What are Western values, anyway?

You can't save the West if you fail to define what it stands for

You can’t argue for Western values when you can’t even name them, let alone live by them. You can’t presume to defend Western civilisation when you don’t even embody its core virtues and ideals or, even worse, when you confuse them with antithetical ones.

For all the talk about Western values, few can clearly and accurately define them. Many like to babble endlessly and self-righteously about “Western values,” yet they seem unable to accurately and objectively define them. It’s no wonder, then, that some of the most prominent and self-appointed “defenders of the West” are nothing but bamboozling grifters who have just identified a lucrative niche to pander to, and whose personal culture has nothing to do with Western tradition.

Today’s Westerners suffer from a lack of identity because they don’t understand what their ancestors stood for, and more importantly, why they stood for it. Thus, today’s Westerners do not know what they should be valuing, and therefore, they don’t know how to define themselves as individuals first, and then as a society.

With such a broad identity gap in the Western conscience, it is no wonder that Westerners now fall for Eastern-style cookie-cutter collectivist identities: shaming, collectivism, socialism, and Islamic feminist Marxism. The most deludedly cheap fairytale cultures - especially those promising free handouts or sex slaves to rape eternally in a cartoonish afterlife - are the most effective at attracting people with no principles, no purpose or identity or meaning; people who stand for nothing.

If you cannot define your principles, values and virtues, then you have no identity, no purpose, no meaning. You live life without knowing what you stand for, without able to define who you are. No wonder depression, hopelessness, and self-loathing are dominating the Western world.

So, what are Western values anyway?

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This is a long essay serving as more of an archive than a story. I recommend you read it selectively.

Table of contents:

1. List of Western values

2. Explanations of Western values

3. The problem with Western values

4. What are not Western values

5. Comparing cultures

6. Consequences of abandoning your values

7. The bottom line

1. List of Western values

Historian Neil Ferguson names six elements that contributed to the “greatness of the West,” so I also will take them as a non-exhaustive set of Western values: free-market competition, scientific way of thinking, modern medicine (until 2020 at least), property rights, consumer-driven society, and work ethic. While these are Western values in and of themselves, most are founded on other underlying first principles and causes. So I expand on a longer list below.

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Inspired by European antiquity were Western values. They are the amalgamation of principles, morals, virtues, ideas, and ideals that lifted us from the stone age, that sprang us out of dark-age obscurantism and into the Renaissance, all the way to the industrial revolution… and the sporadic (and increasingly waning) serendipities of Western ideals in the 19th and 20th centuries.

By saying that these are indeed Western values, I don’t mean that a non-Westerner can’t share one or even all of them. Many of these values are shared by other cultures too. It also doesn’t mean that all Westerners hold them, and it doesn’t mean that all those who hold them actually live by them, especially today, when the West has lost its identity after rejecting its values.

These are Western values:

• philosophy (love of wisdom and questioning),

• ethos,

• logic over emotion,

• critical thinking,

• self-reflection and self-criticism,

• skepticism over superstition (doubt over shamanism),

• science (not scientism),

• ingenuity,

• thirst for discovery,

• freedom (economic and personal),

• defiance of perceived “authority,”

• individualism before collectivism,

• noble guilt before shame and fear,

• function over form (essence over appearances),

• deontology over utilitarianism (first principle over secondary short-sighted utility),

• fairness over justice (equality over equity),

• freedom of speech,

• self-ownership, self-sovereignty, and self-reliance,

• individual property (not collective),

• honour,

• family,

• loyalty,

• mercy,

• self-accountability,

• work ethic and diligent, productive professionalism,

• solidarity,

• empathy and compassion,

• considering others and trying hard not to bother,

• non-pathological altruism,

• hospitality,

• dignified unentitled humility (not undignified self-righteous humbleness),

• bravery in accepting one’s limitations without compromising self-esteem,

• chastity,

• virtue,

• nobility - chivalry,

• integrity and dignity,

• truth over comfort,

• high art,

• respect for nature and the environment,

• thirst for discovery,

• the big picture rather than micro-nuisances,

• guile,

• respect for others (only when earned and deserved),

• tolerance (not over-tolerance or subservience),

• conquest via ideas - not force,

• generosity and kindness only where earned and deserved,

• principle-based morality rather than pretentious or coerced moralism,

• sanctity of the innocence children,

• grace and class,

• comedy and satire, and

• minding one’s own business.

These are values, virtues, principles, and ideals that make people lovable and respectable, and give life purpose and higher meaning. I won’t go over where we see each of them manifest in Western cultures… this should be obvious to most readers, and this article is already shaping up to be too long - perhaps a topic for another post.

By contemplating these mindsets and virtues, you realise that not every self-proclaimed “Westerner” honours or embodies some of them, let alone all of them. However, these are elements that Western societies as a whole seem to value, even when individuals don’t always embody them. You can value something, know it’s good, but still fail to abide by it. That’s when guilt kicks in.

In general, Westerners seem to recognise - even during their identity crisis - that these values are good, even if they betray those values when the chips are down. Values are what people value. This doesn’t mean they always do what it takes to align their actions with those values. You can still value what’s beyond your grasp, or what you’re too cowardly to stand for when it matters.

2. Explanations of Western values

Some of the values listed above merit explanation to avoid confusion and deliberate misinterpretation.

Conditional generosity

We often confuse compassion with compulsive blanket charity to anyone, anytime, regardless of context. For example, consider the condescendingly self-righteous “good Samaritan” who virtue-signals by over-helping a stranger without knowing why the stranger was in trouble in the first place (or if he were indeed in trouble). This self-serving, self-righteous pretentiousness is just for show, since perceived social status and appearances are the highest value in Easter cultures. This is because Eastern cultures are shame-based, which means what other people think about us is more important than what we think about ourselves, or how well we adhere to moral principles when nobody’s looking. Christianity is an Eastern religion, which Westerners still struggle to reconcile with their traditionally Western values. Just read the New Testament no less, and notice the subtle shaming language and emotional blackmail bleeding through the lines.

Selective charity - as opposed to unvetted, compulsive, pretentious, self-serving faux-altruism - comes from compassion guided by dignity, as well as skepticism and situational awareness. You can be compassionate without being taken for a fool. You can be kind without being a doormat. You can show empathy, but not when you have to be a patsy.

You can be charitable only with those who truly deserve your charity; those who treat help as a privilege rather than an entitlement, who are not demanding of charity, and who therefore feel gratitude for it. Selective charity spares you the indignity of being deceived and exploited by self-proclaimed “victims” who just cash in on their victimhood privilege.

Westerners have been traditionally charitable, but not to those who take advantage of charity. However, modern Westerners have lost this distinction; they have become pathological blanket altruists, with just anyone claiming to be a victim. Treating an actual victim and a false victim the same simply takes away from the actual victim, plus it incentivises false victimhood, thus further diluting charity to real victims.

