Barbarity is not external to the system, it lies at its very core, embedded in its logic of self-preservation, expansion, and reproduction.
When the West masks its geopolitical ambitions behind a facade of morality—framing them as civilizing missions, democratization efforts, humanitarian interventions, defenses of freedom, or champions of the rule of law—the stark contradiction between these claims and actual practice inevitably prompts charges of hypocrisy and “double standards.” However, such criticisms presume falsely that the Western capitalist system holds a consistent moral framework which it occasionally violates. In truth, this system is not governed by values. Rather, values serve as conditional tools, switched on or off depending on strategic needs. The system operates based on criteria of utility, efficiency, and power. Confronting it means asking: Useful to whom? Effective for what purpose? Power vested in whose hands? These questions challenge the system’s very purpose—the goal of maintaining and enlarging capital and sustaining an order that centralizes wealth and influence, an inherently anti-social aim. Taken to its extreme, this objective exposes a deeply anti-human nature. Recognizing that the system primarily serves vested interests hidden as universal ones enables evaluation not just of its methods but its legitimacy as a whole.
Let me begin by tracing the philosophical origins of a worldview that, having discarded the Divine as the foundation for moral order—and with it any transcendental dimension—has consequently sidelined the human being, with all his dignity, relationships, and limitations. Once humanity ceases to be an end in itself and instead becomes a mere tool, the danger (quite real today) arises that humans might be replaced by more efficient instruments. Examining how this system functions reveals that its rationality long ago took on a depersonalized character—an insight already grasped by Marx. Within it, a self-sustaining reason has emerged that claims to independently define justice, truth, goodness, and evil based on calculation, utility, efficiency, and outcomes.
The two philosophical traditions at the root of this outlook are English utilitarianism and American pragmatism. Despite their differences, both reduce the “just” to the “useful.”
Classical utilitarianism as articulated by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill holds that the morality of an action depends on a cost-benefit analysis—that is, its consequences. No actions are intrinsically good or bad, right or wrong according to ethical or religious absolutes transcending the system. Bentham, essentially a legal reformer and social engineer, introduced the “felicific calculus”: the notion that pleasure and pain are measurable quantities that can be combined to determine the moral correctness of acts.
Pragmatism, developed by American thinkers like William James, John Dewey, and Charles Sanders Peirce, treats ideas, theories, and moral values fundamentally as tools for solving problems. The “truth” of concepts lies in their “practical value,” meaning their effectiveness in helping us navigate the world and achieve goals. Its proponents intended pragmatism to democratize knowledge, challenge dogmatism, make philosophy serve social progress, and establish scientific inquiry’s logic.
However, by rejecting transcendence and thereby closing off any meaning horizon beyond the current system, pragmatism ultimately became a method of optimizing, legitimizing, and strengthening that very system.
The rise and acceptance of utilitarianism and pragmatism in the Anglo-American context has both a philosophical background (Nominalism and Empiricism) and a historical reason.
Utilitarianism emerged in Britain during the Industrial Revolution, an era of rapid social and economic upheaval marked by urban poverty and class struggle. As the emerging ruling class needed to instill a work ethic in the lower classes, abandoning absolute moral principles became necessary. What was required was a moral structure flexible enough to justify not only exploitation combined with labor surveillance and discipline domestically but also colonial domination abroad—all under the guise of a “greater good” defined by the bourgeoisie.
This framework essentially codified Marx’s notion of homo economicus, reducing all human relations to stark self-interest and cold economic transactions.
This theoretical foundation was forged amid a commercial empire compelled to address the very problems its dominance created, such as finding rationale for ruling other peoples. It is no accident that John Stuart Mill (1) asserted “despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians,” if done for their improvement. In effect, British administrators retained the authority to define what constituted “the greatest good” for Indians or Africans. Mill explicitly rejected the concept of a federation of sovereign states in favor of empire.
Notably, Bentham coined the term “international” in the late eighteenth century while referring to the international market as a testing ground. (2)
Pragmatism, a philosophical movement that took shape in late nineteenth-century America, evolved in a different historical setting.
Put bluntly, pragmatism serves as the philosophy of a power that no longer needs to justify itself because its logic has become naturalized and accepted as common sense.
