A trauma reaction. An inability to discern that just because something bad happened once, that this doesn’t mean that every form of that thing is bad or wrong.
Nationalism
A white european ethnic nationalist movement arose in Weimar Germany - and it became violent, authoritarian, and genocidal But this doesn’t mean that ALL white european ethnic nationalist feelings and movements are like this - there are possible positive expressions of this.
Because one European nationalist movement became genocidal, the entire category of ethnic and national identity became suspect. But ethnic identity, love of one's people, a sense of belonging to a culture and a place and a history — these are not pathologies. They are normal, healthy, ancient, and universal. Every people on earth has them. The Japanese have them. The Jews have them. The Italians, the Greeks, the Persians, the Yoruba, the Navajo. It is only in the post-war West — and really only among white Europeans and their diaspora — that this natural feeling has been pathologized. The result is not the elimination of tribalism but its displacement into ideological tribes, political identities, brand loyalties, and subcultures — none of which carry the depth, rootedness, or meaning of actual cultural and ethnic identity.
Christianity
The Catholic Church as an institution became highly corrupt, violent, genocidal - yet this does not mean all of Christianity needs to be thrown out. Institutions, churches, and individual Christians may preach a gospel of hate, fear, judgement, etc. that insults a person’s intelligence and makes a mockery of true spirituality - yet this does not mean one should throw out all of Christ’s life and teachings and all that Christianity as a religion has created in western civilisation…
The Christianity case is particularly revealing. What happened is that institutional Christianity committed real abuses — centuries of them — and the modern reaction was not to recover the mystical, Gnostic, interior Christianity that existed before and beneath the institutional corruption, but to reject Christianity altogether. The baby (the actual teachings of Christ, the interior path of forgiveness and Atonement, the entire mystical tradition from the Desert Fathers to Meister Eckhart, etc) was thrown out with the bathwater (the Inquisition, the televangelists, the culture wars, the hypocrisy). And what replaced it was not a deeper spirituality but a spiritual vacuum — filled by consumerism, ideology, therapy-speak, or a vague "spirituality" with no structure, no lineage, no depth.
It is essentially a failure of discernment — the inability to separate the principle from its corruption. And what makes it so powerful and so hard to see through is that it is driven by genuine trauma. The trauma is real. The abuse was real. The genocide was real. The corruption was real. So the recoil feels rational. But the recoil overshoots — it doesn't just reject the corrupt form, it rejects the entire category. And in doing so, it throws away things that are essential to human life.
The two examples touch the two most fundamental forms of collective identity: the ethnic-cultural-national and the religious-spiritual. These are not optional extras. They are basic structures of human meaning. A person without any sense of belonging to a people, a place, a culture, a lineage — and without any sense of the sacred, any vertical orientation toward something transcendent — is a person cut off from two of the deepest roots of what it means to be human. And modern Western society has, to a remarkable degree, severed both roots simultaneously.
- A real corruption or atrocity occurs within a tradition (the Inquisition, the Third Reich, the Crusades, colonial Christianity, etc.)
- The trauma creates a powerful emotional charge around anything associated with that tradition
- The mind, unable or unwilling to do the difficult work of discernment, collapses the distinction between the thing and its shadow
- A blanket rejection follows: all nationalism is fascism, all Christianity is oppression, all hierarchy is tyranny, all tradition is backwardness
- This rejection becomes moralized — it becomes not just an opinion but a moral identity. To question it is to be suspected of harboring the original evil.
- The result is a culture that has amputated healthy organs because those organs once developed a disease.
A few other instances of the same pattern:
Hierarchy. Because hierarchies have been abused (feudalism, caste, class oppression), the modern instinct is to reject all hierarchy as inherently oppressive. But hierarchy is a principle woven into the structure of reality — it exists in nature, in the body, in the cosmos. The rejection of hierarchy does not produce equality; it produces a covert hierarchy with no accountability, because the hierarchies that actually exist are denied and therefore unexamined.
Masculinity. Because masculine power has been expressed as domination, violence, and patriarchal control, the response has been to pathologize masculinity itself. But there is a healthy form of masculinity that is noble and absolutely essential to human civilization.
Authority and tradition. Because authorities have lied and traditions have ossified, the modern instinct is to reject all authority and all tradition in favor of individual autonomy. But autonomy without tradition is rootlessness. Freedom without authority is chaos.
Ritual and ceremony. Because religious ritual has often become dead form, the modern person avoids all ritual as superstition. But ritual is the technology of the sacred. Without it, human beings have no way to mark transitions, invoke the numinous, or participate consciously in the symbolic life. The result is a society that has no rites of passage, no initiations, no sacred calendar — and wonders why people feel lost and unmoved.
The modern West is living in the aftermath of a series of genuine wounds — and has responded to those wounds not with healing but with amputation.
The Waste Land and the wounded Fisher King - and the result is a kingdom where everything sacred has been banished.