This Eastern-style self-righteous moral exhibitionism comes at the cost of one’s dignity and self-ownership. It’s all about keeping appearances and has nothing to do with staying true to principle. It’s about “justice,” not fairness; these have antithetical meanings, much like equality and equity are polar opposites.

The value of conditional charity may have been a catalyst for the degeneration of the West, since the Westerner’s noble guilt has been exploited and twisted by relentless guilt-tripping, rendering him manipulable and predictably exploited through his need to be noble. In his needy attempt to be noble, though, the Westerner becomes a laughable patsy, a doormat, a sucker, a victim to manipulating faux victims exploiting sympathy from pity.

Examples of recognising exploitative victimhood

If art and literature are the manifestation of the collective unconscious, as Jung suggests, then we can see how Westerners are aware of the hypocrisy of blind charity. Here are examples from Western culture that signify scrutiny and suspicious critical thinking, and in doing so, reject unvetted generosity to any and all.

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Friedrich Nietzsche makes a good point about helping beggars: “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” He loathes them because of the guilt and shame they provoke in you, and their entitlement to ask for free money, instead of asking whether there is anything they can offer in return for some help. They ask for a service without offering any service in return, even when they get back on their feet (except perhaps giving you their permission to pat yourself on the back for your pretentious moral superiority, if you’re that desperate for it).

Even worse, beggars demand your money while offering a disservice: guilt and shame if you don’t help them, and guilt and shame if you do. Whenever you help a beggar, you might get a momentary self-righteous power-trip from feeling “oh-so virtuous” and condescending to them. But what lingers, what stays with you, is feeling like a sucker for being taken advantage of. And that’s what you are, because you know that if someone has the energy to beg, then he has the energy to work. There are paraplegic people who can’t move below the neck who still find gainful employment in customer service or call centers. If you are poor, there is always something you can offer in return for help. You can offer to wash dishes, wash a car, clean a windshield, do some gardening - anything other than demanding free help with the implied emotional blackmail of making you feel guilty if you don’t help. It’s undignified to demand anything without offering something - anything - in return.

The only way to help people in any meaningful way is to give them opportunities, not free handouts that enable, incentivise, and perpetuate their poverty. Don’t give people free fish - instead, teach them how to fish, or give them a job on your fishing boat.

Begging is evil. Beggars are evil because they emotionally threaten and blackmail you to either give them what they want or fall victim to their shaming and guilting manipulation. Victims of beggars are pathetic - they fall for anything because they stand for nothing. Victims of victimhood manipulation (begging) are so morally bankrupt that they’d relinquish their property, freedom, integrity, and self-esteem in exchange for permission to feel righteous through the meaningless boastful act of pretentious narcissistic altruism.

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There are more examples from Western literature signifying awareness of pretentious victimhood. This means that it was not a shameful taboo to refuse charity to those using victimhood privilege.

In Inferno (The Divine Comedy), Dante encounters the corrupt hypocrites who use poverty as a mask of corruption, and for personal gain at the expense of native charitable people. This is treated as fraud and a grave sin.

Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens stresses the hypocrisy and condescending moral exhibitionism of lavish gratuity and pity-driven faux-philanthropy. It shows how being charitable is often self-serving, and that it is about status and virtue-bragging.

In W.M. Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair,” Sam is a beggar who exploits the charity of others. The fact that begging is illustrated as a recurrent theme in Victorian-era literature shows that there was no shortage of charity at the time. But here we see the recognition of the exploitative nature of begging.

In Henry Mayhew’s “London Labour and the London Poor” (1851), we get detailed descriptions of various professions, including begging. Begging is recognised as a profession because it does technically provide a service: permission to virtue-signal and pat yourself on the back when your conviction in your morality is weak. Mayhew’s accounts often highlight the cunning and resourcefulness of professional beggars, who would pretend to be the “deserving” poor to elicit sympathy and donations. Yet, as I always say, if you’re fit enough to beg, you’re fit enough for most jobs.

In Homer’s “Odyssey,” Odysseus disguises himself as a beggar to test people’s loyalties and to move stealthily as he plots his revenge against the suitors claiming his throne. As a beggar, he is constantly mistreated by almost everyone. This shows that begging was not respectable during the classic Hellenistic era when Helenism still had Western values (before it fell to Eastern influences of Abrahamism and Mongolism (Turkish imperialism)).

The destructiveness of begging and of pretentious charity

Unconditional generosity/charity often comes with underlying resentment against the recipient of help. By conditioning him to be reliant upon handouts, you rob him of his required necessity and urgency to explore his available potential.

Begging is a symptom of pretentious moralism and smug faux charity. Don’t blame the beggar; blame the sanctimonious moral exhibitionists desperate to one-up you with their hypocritical altruism.

Individualism

“Individualism before collectivism” is a value of dignity, integrity, and self-ownership. This is not to be confused with sociopathy or selfishness. “Individualism first” means that individuals define the group in a spontaneous, organic, and decentralised manner. There is still solidarity and a group identity, but the individual is a priority. This is in contrast to collectivism, by which the group defines the individual in a coerced, arbitrary, and centralised manner. Socialism and fascism alike are perfect examples of mindless collectivism where the concept of the group supersedes the very real entity of the individual.

The is nothing more selfish than collectivism, which demands you relinquish your self-sovereignty and base dignity to the interest of those on top of the group.

The Westerner understands that the best value you can offer to the group is to take care of your own interests first. The best way to help others is to first help yourself, otherwise, you become a useless doormat. This does not mean that your interests include the oppression of others, because this only harms the collective and therefore the individual. But this also does not mean that the collective can oppress the individual either, because then the collective is harmed. If you oppress everyone around you, you become king of the ashes. If you take care of yourself while interacting fairly with others, exchanging value for value, then you might not be king, but you get to live in an abundant world.

Indeed, you can be an individualist while also displaying solidarity to your in-group, without compromising your individual self-ownership and self-reliance.

Freedom

There can be no freedom without individualism first. Individualism is not solipsism. Anyone who deliberately conflates the two is trying to gaslight and manipulate you into submission to them; they are trying to get you to be collectivist and altruistic in a one-way self-sacrificial manner so that you give way more than you might receive from the group. This is the definition of slavery.

All that is truly great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labour in freedom.

- Albert Einstein

With freedom comes self-ownership and competition and, therefore, accountability and humility. This fosters the incentive to offer value to others, and you are thus inspired to invent ways to do so.

Western civilisation was built on freedom. From ancient antiquity, we see freedom as a virtue, unlike other cultures that quite literally treat submission as a virtue (e.g., Islam).

One of the morals that stands out in Homer’s epics (Iliad, Odyssey) is the concept of individual freedom, especially portrayed in Achilles and Odysseus. Socrates, Plato, Zenon of Citium, Seneca, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche… thinkers that are valued by the West precisely because they value freedom through individual self-ownership and self-mastery… key concepts in owning one’s own will (as much as free will is possible).

