#thewest — Public Fediverse posts

Tuesday, March 31, 2026

https://activitypub.writeworks.uk/2026/03/tuesday-march-31-2026/

Tuesday, March 31, 2026

https://activitypub.writeworks.uk/2026/03/tuesday-march-31-2026/

Tuesday, March 31, 2026

https://activitypub.writeworks.uk/2026/03/tuesday-march-31-2026/

Tuesday, March 31, 2026

https://activitypub.writeworks.uk/2026/03/tuesday-march-31-2026/

Illumination in dark times
A genealogy of modern Western selfhood and a post-Western world

"Smith ... outlines a genealogy of modern Western selfhood: a radically individual, hypermasculine character that was formed during the rapid nineteenth-century expansion of the white man’s world. “Bold, conquering, and altogether assertive,” it was “dedicated to action,” hostile to reflection, indifferent to community and the environment, and guilty of possessing, Smith writes, an “undeveloped heart,” a term borrowed from E. M. Forster’s assessment of the British elite." "

" “We must alter our very relations with the world around us.” This means giving up the exalted and exaggerated idea of the West that boosts a masculinist self-image but severely constricts thought and feeling. “We should welcome our era’s uncertainties,...the not-knowing of how the post-Western story will come out.” Smith’s final warning—that “we will not survive the Western notion of the individual much longer”—should resonate today, as nineteenth-century individualism reasserts itself in the degraded Nietzscheanism of Peter Thiel and Stephen Miller." >>

* Mishra, P. (2026, April). "The Authority of Thought". Harper's Magazine.
https://harpers.org/archive/2026/04/the-authority-of-thought-pankaj-mishra/

* Somebody Else's Century: East and West in a Post-Western World by Patrick Smith. 2010 >>
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/169395/somebody-elses-century-by-patrick-smith/
#TheWest #WhiteSupremacy #masculinity #ImpulseControl #EthnoNationalism #WesternCivilization #AngloAmerican #parochialism #individualism #subjectivity #SettlerSociety #Culture #RacialInequality #war #EastWest #PostWesternWorld #DarkTimes #illumination #narrative #environment

Image: Double Bay War Memorial, Steyne Park, Sydney

why hasnt this occured to me quite sooner?

but while we all laugh and have fun and fukuyama memes pop up everywhere, be reminded; it is gallow humor. it is the burial of the rule driven democratic world.

#thewest #democracy #fukuyama #francisfukuyama #scipo #politology #philosophy #meme #mamema #memes

"David [Graeber] often said that his task was to decolonise the Enlightenment; to change our ideas of what kind of society we would like to live in."

#NikaDubrovsky

https://artreview.com/noam-chomsky-on-david-graebers-pirate-enlightenment/

#decolonisation #TheEnlightenment #TheWest

SEVEN MORE PALESTINIANS killed.

Do we think the oppressive (to put it mildly) lessons of #apartied learned by Israel (and other murderous regimes) against the #Palestinians cannot be used to oppress #cityDwellers in other places, including #theWest.

What's good for the goose is be good for the gander?

Boycott, divest and sanction — its a tough decision for all involved but this continual theft and murder, idiocy connot continue.

#bds