and looks down on anything to do with the West, excluding most vitriolically, white men. Capitalism…pfft…rail these radicals, nevermind that while capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all the others, it never killed and “disappeared” millions upon millions as communism has through starvation and other unappealing ends, to put it mildly. But if the white man oppressor started and perpetuated capitalism, even if it's blended with socialism as it is world over, burn it down, so they say. What juvenile and backwards black-and-white thinking this is— splitting as it's called in narcissism. Apparently, love is love but hate is not hate when it comes to white men.
Because of rampant moral relativism, a trait of covert narcissism, the West is guilted, shamed, coerced, and corralled into not granting superiority to any system or culture, what I call a flattening. For example, Douglas Murray writes in War on the West that our Western system of musical notation, capturing pitch and time, is world superior. Claiming so elicits charges of white supremacy or even though it may be a stretch, somehow, colonialism.
All this to say, vis-à-vis moral and cultural relativism, narcissists, namely from the woke Left are endeavoring to cancel the West by turning the West into a persecutory object to reject, annul, and render inert much like Julian Sands did in Boxing Helena.
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And finally, new rule for all the progressives and academics who refer to Israel as an outpost of Western civilization, like it's a bad thing, please note. Western civilization is what gave the world pretty much every goddamn liberal precept that liberals are supposed to adore: individual liberty, scientific inquiry, rule of law, religious freedom, women's rights, human rights, democracy, trial by jury, freedom of speech. Please, somebody, stop us before we enlighten again. And since one can find all these concepts in today's Israel and virtually nowhere else in the Middle East, if anything, the world would be a better place if it had more Israels.
Of course, this message falls on deaf ears to the current crop who reduce everything to being only victims or victimizers, so Israel is lumped in as the toxic fruit of the victimizing West. The irony being that all marginalized people live better today because of Western ideals, not in spite of them.
Martin Luther King used Henry David Thoreau's essay Civil Disobedience to help shape the Civil Rights movement. The U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights owes its core to Rousseau and Voltaire. Cleisthenes never showed up for a sexual harassment seminar, but without him, there's no democracy. The cop who murdered George Floyd got 21 years for violating his Fourth Amendment rights, an idea we got directly from John Locke, who no one in college would ever study anymore because he's so old, and so white, and so dead. So Western.
Yes, that's how simple the woke are. It's never about ideas. If it was, would they be cheering on Hamas for their liberation? Liberation. To do what? More freely preside over a country where there are no laws against sexual harassment, spousal rape, domestic violence, homophobia, honor killings, or child marriage? This is who liberals think you should stand with? Women there should be so lucky as to get colonized by anybody else. And for the record, the Jews didn't colonize Israel or anywhere ever except maybe Boca Raton.
Gaza wasn't seized by Israel like India or Kenya was by the British Empire, and the partitioning of the region wasn't decided by Jews but by a vote of the United Nations in 1947, with everyone from Russia to Haiti voting for it. But apparently, they don't teach this at Drag Queen Story Hour anymore.
Now, it is true that for too long, we didn't study enough Asian or African or Latin American history. But part of the reason for that is, frankly, there's not as much to study. Colleges replaced Western Civ. Boo! Eye roll, dead white men, am I right? They replaced that with world civilization classes, which is fine in theory, but what it meant in practice is you read queer poetry of the African diaspora instead of Shakespeare.
And I'm sure there's value in both. But as usual, America only ever over-corrects. And so we're at this place now where the words Western Civ became a shorthand for “White People Ruined Everything”. But... they didn't ruin everything. No, they didn't live up to their own ideals for far too long and committed atrocities.
But people back then were all atrocious. Not just the white ones, depending on who had the power. But it was the Western Enlightenment that gave rise to the notion that the law of the jungle should be curbed. Henry David Thoreau, John Stuart Mill, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jean Jacques Rousseau—three named dudes.
It was all about three named dudes. Three named dudes like that were the O.G. social justice warriors. The ideas that came through Athens, Rome, London, Paris, and yes, Philadelphia, are what make life good for most people in free societies today; that the individuals have value, and even the powers that be must submit to the rule of law; that punishment should not be cruel and unusual; that the accused get, people get a trial; that there is such a thing as a war crime.
Why is it that every other culture gets a pass but the West is exclusively the sum of the worst things it's ever done? You think only white people colonized? Historians estimate that the very non-Western Mr. Genghis Khan killed 40 million people and that was in the 13th century. He single-handedly may have reduced the world's population by 11%. On the other hand, he kind of made up for it because he was such a prolific colonizer of vaginas that today an estimated 16 million people are his direct descendants.
So stop saying Western civilization like it's a contradiction in terms. It's not. You're thinking of moderate Republican.
Oct 22, 2023 TRIGGERnometry - NEW episodes every Sunday and Wednesday 2 pm ET/7 pm UK
Doug Stokes is Senior Advisor to the Legatum Institute and Professor in International Security and Strategy in the Department of Politics at the University of Exeter. He has published a number of books and articles on US foreign policy, grand strategy, and world order, the latest of which is Against Decolonisation: Campus Culture Wars and the Decline of the West.
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Cultural invasion: Cartman has a nightmare that all of his friends have been replaced by diverse women who talk about the patriarchy.
For the narcissistic left, the grass is greener in the Dark Ages.
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