Mark McDonald is a psychiatrist in Los Angeles, known as the Dissident MD.
What exactly is the West?
I don’t really know, precisely, but I kind of have a general idea.
The West includes Australasia, Europe, and the Americas, and known as the Occident. Meanwhile, the East is known as the Orient.
It’s mostly a concept based on cultural, political, and economic factors, rather than a fixed region.
Which is why definitions vary.
For example, in the map above, South Africa is excluded, yet I could argue that it is part of the West due to it being a democracy (officially), it has a Western legal system and market economy, and a fairly significant European legacy (such as the Anglo-Boer War).
The idea of the West is usually traced back to the Greco-Roman era and Christianity, beginning in ancient Greece, evolving during the Roman Empire’s division into the Greek East and Latin West. The Great Schism in 1054 AD, which was a formal split between the Roman Catholic Church (in Western Europe) and the Eastern Orthodox Church (in the Byzantine Empire), played a huge role (hence the name).
The Crusades played a huge role too.
The term ‘West’ originally meant direction, but later described Europe and regions with European influence. Hence countries like Australia and New Zealand, and maybe even Japan, classified as Western.
I’m not sure about Russia, though.
The collapse of the West
Some folks believe that the West isn’t collapsing, but it is and can be demonstrably shown via declines in culture, economics and geopolitics.
The West is in decline because it has lost its sense of purpose and direction. Modern Western civilisation, obsessed with material progress and individualism, has neglected the deeper, spiritual and cultural values that once gave it strength and unity.
Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes (1922)
Consider the following possible vectors which appear to be unstoppable:
- High levels of debt.
- Degradation of civil discourse.
- Policy (local and foreign) paralysis.
- Neverending social unrest (like Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ, climate change, and more).
- Declining birth rates.
- Mass immigration.
- Loss of traditional norms and morality.
- Cultural Marxism and postmodernism.
- Decline of Christianity (and increase in atheism).
- Increase in hyper-individualism.
- Feminism and egalitarianism.
- Loss of sovereignty.
In other words, the West’s collapse stems from mounting debt, social and policy paralysis, demographic shifts (either by design or emergence), and the erosion of traditional norms and sovereignty.
Here’s my conversation with Mark.
We are witnessing the end of the American era. The decline of the West is a relative thing. It’s not about collapse, but about the rise of the rest.
Ian Bremmer
