These two mentalities are those ground into everyone’s heads through popular culture, the “Democrat” and the “Republican”. These categories are described, detailed, and caricatured to death, by their own members or by the other’s. The popular approach is to plot these two groups on a single axis, going from “left” to “right”, stemming from the pop-psychology thinking of “left brain” and “right brain”. The “right” side is said to be paternalistic, nationalistic, non-sympathetic, emotionally dominated by nostalgia, pride, and familial mindsets, while the “left” side is said to be maternalistic, expressive, sympathetic, and more focused on larger social groups. It goes further — the “right”-minded people are said to have specific political stances, such as that taxes should decrease, that police should be supported, or that wars should be supported, while the “left”-minded people are said to take the opposite stances, that taxes should increase to fund public services, that police are too aggressive or oppressive, that wars shouldn’t be supported. Or on social issues — to be for or against governmental prohibitions on gay marriage, abortion, workplace safety standards, or sugary soft-drinks.

These categories have evolved especially in recent years, closely along side the changing faces in politics and media championing different schools of thought, and due to the changes in media itself, namely the internet’s appearance as a means for mass communication. But while the internet is a tool allowing instant, worldwide, peer-to-peer communication, the habits of its users have held it back from this purpose —a crucial deficit in skills that allow for sound logical analysis, vetting of sources, and being able to identify and analyze one’s own biases have prevented it, as of now, from living up to its promise as a revolutionary way to change human thinking, and cursed it to be used as an echo chamber for the ideologies of the past.

The “right” group, at this time, has an ideology that, while in some ways is historically unique, is mostly rooted in the ideologies of the past — namely, the character of the invading American settler. Looking honestly at the modern campaigns against Central/South American immigrants, or against poor black urban communities, one is forced to see echoes of the genocides of native peoples, or of the institution of chattel slavery. The genocide of natives of Central and South Americans, having been less fulfilled than that of native North Americans, left them comprising about 90% of modern native people — and the same attitudes, language, and thinking that facilitated the genocides of their ancestors still shows its face today. The now-romanticized and whitewashed past conflicts between settlers and natives have taken an uglier tone. The realities of poverty, crime, gang warfare, and the like in South and Central America are distorted and repurposed for propaganda by the North American media and governments, evolving the historical “savage” stereotype into a modern, more pseudoscientific version based on fear of the “third world”, stereotypes of gangs, and falsified statistics.

Trump’s “tweet” from the morning this article was written

It is nearly impossible to explain the current state of Central and South America without a deep dive into the past of Spanish imperialism. Americans today thoughtlessly accept Spanish in their day-to-day life (to the degree it’s present) as a language probably spoken by someone from Central America. But the language originates thousands of miles away — from Spain, a country bordering France and Portugal, and only 400 miles south of Britain — similarly, in countries like Brazil, the language spoken is Portuguese, a language equally out of place. This strange detail is the first hint of a long, brutal history of conquest and exploitation, that is wholly omitted from virtually any mainstream discussion of immigration to the “United States”.

In what could practically be a mirror image of the history of the United States, this story is essentially one of two cultures: the local and the alien, the native and the European. The Europeans appear suddenly on boats, perhaps peacefully at first, acting like they’re the only living thing with a brain and a soul, drive the natives off of the land with guns, and then build walls or fortifications around the land they drove them off of. The natives — at least, those remaining — are either forced deeper and deeper inland, building the best fortifications they can against this strange new onslaught, or are homogenized into European society as a “lesser”, sometimes forcefully, as in the case of “residential schools”, the process of abducting children to institutionalize them, destroy all traces of their culture, and convert them to European culture.

Cross Lake Indian Residential School, at Cross Lake, Manitoba, in February, 1940

In North America, this story gave rise to the present-day situation of dysfunctional, subservient tribal governments and reservations in the “United States” and “Canada”, with a still-continuing onslaught against their sovereignty and the little land they could save. In South America, the story was in some ways different, but in many ways the same. In practical terms, South America was not as amenable to European conquest — the terrain and climate were harsher, and the natives, accustomed to the land, less often succumbed to European advances, successfully building fortifications and “maroon” communities termed “quilombos” with escaped African slaves, some of which persist to this day as functioning communities, and as a political bloc. But the Europeans —here, the Spanish and Portuguese — nonetheless established a strong presence, developing cities and trade routes, and increasing their military might and economic stranglehold over South and Central America — not relenting one bit on their original forms of governance, besides the gradual evolution from monarchy to modern elected-representative “republican democracy”. In other words, the system that they had brought was here to stay, by any means necessary, not to be deterred by the the fact that a continent full of existing societies wanted it otherwise.