Aristotle also valued freedom, but he seemed conflicted with his concept of “natural slavery,” which implies natural despotism. Aristotle’s atrocious insinuation is that, if some people are destined or prefer to be slaves, then others must be destined to be masters. Regardless, his valuing of freedom as a generic concept is still clear, and indeed, some people prefer to be slaves (even though this is a mental malfunction due to nurture rather than nature). The tragicomical irony is that modern Hellenic culture is more Eastern than Western, valuing collectivist totalitarianism and shaming peer pressure more than individual freedom and self-ownership.

There are also other Western thinkers who conflate individual freedom with “social expectations,” or perhaps who try to distort the true concept of freedom (individualism before collectivism). But again, they wouldn’t need to gaslight Westerners to distort the meaning of freedom if freedom were not a fundamental Western value.

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Without a culture of freedom and the values of liberty, the Magna Carta would have never been created, and it would not have been held to such high esteem by Westerners, especially when oppressive cultures deliberately conflate liberty with libertinism to make excuses for totalitarianism.

For example, the mostly Eastern value system of Russians was incremental in the rise and sustainability of overt communism. Nothing like that would have been even remotely possible in a more Western culture. For Western cultures to embrace totalitarianism, it has to be presented as freedom or a “small” utilitarian concession for an alleged “greater good.”

It was freedom that made America great in the first place. Europeans left the monarchs of Europe to thrive in freedom with minimal to no coercive centralised governance at all. And when government power structures followed, they naturally brought with them genocidal wars and state-sanctioned slavery.

It was the freedom of Venice and of Renaissance-era Europe (relative to the Dark Ages) that gave us the marvel of the age of enlightenment. It was the trade, ingenuity, and freedom of the late 19th century, the transitional period between monarchy and democracy. It appears that, at the time, the ruling classes seemed confused and without a plan to control a growing world with access to unchecked transportation and trade. This minor increase in freedom is what gave us the industrial revolution and the innovation of the early 20th century, before the World Wars were orchestrated to reestablish global institutional power for the ruling classes.

Freedom is why West Germany was better and more productive than East Germany, even though West Germany wasn’t free either. But the division of Germany showed that even slightly more freedom (Western democracy) is better than slightly less freedom (Soviet socialism). This was an experiment using identical cultures, one with no freedoms at all, and another with slightly more freedom. The same experiment was repeated with China compared to Taiwan/Hong Kong, and North Korea compared to South Korea.

It was free trade and free markets that built up Venice and brought us the Renaissance. It was a culture of freedom that drove people to colonise the unutilised lands of the New World - the atrocities came later when the state followed the first settlers. It was the free spirit of the West that brought the pirate revolt, which was the first real slave revolt since Spartacus - a systematic freeing of slaves. It was the Western value of freedom that abolished slavery in Africa, and blockaded the entire continent to suppress the slave trade. Without the Western value of freedom, there would be no civil rights movement, no feminist movement, and no real progress. Human intelligence can only be maximised when people can labour in freedom in their immediate environment, without the soul-crushing trauma of subjugation.

A common objection is that there has always been a type of state “authority” in the West. Yes, the state persists despite people valuing freedom, because people still don’t know better. For a Western state to be viable, it desperately needs to constantly evoke freedom to appease its Western audiences. The Western state needs to delude them into thinking they are free when in fact they are not. It wouldn’t be able to get away with overt oppression. This means Westerners do value freedom, so the state needs to invest resources to brainwash them into thinking they are free.

Westerners have had and do have dictatorships. All centralised, threat-based governments are dictatorships. Yet these occur not BECAUSE of Western values, but DESPITE them. This is why Westerners insist on free speech: to call out the injustices of authoritarianism, even though authoritarianism keeps succeeding in brainwashing a critical mass of people. People still don’t know better.

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Freedom gives meaning to everything. If we are free to choose our morality, then our morals are noble and meaningful. If we pretend to be moral out of fear of punishment, then our superficial morality is pointless. If anything, coercion turns the antithesis of morality into a taboo, something that the twisted oppressed mind will find attractive. Coercion makes sin appealing. This is why the more we celebrate degeneracy, the more the degenerates try to increase their degeneracy, to again become taboo-breakers. I wonder if that’s the whole point of coercion in the first place.

Minding one’s own business

One thing a non-Westerner notices once he visits a Western country is how people avoid turning their heads towards strangers, and how they avoid eye contact. This is not fear: this is respecting one’s privacy and own business. In a Western society, you feel more comfortable, safe from prying eyes. You feel less ashamed about how you look, how you behave, how you come across to random strangers, because it’s none of their business, and they make it clear that they don’t mind yours.

The principle of minding one’s own business is driven by individualism and freedom, all fundamental Western values. This value is antithetical to Easter societies, in which shame-based people presume to make it their business to gossip, shame, and pay unwarranted, unnecessary attention to things that don’t concern them. When Easterners visit Western countries, they immediately feel liberated by the fact that no one’s judgmental leers cast shame on their shame-based psyches. And when they encounter fellow Easterners, they feel the need to steer away.

One may claim that minding your own business is an obstacle to social/tribal solidarity. Perhaps, but minding your own business is also a hindrance to collectivist groupthink and mindless herding of brain-dead sheep to be slaughtered supposedly “for their in-group.” This is evident today: Most Western countries only have professional militaries of bloodthirsty mercenary scum. These countries cannot rely on conscripts who reluctantly comply, and are hard to convince to “fight in foreign wars” for no honest reason. I still can’t believe how government propaganda machines managed to convince individualist Westerners to submit to the insanity of the World Wars; I suppose fear-mongering and atrocity propaganda were enough. But the Christmas truce of WW1 was that glimpse of how individualism denies and defies war propaganda and brings peace; a small flower that dared to blossom on scorched earth, only to be trampled again by the state’s war machine.

Principle

First principles over cherished beliefs or affiliations…

Principles might limit your behaviour, but because you voluntarily choose to do so without anyone forcing you to, you give identity to yourself, and thus purpose and meaning to your existence. The answer to “who you are” is the principles you stand for - with your life, if need be. If anything, your principles grant you life by imbuing you with self-identity.

Deontology over utilitarianism

Staying true to principle first is what brings a commitment to ethics. Despite the alleged utility (the “greater good”), often claimed to be the consequence of breaking principles, those true to principle will choose to deny the supposed “greater good” in favour of moral consistency.

In most Hollywood movies where the protagonist faces a moral dilemma, he is forced to choose between deontology over utilitarianism. In both “Captain America: Winter Soldier” and “Captain America: Civil War,” the ethical predicament is whether immoral acts are “justified” when the alleged expected outcome is someone’s idea of a “greater good.” Steve Rogers takes the stance of applying morality as a first principle, despite the promised “greater good” that might come from immorality.

