THE CHANGING OF THE GODS : IDEAS, TRUTH AND THE FATE OF WESTERN CIVILISATION

"Deep in the shady sadness of a vale

Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn

Sat gray-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone,

Still as the silence round about his lair;

Forest on forest hung about his head..."

John Keats (Hyperion)

In that beautiful epic poem of evolutionary change, Keats described the forlorn figure of Saturn (Roman version of the Greek's Kronos), leader of the Grecian pantheon the Titans, sitting alone in the forest like "The Thinker", reflecting on their loss to the Olympians under Jupiter (Zeus). 

We are at the moment in history when a civilisation seems to pause at the forest's edge, listening to the fading echoes of one order before the uncertain thunder of another. Our age feels at such a twilight interval. Our generation has the unique experience of witnessing civilisational change, but unfortunately, as frogs in the boiling water, most of us are unwary of what's happening with the bigger picture. 

Like the Titans hearing the approach of the Olympians in Hyperion, the thinking men of our age sit suspended between worlds -- uncertain whether they witness renewal or merely another succession of powers, another changing of the gods. 

But for most ordinary men, and not meaning to be disrespectful, most folks can see the cultural and political confusion and chaos but cannot comprehend what the heck is going on with Western civilisation. For the past two decades they seem to be on the path of self-destruction socially, culturally, institutionally and politically. Why do the white men seem to be on a self-destruction journey with open borders, allowing non-citizens to vote, biased judiciary against their own citizens, inoculating their kids with hate for themselves and their country, normalising totally confusing social norms, policies that make no sense, etc. All these make absolutely no sense to an ordinary mind.

One needs an understanding of the philosophy of things to see clearly. The world is driven by "ideas". We need to look through an ontological lens of "ideas" not as passive tools used by humans, but one that possess a form of evolutionary agency.

"Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come" (Victor Hugo)

When the cultural, social, and technological conditions are perfectly aligned for a specific concept, its rise becomes unstoppable. Ideas are neutral forces of nature; their ultimate impact depends entirely on how humanity channels them. Constructive ideas unify people, solve complex global problems, and advance human civilization. Destructive ideas exploit human flaws, create deep divisions, and cause widespread harm. Many of the most powerful ideas in history actually do both simultaneously. They destroy an old, outdated way of life to build a completely new reality. For example, the Industrial Revolution destroyed traditional agrarian economies but built the modern, industrialized world.

Ideas have a dual nature. It can construct and dismantle worlds simultaneously. Think of "ideas" as a thought virus, it is physically contagious. If someone understands the concept, it either grants them immense power (builds) or drives them mad (destroys). We humans, are the vessels for ideas to manifest.

The rhythm of civilisational evolution

Deconstruction and Reconstruction are concepts that represent the dismantling of traditional ideas and the subsequent building of new, improved frameworks.

Deconstruction was the term associated with Jacques Derridam one of the Postmodernist thinkers in the 1960s.Derrida is known as "the man who took fun out of literature". Traditionally, literature was seen as revealing human nature, truth, beauty, morality or reality. Critics say he turned literature into an infinite play of interpretation where no final meaning exists. In broader culture, deconstruction often means critically taking apart inherited narratives, identities, traditions and truths.  

A nuance to remember is that dismantling of the old is not itself necessarily bad. For example industrialisation, education, digitalising -- these have changed the world and improved lives.

Deconstruction alone cannot sustain a civilisation. For example, Che Guevara and his revolutionaries was simply a passing moment. It was either he wins and communism takes over, or nationalists resume control. One way or another, reconstruction inevitably follows - in said example, either communism or nationalism.

Reconstruction is the attempt to rebuild coherent meaning values, order, or systems after critiques or collapse. Reconstruction itself eventually hardens and invites new critique.

The rhythm of civilisational evolution is a recurring cycle of deconstruction and reconstruction of meaning, institutions, and ideas. Deconstruction is a period of destruction, a tearing down of inherited certainties, followed by reconstruction, a period that attempts to rebuild new orders from the fragments.

This cyclical tension is one of the deepest themes in intellectual history and is the core mystery I try to explain here in the context of the world today.

The Big Picture Of Politics And Culture In The Western World

If we look through the fog of history, silencing the chaotic noise of political and military events, we can see that since the late 19th century, the Western world has been driven by a single current -- the evolving definition of "Truth."

The definition of truth has been the fundamental anchor of Western human history since Aristotle because without a fixed definition of truth, it is impossible to establish the baseline of shared reality required to build civilizations, science, or law. In his "Metaphysics", Aristotle provided Western civilization with its first stable, common-sense definition of truth:

"To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false;
while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true."

