Ideology: Hegemonic Ideology, Western Ideology, European Ideology
An ideology is an explicitly or implicitly organised system of ideas that is both a conception-of-the-world and the bearer of a specific political, social, economic, and cultural project.
Europe today is the victim of an ideology that she herself created — one that began with the Eighteenth century philosophy of the Enlightenment and culminates in what one calls ‘Western ideology’ or ‘globalist ideology’. Western ideology has boomeranged against Europeans. This ideology (which Communism shared in large part until its collapse) is based on the following presuppositions:
1. An absolute individualism and the pursuit of pleasure through economic materialism.
2. An interpretation of technology as a kind of divinity capable of bestowing happiness and serving as a substitute for spirituality — technology seen here not as an instrument of power and sovereignty, but simply as a means of comfort — a domination by gadgets.
3. The hypocritical affirmation of the equality of all human beings and, on this basis, the implicit negation of the idea of a people (in the ethnic sense).
4. A rejection of the divine and the ancestral heritage and their substitution with a presentism, contemptuous of both past and future.
5. The belief in the infinite economic ‘development’ of humanity, as the supreme form of collective and individual happiness — a development without any regard to physical or ecological limits.
6. The cult of endless progress.
7. The struggle against Europe’s ethnic identities.
Founded on Reason (a self-sufficient rationality), Western ideology is but a degenerated form of metaphysics, for it claims to represent all human aspirations, serving as it does as a universal ethical norm, in lieu of religion. Its postulates, though, are unrealistic and anti-vitalistic, disdaining the real — that is, the observable reality of human societies. While criticising the absolute materialism of Western ideology and society, certain unseeing philosophers (on the intellectual Right) imagine that a ‘spiritual’ alliance with Islam is desirable. That would be like falling between Charybde and Scylla.[1] In themselves alone — in their own traditions — will Europeans succeed in finding and reviving their people.
The philosophy of ‘human rights’ and the idolatry of technology as sources of well-being make up the résumé of Western ideology. Today it is hegemonic, totalitarian. It tolerates no challenges. Rather than being rivals, the different Right and Left versions of Western ideology pursue the same general civilisational project. However triumphant this ideology may be at the moment, it is inherently destructuring. For the world doesn’t conform to its postulates, none of which have ever been realised. Its present triumph will be ephemeral.
Western ideology beckons a revival: a real European ideology.
(see belief in miracles; egalitarianism; human rights; modernity; progress, progressivism)
- ↑ In Greek mythology, Scylla and Charybde were two monsters who lived on either side of a narrow strait. Sailors who attempted to pass through the strait were always in danger of being eaten by one while attempting to keep away from the other. It is considered the origin of the expression ‘between a rock and a hard place’. Scylla and Charybde appear most notably in Homer’s Odyssey and Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
