Going West: Is life actually peaceful there?

In a white room on a grey November evening, twelve humans sit perfectly still. The women laugh boisterously and tap away at keyboards as they mechanically consume liquefied drugs. The men watch screens intensely and chuckle in unison at lewd remarks and monotonous small talk. At 5pm they all catch the London tube, ready to go home and consume microwavable junk, state news, and three more cups of coffee. Inside they are dead, only to resurrect in the unconsciousness of their sleep. Then the cycle repeats itself. Every day for the good part of 365 days and for the remaining years of their life.

This is today’s reality of ‘going west’ as an ambitious adult. The archetypal western (white-collar) working conditions are like plastic: unnatural, inauthentic, and poison. As a child, I more or less escaped these conditions. Now a university graduate, perhaps I must at last succumb to what most of us Westerners await as our miserable fate. This lack of depth and spirituality is the result of a new secular morality that has come to permeate western customs and institutions. Whilst more affluent than at any other time in history, the bulk of the general populace is spiritually impoverished and mentally ill.

Unnatural

English people are known for their politeness and lack of visible emotion, but this differs notably from the superficiality that has come to dominate most middle-high-end job circles. Such superficiality doesn’t stem from Englishness per se, but from the effects of a Liberal order that has subtly predisposed individuals to think and speak in a particular manner.

I don’t think that it is natural for people in their late teens and early twenties to sit for eight hours on a daily basis scouring academic papers; nor do I believe it to be the most effective method of learning and contributing to society. It is noteworthy that students of top universities where creative thinking is apparently hailed are expected to mirror the robotic behaviour of most workplaces. Get all the hard graft in from 9 – 5 and then enjoy your evenings doing whatever thing will best distract you from your drudged everyday routine. It seems that work has been cordoned off as something totally alien to the self (a phenomenon peculiar to Western countries) yet the defining activity of an increasing number of people’s lives.

Our connection to nature is also waning. One welcomes the efforts at environmental preservation, but can we truly appreciate our world solely through national parks with their tight rules, artificial signage, and strict governance? The sense that it is possible to leave the everyday and explore the earth has sadly dissipated amongst the bulk of the Western population. Perhaps it is because both public and private ownership laws mean that there is very little left to truly explore.

Inauthentic

There is a colleague of mine whose behaviour has intrigued me. She is in her 30s, with two children, and she moved to the UK a few years ago from Goa, India. We were on a lunch break together—she had asked if I wanted to join her but then proceeded to spend almost the entirety of the time talking with friends on the phone, which I quietly found more amusing than anything else. When there was brief pause for conversation, she asked me if I was a Muslim. I said yes and, coming from a Christian background, she told me how her sister had married a Muslim man and that she didn’t go to the wedding. In any other context and were I privy to such a situation, I probably would have found such a stance distasteful and narrow-minded. But in this instance, the sheer bluntness of the remark made me laugh.

What her foreign attitude juxtaposed is a growing obsession in the West with the written and spoken word—‘the tyranny of the literal’—where individuals are judged by the way they formulate their language rather than their actions and how they treat others. The absurdity of this phenomenon is perhaps most apparent in the virtual world of Twitter. A few words, distastefully formulated, penned in the heat of the moment or sometimes neither of these things, are enough to destroy an individual’s entire reputation and career. Many Western intellectuals turn their nose up at religious fanatics who obsess over de-contextualised words and sentences, yet themselves appear to have been swept in by a new morality that penalises individuals for a single sentence and encourages others to earnestly scour the written and spoken word for anything incriminating.

Poison

This new Western morality is spreading like poison through the veins of civilisation. Often, where there are very real social issues that communities wish to address, ‘radical progressives’ have unconsciously adopted Western frameworks.

When the Black Lives Matter movement kicked off in the summer of 2020, I struggled with the assumption that I must engage in a level of activism demarcated around specific parameters, or otherwise be socially ousted as not an ‘ally’. Although the website has since been edited, the Black Lives Matter organisation highlighted its aim to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure”. 

It is not immediately obvious to me that such a structure is indeed a legacy of the West. I don’t doubt the existence of varying family types across history in non-Western civilisations—that persist in some remote tribes today—but in the present day, the greatest enemy of “the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure” ironically appears to be the West. For instance, studies show that in 2021 in the UK, more than half of live births were not to married couples.

We also learn that the movement affirms “the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, undocumented folks, folks with records, women, and all Black lives along the gender spectrum.” It is difficult to see how such assertions made by the organisation and among the numerous infographics circulated by its followers over social media are not inherently Western in formulation. The rejection of binaries in favour of spectrums, criticism of underlying structures and concepts and emphasis on studying the systems of knowledge that produce an object, all stem from the post-structuralist and postmodernist thinking of 20^th century Europeans.

Social justice movements of our own time that claim to champion the rights of the oppressed, often-times simply appropriate Western models and methods. And the irony is that to disagree with these methods is to be hailed a Western suck-up.

Conclusion

I am very grateful to live in a society where I am mostly shielded from immediate physical harm. Despite the looming threat to us all posed by nuclear armament, the average Westerner is fortunate to not have to worry on a daily basis about drones and bombs. I am also grateful that my Western education has, up to a point, given me the tools to think critically about issues and challenge preconceived notions of truth. But as I have said, the sickness of Western society lies in its spiritual impoverishment. Until this is addressed, we will unfortunately continue to plummet down our current trajectory of cultural degeneration and mental insanity.