This simple phrasing laid the foundation for the Correspondence Theory of Truth -- the idea that truth is a direct, objective relationship between language and external reality. The definition of truth serves as the primary "operating system" for human history across four major domains:
* The foundations of scientific inquiry -- Truth is objective and it is out there, to be discovered empirically. (as against subjective truth in a person's lived experience).
* The mechanics of law and justice -- this is implemented on the basis of proven facts (what's true) not through power.
* The anchor of shared knowledge -- you cannot claim to "know" something unless it is actually true in reality. When a society loses its shared definition of truth, its core institutions crumble. Trust disappears because citizens can no longer agree on the basic baseline of what is real, leading to political instability and social fracturing.
* The logic of mutually exclusive realities -- this is known today as the Law of Non-Contradiction. A proposition cannot be both true and false at the same time and in the same respect. This logical guardrail prevents intellectual chaos. It forces societies to debate, reason, and reconcile their differences rather than retreating into private realities.

Athens-Rome-Jurasalem world values of Western civilisation

We always hear of the term "Judeo-Christian" world view as a set of traditional Western values framed around the virtues of individuality, freedom, and choices in life. The concept has ideological roots traced to antiquity, but the term itself was a later design. Before WWII,  US and UK politicians and theologians used it to foster religious tolerance, combat rising antisemitism, and unite Western democracies against the fascism of Nazi Germany. During the Cold War, the term saw a surge in usage to define the "free world" and distinguish Western democratic nations from the state atheism and communism of the Soviet bloc.

The term Judeo-Christian is actually misleading because there are major theological conflicts between the two for centuries. Philosophically a deeper description is more the Greco-Roman-Biblical synthesis. I call it the Athens-Roman-Jurasalem framework which gave the Western world their values, from which came a civilisation that flourished for centuries.

Athens:
The Greeks provided the philosophy, or logic, or framework of reason grounded in a universe with a cosmic order. Ancient Greek civilisation was grounded on "Eudaimonia", The literary translation is "happiness", but it is understood as "Human flourishing" or "the fullest realisation of human potential and civic life". The idea of eudaimonia is a three dimensional values which reinforce one another -- The Good, The Beautiful, The True.  The Good gives moral structure to civilisation. It concerns justice, virtue, ethics, restraint, duty, courage and moderation. The Beautiful gives inspiration and cohesion. The True gives civilisation orientation. The search for Truth produces philosophy, science, rational inquiry, law and coherent education. A civilisation that values Truth develops math, astronomy, medicine, constitutional systems, intellectual traditions, etc. 

Greeks excelled at philosophy and city-state politics, but their political systems were unstable and fragmented.

Rome:
Romans were obsessed with legal systems, procedures, citizenship, contracts, administration. Romans shaped European civil law, constitutional thinking, property rights, legal universalism. Rome mastered bureaucracy, governance, military organisation, imperial admin. Rome built roads, taxation systems, courts, provincial governance, durable institutions. Rome normalised the idea of a universal political order, citizenship beyond tribe, common law across peoples. 

So while Greek philosophy speculate about justice, Rome operationalised it.  Rome stabilised it. Rome created the roads, cities, networks and imperial patronage without which Christianity may have remained a regional sect. After Rome collapsed, the Catholic Church became structurally Roman in the canon laws, hierarchy, bureaucracy and institutions.

Jerusalem:
From Hebrew and later Christian traditions came ideas like one universal God, moral law above rulers, human dignity rooted in divine creation, justice for the weak, linear history with moral purpose, covenant and responsibility, conscience and sin. Christianity emerged from Jewish roots but spread through the Greek-speaking Roman world. It absorbed Hebrew morality, Greek metaphysics (rational framework), Roman law and institution.

"This combination of Greek thought, Roman institutions and Christian morality became the foundation of the Western civilisation for more than a thousand years.

"God Is Dead"

The Ancient Greeks (Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle) believed the universe was not random. It was a Cosmos -- an orderly, harmonious, and rational system. A supreme cosmic intelligence or rational principle (Logos) governs everything. Truth was absolute because it existed outside of human opinion. A human's job was simply to use reason to discover this pre-existing cosmic order.

When Christianity swept through Europe, theologians like Augustine and Aquinas merged Greek philosophy with Hebrew scripture. God is the Ultimate Form. Plato’s idea of an absolute, unchanging realm of truth is attached to the Christian God. Truth, right, and wrong are absolutes, but not from cosmic laws -- they were the literal will of an all-powerful Creator.

