July 26, 2017 - Fort Russ News -
Op-ed by Padraig Joseph McGrath - "The Irish Crimean"
As an approach to analyzing western nihilism, this point will probably seem completely obvious to most of you, but precisely because it's so obvious, we sometimes overlook its importance:
One of the great failings of western ideology, which distinguishes western civilization from all previous civilizations, is that, in the west, material prosperity and progress are pursued for their own sake rather than as a condition for other kinds of social "good."
If you had asked the rulers of the Mughal Empire or of Han Dynasty China "Do you want your people to be materially prosperous?", then they would have answered "Of course!"
"Why?"
"Because it will enable the development of our arts and sciences, because it will provide surplus resources for us to channel into the development of the finer things - literature, science, architecture, music, poetry, theology, mathematics, etc,...."
Prosperity WASN'T pursued simply for its own sake.....
In the present-day Occident, material prosperity is desired simply for its own sake - bizarrely, it is seen as an end in itself.
Most westerners and wannabe-westerners don't understand just how bizarre that is in historically comparative terms.
That Mughal or Han dynasty mandarin would scratch his head in bemusement if he saw us - he'd think "These people aren't very ambitious - they're so simple-minded, so easy to please...."
The present-day Occident is the first civilizational continuum there has ever been wherein the economy was not thought to serve any higher purpose.
This is tantamount to the religious worship of Mammon - it implicitly deifies economic processes in themselves.
No wonder that so much contemporary economic "theory" is indistinguishable from religious fundamentalism.
Padraig McGrath was born in the Republic of Ireland in 1973. He has lived in Britain, Germany and the Czech Republic, and has published journalism and commentary on social and philosophical issues for a number of media for 15 years. He moved to Simferopol, Crimea in December 2013, 3 months before Crimea's re-unification with Russia, and still lives there.
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The Irish Crimean: Mammon and Analyzing Western Nihilism - Like This Article
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