Why? Because, regardless of what utility immorality may promise, once you go down the road of betraying your principles, the potential for evil is unpredictable. Not only that, but without principles, we lose our identity, and we feel like we don’t know who we are. When we have no principles, we don’t exist as individuals - we are just biological automata without will. Besides, any good that requires evil loses its meaning, and it can’t then remain good.

There are countless such examples in Western movies. The Matrix Reloaded, The Lord of the Rings, Star Trek TNG, The Terminator 2, Watchmen, The Dark Knight, 300, Ender’s Game. The list is endless. This doesn’t make Hollywood moviemakers benevolent or driven by principles and virtue. It means that screenwriters write what is expected to resonate with audiences. And deontology over utilitarianism resonates with Western audiences.

Conquest via ideas, not force

The Hellenic cities, despite being conquered by the Roman Empire and its armies, managed to reverse-conquer the Roman Empire with their culture: art, architecture, philosophy, spirituality, and even language. The Romans prevailed over the Hellenics militarily, but the Hellenics prevailed over the Romans culturally. The Romans were gracious enough to accept and recognise superior ideas and ideals, even from their conquered peoples. This serves as a testament to the power of reason over violence, even from an all-powerful totalitarian empire, no less.

Christianity was mostly spread via missionary work, unlike Islam, which was spread almost exclusively by the sword. Yes, Christianity was also spread by the sword in many cases, like its beginnings in the Roman Empire, and in the Americas by the Spanish colonisers. But these atrocities are simply expressions of statism, not an expression of Western ideals. How we know? Because Westerners still to this day criticise and apologise for those atrocities conducted in their name, unlike other cultures I could name that boast over the atrocities of their past. Those atrocities happened not because of Western ideals but despite them. Conversely, it is an Islamic value to spread Islam via violence, and to kill and brutalise the “infidels” (e.g. Surah 2 & 9). The evidence is that no practicing Muslim today will ever criticise and reject all the violence that occurred in the name of Islam. In contrast, Westerners today still apologise for the Crusades, a half-assed response to centuries of Islamic raids and brutal expansionism against Europe.

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True meaningful “conquest” is winning someone over voluntarily by offering value without threatening them. It is this absence of threat that makes your “conquest” meaningful. Threats only gain you the reluctant submission of your subjects due to your circumstantial advantage. It is not a meaningful win.

Humility

Humility does not mean undignified humiliation; quite the contrary. Humility is bravery and confidence to be grounded without compromising self-esteem. Self-esteem is superior to narcissistic and insecure self-love.

Humility means understanding that you are just a human - nothing more, nothing less - but you still regard yourself as something of some worth (at least to you). You accept that you are not entitled to anything, and that whatever you desire, you want, you don’t need. This means you’re not desperate for it, which means you can live without it. This makes wanting it all the more meaningful.

The way to get what you want (not need) is through offering incentives to others so that they voluntarily give it to you through a voluntary exchange of value - a mutually beneficial win-win. We know it’s a win-win because otherwise, a voluntary transaction would not have taken place.

When you incentivise (instead of threaten) people to give you something, that something holds meaning. For example, there is no meaning in raping someone. They didn’t give themselves to you freely; you took their intimacy by force because you slyly found yourself in a circumstantial position of power. It just means you are pathetic. But if that same someone voluntarily gives themselves to you, that means you earned it, you deserve it. And that is meaningful.

Humility is valued in Western culture. The highest Christian values (Christianity is Judaism appropriating Western values) are humility and the rejection of pride. Stoic philosophy is about groundedness, reason, and humility to philosophise, since the first step in philosophy is admitting that you don’t know. The ancient Spartans were known for their simplicity and minimalism, and their rejection of luxuries; still today, when we call something “Spartan,” we mean it is simple and frugal.

Perhaps one of the drivers behind modern brutalist architecture is that resurfaced Western humility, on a subconscious level.

Humility is dignified because it does not come at the cost of integrity or self-respect. People often confuse dignified humility with undignified self-humiliation. More on this in section 3 below.

The cherishing of children

Contrary to popular belief, the atrocious and disgusting axiom “spare the rod, spoil the child” is a satirical take, a ridiculing of a heinous verse in the cartoonishly laughable Old Testament (Proverbs 13:24). This ancient Judaic custom wants parents to cane their children supposedly to “discipline” them… Eastern cultures tend to conflate submission with discipline. They are unable to comprehend that discipline is only self-discipline, and “discipline” to others is just a euphemism for threat-based submission, subservience, and blind obedience to the point of denying individual self-ownership.

Granted, there is also the possibility that this verse was misinterpreted - that “the rod” symbolises guidance and mentorship rather than child abuse. But I’ll go with its popular interpretation: that parents should physically abuse their children, supposedly to avoid “spoiling” them. The irony is that it’s the abuse itself that spoils children.

The main reason I still have a soft spot for Christianity (despite being areligious) is Jesus Christ’s cherishing of women. Christianity is Eastern religiosity adapted to Western standards, which is why Jesus was openly defiant of shaming from hypocrites, and he was explicitly a defender of children.

The cherishing of children is indeed a Western value even today, even subconsciously. If culture is a manifestation of the collective unconscious, then look at decades of movies and sitcoms that clearly depict engaging and communicative parents, parents who have the patience to sit down and reason with children rather than react emotionally to them.

Child labour laws? These were the result of the public’s overwhelming sentiment when exposed to child exploitation. Was there child labour exploitation in Victorian England? Yes, and the people were sensitive to it, which is why this phenomenon was condemned in Dickensian literature. Good luck getting that kind of sympathy in today’s Asian sweatshops or African cobalt mines. If anything, Westerners are made to feel bad for those occurrences, too: “It’s the West’s demand for consumer products that supposedly enables child slavery in those parts of the world.” The irony.

The Islamist apologists’ “argument” to justify the pedophile Mohamed’s raping of a nine-year old child is that child prostitutes and child marriages occured throughout all history everywhere. While this is true, the crucial difference is whether this was and is still considered a value or an ideal. It’s not. Just because, for most of human existence, humans lived in caves and killed each other over food, doesn’t mean we should consider that a virtue, and it definitely doesn’t mean we should consider them role models. Unfortunately for humanity, the pedophile Mohamed is treated as a role model - the “perfect” man. If a slave-owning warord who, in his 50s, chooses to rape a 9-year old girl is the “perfect” man, then I wonder who the worst is.

Yes, child trafficking, unfortunately, is still a reality today. It is not commonly accepted as a value, though. It is treated as an atrocity. Is pedophilia a trait you would ascribe to the “perfect man and representative of your god,” or do you treat it as a sickness, a taboo, and a crime? What Mohamed’s apologists refuse to understand is that in some cultures, this atrocity happens despite being scorned. In other cultures, these atrocities happen specifically because they are valued. And this valuing of atrocity can only motivate atrocity.