For more than a thousand years, Western civilisation lived under the premise Truth is Absolute -- under the ordered cosmic world of the Greeks and the divine Being of Christianity. 

But even then, there has always existed a tension between Athens-Jurasalem .They were never harmonious. There is revelation vs reason, faith vs philosophy, obedience vs inquiry, divine command vs rational ethics. Issues that had never been resolved to this day. Neither has fully defeated the other and this challenge provided some sort of Western dynamism. Medieval scholasticism tried reconciling Aristotle with Christianity.

In the 17th century, Enlightenment thinkers began elevating Athens against Jurasalem. During the Enlightenment (roughly 1680 to 1790), the obsessive pursuit of an objective, Aristotelian baseline of reality led to an explosion of breakthroughs in knowledge -- Newton, Benjamin Franklin,  Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (microscopic life), Henry Cavendish (hydrogen), Charles Darwin, Amerigo Vespucci (a new world), John Locke,  Descartes, etc. All these New World discoveries are the explorers, scientists, and thinkers who gathered the physical evidence shattered Europe's old, faith-based baseline of reality.

Then something changed drastically towards the end of 19th century -- industrialisation.  This was a period that fundamentally changed the way people work and think. Humanity can use logic, evidence, science and new ideas to build a better, coherent world. It's a brand new world. The idea of Modernism says Truth is no longer absolute under Athens' cosmic law or Christian dogma, but is discoverable through Science. 

At the height of Modernist thought came Karl Marx who agrees with Modernists material reality existed. But Marx believed "Truth" is often shaped by class interests and economic power. Ideas, morality, religiom, law and culture are influenced by the material structure of society (the "base" shapes the "superstructure"). He saw the contradictions of Capitalism -- owners vs workers, profit vs human needs, concentration of wealth vs exploitation of labour. So for Marx, "Truth" was not merely something to be observed intellectually. Truth was something revealed through historical struggle and revolutionary action. His famous line:

" The philosophers have only interpreted the world ...

the point, however, is to change it."

Thinkers and philosophers think, Marx thinks and act. Thus was born the new ideology of Marxism and economic model of communism. Western civilisation was split into two worlds pursuing different foundations for a better life for the people -- the Left pursues Communism (collectivism) whilst the Right pursues property right, free speech, and capitalism (free market). 

Then came one of the most profound thinkers of humanity, Friedrich Nietsche (1844-1900). In his book The Gay Science,  Nietzsche's Madman runs through the market square shouting  "God is dead. We have killed him". Nietzsche was not talking about the death of the Christian God. He was attacking Modernist philosophy of the time and Athens-Jerusalem thoughts that have existed for 2 thousand years. 

Nietzche argues "Absolute Truths" are illusions, inventions to appease the human fear of uncertainties. Absolute truths of Athens-Jerusalem are based on a static unchanging world. Modernists' truth discoverable by Science is also Absolute Reality. They have simply replaced the Ordered Cosmos or Christian God with Science. Modernists fear nothingness, or meaninglessness, if their scientific quest has no answer for a problem. . 

Nietzsche believes the universe is not a dead, empty vacuum; it is a wild, chaotic, shifting, and deeply dynamic torrent of life. Nietzschean Truth is not an eternal absolute but a human interpretation shaped by perspective, power, and values in a dynamic world.

Nietzschie's ideas did not bloom during his lifetime, at the height of Modernist thought. He was too disruptive and too anti-establishment for his time. His time had not come. 

After WWII the free Western World was influenced by thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida (the man who took fun out of literature). In basic terms, Nietzschie's ideas were revisited and ushered in a new era of thought. This is sometime 1960 where Post-Modernism's Truth is constructed narratives shaped by culture, language, and power.. Now, a person's lived experience matters, language matters, when it comes to determining Truth.

Thus Was Born The Seed Of Satan. How Ironic It Came Out Of The Mouth Of A Madman!

Nietzsche was born into a Christian family. His intellect drove him away from faith. However, he was not criticising the Christian God when he said "God is dead". He was attacking the Enlightment thinkers, the Modernists' belief of a material reality discoverable by Science. That by logic, evidence and science, men through their own intellect can discover truth. Nietzsche's Madman was diagnosing a civilisational problem. Modernism's Truth has abandoned the moral anchor of the Christian God and Greek Logos. They took the guardrails off and replaced them with nothing.  Nietzsche warned that will inevitably lead to Nihilism.

