The Greatest Western Misconception is That the West is Misconceived

It isn’t uncommon in our modern-day climate to be critical of our own nation and the ideals that served as the engine for it. It, after all, goes with the territory in our postmodern age. But it wasn’t until we, as a people, devoted ourselves to that ethic of skepticism -- the ability to uncouple from some monocratic consciousness -- that we could begin to indict and rectify the sins of unchecked authority.

Following the paradigm shifts of the Civil Rights Era, the American people became open to the prospect of questioning the inadequacies of the Establishment and its inability to solve the crimes of racism, refrain from martial jingoism, nor clarify why there continues to be a symbiosis between the two. By the time the population fully reckoned with the Vietnam War, which had uncoincidentally been festering under the surface of the civil rights struggle, the reality finally came to light that colonialism hadn't died. The televised nature of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, in particular, obliterated the distance between the American public and the horrors of the government’s efforts to combat otherness. In the ferocious and unsuccessful attempt to contain communism in Vietnam, the power elite had inadvertently shed light on the internal parallel that was the overt fight against social equality prior to 1964.

So, in ideological recompense, it has since become mainstream to engage in postcolonialist censure against the powers that be. And this has been categorically positive at times, weakening systems of oppression, heightening accountability, checking power, and so on. In fact, the fundamentals of anything and everything analyzed under the lens of agnosticism have been and continue to be questioned, as they ought to be. The basis of the United States, one always taught to be of liberty and solidarity and enlightened by the ideality of a republic, has paradoxically morphed into one tempered by hypocrisies of imperialism, persecution, and disunion. Along with Nordicized gods, the powers of the West colonized the heavens themselves to cultivate hierarchies with which they have controlled the populace for centuries.

But this history-is-written-by-the-victors mentality, while certainly not unfounded and infinitely valuable in truth-finding, has resulted in the glorification of the East. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, an Indian guru credited with single-handedly introducing transcendental meditation to the United States in the sixties, indeed served as the demarcation between America’s reliance on traditional epistemologies and the migration to more Eastern modes of thought. Symbolized best by his conversion of The Beatles, the Maharishi popularized a subculture that would become a widespread obsession with marginalized peoples -- a cultural counterculturalism. This gave rise to spikes in Eastern spiritualism, self-betterment, yoga, feminist critiques of patriarchal structures, critical race theory, awareness of implicit biases, microaggressions, and microaffirmations, Marxist reinterpretations of the market economy, and appreciation for indigenous peoples, among many other things. Perceptions of men and women, gender identity, family structure, and cultural truisms are subjected to scrutiny. Each of these criticisms of the West possesses great value in the process of healing from the wounds of a bloodied history. But the danger emerges when, during global healing, the positives of Western perpetrators and the negatives of Eastern victims are overshadowed.

Whether or not the belief is accepted that evil is universal and intrinsic, we have to acknowledge that systems of exploitation are bidirectional -- the West is not unique in its abuses. The Western world, that is, political superpowers in the Western hemisphere, has laid bare its shortcomings. But their vastness does not absolve the evils of the Hindu caste system, dynastic imperialism in China, or the massacres and war crimes of the Second Sino-Japanese and Pacific Wars, just to name a few. This isn’t to say that Eastern territories ought to be necessarily disparaged or depreciated for these things—quite the contrary. It is to equalize the East and the West. One is no more ethically validated than the other. Atrocity is not geopolitical, in other words. It is global.

The suicide of the nationalistic self, then, does not destroy the ego -- it is just uprooted and replanted elsewhere. Rather than being healthy self-criticism, the apparent departure from patriotism became a much more nuanced and pernicious pseudo-nationalism. Differences between “us” and “them” are still manufactured. The West, as it is proclaimed, is rife with misconceptions and failure, while the East is enigmatically superior and possessive of all the right answers. But even in this sense, colonialism still hasn’t died. The exaltation of the East is, in actuality, another one of many forms of neocolonialism.

This latter-day phenomenon is comparable to “positive stereotyping,” where minorities have higher expectations to fulfill some criteria that render them over and above in some sense. How, as the frustratingly uninitiated continue to ask, could this be discriminatory? The problem that carries over here is not the quality of the judgment, but the judgment itself. The egoism, moreover, is not inherent in how we gauge one another, but in why we feel the need to gauge one another in the first place. It is a matter of getting out of the judgment seat altogether.

This is probably best characterized as an overcorrection, where a deified East is a product of recognizing self-centered biases and, in order to circumvent them, hyper-focusing on the positives of the Other. But the contradiction becomes manifest when, in trying to make up for the dehumanization of the othered by colonialism, discrimination, and otherwise, those who have been oppressed are elevated and granted some godlike ontology by modern Western perspectives. This still dehumanizes marginalized people and implies distance. Elevation is still a means of alienation.

So in order to truly combat egocentrism, those who are considered part of the Other must be deemed simply as they are -- human, with all of their merits and foibles. No more or less, neither subhuman nor metahuman, but fully and merely human.