While utilitarianism justified the industrial and colonial capitalist expansion during its rise, pragmatism personifies an ethos of capitalism whose rationale is firmly embedded socially, allowing it to dispense with moral support. Free from entrenched principles and fixed rules, pragmatism adapts to any circumstance.
Permeating everything from American education theory to legal systems, pragmatism has morphed into the ideological core of global capitalism and business management—a dominant discourse infiltrating all areas of life, including personal relationships. This more subtle form of subsumption operates through a vocabulary that does not initially appear economic, such as “personal growth,” “effective communication,” “emotion management,” “social capital,” and self-optimization for “results.”
Pragmatism has faced criticism from Marxist philosophers (3) for embodying imperialism, and from conservative thinkers for representing a principle-free adaptation philosophy that exposes society to relativism and entrenched power. Despite their different stances, both critiques agree that pragmatism offers no resistance to the status quo since it dismisses any transcendent principles to challenge it.
The Mexican thinker José Vasconcelos (4), writing outside of Marxist frameworks, described pragmatism as “the philosophy of gunboats,” arguing it was not a neutral knowledge theory but an epistemology designed for expansionist nations, a “sub-philosophy” treating “truth” as “whatever works to secure power.” Vasconcelos argued that empirical philosophies “depend on appetite and the interests of their epoch,” causing a shift “from using experience to justify norms to bending norms to fit selfish interests.” According to him, when such philosophies coincide with moments of “practical fervor,” history produces “national philosophies, racial philosophies, and imperial philosophies.”
The variable geometry of values and principles
This outlook inevitably results in selective value application: a value is upheld if useful. When the West’s aim is preserving and spreading its dominance, any value losing utility is easily redefined or discarded. This instrumental logic is fully visible in the West’s treatment of fascism and Nazism historically and currently. During World War II, anti-fascism was enshrined as the moral bedrock of the Western liberal order. Soon after, during the Cold War, anti-communism displaced anti-fascism in practical utility. Though anti-fascism remained honored ceremonially, it was effectively sidelined.
In postwar Japan, the United States rehabilitated right-wing nationalists and fascist collaborators, including Nobusuke Kishi (a war criminal turned Prime Minister), and shielded the infamous Unit 731 scientists, responsible for gruesome experiments on thousands of prisoners from China, Russia, Korea, and Mongolia. Condemning Japanese imperialism was sacrificed to utility, transforming Japan into an anti-communist regional bulwark. The US did not purge Japanese ultra-nationalists; instead, it co-opted them. CIA files show they participated in US-backed espionage missions in Japan, efforts to infiltrate Soviet and North Korean territories, and recruitment of Japanese mercenaries to “protect” Taiwan.
Also noteworthy are programs that brought German and Austrian Nazi scientists and engineers to the US. Operation Overcast, authorized by the Joint Chiefs of Staff on 6 July 1945, initially targeted 350 specialists but later expanded.
In 1946, President Truman approved a broader effort under the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA)—Operation Paperclip—to select useful Nazis.
From 1945 to 1955, 765 scientists, engineers, and technicians who served Hitler continued careers in the US through these programs. Recruitment extended beyond scientists—former members of the SS, SD (Sicherheitsdienst), and Gestapo were absorbed into US military, intelligence agencies, and NATO, valued for their expertise in espionage and counterintelligence against the Soviet Union.
The most notable example is General Reinhard Gehlen, ex-head of Nazi intelligence on the Eastern Front. Rather than being prosecuted, he was recruited by the US to rebuild his spy network with CIA support. In 1956, his organization formed the core of the Federal Intelligence Service (BND), West Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, with Gehlen as its inaugural president until retirement in 1968.
In Italy, Operation Gladio was NATO and CIA’s code name for the Cold War “stay-behind” network. Comparable secret networks existed in nearly every Atlanticist country, from Sweden to Turkey. Though intended to resist unlikely Soviet invasions, their history uncovers a darker reality: Nazi-fascists (past and active), Freemasons, and terror groups were recruited to execute the Strategy of Tension—false-flag attacks and terror campaigns to create fear, justify repression, discredit opponents, and push society toward authoritarian rule.