Grace and class

One of the highest Western values is a stance of dignity and integrity, often conflated with pomposity and delusions of grandeur. However, an amalgamation of freedom, self-ownership, dignity, integrity, and a commitment to dispassionate logic instead of unhinged emotionalism, undeniably gives rise to class… a graceful demeanour that is both unwaveringly strong but also not threatening. From the cool retorts of Thucydides to the cheesy-yet-cool one-liners of James Bond, you can see how a calm, graceful, and classy demeanour (unlike an estrogen-fueled, overly emotional tantrum) is something Westerners value.

This modern phenomenon of snarky passive aggression, immature sarcasm, and an “I got you” one-upmanship is nothing but uncultivated juvenile angst, and not a Western ideal. You can blame the barbarity of state-enforced schooling for this lack of class. These pathetic, cheesy “gotchas” aiming to humiliate you rather than make a point are nothing but an investment in emotion, instead of a commitment to logical discourse.

Emotional people tend to be classless, while logical people tend to have class. Logic is a Western value from antiquity. See Ancient Greco-Roman philosophy, and the logical, dispassionate way in which Jesus Christ spoke. Jesus brought a Western temperament to the foreskin-obsessed, backwards people of the East. This evolved into Christianity, and Eastern matriarchal Judaism adapted to the standards of the West.

3. The problem with Western values

In ‘Why the West is NGMI [Part 2],’ I made an effort to illustrate the Westerner’s unique susceptibility to guilt manipulation due to his affinity to moralism. So committed are Westerners to the idealism that they won’t notice when they are being deceived through it.

Couple that with the Westerner’s value of dignified humility, which he often conflates with undignified humbleness and humiliation, and you have a recipe for manipulation.

Want to know how to manipulate a Westerner? Simply trigger his guilt. Westerners feel virtuous by feeling guilty, even for things that aren’t their fault.

It is easy to confuse dignified humility with undignified humiliation. If you do, you then conclude that being oppressed, exploited, and taken for a fool is somehow a virtue. Christianity takes dignified Stoic humility and turns it into undignified humbleness: “turn the other cheek, love your enemies, give your cloak to anyone claiming to be free, forgive anyone even if they did not bother to earn forgiveness.” Christianity blesses “the meek” and “the poor in spirit.” It reduces masculinity to pathological passive tolerance, compelled to love your abusers as you forgive them for “not knowing what they do.” This Buddhist pacifist mindset can be a grave vulnerability because many people perceive kindness as weakness, and it often is.

Guilt and humiliation are how we get the condescending pity for the noble savage. Self-righteous, pretentious, and narcissistic guilt is what causes the Westerner’s oikophobia. He thinks he is virtuous for hating himself for the sins of his forefathers. The naive nobility of the Westerner becomes self-deprecating guilt, something that individuals without nobility nor guilt exploit in the Westerner. Yes, even today’s Westerners who don’t uphold Western values are driven by those values on a subconscious level; even the “woke” and the leftists who explicitly hate everything they were told the West stands for are driven by fundamental Western values: naive noble guilt, humility, and a need for ethical purity.

The more these oikophobic leftists feel insecure about their personal morality, the more they feel the need to overcompensate for it with meaningless acts of self-hatred and self-aggrandising pretentious guilt.

Noble guilt can be twisted into self-righteous sanctimonious moralism with a saviour complex, just like healthy modesty can be twisted into a shame-based psyche with deliberately provocative, prideful displays of shameful behaviours. This is a desperate attempt to be accepted as shame-identified individuals, since they have been shamed so much that they have identified with their shame. This is why guilt-based people tend to endlessly pontificate and moralise, and shame-based people tend to provoke with their shamefulness. Both are manipulable through their twisted values.

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The Westerner’s noble guilt has been exploited by state propaganda to render him subserviently self-loathing and pretentiously guilty for all the world’s problems. This is unique to cultures with Western influences.

Unfortunately, megalomanic despots go by the Luciferian axiom “better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven.” They prefer to suffer, as long as they get to rule. They prefer to be lords of a cesspool rather than to live blissfully in a prosperous world of mutually beneficial cooperation among equals. They can’t tolerate being equal to anyone, even in paradise, even in an ideal world where they’d have even more than the kings of the past. Rather than in a heaven of peers, they prefer a scorched earth, a hell in which they can reign over others.

This sick obsession with dominance at one’s own expense, this self-crippling despotism, is not a Western value. Aristocracy and rulers were what the Ancient Greeks tried to avoid with their city states and theoretical democracy, which ended up being a failure, just like communism; good in theory, but horrible in practice. But at least the endeavour was there. The deception of democracy emerged because people valued freedom: they needed to be deceived, unlike other cultures that had no problem with overt totalitarianism.

4. What are NOT Western values

Western values are dying because most Westerners deny them daily. The West is fading into nothingness because most of today’s Westerners do not know how to uphold any values other than nonsense instilled in them by state propaganda: statism, socialism, feminism, and oikophobia. They can’t name their values, so they have no individual nor collective identities; they don’t know who they are.

Not knowing who you are - what you stand for - leads to crippling depression, self-loathing, degeneracy, mental illness, despair.

To resolve misunderstandings and deceptions, let’s see what are not Western values.

Shaming

Shaming is not a Western value. Easterners like to accuse Westerners of being shameless; it’s true. Shame is the corruption and twisting of healthy modesty, and it is a manipulation trigger. Shaming aims to force you to comply with social demands, but only in public. As long as you don’t do shameful things in public, society and the individual are fine with committing immorality. Shame-based individuals are drowning in lies and hypocrisy. For example, even the most devout Muslims will admit that they break the Ramadan fast, but they make sure not to do it in public. If you’ve lived in Muslim countries, you will have noticed this.

Shame is externally sourced. Being moral out of a fear of being shamed isn’t true morality - it’s pretentiousness.

Guilt is the consequence of being misaligned with your principles, a correction mechanism giving you negative feedback whenever you’re off course. It is your moral compass. Guilt is felt by people who, when guilty of immorality, would feel so whether others know about it or not. Guilt is internally sourced.

From Shame-culture and Guilt-culture

Westerners tend to be guilt-based, which is why they are so easily manipulable through guilt-tripping. Try to guilt-trip anyone other than a Westerner about their history’s atrocities, slavery, or environmental burden. They’ll laugh in your face. Shame them, though, through ridiculing and public humiliation, and you’ll get them to reluctantly comply. But they won’t comply when you’re not looking.

Indeed, guilt becomes a vulnerability when you are up against people without it. But so is shame. Shame-based individuals experience so much public humiliation that they twist their shame into a fetish. They are shamed so much that they identify with their shame, so they need validation of their shame-based identity. This is why they become provocative through pride parades and public displays of explicitness. It is intense shaming that made them this way. You might wonder why we don’t get shameful public displays in Eastern countries? Because they don’t value freedom of expression. If you don’t see how prevalent shame-based degeneracy is in Eastern countries, you’ve never lived in an Eastern country at all. For example, the most moralising and intolerant countries tend to be show the most vices: Article “Gay-intolerant Pakistan world leader for gay porn searches.”

