The End of the West

The End of the West

Werner Olles 

The West’s inability to analyze reality is one of the symptoms of our cultural and intellectual catastrophe. It stems from the fear of shedding the last shell of radicalized bourgeois mentality, whose intensity and intentionality the historian Professor Jiang, using the example of the European Union, described as a “burning dumpster.” 

The West—meaning the EU, NATO, and the USA—not only has no idea what is happening in the world, but its strategies—whether in Ukraine or in the Near and Middle East—represent a constant confusion between reality and wishful thinking. Indeed, it rationalizes its resigned and individualistic-subtle fear, which by now also displays features of the clinical condition of delusions, through a totalitarian irrationalism that promises short-term states of narcissistic satisfaction.

What is supposed to be a pragmatic reflex, upon closer inspection, turns out not to be a reflective strategy but rather a lame duck of Minerva, secretly convincing itself that praxis is, so to speak, impossible, and thus one must retreat into the edifice of philosophy. 

In fact, Critical Theory in the 1960s allowed for a moment of resistance both against the pull toward totalitarianism and toward liberalism, but ultimately also against certain forms of left and right orthodoxy. 

Over six decades later, libertinism, transhumanism, and dystopian techno-capitalism have destroyed all illusions that excessive indebtedness and ideological delusions could lead to anything other than systemic violence and the steady erosion of the common good. 

Material production and labor have been marginalized and thus rendered meaningless, and a bankrupt new normality as spectacle and as a symptom of systemic exhaustion has emerged. 

Our civilization—calling it culture would be heresy—slips relatively silently into a vortex of perversions, cycles of scandal, and dark rituals, yet oddly still believes itself to be alive and creative. 

In reality, the hypersexualized predator has transformed every form of natural eroticism, seduction, and human sexual instincts into a form of ritualized and utterly devoid of ethical norms cannibalistic primitive sexuality, thus becoming an accessory to the porn computer and AI.

Although an eschatological optimism shimmers through every tragedy, the global elites and dominant ideologies offer us, in every respect, little more than redundant trash and the fate of happy vassals. As the political right now also understands mimeticism and servility from A to Z, and aside from mindless competition for outdated political positions in the global capitalist mass society of Western democratic stamp, has made itself quite comfortable, its offering consists of little more than an unconvincing diagnosis and relatively ineffective and poor remedies instead of radical shock therapies. 

If, however, ideologies are basically only vulgarized and archaic philosophies that corrupt healthy instincts, “microphysics” (Foucault) mutates into a method that dutifully and willingly supports the ruling ideology—which is, of course, always also the ideology of the rulers. What ultimately remains is the cosmic battle between God and Satan, Heaven and Hell!