The West’s stance on Ukrainian nationalism also exemplifies this utilitarian approach. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its armed wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), allied with Nazi Germany during WWII. Leaders Stepan Bandera, Andriy Melnyk, and Roman Shukhevych are now hailed as national heroes in Ukraine with public places named after them. The Azov Battalion, originating from the neo-Nazi Patriot of Ukraine, was banned by the US Congress in 2018 from receiving American weapons, funds, or training due to its extremist and Nazi ties. This ban vanished rapidly; the US lifted it, and Western media repositioned Azov as a legitimate military force. Like earlier terrorist groups, Azov proved instrumental in proxy hostilities against Russia.
The same utilitarian framework produces uneven applications of principles such as self-determination: armed or suppressed depending on convenience. A striking current example is Western backing of Israel despite ample evidence of genocidal policies and military operations in occupied territories.
Were human rights truly Kantian categorical imperatives, they would apply universally, independent of consequences or vested interests. The West would be morally and politically compelled to sanction or publicly condemn any state—ally or adversary—that violatessuch norms, without regard to victim nationality or perpetrator usefulness.
Yet in the Anglo-American utilitarian-pragmatist tradition, principles are never absolute and must be weighed against outcomes aligned with prioritized interests. Israel’s strategic role as a Western military, intelligence, and technological outpost in the Middle East outweighs the “cost” imposed by violations of Palestinian rights and selective erosion of international law.
Even the “free market,” hailed as Western capitalism’s sacred ideal, is abandoned whenever state action is required to protect Western capital from crises, as shown by the 2008 bailout of financial institutions, sanctions as pressure tactics, and widespread protectionism aimed at containing China.
Post-Ethics and Post-Democracy
While history is full of leaders and governments shifting alliances and breaking agreements with former foes, it remains crucial to consider how easily the West imposes contradictory narratives and policy reversals on both the so-called “international community” and its own people.
In traditional societies—based on honor, religion, kinship ties, or committed ideologies—a leader’s legitimacy depends on fidelity to shared values. Hence, any collaboration with sworn enemies is viewed as betrayal, hypocrisy, or weakness, breaking the social contract, corroding trust, and stirring resentment that eventually erupts in violence or expulsion of the traitors.
In the modern West, political leaders—interchangeable figures shaped by marketing campaigns—do not suffer these consequences because the underlying anthropological, political, and cultural paradigms have drastically shifted. Leaders simply leave the stage and are replaced by others more suited to serve a select elite’s interests, just like corporate executives.
Postmodernism has dismantled the West’s “grand narratives.” The West no longer holds a creed rooted in religion, revolution, or nationalism, and possesses no moral boundary that cannot be crossed with impunity.
Classical societies are often governed by deontological ethics, sometimes combined with virtue ethics. By contrast, the contemporary West primarily operates within a utilitarian-pragmatic framework where politics mirrors management: special interests define goals which steer cost-benefit analyses. Marketing professionals—the Consent Manufacturing Industry through media, algorithms, culture, education, and research—package and sell these goals as the common good.
Walter Benjamin insightfully noted that capitalism is the West’s true religion. It has not “disenchanted” the world, as Max Weber predicted; instead, it relocated the sacred into markets, profits, and consumption. Given capitalism’s intrinsic contradiction between capital and labor, it inevitably generates ongoing contradictions, not as insurmountable dilemmas but as technical problems to fix. For capital, crises offer opportunities: the system adapts, refines regulatory frameworks, adopts new technologies, and ignites new accumulation cycles. Irresolvable contradictions are merely deferred across space and time. So long as these deferrals remain feasible, the system reproduces and grows.
Within this setting, expecting political leaders to adhere strictly to their declared ideals and campaign promises is unrealistic. They justify contradictions by citing “external constraints”—experts, financial markets, geopolitical circumstances—that compel decisions at odds with their platforms. Crucial decisions have long been removed from political discourse, imposed as “inevitable” (There Is No Alternative). This trend is only reinforced by today’s technological and managerial culture.
An additional key distinction lies in memory. Traditional societies possess a “long memory” passed down through generations. Conversely, the contemporary West suffers from a “short memory” exacerbated by short electoral cycles and 24-hour news coverage. Before citizens can process betrayals and mobilize, their attention is diverted by the next scandal or “emergency.”
