My 2 cents

Contents:

• Introduction: Western Culture on the Therapist’s Couch 
• II. The Core Symptom: The Us vs. Them Mentality 
• III. The Hidden Roots: A Mediterranean Crossroads 
• IV. The Debt Repaid by the “Other”: The Moorish Connection 
• V. The Anomaly of Dominance: Military and Economic Mechanics 
• VI. The Moral and Political Break 
• VII. The Scars of Superiority: The Case of Africa 
• VIII. Conclusion: The Path to Humility and Health 

I. Introduction: Western Culture on the Therapist’s Couch 

America, and indeed the broader Western world, is currently experiencing significant social and political turmoil. We see popular movements determined to either tear down old norms or desperately regenerate cultural attitudes that prevailed decades ago. This pushback represents a deep anxiety among a group of people who feel that their nation, or the broader Western identity, has been lost. They yearn for an idealized version of the past that their parents and grandparents spoke of. 

This feeling of cultural displacement isn’t just American; it’s a symptom shared by Western Culture as a whole. But just as individuals must evolve to accept change, so too must civilizations. Civilizations evolve through peaks and valleys; they expand when others contract, and flourish when the timing is right. I believe Western dominance was primarily a result of historical timing, not inherent superiority, a truth that is essential for its recovery. 

The deepest problem, however, is this: When a person or a civilization wants to believe its own flattering story, it tends to hide from the truth to justify its actions. This resistance to reality is why we see the deliberate distortion of scientific journals in the past and the current movements to suppress information in the present. It is all an effort to resist change and cling to a comforting, yet false, narrative. Therefore, this paper proposes an intervention: We are putting Western Civilization on the therapist’s couch. 

Its biggest problem would be diagnosed as a massive Superiority Complex rooted in grandiose delusions. The lie at the heart of this story is that Northern European people invented nearly every great thing in the modern world: science, reason, law, and government. 

The objective of this therapy session is acceptance—acceptance of the inevitable change that any growing, evolving organism goes through. By recognizing its true, multi-cultural ancestry and acknowledging both its genuine strengths and its profound weaknesses, Western Civilization can finally move past the Eurocentrism that fuels disrespect and grow into a healthy and productive global partner. 

II. The Core Symptom: The Us vs. Them Mentality 

The clearest sign of this complex is how Western culture categorizes people, using Color and Race as weapons. 

• Color as the Barrier: The simple fact of skin color becomes the fastest way to divide people. Whiteness is established as the ideal, the unmarked default. All others are grouped under the political label “people of color.” This grouping, regardless of its original intent, forces billions of diverse people across the globe into a single category defined only by their exclusion from the white norm. It visually reinforces the idea that the world revolves around the white experience. 

• Race as the Justification: Race is not a biological fact; it is a social and political invention created during the age of conquest to enforce hierarchy. This construct provided the necessary moral fiction to justify historical actions: 

• The Slave Trade: Race permanently distinguished enslaved Africans as inherently inferior property. 

• Colonialism: Race rationalized the conquest of vast territories by designating non-European peoples as “primitive” or “savage.” 

This manufactured hierarchy is the intellectual root of white supremacy. If Western culture can convince itself that it alone invented the ingredients for success, then the racist conclusion that Northern Europeans are inherently superior flows logically from that false premise. 

III. The Hidden Roots: A Mediterranean Crossroads 

Western culture often points to Ancient Greece and Rome as its pure, original source, but this foundational period was not purely European; it was a vibrant Mediterranean civilization—a crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa. The patient must acknowledge these debts: 

• The Building Blocks of Thought: While the Greeks gave us systematic philosophy (like Socrates and Plato), the knowledge that enabled their genius—geometry, astronomy, and advanced mathematics—was inherited from the older, more complex civilizations of Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt. 

• The ABCs (Culture/Ethnicity): The alphabet we use today, based on the Roman system, was adapted from the Phoenician writing system from the Near East (modern-day Lebanon). 

• The Moral Compass (Culture/Ethnicity): The other great pillar, Christianity, did not start in Europe. It began with Judaism in the Levant, Western Asia, and its early development occurred in the Roman Empire’s Eastern (Greek-speaking) territories. 

The distortion happens when the modern West skips over these foreign influences to draw a straight, clean line from Greece to itself, ignoring the original, shared cultural environment. 

