Death by Ennui

In a profoundly brilliant piece, our friend Aussiegirl explains what is wrong with Western civilization.

If the West believes in nothing -- no wonder it fails to defend itself. One truth is as good as another. You (Muslim) believe in your truth more strongly than I do mine (because, really, if I think about it, what DO I believe?), then I suppose you might as well have your way, because now that I think about it, the only thing I really believe in is YOUR right to believe and do what you want. I don't really much care WHAT I do, as long as I'm tolerant and enlightened while I'm doing it. But then -- why am I so bored? Why am I so angry? Why am I so discontent?

It is Western love of tolerance that has led us astray to a large extent. Western intellectuals and liberals are inconsistent in not expecting the same respect for their own culture that they give so willingly to other cultures. In that sense, they are hopeless elitists, for they condescend to the Muslim and immigrant populations, by assuming that they are so benighted and brainwashed by their environment and class and culture that they are incapable of being tolerant and respectful of western ideas. They imply that it is only because they (liberals) are so superior and enlightened that they can rise above the brainwashing of their own culture, and see that this is all foolishness. But the modern liberal is prepared to let the Muslim indulge his own little delusional fantasy and version of truth. In other words -- Muslims are deluded and Europeans are not, although how Europeans managed to rise up above the brainwashing of culture and to determine this "truth" (which according to their philosophy does not objectively exist) is not explained.

So, one wonders what is the liberal version of truth? That there is none? Well, obviously, that's a form of nihilism, and that way lies madness -- which is what we are seeing. It just goes to show that once you abandon the concept of God, and ultimate truth and reality, you become unhinged from reality itself. And here is where the 20th century went horribly wrong. As Dostoevsky once wrote: "Without God, anything is permissible."

In the twin evil ideologies of Nazism and Marxism (which proceeded from an Enlightenment emphasis on reason that went wrong as early as the French Revolution), man untethered himself from God and from any sense of an overarching right and wrong, freed as he thought he was by the advance in science and the power of his own mind and reason. He thought he could explain everything through objective reason and science, and ended up using that same reason to deny reason itself. If nothing can be objectively determined to be true-- then how can you even say that deconstruction is true? It seems to me these philosophers cut off the branch from under their own theory. They claim to have arrived at their theories through reason, yet they tell us that reason alone is inadequate and cannot teach us anything or arrive at the truth.

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