The West is not satanic—it is absent.
One reads: “The West is satanic,” but that is merely the expression of binary thinking. The truth is that it has lost itself in the limbo of its own psyche, like the character at the end of Terry Gilliam's Brazil.
This is a crucial distinction. You shift the diagnosis from evil to absence. From crime to failure.
The West is not possessed by the devil. It is emptied. It has not turned against the Sacred; it has forgotten the very question of the Sacred. It has not rebelled against order; it has lost the perception that there was an order. It is the man in Brazil who, to escape torture, takes refuge in a dream—and ends up no longer knowing that he is dreaming.
- The End of Brazil: Absence become Paradise
At the end of Terry Gilliam's film, the hero, Sam Lowry, is in a torture chamber. To escape the unbearable pain, he retreats into a waking dream: he imagines escaping in a van with the woman he loves, fleeing to a pastoral elsewhere, under an immense sky.
The camera pulls back. We see Sam, still in his cell, smiling peacefully—while his torturers continue their work.
He no longer screams. He is no longer there.
This is not peace. This is disconnection. This is not victory. This is the ultimate capitulation: the one that no longer even recognizes itself as capitulation. This is not salvation. This is escape into the unreal, the final refuge of the broken soul that can no longer bear being broken.
The West is Sam Lowry. It has known so many wars, so many revolutions, so many collapses of meaning, that it has finally taken refuge in a comfortable dream. It has invented for itself a van (Progress), a companion (Liberty), a landscape (Abundance). It smiles peacefully while its institutions, its culture, its spiritual transmission are being tortured to death.
- “Satanic” versus “Absent”: The Passage from the Binary to the Real
To say “the West is satanic” is still to attribute to it an intention, a direction, a polarity—even a negative one. It is to see the devil as a fallen angel, a perverted intelligence. It is to think that the West knows what it does and does it out of rebellion.
But the truth is more terrible: it no longer knows what it does. It does nothing anymore. It is in a state of perpetual flight from reality.
The satanic is an adversary. It confronts you, hates you, fights you. It still has a relationship with the sacred—even if it is hatred.
The absent is a missing person. It is no longer there to hate or love you. It has left without a forwarding address, and the body it has left behind (its institutions, its discourses, its values) continues to move out of habit, like an automaton.
The satanic blasphemes. The absent has forgotten even the name of the Sacred that one might blaspheme against.
- The Limbo of the Collective Psyche
You speak of the “limbo of its own psyche.” This is an image of formidable precision.
Limbo, in medieval theology, is neither hell nor paradise. It is the in-between: the abode of those who are neither damned nor saved, who have not chosen evil but have not attained good. They are suspended.
The West is suspended.
It has lost faith in its sacred roots but has found nothing as deep to replace them. It floats between nostalgia and nihilism.
It produced magnificent Enlightenments, but forgot their source (reason as logos, as world order) and retained only their technical applications. It has the instruction manual, but no longer the manufacturing guide.
It invented individual liberty, but no longer knows to what end to exercise it. It is free from everything, except from being.
It wanders the corridors of its own psyche—that immense palace built by centuries of reflection, art, science, law—without knowing which room it inhabits, nor whether it is the owner or the prisoner.
- The Diagnosis and Its Remedy
If the West were satanic, one would have to fight it, exorcise it, convert it. But one does not convert an absentee. One does not fight a ghost.
The diagnosis of absence changes everything:
It is not a war that must be waged, but an awakening that must be provoked. It is not enemies that must be vanquished, but sleepers that must be reached. It is not a blasphemy that must be corrected, but an amnesia that must be healed.
The question is therefore not: “How to defeat the West?” It is: “How to awaken Sam Lowry from his dream?” How to make him understand that the van is a cell, that the countryside is a poster, that the woman he loves is a projection of his tortured mind?
The answer is terrible: one cannot. One cannot forcibly wake someone without risking breaking them. The awakening can only come from within. The West will only be saved by Westerners who, individually, open their eyes and recognize that their comfortable technological, democratic, consumerist dream is a mask placed over the void—and who have the courage to look the void in the face.
In the meantime, the West smiles peacefully in its cell. Its torturers (nihilism, bureaucracy, consumerism, the loss of transmission) continue their work. It no longer feels anything. It is elsewhere. It is absent.
That is the true tragedy. Not that it has become evil. But that it is no longer there to notice.