The crucial detail in the expansion of the European system was the constantly multiplying, merciless claims of land ownership by the Europeans. This concept of land in European law — rooted in the mindsets of feudalism and cultural superiority, tracing all the back to the laws used to construct the Roman Empire— was fundamentally different to the concepts held by the natives — it was foreign to think of the ground that people walked on being something that could be “owned” — that if someone broke that rule, to step foot on that land, or much less live on it, it would be “illegal”, and hence the rule-breaker would be punished, his buildings torn down. The stunning detail is that the Europeans, holding this concept of land ownership as such a sacred ideal, nonetheless managed to wrest control of ownership of nearly the entire “New World”, through an unended series of outright invasions, broken treaties, falsified causes for war, and massacres.

Left with zero other options and the will to survive, untold millions of natives were absorbed into the European-founded, or into impoverished “reservations”. As time went by, these populations became a major component of impoverished urban populations. Poverty, as it inevitably does, gave rise to crime, gangs, drug use, and urban decay. In South America especially, the mostly European-populated political class, as a whole not nearly as moral and pious as their stringent legal system would imply, gave rise to rampant political corruption, swaying freely to please whoever held the money.

This would naturally take many forms. First and foremost, you’d see the phenomena of North American neo-imperialism — lopsided trade surpluses, the goods of a poorer country being exported to richer countries, under the auspices of “free trade” but, in practical terms, under the influence of “corporations” from the richer countries simply assuming ownership of the economy of the poorer country, often in agricultural exports, minerals, and so forth —giving rise to terms like “banana republic” being used to describe political instability resulting from the whims of this economic control. As if the below-first-world-minimum-wage economic conditions for the country’s workers were not enough, the entire currency of the country would often be pegged on the depreciating U.S. dollar, and/or inflated itself, further increasing poverty and political instability. Popular movements against these kinds of forces would openly attacked militarily, giving rise to the phenomena of 20th century South American guerilla warfare and much of the spread of political “Marxism” in South America, which itself would often sit on the fence between subservience to first-world imperialism and a facade of popular control, often in the form of semi-”Marxist” “neoliberalism”. The international drug trade would occupy a similar position, especially in the late 20th century and after, with the global cocaine trade being centralized near the northern tip of South America, in Colombia and elsewhere, for easy export to the United States (controversially, under the control of the CIA and other agencies of the U.S. government, as witnessed in the “Iran-Contra” affair, where one could see the CIA actually simultaneously trying to influence overseas politics and trafficking cocaine). And on the more local level, politics (and hence police) could be influenced simply by the most powerful local gang, using the police as mercenaries to take out rival gangs, or by landowners or developers needing extralegal “death squads” to kill all of the inhabitants of some patch of land.

These kinds of unstable political situations are sometimes described inaccurately as “anarchy” or a “power vacuum”. I prefer the description of “a society where power has accumulated among evil people” — the point being to omit the European assumption that any society wherein power is not exerted will immediately see someone seize power — as if no societies never managed to exist without being violently controlled in some way. Unfortunately, this is one of the most pervasive myths in Western political thinking, and is itself used as a tool to justify violent interventions in other societies — the results, unsurprisingly, often being that of a ruler uncooperative with Western powers being accused of great crimes, in order to justify a military invasion or coup d’etat of some kind (often euphemized-away with phrases like “we didn’t put any boots on the ground”) and install a ruler who’s more cooperative.

This brings us back to North American society. The same assumptions re: the necessity of power are very much at play here — among the “right” group discussed earlier, as well as among the “left”, it’s assumed with little question that some specially designated organization, with the power to tax, author “law”, imprison, declare war, and generally “to rule”, is crucial to a society’s existence.

