He’s not the first or the only one, however. The British psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist says essentially the very same thing in his books and his many talks available on YouTube. As did Carl Gustav Jung all his life.
The decline of religion in the west was actually Jung’s main concern. He predicted that the west had approximately 50 years left, shortly before his death in 1961. That’s 2011 and quite close to the current crisis.
The following quote sums his standpoint up quite nicely:
“We think we can congratulate ourselves on having already reached such a pinnacle of clarity, imagining that we have left all these phantasmal gods far behind. But what we have left behind are only verbal spectres, not the psychic facts that were responsible for the birth of the gods. We are still as much possessed by autonomous contents as if they were Olympians. Today they are called phobias, obsessions, and so forth; in a word, neurotic symptoms. The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor’s consulting room, or disorders of the brains of politicians and journalists who unwillingly let loose psychic epidemics on the world.”
Posted by: Helmuth von Moltke | Nov 18 2025 20:48 utc | 37
Cut and pasted from Moon of Alabama URL:
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2025/11/the-defeat-of-the-west-and-europes-bleak-future.html
Michael Hudson nails it…
That is their idea of national interest. So, it’s not what you mean by national interest. When you and I talk about national interests, we use it in the way that it used to be used 50 years ago. It’s the interest of the entire economy — if you were saying what is good for the economy, in terms of its material welfare and well-being for the population, the increase in output, and the more equal distribution of this output — that’s how you and I, and, I think, most of your listeners, have defined a national interest.
But the national interest as defined by the European leadership is: No, our interest is the same as in America — the 1%, mainly the 10%. Our interest is in the military-industrial complex. Our interest is the money in our personal pockets, that we get from the bribery from the U.S., from NATO, from the companies that we represent — against the interest of labor and the voters.
So, you have a divergence of national interest, from what used to be called a materialist approach to history: thinking that countries are going to act in their own economic, and social, and political self-interest, in a democratic way that represents what’s good for the population as a whole. This is no longer the meaning of national interest in today’s Western economies, from the United States to Europe.
The Strange Case of Europe’s Decline | Michael Hudson
Posted by: Saint Jimmy | Nov 18 2025 20:46 utc | 36