On the idea of the West. (and its failure)
I am often criticized for not believing in the idea of "the West", or rather of a commonality of values and objectives between peoples who evidently do NOT have values or objectives in common, and who belong to the same patamilitary alignment just because they were invaded in World War II. But let's try to ask ourselves: if the "West" as a hallucination is so widespread, how did it come about?
When you call a pseudo-intellectual to answer this question, he will immediately begin by saying
“the idea of the West was born from the Sardanapist philosopher Agilolf Varmblixt who was the first to mention it in his treatise “ethics of the mandarin seed in the nose” “, a famous treatise from 1694 and three quarters, around ten in the morning.
In reality, it is a book that no more than 6 people have read – and one doesn't even feel very well – so the fact that Agilolf Varmblixt once mentioned him as a philosopher while sneezing a mandarin seed has made absolutely no difference. shit. It is a non-phenomenon which as such is a non-cause, and therefore will have non-effects. An elegant way of saying that it has nothing to do with shit.
On the contrary, since we are talking about a shared idea, like Superman or Santa Claus, we can say that it is born when it becomes common baggage, that is, when in addition to an unknown philosopher it is found in the minds of the population. Not necessarily because of a Sardanapist philosopher (whatever that means, but philosophies are like metal genres and you need one), but through the most disparate ways, including advertising fish sticks. (now put on rectangular glasses, pretend to read a book, and ask the first passer-by "but how much Nietzsche is there in Captain Findus? How much? How muchoooohhhhh??????!" )
Once out of the mental hospital, we can move forward. We were saying, the idea of the West. How does it get into people's minds? How does it become “pop”? The thing begins after the Second World War: Europe is in crumbs, the USSR too, and the only place on the planet that has industry and drinking water is the USA. Signs of this type then began to appear everywhere.
And it was exactly like that, they made posters to put up everywhere, to convince Americans of something that, if it had been true, they would have been able to notice for themselves. In postmodernist terms it is one of the most famous simulacra. But let's move on: what is this idea of the West?
The idea of the West was born as a kind of contract, or at least a promise: any people who decide to adhere to our values will in exchange receive a reasonable dose of well-being and a certain happiness. Just like the happy family in the first image.
The purpose of this propaganda is to convince Americans that NO, things were no better in the USSR than in the USA, so the few communists should keep quiet. And they picked the cotton.
It is good to reflect carefully on this image:
because it doesn't just portray a middle class family. It portrays (also and especially) a happy family. The promise is not based only on an economic condition, that of entering the American middle class. The promise is ALSO of a spiritual nature, and includes happiness .
It is something called, of course, the American Way, but at a certain point it will seem that Europeans too have adhered to American values, and therefore they too have been paid properly. This contract, that is, some values in exchange for happiness – very similar to the religious idea of paradise in exchange for adoration – ends up taking, clearly, the contours of a single ethnicity characterized by following values and collecting the price.
At a certain point, in the West it was understood to indicate all those who embraced certain values - even aesthetic ones – and received the reward, as promised by the MARKET GOD.
This hallucination worked very well, to the point that people forgot the paradox of systems like the Scandinavian ones, which had the same well-being as the USA, if not more, without fully adhering to these values. But everything was ok, the MARKET GOD doesn't make many distinctions.
Western identity, therefore, has become that. Here the idea of the West was born: from the propaganda of American industrialists, made to convince people not to join communism.
But there is a problem, which has emerged over time. The problem is that this promise must be kept to work.
As long as the West was the place to be, what everyone in the world was trying to be, imitate or catch up with, it worked just fine. And when the Berlin Wall collapsed, many saw in this the inexorable end of different systems, faced with the most spiritually and materially attractive offer in the world.
But I repeat: to work, the contract must be maintained.
So let's ask ourselves: did it work? It worked for a while, yes. In some years it seemed like the only possible system, and the market seemed like the only God, etc. But over time, the promise has been eroded. The system, made overbearing by the fact that there seemed to be a lack of alternatives, decided to continue to ask for adherence to certain principles, including the adoration of the market God, but stopped paying .
The first to die, well before the middle class, was happiness. At a certain point, it was clear that only the rich could be happy. Because at a certain point, status symbols must exist, and if you think carefully about the 80s, status symbols were easily reachable by the middle class, who wore designer clothes and drove around in a nice car and listened to trendy music.