The proof is in the pudding, they think — “show me a modern society without a government”. And yet that’s the great lie in its essence. They (“we”?) killed those other societies off. We aren’t the most empathetic, our system of law is not the most ethical, what distinguishes us is our sheer efficiency at killing the competition, bringing us to the great conflict of Western thinking — the “battle for survival” mindset versus the “good of all” mindset. Both are ancient ideas — the former seen in modern thinking originally as the Hobbesian “all against all”, an idea of the world as a place of prey vs. predator, perpetual conflict, life and war being one and the same. This adversarial way of thinking about human relations, paradoxically, is itself a great source of dysfunction and conflict, as it reduces an actor — a person, or a state — to purely selfish, defensive & offensive thinking. This failure is much greater at the political level, where supposedly the goal without question is to be to promote the welfare of all — the idea of the nation or state in itself is inherently to limit the “all” to “some”, immediately creating a dynamic where the “outside” is considered separately from the “inside”, where the politicians only represent the “inside” — their “constituents” — seen today in horrifyingly desensitized political language, like describing the casualties of war only in terms of “American lives”, no matter if a hundred times as many people died on the other side of the war. “We’ve lost 5,000 American soldiers to this war!” By what measure is an “American” life more important than a “Canadian” life, a “Mexican” life, or a life in “Uganda” or “India”? These words, the lines on the ground and political systems they denote, are nothing but human imaginations manifested as social organization and history. An actual, real-life human being described in actual physical terms, of types of tissues, cell structure, DNA, or how they learn and develop in any culture, does not vary across any of these lines. Rather, the differences across these lines are limited to what group identity people subscribe to, what “nation” or “religion”, what ideological faction they identify with, or a superficial aspect of their appearance, or the way they sound, their language or the color of their skin.

The effects of this way of thinking are immediate and obvious. The world, separated into 170-something “nations”, in our supposedly modern era, still sees perpetual violent and pointless military conflict, right alongside its sibling, economic imperialism and global inequality. The “Global South”, as it’s sometimes said — namely, South America, Africa, Southern Asia, and Polynesia — bear the brunt of overpopulation, poverty, misery, and industry, while the “Global North” —namely, North America and Europe — enjoy the wealth and surplus from the rest of the world.

The mindset of imperialism is maybe the strangest part of this phenomenon of global empire. Ideologies in the countries which come out on top give rise to this phenomenon and are used to rationalize its outcomes. The “right” group is the strongest example of this type of thinking, spurred on by herd behavior initiated by popular thinkers in the space. In recent years, this has become characterized by the so-called “alt-right” — essentially a merger of Bush-era “conservatism” — characterized by fear-mongering against Muslims, immigration, “socialism”, and a vague nationalistic sense of “American identity” — and the nascent culture of the internet, particular the undercurrents of communities like 4chan, YouTube, and so forth. The fundamentals of the ideology only evolved slightly — not surprising, considering its emphasis on preserving the past — but the presentation and language evolved, from expressions meant to like “liberal snowflake”, “cuck”, “reeee”, etc. being used to describe and emasculate opposing ideologies, and a variety of in-group memes and terms for their own ideology and members— “Pepe the frog”, “Pedes”, etc.. The sort of “redneck conservative” took on a kind of smug, angry arrogance, and a locked-in mindset of superiority and validation of impulses for negative behavior against opposing groups, communicated visually through these meme formats.

Like the “tweet” posted near the beginning of this article implies, there is a huge, irrational concern placed on the danger of “illegal” (read: not state-sanctioned) immigration. The statistics regarding crime by said migrants, if even mentioned, are falsified. Similarly, other problems are given major attention, in virtually every case far outweighing that problem’s significance in terms of its impact, or based on a misunderstanding of that problem’s causes and effects.

Case in point is the “alt-right”’s inheritance of the Bush-era focus on “terrorism” — one of the most Orwellian words in modern English language — which, to a degree which is controversial, has been falsely associated with the world’s Muslim population in the wake of the much-eulogized “9/11” attacks. It’s what I consider the expert consensus that the attacks were an internal, state-orchestrated attack. This is a hugely controversial topic, and outside the scope of this article — but for the sake of moving forward, I would simply say the U.S. government’s explanation of the attacks failed on forensic and evidentiary grounds to account for evidence of how the events unfolded, and failed to justify the government’s genocidal, decade-long military response to it — further, that the degree to which the government and associated parties (particularly Securacom/Stratesec) were involved with the circumstances prior to the attack is damning beyond certainty. Taking that conclusion into mind, the “alt-right” movement, and the Bush-era “conservatives” before it, are painted in a very ironic light — that they have banded together under the rationale of a threat to their existence, to support a government that created that very threat. Even if one accepts the official story, and the explanation of “Al-Qaeda” staging the attack to try to discourage actual American imperialism, the government response of invading half a dozen countries could then only be seen as an affirmation of continuing what “America” was doing wrong, in response to a wrong done against “America”.