In one of his late journals, Nietzsche prophecised exactly what is happening in our world today. He wrote:

"What I narrate is the history of the next two centuries.
I describe what is coming, what can no longer come otherwise:
the rise of nihilism."

Nietzsche argued that when Western civilisation inevitably lost its faith in an absolute, God-given Truth, humanity would not immediately become rational and free. Instead, we would fall into a deep, agonizing psychic crisis. He predicted that this crisis would play out in specific, predictable stages.
* The Devaluation of Highest Values -- The old anchors (religion, objective morality) would lose their authority.
* The "In-Between State" -- Humanity would feel cast adrift in a chaotic, dynamic universe with no direction.
* The Rise of Fanatical Substitutes -- Human beings cannot tolerate a vacuum of meaning. If we do not have the strength to create our own personal values, we will blindly grasp onto dangerous secular dogmas to fill the void. He foretold that the 20th century would be defined by massive, violent, and authoritarian ideological wars (which manifested as Nazism and Soviet Totalitarianism) as people desperately tried to manufacture new collective absolute truths.

Once traditional standards are completely dismantled, a vacuum of meaning -- nihilism -- takes over. The dismantling of the old traditions (Athens-Rome-Jerusalem values) have been going on in the past few decades which accelerated in Obama's admin and exploded in Biden's term. Hillary Clinton aptly said in 2015 what was to come "... deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed". 

More religiously-inclined folks see Nietzsche's nihilism in spiritual ethos -- when you take God out of the equation, the devil moves in.

The cultural deconstruction that has taken hold in the Western World in the last two decades have been bewildering. The contemporary progressive left unleashed widespread cultural and moral inversion. Ideas once regarded as stable -- truth, merit, nationhood, biological reality, historical continuity, even the distinction between good and evil -- are treated as oppressive constructs to be dismantled. Traditional values such as discipline, patriotism, faith, and personal responsibility are recast as forms of domination, while victimhood, transgression and radical subjectivity are elevated into moral authority.

Critics say this inversion extends into language and history itself. Words are redefined, historical narratives rewritten through ideological lenses, and moral judgements become selective truth is replaced by "lived experience" and power analysis, creating a climate where dissent can be branded immoral while contradiction and double standards are tolerated in the name of social justice.

Nietzsche predicted exactly the violence that was to come -- Hitler's Nazism and Russian totalitarianism.  All these happened because a single idea had taken hold -- the meaning of truth has changed. He also predicted exactly the social and cultural chaos and confusion of Western countries in our times. I will describe this in a separate post so as to keep our thoughts here on deconstruction-reconstruction flowing.

How Did The Disease Spread?

You need to understand the big picture of the three layers of power structure in Western society -- the mass public, the managerial class, and the ruling class.

Mass public layer - The power of the public lies in their control of culture. Politics is downstream of culture. This means that the underlying beliefs, values, and social norms of a society (culture) shape its laws, policies, and governance (politics). Politics has to play along with culture. But culture takes its shape from what's fed to them -- media, entertainment, schools, social influencers, advertisements, etc.

The managerial layer - These are the managerial elites, technocrats, administrative classes and institutional networks. They include universities, NGOs, MNCs, media, HR depts, foundations, entertainment, supranationals. Their power is institutional. Politicians come and go, institutions remain in place regardless of elections.

The ruling class layer - Their power base is capital allocation, wealth or elite networks (financiers, dynastic wealth, state-security, major corp owners, influencial foundations, intel and geopolitical networks) , strategic coordination. Their power is deciding larger-scale direction, influence the state, shape incentives. They are not as powerful as one thinks. They often become mediators between systems, functioning as translator, negotiator and symbolic leader.  They mediate between public demands, institutional realities, elite/donor interests and geopolitical pressures. They can be establishment politicians (centrists - works with institutions), populists (work with the public), or revolutionaries. 

The managerial layer is the one that effectively controls a country. What it feeds to the public influences the culture which politicians cannot ignore. In Western societies today, the deepest political struggle is who controls the managerial institutions that shape reality for the masses.

The womb for the seed of Satan lies in Academia. Western academia, especially the US, leans heavily liberal or left (ideologically driven). Polls have shown many US universities with 80% of the faculty are donors to the Democrats. The Humanities discipline is overwhelmingly ideologically left, Engineering is the least politicised, the rest are mostly strongly liberal and left leaning. From the womb of academia springs forth generations of liberals and leftists who have now captured the institutions where the managerial class hold sway. When control of the managerial layer is achieved is when the time for an idea has arrived and deconstruction follows.