IV. The Debt Repaid by the “Other”: The Moorish Connection 

The therapy must address Europe’s time of intellectual weakness, the Middle Ages. During this period, when learning largely stood still in Western Europe, the Islamic world was in its Golden Age, and the Moors (Arabs and North African Berbers) were leading the way in Spain and Portugal (Al-Andalus). 

The Moors served as a crucial intellectual lifeline to Europe, preserving and advancing knowledge that the West later appropriated: 

• Mathematics Revolution: The Hindu-Arabic numeral system (originated in India, brought to Europe by the Moors) replaced the clumsy Roman numerals, making complex calculations possible. They also formalized Algebra (al-jabr), contributing essential tools for modern science. 

• Medicine and Hospitals: Scholars like Albucasis wrote advanced surgical textbooks that were translated into Latin and became the standard texts in European universities for hundreds of years. 

• Technology and Literacy: The Moors introduced the technology of paper-making (originally from China) into Europe, an invention necessary for the later development of the printing press and the spread of mass education. 

This undeniable debt proves that the European Renaissance—the supposed “rebirth” of classical learning—was actually a massive translation and assimilation project facilitated by the very non-European Cultures Europe would later dismiss. 

V. The Anomaly of Dominance: Military and Economic Mechanics 

Western global dominance was not an inevitable outcome of superior culture; it was a result of sudden, overwhelming military and economic superiority that emerged late in history. 

• The Weaponization of Gunpowder: Gunpowder was invented in China, but Europe’s politically fragmented landscape of constantly warring nation-states created an endless, continuous arms race. This rivalry spurred relentless investment in weaponizing the technology, leading European powers to perfect firearms, cannons, and heavy warships faster than any other civilization. 

• The Industrial Revolution and The Great Divergence: The military edge was cemented by the Industrial Revolution (starting in the 18th century). The ability to use mechanical power (steam, coal) to mass-produce goods and military hardware created a huge and sudden gap in wealth and power known as the Great Divergence. Crucially, this explosion of Western productivity happened precisely when great Asian empires, such as China, were focused inward on stability, temporarily slowing their own pace of innovation. Western dominance was less about inherent genius and more about hitting an accelerated phase of evolution during a temporary global downturn. 

• The Extractive System: The West then used this technological advantage to establish Colonialism, where non-Western regions were forced into systems of extractive colonial capitalism. This means the colonies existed purely to supply cheap raw materials and serve as closed markets for Western manufactured goods—an enforced control, not a natural cultural triumph. 

VI. The Moral and Political Break 

To understand the scope of the superiority complex, we must realize that the modern West’s success was not a straight line; it required shattering its own traditional principles and beating out other great civilizations to take the lead. 

• The Lie of Resisting Change: The current cultural pushback often operates on the premise that change is bad and that the West must cling rigidly to the past to survive. However, the exact opposite is true. The very reason Western civilization became dominant was because it broke from the restrictive, exclusive tenets of Greek democracy—a system that relied entirely on slavery and excluded the vast majority of people. Our modern liberal democracy (with universal rights) is a new, revolutionary concept precisely because it fundamentally rejected the exclusion of the ancient model. The success of the West has always been defined by this revolutionary embrace of moral and political change, not by holding onto restrictive traditions. 

• Superior Contemporaries: To truly understand the complex, the patient must recognize that its ultimate dominance was a matter of timing, not inevitable superiority. For centuries leading up to the Industrial Revolution, the idea of European superiority was unfounded. Other civilizations were more stable, wealthy, and advanced: 

• China’s vast, unified empire was the gold standard for administration and population size, having completed its own long evolutionary cycle toward internal consolidation. 

• The Ottoman Empire and the Mughal Empire in India controlled critical global trade and military forces. 

Western dominance was an historical anomaly—a powerful acceleration phase—tied to unique technological competition occurring precisely when other great global systems had temporarily stabilized or were experiencing internal issues. This means that Western power was a result of a lucky break in the historical timeline, not a destiny. 

VII. The Scars of Superiority: The Case of Africa 

The patient often deflects by pointing to the modern instability of African nations. This, too, must be understood as a direct consequence of the patient’s actions, enforced through Race and Ethnicity. 