Regardless, you are left with only one picture: an irrational response, spawned from mass hysteria, to group together under the banners of nationalism, increased government power, decreased civil liberties, and increased militarism, in response to an act of violence. The society responded to a punch in the face, from who knows where, by punching itself in the face again, and punching a few bystanders as well. The destructive impulse is to react to violence with violence — it’s the logic taught to a second grader that two people behaving in this way will simply create perpetual violence , one person forever retaliating against the other— that “an eye to the eye makes the whole world blind” — but stunningly, this mindset nonetheless became a fundamental part of the ruling political ideology.

A lot of similarities to this phenomenon can be seen in the area of immigration. In response to the more or less equally fabricated “problem” of “illegal” migration, we see a draconian response proposed — the construction of a gigantic steel wall stretching for thousands of miles to isolate “America” from the rest of the planet, at least on the south-facing side.

Another form of contradictory and hypocritical thinking can be seen here — the same people that this wall are meant to exclude are the remnants of the South and Central American natives — the same mentioned earlier, the oppressed natives of the continent, torn from their roots, absorbed into the urban poor, afflicted by poverty and gang violence, now fleeing to try to reach a better life. White Americans, callous or blind to their misery and plight, informed only by stereotypes and insular visions of a world outside the “United States” as simply a miserable “shithole” (to reference a certain quote), act on the impulse to isolate — to cut off the link between themselves and the undesirable outside, to try to exclude anything from their internal society, besides an identity they view as pure, virtuous, patriotic, etc.— the white American identity.

The irony here is that the identity they hold so proudly is itself very recently introduced to this land — for the 40,000 years before that, that land hosted the people whose identity they seek to exclude. It is the white European identity, the post-Roman Empire, Christian-in-name-only, genocidal, and psychotic identity, that has imposed upon this land now called the “United States”, that has killed untold millions of its previous inhabitants, paved over it with roads, strip-mined it, polluted its water, and killed off its animals. In their fight to “purify” the land, the target is “pure” in so many more ways — the cultures that managed to live sustainably here for 40 millennia, that, at least more than the Europeans, managed to live in peace with themselves and with the environment — while what the European inhabitants seek to preserve is a cancerous, destructive presence, that fosters violence, war, the destruction of the land, and the oppression of others, who are then blamed for all those faults. It is ultimately a projection of self-hatred. What you are left with here is a picture of an animal, clawing at an infection on top of its abdomen, until it’s cut itself open, and starts ripping out its own insides. All other things are blamed for the destruction they’ve wrought upon their own society, with their totalitarian mindset, oppression, and violence, and they simply double down on what’s already done so much to destroy them.

The “American left”, which evolved for centuries alongside the “American right” mindset, I feel has just resulted from so many people’s initial response to a first glimpse of the horrible reality of the “American right”. It’s a convenient and reassuring assumption that the opposition to the “right” is simply in the right about everything. But the reality unfortunately is very different. You could draw the analogy of two abusive parents, of whom the mother, while still violent and abusive, has just enough more sympathy for the child to look to her as the source of comfort. Some of the totalitarian tendencies of the “right” are checked by the “left”, but the vast majority are not. In the case of both groups, there is widespread ignorance as to the actual nature of the “law” — the specific “statutes”, “regulations”, and “codes” at the different levels of government — in general they are accepted without a moment’s thought, except for a few token issues of little to no consequence, which are widely debated to no end.

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum….” — Noam Chomsky, “The Common Good”

It’s trivial to list these issues — they are few in number and repeated endlessly, only changing slightly over time. Abortion, gay marriage, “ObamaCare”, the great border wall, misc. “government shutdowns” every few years, gun rights, and so forth. In the past few weeks, there’s been a showdown between “Republicans” and “Democrats” over said wall, leading to one of said shutdowns, causing numerous federal employees to be “furloughed” (have their paychecks delayed) while various governmental functions — generally, the ones most visible to the public, as in “Washington Monument Syndrome” — are curtailed — with a variety of detrimental side effects on the general population resulting from the cessation of various benefits, which I often find helpful to compare to the period of withdrawal between doses of an addictive drug.