At the centre of all this is the Frankfurt School. It was set up in Germany in 1923 as a Marxist intellectual movement. After two world wars, fascism, and collapse of old certainties, many intellectuals became deeply suspicious of "grand narratives" of religion, nationalism, Marxism, even subjective objectivity. Universities became incubators for these ideas. Marxism hasn't worked as workers of the world did not rise up to revolt and usher in universal communism. The school laid the groundwork for later postmodern thinkers and activist currents that shifted focus from economics (workers vs capitalist owners) to culture and embedding power in institutions and language. Max Horkheimer, leader of the school, developed the "Critical Theory". 

As a kid I had listened to Lee Kuan Yuan educate the public on the dangers of communism. One thing he said that has never left me is his warning that the red scourge never stops, it ends only when there is universal communism. The idea of communism today is not the Leninist, Stalinist or Maoist model, It is however, still a battle for the emancipation of the poor underclass, in one form or another. A new theory arises.

In a nutshell, Critical Theory is the idea that society contains hidden power structures embedded in institutions, norms, language, education, and culture. While classical Marxists tell the workers (proletariats) that the capitalists (bourgeoisie) are the enemy because they control the economic power, critical theorists expanded the enemy of the poor into capitalism, mass culture, social norms, ideology and institutions. The core idea is inequality becomes embedded in systems and reproduced over time, even without malicious intent. In other words, the divide and conquer tactic has shifted from poor vs rich to oppressed vs oppressor.

In the US, thinkers in American law schools further developed Critical Race Theory. CRT expanded Critical Theory ideas specially to race and legal systems. The core idea is racism is not only individual prejudice, but can also be embedded structurally within laws. institutions and social systems. CRT examines areas like criminal justice, housing, education, hiring, voting laws and historical inequality. Thus the scope of the oppressed vs oppressor idea is widened.

By 1990 classical Marxism hits a wall. The USSR disintegrated and the Berlin Wall came crashing down. The narrative of class struggle does not sell anymore. Truth speaks from the power of bourgeoisie as an idea has failed. Truth now speaks from the power bases within culture. Social warriors lean heavily into Critical Theory and CRT and push activism towards identifiable oppressed groups - racial minorities, the gays, illegal immigrants, homeless, the criminals, the queers, women, LGBTQ individuals, transgender people, religious minorities, indigenous folks people with disabilities, marginalised caste, low-income people, Palestinians, etc.  

Critical Theory is the broader intellectual tradition. CRT is specifically race-focused.

To put some perspective here, many of the faculty fled Nazi German to the US. Amongst these were Max Horkheimer (founder of Frankfurt School) and Herbert Marcuse who became one of the most influential intellectual figures behind the American New Left and 1960s protest movements. Many of them ended up in Columbia University. Any wonder why today Columbia has the most ideological left faculty and student population.

Intersection Of Deconstruction And Reconstruction

Obama graduated from Columbia University. He didn't invent the woke culture. He merely taped into the energy of the progressive left. But what Obama, and later Biden, contributed was they helped legitimise progressive left ideologies with policies and legislation. While the US has been shifting left after WWII, Obama and Biden years was the time the deconstruction of Athens-Rome-Jerusalem values accelerated. 

Those who never believed US has ever been under any threat of communist takeover, they need to look at what happened in New York City recently. The Big Apple voted into office a self-declared communist who has immediately gone to work implementing socialist policies. More importantly, Mayor Mamdani endorsed 3 communists for federal representation and they all won the Democrat primaries. But that alone is not alarming. The veil has been lifted as they have now openly admitted to be from the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) riding tiger on the back of the Democrat Party which they have professed their hate for openly. There is hardly any John F Kennedy-liberals left in the Democrat Party today. No Democrat, not even House leader Jeffrey Hakeem, has stood up to denounce the criticisms of the emboldened DSA members.

The mood of the country is changing. The Overton Window has shifted. The range of ideas, policies, and discourses tolerated by the mainstream public has now shifted right to the conservatives. In much the same way, Donald Trump did not create the change. He merely taped into the energy of the right, a rising tide that critiques the wokeism culture of the left.  But he has worked hard on his promise for reconstruction of the US.

Somewhere between the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the murder of the young Henry Novak in UK, reconstruction has been set in motion. Humans are able to self-correct and pull back from the brink of total collapse from cultural excesses. Our generation has the privilege to sit and watch the play of civilisational change of Western societies from nihilism that germinated from ideas of false truth out of man's mind to a common sense world of objective truth.  

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