The more you suppress something through shaming, the more you make it an attractive taboo to those twisted enough to enjoy breaking it.

Unfortunately, there are “influencers” out there who are viciously trying to normalise shaming in the West, a brutal practice of the East; the likes of opinionated loudmouths who mindlessly chant “bring back shaming!” as if shaming were ever a solid foundation for any morality, let alone a culture.

Conquest and empire

There is a recent trend whereby pathetic idiots desperate for daddy figures mindlessly romanticise Roman imperialism, and portray Hitler as “the good guy.” These people have no moral grounding, so they reach and grasp at straws, at anything that might resemble the values they clearly don’t have.

Imperialism and aggressive expansionism are not Western values. Yes, these things did and do occur under Western despots, but these things are not valued by the vast majority of Westerners who are disgusted with the was being committed in their name; except those online incels with delusions of masculinity. Masculinity is not the cowardly, mindlessly obedient, collectivist thuggery of imperialism.

Hitler had nothing to do with Western values. All Hitler did was parrot the plight of the German people during the mid-war period, and then terrorise them enough to goad them into submission to perceived “authority.” The National Socialists (Nazis) did not represent Western values: Blind obedience, threat-based moralism, backward-thinking centralised governance, and Eastern swastiga symbolism, no less, are antithetical to Western values.

Forced involuntary conscription is not a Western value, whatever the justification. Forced conscription is slave-minded collectivism over individualism, and it has nothing to do with self-ownership nor voluntary solidarity. If anything, when someone needs to be forced to defend their community, this proves there is no solidarity, and so being forced to fight for such a “community” is unjustified; there is no community to fight for. The only thing fighting for in this case is the tyrant’s established power structure that is being threatened by another tyrant. So it’s just slaves killing each other over who gets to be their master.

Westerners thrive through mutually beneficial trade, not through war. When a true Westerner is surrounded by enemies, he prefers to try and trade with them, rather than to fight them as a cheap way to mitigate insecurities. Through trade, he uses his ingenuity and work ethic as an advantage to become more valuable to his enemies as a trade partner than as a conquered enemy. This is what Hitler and his trigger-happy closet-gay generals couldn’t understand. This is why the National Socialists failed to protect their people and instead exposed them to multiple fronts against vastly outnumbering foes. The National Socialists, like all brands of socialists, destroyed their country.

Collectivist obedience to the state is as un-Western as it gets. Such self-deprecating subservience is undignified, unmanly, and unworthy.

Western civilisation, the true Western ideal founded on higher values, conquered the world through ideas and ideals, not force. Yes, many atrocities were committed by Westerners, but they were committed DESPITE Western values, not BECAUSE of Western values. While Mongols still worship their butcher Genghis Khan, and Arabs still take pride in the barbarous slaughter-fest that was the religiously motivated violent expansionism of the Arab empire, Westerners have the nobility to acknowledge the faults of their forefathers, the mistakes of their past, the dark pages of their history. Westerners have the decency (and often self-righteous pretentious guilt-boasting) to apologise for slavery and violent conquest done in their name, when others are unapologetic and even boastful of the same, if not worse, atrocities. Western cultures, at least, have the humility and nobility to collectively commit to their historical guilt. They voluntarily do so even in a time when they hold all the economic advantages against other cultures, no less, which makes this Western self-reflection all the more meaningful.

Westerners, by and large, admit those dark pages of their history, and they acknowledge them as bad, at least for the most part. War, conquest, slavery… every single culture is “guilty” of these things. But who actually feels guilty about them? Remind me when the abolitionist movements of the Turkish and Arabic empires occurred. Never. The Ottoman Empire gradually and reluctantly abolished slavery in the 19th century after pressure from the British Empire. Show me where modern Turks or Arabs criticise their ancestors for the raids, brutal conquest, mass rapes, mutilating slavery, and their (uh)Holy Wars. Imagine a culture that made warfare holy…. Show me where they deem the myriad of dark pages in their history regrettable - all things that were directly and clearly inspired by their values, no less, by their own admission. Not only are they proud of the conquests they blatantly attribute to their religion, but they also brag about the current demographic replacement of the West by Muslims, which they don’t understand is against their best interests in the long run. If anything, the way Westerners treat the atrocities of their ancestors proves that those atrocities were not motivated by Western values.

While still holding our ancestors accountable, we must understand that these atrocities occurred despite Western values, not because of them. There is no value in atrocity. There is no virtue in narcissistic self-righteous guilt either.

The fact that propaganda and gaslighting are needed to get the Westerner to commit atrocities in the name of virtue at least shows which virtues he values. His values are used against him to manipulate him. He needs to believe he is virtuous when he commits atrocities, the naive fool. He needs to be tricked into believing his atrocities are in line with his principles, and so desperate is he to uphold his principles that he will do anything for them… as long as he is convinced that anything is what it takes to honour them. Had he not had those principles, then you’d only need to recite a verse from the Koran calling for the killing of unbelievers, or their torture, or their enslavement. Europeans were invested in building defensive structures (walls and castles) while Easterners were invested in cannons to break them, and in long-range light cavalry, and archers on horseback. One was more interested in defence, the other in aggressive expansionism. One was more interested in trade, the other in raid.

“Conquest” or “empire” are not Western values, despite this online trend of romanticising the socialist Roman Empire or the half-assed response to centuries of genocidal Muslim aggression - the weak Crusades.

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If conquest were a Western value, then Westerners would have been proud of the conquests of their history, not guilty and apologetic about them. In contrast, look at how much pride some other cultures have for the brutal, violent conquests of their ancestors. Mongols, for example, still worship Genghis Khan, the butcher and rapist of history.

Western leaders conquered because they could: they amassed surplus riches and technological supremacy so they could conquer. But that is a symptom of statism, not a value of culture. If Westerners saw conquest as an ideal, they would have reacted to being essentially colonised by state-enforced immigration. They would not hold the label “racist” as the most terrifying condemnation. If conquest were a Western value, they’d resist being colonised by privileged immigration, because they’d see that conquest was indeed valued by their colonisers, which it is. The current colonisers of the West gloat over their state-funded “achievement.” If Westerners valued colonising, then they’d soon realise that being colonised was antithetical to their values.

If anything, it’s every other culture other than Western cultures that value conquest: they venerate the conquerors of their history rather than criticise them as the Westerner does. The Brits still apologise for their British Empire. The Germans still apologise for being born German. The Russians, however, do not apologise for the atrocious USSR. Granted, many of them aren’t proud of it either. Still, Slavic cultures are more Eastern than Western.

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National identity cannot be an enforcement of borders within which you mix and dilute values. If anything, national identity is derived from shared historical values, and you can have that regardless of where you are. The proof of this is national minorities living all over the world who are still keeping their values and identity even though they’ve lived for generations in foreign countries. National identity and culture emerged spontaneously without passports or migration control. State enforcement of national identity is not required. If anything, it is Western states that work hard to destroy any and all remnants of Western values and identity.