These issues often deal with mildly authoritarian issues — should the government restrict this or that — so in general, the divergence from the “right” group stances, with their character, on average, being marginally more authoritarian — is significantly more pronounced among the general population than it is among politicians — as the politicians quickly converge on authoritarian stances, while the population is slightly more reluctant. The politicians and population both split in half on party lines, but regardless, the politicians reach a consensus in favor of totalitarianism and state control — it can be seen, time and time again, that when there’s a vote to start a wars, to limit civil liberties, to take more money from the population, and so forth, the politicians will vote in favor of it, regardless of whether or not the public supports it.

One example of this I often think of is the 2003 “USA PATRIOT Act” — short for “Uniting & Strengthening of America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism”. The title of the act here is interesting on its own — the odds in this case are microscopic that they came up with the longer name first, stepped back, said, “hey, look guys, if you take the first letter of each word, it spells out “USA PATRIOT!”. No, clearly they worked backwards there, choosing the prideful and nostalgic word “patriot” to ram through a law based on eradicating supposedly Constitutionally-protected civil liberties and legal rights. Enabling various methods forbidden by the supposedly inviolable “Bill of Rights” becomes “Providing Appropriate Tools…to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism”. Who could disagree with something that sounds so good? It seems like a paper-thin facade, that any representative in government with integrity would see through immediately and reject, an unprecedented power-grab incompatible with the free society Americans take so much pride in. But did the “Republicans”, the party of “preserving American freedom”, or the “Democrats”, the party of “protecting American from the Republicans”, reject the law? Was it a 50/50 vote with one party, the good party, rejecting the law, and the other party narrowly pushing it through?

No. The Senate, the upper echelon of the political class, the 100 members of the inner house of Congress — who for some reason, we entrust with controlling the 300+ million people in the United States —near unanimously, in a vote with 98 in favor, 1 against, 1 abstaining — passed the law.

To the citizenry in the “left”, particularly those paying close attention to politics, the “PATRIOT Act” persisted as a symbol of neofascism in the Bush era, a totally unwarranted and illegal crackdown on civil liberties, and yet the subsequent president Obama, of the “Democratic” party, swept into popular office on a campaign of “CHANGE”, signed or voted for a renewal each time it passed. This example is far from the only one of the “Democrats” contradicting the belief that they’re an “anti-war” party — the most recent Presidential candidate from the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton, comes to mind for refusing to rule out the use of nuclear weapons in warfare — euphemistically, “we’re not taking any options off the table” — or her President’s military interventions in Kosovo or Bosnia, or Obama’s endless continuation of Bush’s “War on Terror” into new countries and new methods of warfare, such as the much-maligned “drone warfare”, leading new invasions into Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Somalia, and others. Where the “left” citizenry would expect the “left” politicians to take a strong stance against the militarism of the “right”, they simply continue the same invasions and narratives of the “right”, and create new ones of their own. Obama publicly took credit for the achievement of “ending the war in Iraq” — despite the government continually funding military contractors and the like in the country — while dramatically scaling up military operations in Afghanistan, bringing up the earlier question of American involvement in the international drug trade — Afghanistan being the world’s center of heroin production.

There’s a quote, I forget the source, along the lines of, “the Democratic party is where protest goes to die.” The old cliche of the politician saying anything to get elected, and ruthlessly oppressing the population while in office, applies best to the Democrat —the Republican at least tells you up front he’ll oppress you. The Democratic Party simply appears like opposition to political oppression to people who don’t spent more than maybe a couple hours a month researching politics. Unfortunately, pride, group mentalities, and stereotypes enter about equally as well into the mind of the “left”, so it seems about as difficult to carry on a conversation about politics, or to change their opinion, as it is with a member of the “right”. The result becomes an Orwellian “inside” and “outside” — people who have seen the true ugliness of society and government become muted, unable to obtain a public platform, and impulsively ignored by anyone who hasn’t.

