Reckoning With the West 🏛️
the epitome of evil / western inheritance / incremental improvement
📖 Reading Time: ~8 minutes.
🏴 Vibecheck: The daily writing ritual for Blood & Ink has thrown open my creator gates. It feels free and fun to be writing again. I’ve got a wicked video experiment I’ll share with you next week. I hope you enjoy this one! EB. 🦁
🩸 Blood & Ink
I kicked off Blood & Ink this week. Shoutout to those who joined Day One, I see you. It’s been a powerful ritual, sharpening the proverbial sword as it were. Look at what’s gone out here, and I’d love for you to join us.
Monday: Musashi’s Twofold Way
Tuesday: The Emptiness Machine
Wednesday: Good Men vs. Good Men
Thursday: All Defeat is Psychological
Last week I spoke about my ongoing reckoning with Western culture…
Today I’ll share a few glimpses into where that has taken me, and what I mean by this.
😈 The Epitome of Evil
I grew up in the suburbs outside of Toronto, Canada.
Starting in my teenage years, the cultural zeitgeist and public media began to chant a troubling creed: somehow, inherently, I was the problem.
A cis-gendered, heterosexual, privileged white male of the patriarchy. A child of Western Culture, standing for nothing but the oppression and enslavement of others and the destruction of planetary ecosystems.
From my suggestibility, I internalized a troubling notion: I was the problem.
This split my psyche, creating a constant and chronic self-correction mechanism. A vicious psychological sentry, detecting problematic natural impulses, and quickly correcting them.
With internalized shame and guilt for just being who I was, I sought solutions to ‘the problem of myself’, and alternative models to Western culture.
For the better part of a decade, I explored governance models, how to change your core beliefs, and exotic forms of spirituality. So long as it wasn’t what was I born into, it was fair game.
I spent a decade campaigning against ‘The West’.
I’ve written thousands of words on the internet to this effect. In some ways, my project Phoenix Culture was born from this rejection of Western Culture, in search of something new and greater.
I came out the other side with a comprehensive understanding of cultural emergence, governance systems, religious practices, and a theory of psychological change in an individual. These are all great things.
But more recently I’ve started to see my rejection of Western culture—and my heritage and ancestry—for what it is: a programmed allergic response.
If you cannot steelman the opposition, if you find nothing good nor beneficial in something — you’re not genuine. I noticed this and sought to correct it.
What I realized, and discovered, was challenging.
🌱 The Garden of the West
It feels ridiculous to write this, standing in defence of what the West has given me and the world.
Alas, here we are at this point in history.
Writing about the ‘benefits of Western culture’ is like the fish and water story. They are so evident, so pervasive, so commonplace, that it’s easy to forget that these things had an origin and that their origin is Western Culture.
The fact that you can viciously critique Western culture in public without being struck dead, is itself something that originated in Western culture: everyone equal before the law.
Let’s take a look at some of the things that trace their roots back to the very foundations of Western Culture:
📚 Literacy
The world was illiterate for most of human history.
It was primarily through Christianity & the Bible, giving everyone a direct connection to God, that literacy became public.
The second literary revolution—the Gutenberg printing press—was created to spread the Bible. If you are not from an aristocratic family, and you can read, thank the West.
📜 Constitutional Republics
The United States is not, and has never been, a democracy.
Nowhere in the Constitution is the word democracy found. The US is a constitutional republic, modeled after the most successful models of its Greco-Roman past.
Constitutional republics are far superior to democracy. Democracy is the will of the majority. A pure democracy would have the rules changing each day, as the majority realized they could vote into existence whatever they wanted on a whim.
A constitutional republic binds a group of elected representatives to adhere to a code, enabling change while maintaining structure.
⚖️ Equal Human Rights
Knowing that you have a right to a trial of your peers and that (at least in theory) everyone is subject to equal treatment under the law, is a Western idea.
It’s insane to realize that all of these things were created. They are so fundamental to who we are and how we operate that they are taken for granted.
Don’t overlook them, they are your cultural inheritance.
🔬 The Scientific Enterprise
The seeds of the modern scientific enterprise take their root, surprisingly, not only in the West, but in Christianity.
The Church funded most scientific endeavours, to learn more about the brilliance of Gods creation. These seeds grew into modern science, granting us our current models of physics, medicine, and much more.
To say nothing of the sheer amount of scientific discoveries and creations that come from Western institutions or individuals.
🏫 Universities
Universities too, were created.
Born from the monastic model of the Christian church. Places of deep study and teaching, the early monasteries were incubated until they became resilient enough to grow outward.
To this day—for better and for worse—universities are seen as beacons of higher learning and education. Thank you, Western monks.
🌐 Modern Governance Models
While we had a brief rundown against democracy, many more foundations of modern governance claim their origins in the West.
The democratic model, separation of church and state, distinctions between city, state, and federal powers, and representational democracy. You name it, our models of governance are rooted in the ancient West.
While you may be compelled to critique this (as is your right under these models!) if you think Western governance is so bad, you are free to go live under an authoritarian regime and see how enjoyable you find it.
✝️ Christianity and the Psychological Immune System
This will be the full subject of my essay next week.
Christianity and the West are nearly synonyms. It is difficult to untangle the West from Christianity. A frame I’ve been developing is that Christianity is a psycho-spiritual immune system.
While you may feel the rules, guidelines, and ethics espoused in Christianity to be oppressive, I invite you to consider how they are also protective.
As a culture that is becoming less Christian at its core (atheism the fastest growing, and nearly the largest, religious identification in the modern West), we have a concurrent increase in degeneracy, debauchery, mutilation of children, unethical conduct, and worse. More to come on this next week.
💵 Capitalism and Free Enterprise
You can argue that capitalism was a global discovery.
As nation-states engaged with each other and within their borders, they found this to be the most efficient and effective means of trade.
However, it is only due to the previous inheritances (equality under the law, constitutional republics, widespread literacy) that capitalism and free markets have been allowed to continue and generate the most unfathomable level of wealth for everyone ever created.
✊🏻 Foundations of Modern Ethics
Last, but certainly not least, is the modern ethical software that most Western folk are running.
Regardless of how conscious any individual is about their code of ethics, you can guarantee its roots are nested in Christianity. While our culture may be increasingly less Christian, our cultural ethics remain almost completely Christian.
But What of the Atrocities?
This is not to say that Christianity and Western Culture have not done terrible things.
Like I’ve said, I’ve spent the better part of a decade dismantling the West and taking sobering looks at the present and ancient examples of where things have gone astray.
But something important hit me recently: when something isn’t working flawlessly, you need to incrementally improve it — you don’t simply blow the whole thing up and start from scratch.
While I don’t recommend it for your own mental health, it is shocking to plug into public sentiment online and track it. You see clearly in some left-leaning ideologies how explicitly their goal is dismantling and destroying existing power structures. They are death cults, oriented around destruction rather than creation.
With the eyes to see it, it is embarrassing to realize that these people have the right to speech and protest given to them by the very system they seek to destroy.
Should this be anywhere else in the world, or at any other point in history, they’d be thrown in prison… or worse.
Are there real, true, and important improvements that need to be made? Absolutely.
Can you reasonably deny the important, rich, and significant contributions the West has made to the progress of humanity and your current society? Absolutely not.
As my own reckoning with the West continues, I’ll write and share more about it.
I hope this was useful—a little challenging—and a powerful reminder of the unbelievable creations the West has made, and stewarded, for centuries.
Next week, we’ll explore Christianity as a Psycho-Spiritual Immune System. It’s going to be a good one.
See you then,
Eric Brown. ⚡️