National borders as a means to satisfy a needy, insecure ego is not a Western value. The “migrant crisis” is nothing but a welfare abuse crisis - state handouts are the problem.

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Lastly, when the West finally rediscovered its true values of freedom, the British Empire willingly let go of most of its colonies, even though it could still hold them. In many cases, the colonials preferred to have stayed under British rule, rather than mess it all up with their own useless leaders. I grew up in a former British colony just like that. Even today, people there still admit that British rule was not as bad as being ruled by their own useless people. I hear many Hindus feel the same way.

Unfortunately, World War 1 - the most blatantly dumb war in history - constituted a severe blow to the value of freedom in the West, blaming “anarchists” for starting the war, and conditioning generations after that to submit to one war after another for an alleged “greater good.” The psychological operation needed to submit the Westerner is simple: exploit his guilt-based mentality, cultivate his saviour complex, then convince him that relinquishing his freedom is a valiant sacrifice for an arbitrarily defined “greater good.”

Obeying monsters to commit atrocity in the name of good is as evil as evil gets.

Utilitarianism

The concept that any evil is permissible if it might bring an alleged “greater good” for some is called utilitarianism. It is the sick, twisted idea that you are somehow justified in murdering an innocent child if that would supposedly save two or more lives, regardless of why those lives were on the line in the first place. No one asks why the innocent have to pay for those without accountability for their lives. Utilitarianism, being a classic communist value, does not recognise accountability, like all cowards don’t.

The atrocity of the COVID era during which billions were threatened, oppressed, ruined, and forced to subject themselves to unsafe, ineffective, and experimental pharmaceuticals, was a classic example of utilitarianism: “If it saves one life, we live in a society, one more week to flatten the curve…” all utilitarian squeals calling for the justification of any atrocity if the advertised outcome for someone else is greater than your sacrifice.

As I explained above, utilitarianism is not a Western value; deontology is.

Degeneracy

The fact that Westerners are preoccupied with actual adherence to principle (guilt) rather than appearances (shame) is why degenerates have been accepted and tolerated since European antiquity. Notice “tolerated” but not celebrated. The ancient Hellenic word for male homosexual, “κίναιδος” (kinaidos), literally translates to “he who provokes shame” - the meaning in its etymology. Homosexuality wasn’t a crime, but it wasn’t a virtue either. At best, it was something accepted, but it was definitely not ideal. At worst, it was a light-hearted joke. And so was female homosexuality, judging from the fact that female homosexuals of the time were teased as “lesbians” as in “inhabitants of the island of Lesbos” the home of Sappho, the known lesbian poet. This funny jab at female homosexuals is still prevalent today - go figure.

It takes Eastern-style shaming combined with Western-style tolerance to get the flamboyantly prideful and provocative degeneracy we see today, which is nothing more than an overreaction to relentless shaming. They are shamed to the point where they internalise their shame, and so externalising their shame-based identity validates their personality. And they are allowed to do so in the tolerant West.

You can’t get anyone to be truly moral through shaming. You can only promote your morality by being a good example of it yourself. Shaming suppsoedly to promote your morality only shows your lack of conviciton in it.

Shaming only further entrenches the shame-based in their shameful behaviours. It motivates them to provoke you, when otherwise they would have lead private lifes. For the provocative degeneracy we see today, you have only the self-righteous shamers to thank; the sanctimonious pontificators of moralism, those with a such insecurity about their morals that they need to overcompensate with shaming others to aggrandise themselves. Whenever you see a moralist, you are safe to bet he’s likely a degenerate in denial.

Tolerance is indeed a Western value. The Western ideal is to be so secure in your moral conviction that you don’t feel threatened by the immoral enough to persecute them. But tolerating doesn’t mean celebrating or kowtowing to them either. You can tolerate while maintaining your own personal boundaries, and that’s up to you to do, not a despotic state that literally promotes degenracy with your taxes, no less.

Whenever kowtowing to degeneracy occurs, that comes from the Westerner’s affinity to guilt (poked by state propaganda through schools and media). The Westerner’s saviour complex kicks in, driven by his need for moral superiority and self-righteousness, as he sanctimoniously pretends to feel guilty for all the world’s ills, arrogantly deeming himself important enough to take the pain of humanity on his shoulders.

Usually, degenerates tend to be private people when left alone. If you shame them too much, they will feel the need to react. The fact that degeneracy tends to express itself in a prideful and provocative manner in the West is not organic - it’s the product of state propaganda, encouragent, enabling, and constant poking by the shamers (likely state propagandists). The state thrives through internal division. The “divide and conquer” doctrine is universal and timeless, and it is as predictably effective as any strategy.

Christianity

Some may claim that the Renaissance was inspired by Christianity. If that were true, then why did the Dark Ages follow Christianity? Why did it wait so long to inspire?

No, a Judaic offshoot adapted to Western standards is not a Western value. The Renaissance was driven by freedom, not Christianity. It was the freedom mindset and the newfound global trade of the time that inspired the boom of culture and scientific observation we now call the Renaissance. Christianity only inspired the Dark Ages. The morals embedded in Christianity were already there. Nobody waited for Emperor Constantine to force Christianity upon the West before having morals.

Cultures much older than Judaism and Christianity already had their own moral frameworks - they didn’t sit around waiting for the abhorrently ridiculous 10 Commandments.

Granted, the artistic expression of the Renaissance touched on Christian themes, since it was profitable for the artists to do so - the Christian church held the money, which is ironic because Jesus Christ was clear about the impossibility of rich people entering heaven.

The theory goes that Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam” depicts Yahweh in a human brain, hinting that this deity is nothing but a creation of the human mind.

For context, read ‘Why the West is NGMI [Part 1]’ where I separate Western values from the Eastern religion (Judaism) that had appropriated them.

Statism is not a Western value

They had to come up with the scam of “democracy” and “republic” (potato-patato) to convince Westerners to submit to the totalitarian apparatus of government. Any type of threat-based centralised government is simply an authoritarian state functioning only on coercion and intimidation. Everything it does is founded on arbitrary enforcement of arbitrary laws made using ridiculously elaborate and even more arbitrary methods… not to mention a subjective interpretation of deliberately vague and biased laws made only to serve and protect the ruling class at the expense of the naive people. Sure, some common-sense good laws still apply. But remember, even in the worst concentration camp or slave plantation, the plebs are protected from one another by their masters. This is not because the masters care for their human cattle; it’s because cattle have value.

Indeed, the vast majority of Westerners are submissive state-worshipping plebs who kiss the hand that flogs them, but they at least make the effort to perform mental gymnastics to rationalise their statist affliction. To cope with their cognitive dissonance (their confusion between valuing freedom and eagerly submitting to perceived “authority”), they must constantly feed their self-delusion of freedom. They must keep telling themselves that submission to the state is somehow freedom, or that freedom isn’t free, or that democracy is somehow free voluntary obedience, and other schizophrenic assertions like these. Submissive Westerned value freedom even in their naive condoning of the state’s slavery system of taxation, conscription, and submission to nonsense laws. If they didn’t value freedom, they wouldn’t need to rationalise their enslavement.

