The Culture Wars
Culture defines reality and we are engaging in a struggle over culture which is therefore a struggle over reality. But I do not see any actual sides. We really all want the same thing. It’s hard to put a name on what we want, but we all know what it would feel like if we had it. And yet we struggle, because it’s confusing, we don’t know what to choose, we don’t know who to trust, we don’t even know who we really are.
Somehow, we have knowledge of a better world. Somehow, we know that we must change in order to get to this world, as if we are here to evolve the individual spirit, or rather, that we are here to reveal ourselves. Whatever we are afraid of, at the end of the day, we all want to become real.
But our impulse to truth, our impulse to empathy, our impulse to life is often hijacked by other impulses . There are forces inside us that are not who we are, and these forces are at work in the world and amongst ourselves, endeavoring to egg us on to pathological destruction. It might not be obvious when our good intentions begin to pave the way to hell, but it is our task to ‘shine a light’ into the unconscious and recognize which impulses truly belong to us.
The West is riddled with flaws and we want a better system, and rightly so, but we stand so high only because we stand on its shoulders. We don’t get to the next level by destroying the old, but by completing it. Our efforts to ‘save others’ is often a frantic effort to save ourselves from the fear either that there is no one to save us, or that we are unsaveable. Or we grow impatient in our superiority and try to force this new world into being, but this new world cannot come through force. This is what the Marxist will never understand: its brotherhood of man can never come about through force, coercion or ‘reeducation’ — the end is destroyed by the means.
We don’t have to listen to those who scream the loudest. We can find a better way. We can reject the political woke-ification and the economic commodification of culture, we can reject the growing totalitarian ideology and its unholy trinity of government, media and big tech. We can defend those values responsible for Western exceptionalism: love for humanity (true humanism), individual autonomy, and limited government. If only those values could find themselves on the ballot box. And if not, we must put them there.