Accusing the West of double standards presupposes belief in a universal, binding ethical and political code applicable to all. After World War II, many hoped—or deceived themselves—that such a code existed, but this faith is misplaced. The impotence of international bodies like the UN clearly demonstrates this.
For some time, the West has functioned under a regime of post-democracy upheld by a post-ethical capitalist power that increasingly concentrates wealth.
When Western states invoke freedom, democracy, and human rights—even while routinely violating them—it is because these ideals have been emptied of substance and serve as effective instruments for legitimizing military interventions, undermining rivals, and manufacturing consent. The West is not failing to live up to its values; those values were never the real objective. The goal was hegemony.
Whose “values”?
The “Western values” most often invoked—individual liberty, representative democracy, human rights, free speech, rule of law, private property, free market, equality, and anti-totalitarianism—form a fluid set of norms developed through various European historical phases and retroactively universalized to justify a geopolitical bloc.
Though Enlightenment thinkers spoke of universal rights, they meant the rights of a “rational, civilized subject”—defined as a propertied, white, European, Christian male. Women and non-Europeans were excluded as “irrational” and unfit for self-governance.
The phrase “Western values” gained prominence during the Cold War to distinguish the “free world” from the Soviet bloc and resurfaced post-1989 to legitimize NATO expansion, humanitarian interventions, and neoliberal globalization.
Interestingly, the West kept shifting its criteria.
As several Global South countries adopted traditional Western values, the West introduced new standards—highly specific, culturally loaded, or administratively complex—to sustain moral superiority and brand rivals as deficient in “universal standards.”
LGBTQ+ rights, “good governance” (transparency and anti-corruption), environmental benchmarks, and Internet freedom became fresh dividing lines between “the civilized and the uncivilized.”
Because Western values function primarily as tools, contradictions are unavoidable—not only between proclaimed ideals and material realities but also within the values themselves. As long as these ideological contradictions persist, the capitalist system can absorb and even exploit them.
Consider freedom and equality, which clearly pull in opposite directions. Western freedom largely emphasizes “negative liberty” (freedom from interference) over “positive liberty” (the ability to self-determine within a community). Freedom is downgraded from a political or civil right to competition and consumer choice. Even these freedoms remain subject to big capital’s imperatives, which can curtail them at will.
The only genuine freedom remaining is that of capital itself: the liberty to set rules, expand beyond all borders, and permeate all realms of human life without constraint. Marx anticipated this, writing in the Grundrisse: “It is not the individuals who are set free by free competition; it is, rather, capital which is set free.”
You are “free” to pick from dozens of cereal brands, vote for parties incapable of changing the system, and declare “they/them” pronouns on a résumé. Yet this illusion conceals harsh structural impotence: isolated individuals lack power over the macroeconomic forces and policies shaping their lives. Freedom becomes a commodity, and identity, an exercise in branding.
The freedom of capital fundamentally contradicts real democracy. Since capitalism inherently concentrates wealth and power, how can it be truly compatible with democracy, whose essence disperses power?
When demands for democratic equality threaten profits or property, the system does not hesitate to forsake democracy in favor of authoritarianism to defend capital’s “freedom.”
Praising Western liberalism while ignoring this power concentration amounts to either profound naivety or ideological collusion.
Human rights are invoked to justify interventionism, while the rule of law, though formally guaranteeing equality, enforces substantive inequality and disciplines subordinate classes. Liberal democracy is promoted only where it serves regime change, making its application entirely utilitarian.
The free market is preached to the Global South only when convenient; otherwise, the West imposes protectionist tariffs, sanctions, and arbitrary “rules” restricting exports.
Yet it is important to stress that ideals like freedom, equality, and human dignity are not exclusive to the West. These principles are deeply embedded in Islamic, Indian, Chinese, African, and Indigenous traditions. Critically examining Western values does not imply outright rejection but recognizing them as historically situated constructs applied selectively.
War as the Logical Outcome of Instrumental Rationality
If we understand the degeneration of liberalism into Nazi-fascism not as a betrayal but as the realization of its economic logic when confronted by mass democracy’s “threat” in the early twentieth century, then it ceases to be an anomaly or break, instead becoming an authoritarian remedy to liberalism’s internal crisis (5). Viewed this way, Nazi-fascism served as a self-regulating device for capitalist survival.
