I don't really know how to write this and frankly don't feel qualified to write it, and I guess that is part of the point. Certainly there's a good amount of western / white supremacist egotism still surviving in the western empire, but it's also being challenged by material realities.

The west's model increasingly looks to be on life support, amping up mask off violence in an attempt to cling to supremacy. But as an article like this one shows, even some of the more proactively plotting imperialists are having to come to terms with decline: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/11590089

I always have mixed feelings about this kind of thing, lest I have too much hope too early, or underestimate the tenacity of the hodge podge of mass murderous western hegemony. But at the same time, I'm living within it and yeah, I'm impacted by my "anti" beliefs in how I look at it, but I seem to see myself reflected in others more often without them necessarily being commies.

That is, the punctured listlessness that comes from a world model coming apart at the seams. It seems annoying to mention a guy like Trump in all this, but he does have relevance in that he's quite literally a textbook clinical definition NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder). How much more fitting could it get for a declining empire based in a view of systemic superiority to be led by a guy who can't handle the idea of being inept, incompetent, unskilled, and (god forbid) somehow lesser in some measurable metric.

He's only the face of it though. The broader supremacist superstructure, and the millions immersed in it, have to contend with it too. Most of us aren't narcissists, but we (the we living within that superstructure) are still going to have characteristics of its narcissism. The clothes that come with it, so to speak.

The psychological framework of "I'm up here and you're down there and this is how it's supposed to be and it's not that somebody designed it this way, it's because I'm more deserving." But I'm not more deserving, I'm not up here (at most I am only up here in fleeting moments in my head), and the material realities bringing me closer to the soil with each step of decline.

It's not that I want to believe that I'm up here. I didn't make the world model. I didn't organize the soldiers who enforced it. I didn't work out the economics of it. But some part of me is attached to it anyway, like a piece of gum stuck to the bottom of a shoe. You don't just choose to exist outside the superstructure you're in by sheer force of will and rise above, and there's that suspicious phrasing anyway. Rise above. Above to where? Rise above who? The "civil" rising above the "savage"?

It's not for me to say, but it's not for me to imply it's relative and flat either. That I can sweep away the hierarchy with a hand and pretend that it doesn't matter. It does matter, which is why I can't just walk out its door like it doesn't.

Somewhere in this morass, humility has to be learned. Not the faux humility of mea culpa and "I'm so stupid/ignorant, teehee," but the studious openness of learning from those who know. At some point, the west, who for so long used military superiority to enforce an idea of cultural superiority, has to contend with the realities of not only being culturally backward, having developed into a mechanized spear with which to stab those who defy it, but also having a declining military and economic weight with which to hide this damning fact.

At some point, the west is going to have to stop dancing around fancy mental gymnastics and admit that the east is red (or red enough anyway), that it's rising in material ways that colonialism could only ever borrow for a time, and that in it is the blueprint for how to escape this death cult we call colonialism and imperialism.