The strange irony in the conversations with “Democrats”, the individual citizens, is how much they, as the modern “liberal”, have deviated from the roots of the “classical liberal” ideology. The latter focused almost entirely on detaching society from the control of government, as a result of their familiarity with the insanity of monarchism. In the centuries since, these memories of brutal and oppressive monarchs have faded, and the positive concept of an authoritarian state has reemerged — this time, not as the loving manifestation of an all-powerful king or queen, but as a scientifically orchestrated guiding force of the economy — replacing, to one degree or another, the idea of an economy freely built by the people.

This has not happened naturally — a centuries-long propaganda effort painted various orchestrated economic failures as the result of “unregulated free markets” [sic] being blamed for wealth inequality and other oppressive economic conditions, as a way to justify constantly increasing state control of the economy to remedy these conditions. The “Great Depression”, an economic collapse resulting not from any natural disaster, but from human institutions, is immediately suspect on account of the simple fact that no single factor should have been able to exert such influence of the economy — a close inspection of the facts reveals the nascent Federal Reserve, at that point only slightly over a decade into existence, as the cause of rampant financial speculation during the 1920s resulting in the “bets being called back”, and the financial infrastructure of the economy collapsing. The waves of poverty resulting from this gave rise to the state assuming control of social functions previously dominated by independent charities —providing food, financial security, or healthcare for the sick and poor — reaffirmed in the 1960’s “Great Society” programs — and seen today as the push for “Medicare for All”. Blind to the details of a century of collusion between government and corporate interests resulting in critical economic functions like healthcare and charity being utterly sabotaged and repurposed into systems of financial exploitation, the modern “liberal” (note the word root here as the same in “liberty”, “liberation”, etc.), now renamed the “progressive”, seeks to wrest control of these functions completely away from the people, and into the hands of government. The quest for complete freedom slowly incorporated new “freedoms” that were really enslavements —such as FDR’s famous “freedom from want” — until the liberationist began calling for his or her own enslavement.

In this way, the modern “left”, in some ways, surprisingly manages to exceed the “right”’s tendency to oppress — to centralize vital functions of society such as education or medicine entirely under the control of the state. It is as if the lessons of 20th century state implementations of “Marxism” had never been learned — that the emotionally-based, oblivious-to-empirical-truth, genocidally destructive, and most relevantly, completely economically disabling, movements under Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Deng Xiaoping, and not the least, the Kim dynasty, had never occurred. That we had not witnessed a clear demonstration, once and for all, of what should be obvious —that giving absolute authority to a single institution to rule every detail of the lives of millions of people is going to be both the single greatest possible opportunity for corruption, and completely incapable of meeting the trillions of nuanced requirements of every person in a society, in a way that actually benefits humanity.

In turn, this tendency to support state involvement in education, medicine, science, or whichever, is seized upon by the “right” — as if they had no totalitarian faults of their own - as justification for another unusual tenet of their own belief system, that some vague conspiracy of “socialism” or “Marxism” is constantly banging at the gates of American society, trying to disrupt the “old ways”. This evolved into a kind of mythology in “right” ideology, a “dog whistle”, as people say — any time a “right” media figure speaks of “the socialists”, “George Soros”, “the globalists”, etc., a viewer will instictively nod, and with somewhere between zero and few particular names or institutions in mind, will say, “oh yeah — them” — completely oblivious to the fact that the leaders in their own ideology profit into the billions and trillions from the division and hatred they foster into them, through the militarism, oppression, and rigorous economic control that they cause.

Both groups, the “left” and the “right”, are just completely unwilling to acknowledge the old truth, that absolute power corrupts absolutely. They fail to see the faults they blame each other for in themselves. They both constantly seek to find ways to entrust more power in some kind of corrupt elite, while blaming the other group for doing the exact same thing.

Ultimately, these contradictory and destructive political tendencies just point to a massive identity crisis in Western civilization, one that’s been progressing for centuries. Unwilling to look truth in the face, they all piece together their lazy and incorrect abstractions and generalizations of reality, their group identities, and rehashed ideologies, from those around them — all full of contradictions, hypocrisies, and supporting great wrongs, that either they fail to see, or fail to acknowledge. They are all unable to cope with the nature of evil, oppression, or domination, either to fully understand it, or to recognize it in themselves and root it out. As such, Western civilization continues on, characterized by militarism, oppression, archaic and dehumanizing legal systems, and a fundamental failure to recognize its own identity, its origins, or its future, and will do so so long as this continues.