Why Western Civilisation is Facing the Great Unravelling, By Peter West

We've all seen the headlines about "polarisation" and "fragmentation," usually served up with a side of hand-wringing about Twitter bots and echo chambers. But there's a more chilling diagnosis floating around the paywalled corners of the intellectual Right lately: Civilisational fragmentation isn't just a political disagreement; it's an erosion of reality caused by a total lack of a coherent worldview.

In short, the "house" of Western Civilization is falling apart because we've forgotten that it was supposed to have a foundation, a roof, and a purpose. Instead, we're all just fighting over the wallpaper in the guest bathroom while the termites have a field day with the floorboards.

1. The IKEA Model of Identity

In the old days — you know, ten minutes ago in historical terms — civilisation was built on a "Grand Narrative." Whether you were a peasant or a prince, you shared a map of the world. You knew where you came from (the past), what was expected of you (duty), and where you were going (the future/the transcendent).

Today, we've replaced that solid oak furniture with "Flat-Pack Worldviews." We pick a bit of secular humanism here, a dash of therapeutic yoga there, and a heavy dose of political coercion to hold it all together. The problem is that IKEA worldviews aren't meant to hold up a civilisation. When the wind blows — say, in the form of an economic crisis or a global pandemic — the whole thing wobbles because nobody agrees on the assembly instructions.

2. The "View from Nowhere" leads to "Nowhere"

The modern liberal project promised us that we didn't need a shared worldview. We were told we could all just be "individuals" floating in a neutral marketplace of ideas. It turns out that "neutrality" is just a fancy word for "empty."

When you stop teaching the classics, stop valuing the sacred, and start treating history like a crime scene rather than an inheritance, you don't get a more "inclusive" society. You get a fragmented one. You get a population that can't even agree on what a "woman" is, let alone what "justice" or "the good life" looks like.

Conservative Pro-Tip: A civilisation that stands for everything actually stands for nothing, and a civilisation that stands for nothing eventually falls over when the dragons breathe on it.

3. Fragmentation as a Feature, Not a Bug

From a conservative perspective, this fragmentation isn't an accident; it's the logical conclusion of "Expressive Individualism." If the highest goal of life is to "be yourself," then there are 8 billion+ versions of "the truth" walking around.

Cohesion requires sacrifice. It requires saying, "I will give up a bit of my personal whim to belong to this greater thing." But we've become so allergic to authority — religious, historical, or even biological —that we've shredded the fabric that used to bind us. We aren't a "people" anymore; we're just a collection of demographics sharing a ZIP code and a Netflix subscription.

The Verdict: Can We Re-Glue the Cracked Vase of Modernity?

The dark irony is that as our shared worldview erodes, we become more obsessed with politics, not less. We try to use the law to force people to act like we have a shared culture, which is like trying to use duct tape to repair a shattered Ming vase. It looks ugly, it doesn't hold water, and eventually, the tape loses its stick.

If we want to stop the fragmentation, we have to stop pretending that "tolerance" is a sufficient substitute for "truth." We need to go back to the basement, check the foundation, and remember that civilisation isn't something you innovate into existence — it's something you inherit and protect.

The Counter-Manifesto: Rebuilding the Foundation

To stop the rot, we have to move past the "DIY" approach to reality. If fragmentation is the result of billions of individual truths, the cure is a return to Objective Order. We don't need a new "app" for society; we need to rediscover the operating system that worked for centuries.

The Restoration of Shared Language: We must stop the semantic games. If we cannot agree on the meaning of basic words — family, virtue, duty, truth — we aren't a civilisation; we're a tower of Babel with better Wi-Fi. Rebuilding starts with calling things what they are.

The Primacy of the Local: Since the "Grand Narrative" has been shattered at the national level, the repair work begins in the "Little Platoons." It's hard to fragment a community that shares a physical space, a local church, a school board, and a common history. We re-glue the vase by starting with the largest shards first.

The Inheritance Model: We must pivot from being "consumers" of culture to being "stewards" of it. Education shouldn't be about "interrogating" the past until it confesses to modern sins; it should be about learning the wisdom of those who managed to build the cathedrals we're currently spray-painting.

Embracing Transcendence: A worldview that stops at the edge of the physical world is too small to sustain a civilisation. Without a sense of the sacred — something higher than our own appetites — society becomes a zero-sum game of power. We need a "North Star" that isn't just a reflection of our own faces. I suggest Christianity, which has been the foundation of the West; tried and totally proven.

True conservative "progress" isn't moving forward into a void; it's a stubborn return to the things that stay true even when they aren't popular. It's the realisation that while the wallpaper might change, the load-bearing walls are non-negotiable.