What, then, did the rich have more?
The result was that happiness became the first status symbol to pass from the middle class to the rich. The story of the middle class began to contain "stress" (*) and other supposed troubles, and at that moment the photograph became a photograph of a wealthy but unhappy family.
How do I know? Because when a society is made up of unhappy people, the rate of violence grows and grows, and wars begin. Like a cat pinched by the tail, it lashes out at the first person who comes within range, even if it's the one holding us in their arms.
The growth of violence is evidence of the growth of unhappiness. The second proof is an inexplicable decline in births. A happy people have children. Even if he's poor. Even if it is made up of unemployed people. The nations that grow the most are often the poor ones. The birth rate doesn't drop when they are rich, it drops when they are unhappy.
Later, when the communist systems ended and the Market God felt safe, thinking that there were no alternatives, in addition to happiness, our happy little family also lost its economic status.
And so, let's look at photography:
Will you meet again?
No, right? And maybe not because you are not middle class, but more often because you are not happy. They convinced you that happiness coincides with "success", they made you work day and night to achieve it, but even by declining "success" in all possible ways, you are not happy. Maybe some readers will also be happy, but we can hardly say that a population like the Italian one, which has fewer and fewer children and becomes more and more violent, is a happy population.
As a fortiori proof, I could simply cite the enormous growth in the consumption of psychotropic drugs and drugs. People look for happiness in chemistry, because they don't find it in life. It's a bit like with the Berlin Wall: people said "but if everyone is happy in communism, why do they try to escape even risking their lives in crossing the wall?".
So today I ask you: but if everyone in the West is as happy as you say, why do so many people try to escape, even risking their lives by taking fentanyl? Why are antidepressants sold like peanuts?
Unhappiness even in the presence of “success”. Remember this phrase.
In short:
- an absurd distribution of wealth has deprived the middle class of the economic component.
- a vision of the world where life is dedicated to "success" has removed the spiritual component.
We can clearly say that, today, the promise is NOT being kept.
When I say this, economists come – people who don't understand shit, at least twice as much as Hegel – and tell me that in Western nations the GDP is up, and the average per capita income is down. Except that they never give the distribution, and to make matters worse they didn't understand something that their useless and atrophied brain cannot understand – sorry, Puglisi, but as I see it, it takes four like you to make an idiot – I was saying that that they cannot understand is a simple concept:
when I say the promise was of a reasonable amount of wealth and happiness, the most important part is not the economic one. And the happiness'.
We can therefore state this simple thing: the concept of the West is dead, because if it was possible to delude ourselves that it existed BEFORE, when at least the economic component was possible, today when in addition to happiness the economic component has also disappeared, that is ' "success", we can say that the promise is not being kept.
The concept of the West has become a silent god: do what it says, defend freedom, the rule of law, human rights, but in exchange you get no happiness, much less any economic success. At most you can buy drugs and some psychotropic drugs to fool your brain into thinking you are happy.
Everything's fine, right?
Moral of the story?
- The concept of the West was born from the propaganda of the American industrialists' association, to counter the communist workers' movements.
- it was based on a kind of contract, by which we would defend the American economic system, or similar, with our lives and with all the time available.
- in itself it never existed: the illusion consisted in ignoring the spiritual component, and pretending that the economic part was sufficient to respect the contract.
- now that the economic percentage is also missing, its falsity is evident.
And now that its falsity is evident, no one will ever die to defend a system that has only unhappiness to offer.
Go ahead and do your levies to go and fight with the Russians. You will see, how many will be happy to go to war to defend their daily antidepressant.
We'll see how many are willing to go and defend democracy, the one that unemployment is giving them.
*( I come from a family that made me spend my childhood on redundancy pay. If you think that Elon Musk is stressed, try to feed a family without even knowing if you will get paid this month. A mother of a poor family is stressed, not Elon Musk. At most Elon is upset, or vaguely worried that he won't be able to buy a new underage slut by Christmas. It's a different thing, and ONLY the poor have it. The rich whine with stress, but they don't know what it is. They're not stressed, they're unhappy.
Uriel Fanelli
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