Western self-hatred – knowing too much about ourselves and too little about others
Never has a civilization been more successful than the west, and never more self-critical.
Often, a little knowledge is worse than no knowledge. Even if what we know is true, it can still lead us utterly wrong if we lack important pieces which point in the other direction.
A good example is “oikophobia”, a fear or dislike of one’s own culture. Today this is very common in western civilization. And even worse, we often have a strange sympathy for our enemies. Consider the support bloodthirsty communist regimes enjoyed throughout the twentieth century. Today, we have similar support for Hamas in Gaza.
Why do we dislike ourselves? The simplest explanation is that we dislike ourselves because we deserve to be disliked. But the thing is, that just isn’t true. The modern world is freer and more prosperous than it has ever been, largely because of tech, ideas, and institutions that originated in the west. If you had to choose a time throughout history to be born, the modern west-created and west-dominated world would be the obvious choice – even if you were to be born outside of the west itself.
While there are many reasons for our current oikophobia (See Western Self-Contempt: Oikophobia in the Decline of Civilizations by Benedict Beckeld from 2022) I would like to focus on just two of them. What these two reasons have in common is that they concern the flow of information through society, explaining why anti-western facts and ideas are more successful in the informational eco-system.
The first reason is the simple fact that as westerners, we know far more about the west than we know about other civilizations. We know (some) of what we did and do – we know almost nothing of what others did and do. We know of our wars, our crimes, our invasions, our genocides, our mistakes, our revolutions, our treasons, our errors, not because they are uniquely heinous, but because they are ours.
This is made worse by the fact that our sins tend to fester and grow political. If something is good, it won’t be argued about. Instead, it will be accepted, and soon taken for granted or forgotten. But bad things are often controversial, and for that reason we will keep arguing about them. I believe the best example is the case of slavery. We remember western slavery because it was bad. We do not remember the west’s centuries-long struggle to end slavery, because it was good.
The second reason why the west is often thought to be uniquely evil is its success. This is because success leads to power, and power leads to visibility.
There is truth in Lord Acton’s famous quote “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. But I believe there is more truth in the idea that power reveals corruption that was there all along. Power lets us do whatever we want – and all too often that shocks even ourselves.
Western power reveals the flaws of the west, but it also conceals the flaws of non-western civilizations. We feel pity for the losers of history because they lost and never got the power to show us who they really were. The Spaniards are criticized for destroying the Aztecs, but the Aztecs are not criticized for destroying the Spaniards, because they never did. Aztec imperialism and human sacrifices fade into history.
A modern example of this is the October 7 massacre in Israel. For a few hours in 2023, the balance of power shifted away from the Israelis and over to their enemies. The result was horror. But soon power shifted back to Israel – and so did the blame.
Before judging something, even ourselves, it is not enough to know what bad things were done. We must also know what good was done, and what the alternative was. We know the world of western dominance because we live in it. We do not know the world without western dominance, because it doesn’t exist. We should consider ourselves lucky that we don’t. But if we did, at least we would have been spared the scourge of oikophobia.
Jakob Sjölander