Why Africa is Central to the Cure: 

The patient, Western Civilization, must confront the continent of Africa because it represents the critical fault line where the core delusions of the superiority complex were coded into action. For centuries, Africa has served as the ultimate “Other” in the Western narrative—the place whose people were designated as sub-human (Race), whose history was deemed nonexistent (Culture), and whose resources were taken as justification for absolute control (Economics). Therefore, acknowledging the true history of African civilizations and the catastrophic external interference they suffered is the single most powerful step toward dissolving the foundation of white supremacy and healing the patient’s deepest moral flaw. Pointing to Africa’s modern instability as a sign of inherent failure is simply the last, desperate act of the superiority complex. 

• The Internal Challenge (Geographic/Climatic Factors): It’s vital to acknowledge that African civilizations faced massive, non-Western evolutionary hurdles. Climate and geography were not always favorable; for instance, the periodic expansion of the Sahara Desert disrupted long-established trade routes and forced the migration or collapse of powerful, centralized nations (like Great Zimbabwe or various West African kingdoms) long before Europeans arrived. These were natural pressures that required enormous internal resources to manage. 

• The Human Capital Drain: The Transatlantic Slave Trade systematically removed millions of the continent’s most productive people over four centuries, fracturing societies and crippling development. This external trauma eliminated the human capital needed for these African nations to execute their own solutions to environmental or economic downturns. 

• The Arbitrary Borders (Ethnicity): European powers at the Berlin Conference (1884–1885) carved up Africa with arbitrary straight lines, intentionally ignoring existing ethnic and linguistic boundaries. This forced rival groups into single nations while splitting unified groups apart, guaranteeing the political instability and internal conflict that exploded after independence. 

• The Extractive System (Culture): Colonial rule left behind economies dependent on exporting cheap raw materials and importing expensive foreign finished goods. Any infrastructure built was designed to facilitate extraction, not to connect African communities or foster internal growth. 

This history proves that Africa’s modern challenges are not a sign of inherent failure, but a direct and predictable outcome of centuries of economic and political sabotage orchestrated by the colonizing powers, exacerbated by the fact that they were prevented from managing their own historical and environmental evolutionary cycles. 

VIII. Conclusion: The Path to Humility and Health 

The path to curing Western Civilization’s superiority complex lies in accepting the truth of global synthesis and the cyclical nature of power. 

Western Civilization is not a solitary genius but a rich river of human innovation, constantly fed by diverse tributaries. To correct the distorted history, we must fully credit: 

• The Phoenicians for the alphabet. 

• The Indians for the zero. 

• The Arab/Berber scholars for Algebra and the saving of Greek philosophy. 

The Reality of Growth, Not Decline: 

The current anxiety in the West, which manifests as a fear of “losing ground,” is a crucial symptom of the complex. The growth of nations like China (now a global economic power) and emerging African nations such as Ghana and Nigeria (experiencing rapid economic and technological development) does not signify American or Western decline; it signifies global progress. This success is cyclical. America’s feeling that its perceived current failures are somehow related to other nations’ advancements is a classic symptom of the superiority complex, rooted in the false idea that global success is a zero-sum game that the West must exclusively win. America returning to a romanticized, restrictive past will not slow the growth of other nations; it will only impede its own ability to adapt to a multi-polar future. 

Furthermore, we must honor the forgotten innovators within its own borders: 

• America’s foundational strength is built on immigration and diversity. Its success was fueled not by ethnic purity, but by the constant influx of global talent. Immigrants from every corner of the globe, alongside African Americans and other diverse populations, secured thousands of patents and founded major industries. Figures like Elijah McCoy (automatic lubricator) and Garrett Morgan (traffic signal), despite facing immense racial barriers, prove that ingenuity is distributed across all Races and origins. This history shows that the West’s true strength lies in its pluralism—its capacity to draw from the worldwide well of invention.. 

Acknowledging this complete, honest history shatters the lie of singular European creation. When a civilization truly knows its history is built on the genius of all people, the bias that fuels racism and disrespect loses its intellectual foundation. This truth forces the end of active information suppression and allows Western Civilization to accept the ongoing, inevitable evolution that any great organism must endure. This leads not to weakness, but to genuine strength—the capacity for truth, humility, and universal respect.