It’s time we, living in capitalist countries, got ourselves into perspective.

Over the past century, people living in Western (capitalist) countries have increasingly imposed their understanding of reality on others. Now, they are becoming aware of  a growing antipathy toward ‘The West’ around the world. Henry Hyde’s view of  the problems facing Western countries (US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations October 3 2001) is not isolated,

Let us begin by accepting there is no single enemy to be defeated, no one network to be eliminated. Al-Qa’eda is but our most prominent opponent, but its outlook is shared by many others who are equally committed to our destruction… we know now that we have permanent, mortal enemies who will seize upon our vulnerabilities to bloody us, to murder our citizens, to commit horror for the purpose of forcing horror upon us…

 For the past 8 years the West has confronted what it perceives as a growing ‘climate of terror’ around the world. While estimates vary, it is reasonable to say that thousands of lives have been lost and billions of dollars have been spent in pursuing, capturing and killing those deemed a threat to the security of Western nations.

It is time to take stock. Before continuing to pursue phantoms and shoot at shadows (and, in the process, alienate thousands caught in the crossfire) we need to understand what is producing this apparently burgeoning antipathy toward Western capitalist countries. 

Western capitalist nations, over the past century, have attempted to re-organise the world to reflect their understanding of reality. Although we often fail to recognise it, this requires a far-reaching reorganisation of people’s lives in non-Western countries. It would be surprising if there was not, sooner or later, a reaction against such activity. So, what impact does this attempt to reorganise the world have on people living in non-Western regions of the world?

Human beings (including members of Western capitalist nations) believe that they interact with ‘objective reality’, that is, a reality that exists independently of themselves and is perceived in the same way by all human beings. In every community, models are built from that assumed objective reality which, in the opinion of those who order their lives by them, provide the best ways of organising life to make the most of the reality in which they live.

Of course, although the raw materials from which perceived reality is constructed are ‘out there’, nobody actually perceives them as ‘they really are’. We all filter our perceptions through sets of models which order that unstructured ‘reality’. And the models used to structure reality are, like language, constructed over time within communities.

Like language, each community has its own set of models, built through history, and believes that the models it perpetuates are ‘objective reality’ and so are universally held by all human beings. Because these models are fundamental to conceptualising reality and those who hold them have been immersed in the reality structured through them since birth, their existence is not even recognised by community members. This, again, is very similar to our experience with language.

 Very few people are able to focus on, let alone describe, the models which structure their language. Even fewer are able to focus on the models which structure reality because they are required in order to think, and so form the bed rock of human understanding. To challenge those models, is to challenge all the understandings which people have taken for granted throughout their lives.

When people in other communities are subjected to Western capitalist demands for change, based on very different presumptions about ‘objective reality’,  their understanding of their environment and of themselves in terms of their environment decreasingly ‘makes sense’. They lose their sense of identity and self-worth as their indigenous status and prestige systems break down and brutality, despotism and corruption escalate in their communities.

Over time, people begin to realise that the problems they face and the disorientation they experience are connected to Western activity within their regions. Inevitably anti-Western sentiment grows… Read more:  Capitalism and Reality