A recent text, entitled “On the Moral Collapse of the West”, by Andrea Zhok, aims to analyze the spiritual and moral decay of the contemporary world. The author starts from the premise that the “West” is a spurious concept—a recent political-military-financial construct (“Atlantic West”), fundamentally distinct from the millennia-old “cultural Europe” with Greco-Latin and Christian roots. According to Zhok, this Western construction, hegemonic since the end of the 20th century, would have caused a “desertification of the soul” by reducing all value to monetary price, producing one of the “most morally infamous” ruling classes in history—characterized not by cruelty, but by a cynical nihilism and an unlimited adherence to lies as instruments of power. The author expresses concern that authentic European culture may be dragged into “historical condemnation” along with the obscenity of the contemporary West, thereby losing not only hegemony but its very soul.
The analysis, in its apprehension of the state of moral abjection and spiritual desertification, describes with remarkable precision the symptoms of a deep illness. The perception that unlimited lying has become common practice among the ruling classes, and that human life has been downgraded to an instrumental value, is undoubtedly correct. However, in attempting to diagnose the causes of the malaise, the author commits historical and philosophical errors so grave that his analysis, rather than clarifying, ends up reinforcing the chorus of confusions that constitute the very disease it intends to describe.
The fundamental error lies in the radical and historically unsustainable distinction between a virtuous “cultural Europe” and a spurious and recent “West.” What the author describes as the “Atlantic West” is not a denial or deviation from European culture, but its logical and inevitable culmination; the final result of a process of spiritual inversion whose roots are much older and deeper than “a century and a half.” The modern tragedy did not arise from the hegemony of financial capitalism in the final decades of the 20th century; this is only one of its many late fruits.
The genesis of the collapse traces back to a drama unfolding for centuries, marked by the progressive suppression of the vertical and transcendent dimension of existence and the deification of horizontal forces: space and time (Carvalho, 1998, p. 96). The passage from a theocentric cosmology to a mathematized worldview, and later to a deification of the historical process, represented the transfer of spiritual authority from God to the impersonal structures of the cosmos and, finally, of History itself. The “West” that the author criticizes is the final stage of this process, where the religion of Empire—a civil and secular religion—is established as the only spiritual authority, reducing all sacred traditions to mere “cultural facts” or, at best, to private options devoid of any power to order public life (Carvalho, 1998, p. 135).
The confusion in the diagnosis becomes evident when the author includes, among the exponents of the “extraordinary efflorescence” of Europe, the figure of Karl Marx. But Marx is not a victim of the soul’s desertification—he is one of its most potent agents. His philosophy is the finished expression of the Gnostic inversion that subordinates theoria (the contemplation of truth) to praxis (the transformative action on the world), reducing reality to mere raw material for the revolutionary will to power. To present Marx as a representative of the spiritual tradition that opposes modern nihilism is a colossal mistake, revealing a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the forces at play. Marxism, as has been demonstrated, is itself a direct heir of the Epicurean matrix, which seeks not to understand, but to transform the world, replacing reality with a voluntarist construction (Carvalho, 1998, p. 77). The combination of Marxist atheism with Calvinism, which the author points to as the matrix of the Atlantic West, is not an accident, but the fusion of two currents of the same Gnostic revolution.
The “morally infamous” ruling class the author describes is not a product of “financial capitalism” as an autonomous economic force, but the priesthood of the new Civil Religion. Its power does not reside only in money, but in the ability to manipulate the social imaginary and to present itself as the sole and exclusive administrator of the “meaning of History.” Unlimited lying and denial of evidence are not mere tools of power; they are the central dogmas of this new faith, whose liturgy consists in dissolving the ontological structure of reality into a flow of arbitrary interpretations, legitimized solely by their pragmatic efficacy. It is the rise of the usher-state, which, having become the arbiter of all moral and spiritual matters, promotes the “confusion of the languages of good and evil” (Carvalho, 1998, p. 173).
Finally, the concern with a future “historical condemnation” reveals that the author, despite his criticisms, remains imprisoned by the historicist mentality that is one of the pillars of the evil he describes. The real problem is not the judgment future generations will pass on Europe, but the effective loss of the soul in the here and now. The tragedy is not a matter of historical image, but of spiritual reality. The loss of the soul is not a future possibility, but an ongoing process that can only be understood and fought through the restoration of the primacy of individual conscience and its connection with the transcendent dimension—not through lamenting a lost cultural glory or creating false genealogies.
In short, Andrea Zhok’s text offers a vivid portrait of the effects of the modern spiritual catastrophe but fails to identify its causes. By projecting the origin of evil onto an external and recent entity—the “West”—he exonerates the European intellectual tradition from its active complicity in constructing the very desert it now laments. The true genealogy of contemporary nihilism is long and complex, and its most effective agents are found precisely among those whom the author, in a tragic irony, still celebrates as heroes of culture. Healing will not come from a nostalgic attachment to an idealized Europe, but from the recognition that the enemy is not outside, but within—and that its victory was prepared by centuries of philosophical errors and suicidal spiritual wagers.
References
CARVALHO, Olavo de. The Garden of Afflictions: From Epicurus to the Resurrection of Caesar: Essay on Materialism and Civil Religion. 2nd rev. ed. Rio de Janeiro: Topbooks, 1998.