“War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.”

- George Orwell, 1984

Westerners need to be gaslighted and brainwashed to accept their slavery as somehow freedom. Other cultures don’t need such propaganda; their people accept totalitarianism as it is - no need to deceive them into accepting totalitarianism under a different name. Islam, for example, literally translates to “submission.” Yes, they’’ tell you that it means ‘submission to god,’ but since god never appears to us, submission is then inevitably granted to anyone who presumed to represent god. A submission mindset thus breeds people who treat undignified kowtowing subservience as a virtue.

So no, centralised coercive threat-based statism is not a Western value. Truly voluntary and anarchist (not socialist “anarchist”) movements are almost exclusively found in Western regions. Good luck finding one in China or in the Arab Peninsula. I’m sure some exist, but they cannot flourish, not with the current Eastern culture of authority worship.

False hope

Cultivating false, unfounded hope is the ultimate act of cowardice, treated as a virtue. It is a conscious self-delusion - a voluntary choice to lie to oneself - to make the present moment bearable at the expense of the future. The ostrich is the perfect example of the pathetically hopeful who feeds his demons of hope with nothingness just to get by in the now. So terrified are the hopeful that they bury their heads in the sand, deny all reality, and hope that the danger will go away. Hope is the self-inflicted delusion that danger isn’t there. The irony is that this act alone puts the hopeful in even more danger. The ostrich, by burying its head in the sand, worsens its position, because it stands inert instead of fighting or flying.

The Westerner values the harsh truth more than comforting lies. This is why religions are dying in the West. Indeed, the fall of Christianity was a net loss for the West, because unfortunately, the Westerner had fused his values with Christianity. By rejecting the unprovable claims of religion due to his commitment to truth, he threw the baby out with the bathwater.

Skepticism of unprovable and unfalsifiable religious claims is a principle and a value that frees the mind to at least begin to ponder what this reality is. However, life becomes hard when you shed your naive hope and faith in a benevolent, loving god who will grant you an undeserved eternal paradise… However, a harsh truth over a rewarding lie is a principle found mostly in skeptical and critical Western cultures. There are very few Christians left - actual practising Christians - in traditionally Western regions, let alone elsewhere. This is because skepticism and critical thinking are fundamental Western values. At the same time, certain Eastern cultures that value belief over fact, boast a swelling and reigniting of their backward faiths.

Indeed, having faith grants meaning and hope, but it is undeniably unfounded if you look at it from a logical, pragmatic perspective. There is no truth in unfounded, unprovable, and unfalsifiable claims, let alone imaginary narcissistic hope, the arrogance that we deserve grace just by asking for it.

Cowardly false hope is antithetical to Western values of the bravery of facing the truth.

5. Comparing cultures

Most cultures tend to share most of their values. However, there are some fundamental values that make all the difference. For example, Easterners are prone to fear and shame more than guilt; the opposite is true for Westerners. The Easterner will admire and submit to whoever has the power to make him feel ashamed or terrified. The Westerner will submit to anyone who can make him feel guilty. This is why “you’re going to kill grandma” and “I’m doing it to protect others” were the propaganda narratives of choice for Western audiences during the COVID insanity.

I understand that comparisons to other cultures are a weak standard to set for your own. But I make comparisons with other cultures because there is no other way to set a standard about “how much” a thing is valued. It’s all relative, so I see the values of one culture in relation to others.

For example, a crucial distinction between Western and Eastern cultures is their proclivity to either essence or appearance. The Westerner is more preoccupied with essence and meaning, rather than appearances, because he’s less shame-based and more guilt-based. The opposite is true for the Easterner. Eastern cultures are preoccupied with appearances over essence, and when they are caught in a dilemma between the too, they’re more likely to choose keeping appearances, regardless of true intent. This is why Easterners tend to be more submissive and obedient to perceived “authority” figures. Compliance begins with the desperate need for conformity.

6. Consequences of abandoning your values

If the West abandons its values, then it relinquishes its privilege to exist. No culture is entitled to survive if it does not prove itself worthy of surviving, if it does not earn it. For a culture to survive, it must become deserving of its right to do so, again and again, with each generation.

And for the schadenfreude haters of anything Western, masturbating their insecure egos with glee at the fading away of Western values, I have this to say: It is not in your best interest for these values and these historical identities to disappear. If they do, the world will descend into Marxist collectivism, and humans will be reduced to faceless, nameless automata. You truly don’t want a world based on matriarchal shame and totalitarian collectivism.

Those who gleefully rejoice at the apparent collapse of Western cultures don’t understand that he void created from it will be filled with aggressive expansionism by groups with a psychotic need to prove themselves to imaginary deities or non-imaginary inferiority complexes. North Africa, Asia Minor, Syria, Lebanon, and the Balkans were all Christian once. The reason they will never know peace is that they have lost their cultural identity, which was galvanised by Christianity at the time they lost it. Now these regions are full of people with identity crises, unsure of their heritage or of the values of their ancestors. Modern Asia Minor (Turkey) suffers from such cultural insecurity that its government feels compelled to flood the landscape with Turkish flags just to forcibly instill some semblance of a solid ethnic identity, which it clearly lacks. And the infighting in these pseudo-cultures will never end. Egyptians weren’t Arabs. The natives of Asia Minor weren’t Mongolian Turks. Cultures from Mesopotamia to Morocco spoke Greek and Latin, and were culturally pagan or Christian, not forced to adopt Islam by the sword. So the modern inhabitants of these lands are insecure about their identity. The inhabitants of Turkey deep down know the history of those lands, and they don’t know whether to identify with the natives or the colonisers. Of course there will be infighting. Of course they’ll feel an ingrained aggression against their neighbours in a desperate attempt to overcompensate for their ethnic insecurity and lack of tribal identity. Of course they will then be easily manipulated by warlords and dictators promising a “strong nation” and ethnic identity to weaklings fiercely desperate for one.

7. The bottom line

Do not be swayed by those who presume to tell you what Western values are when they promote the exact opposite: romanticising conquest and empire, kowtowing to perceived “authority” daddy figures, promoting the spanking of children, promoting Eastern-style matriarchal shaming, defending the uncivilised practice of statism or totalitarianism.

You can tell who they are. They tend to appear smug and snarky, since they are too insecure to be humble without compromising their self-esteem. The true West instead values humility, dignity, and self-esteem (the opposite of humiliating arrogance).

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Thank you for reading. I appreciate your time. All my work here is free.

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Useful reading

‘Conceived in Liberty’ by Murray N. Rothbard

‘The Ethics of Liberty’ by Murray N. Rothbard

‘Freedom in the making of Western culture’ by Guy McLean Rogers