It is instrumental reason itself—the prevailing code of modern Western governance—that produces anti-democratic and frequently inhumane political and economic choices. Having embraced cultural relativism and rejected grand narratives, the West no longer agrees on what constitutes Good, Truth, or Justice and thus fixates on the “how.”
Ethics has been supplanted by procedure. Moral language—rights, justice, duty—remains in use but its teleological grounding has vanished.
Freed from a humanist ethic, pragmatism becomes totalitarianism’s and technocracy’s perfect ally. Governments enact authoritarian, neocolonial, or mass surveillance policies, justifying them as “necessary” and “effective” means to maintain order and security.
Depicting political decisions as merely “technical” or “pragmatic” conceals power asymmetries and compels passive compliance; critical thought gives way to simple “problem-solving.” As Mark Fisher observed (6), “the system makes it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”
When contradictions reach breaking points—widening inequality, social fragmentation, or failed policies—the system triggers regulatory responses. These may manifest as authoritarian, protectionist “closure mechanisms” or “opening mechanisms” where some chaos is tolerated to create new capital accumulation chances.
Historically, Western capitalism’s survival has relied on two main strategies: spatial displacement by exporting inflation, environmental harm, political instability, and low-wage labor demands to the “periphery” (Global South); and temporal displacement via financialization—a “consume today, pay tomorrow” debt-driven growth model shifting burdens to future generations.
Currently, both options are narrowing. The Global South—especially China as a systemic force—is imposing real and structural limits on exporting problems outward or into the future. Consequently, the Western system must address them internally and now. But a democratic resolution would require radical redistribution of wealth and power—something elites will never voluntarily permit—leading instead to authoritarian drift cloaked as “security” and “crisis management,” combined with militarization to prop up a rapidly weakening geopolitical supremacy. Merely by asserting sovereignty and rejecting the neocolonial template, the Global South has unintentionally hastened the West’s internal reckoning.
But there is more. By centering human beings in its development agenda, China poses an unacceptable challenge to a system premised on the falsehood that capitalist neoliberalism has no alternative. This fallacy—“There Is No Alternative” (TINA)—justifies sacrifice, precarity, austerity, debt, and financialization. Yet when a sovereign non-Western nation demonstrates growth, industrialization, and poverty reduction without following Washington Consensus dictates, wholesale privatization, or subordination to financial oligarchs, the system’s foundational premise collapses. TINA is thereby revealed as an anti-human ideology rather than an immutable law.
Barbarity is not external to the system, it lies at its very core, embedded in its logic of self-preservation, expansion, and reproduction.
Cybernetic capitalism and thermodynamics as its limit
Capitalism does not seek to maintain a fixed order; it evolves to sustain its core code (accumulation, profit, control, hierarchy). To survive, it willingly changes form to preserve essence. The severity of capital’s struggle against subordinate classes and resistant nations fluctuates according to a cybernetic logic. Cybernetics has reframed entropy as information and prioritizes producing order countering entropic decay. This, however, demands constant energy input, making the system structurally reliant on external environments (other systems) capable of supplying low-entropy energy and absorbing high-entropy waste. Should the environment fail to provide or absorb, the system faces crisis. Far from escaping limits, the expansion of AI-driven capitalism (with massive energy needs for data centers and reliance on critical minerals) intensifies constraints.
As easy access to low-entropy resources from outside (Global South, cheap energy, labor, new frontiers) diminishes, capitalism begins consuming its own foundations and reserves of order: social welfare, cohesion, public infrastructure, political legitimacy, and the living standards of subordinate groups.
Europe exemplifies this self-consumption. Its schizophrenic double bind, combined with subservience and co-opted elites, renders resistance to Atlanticist pressures impossible, forcing externalization of crises onto Europe itself where friction is lower. What looks irrational (autophagy) is actually the manifestation of systemic rationality at its extremes. While autophagy sustains the system temporarily if outside flows remain blocked, it perpetuates structural decay. Consuming its own margins transforms prior order into chaos, which demands even more resources to manage. Even cybernetic capitalism, which converts entropy into information (data, algorithms, financial instruments) to sustain valorization, cannot circumvent thermodynamic laws, raising the real prospect of escalation from localized conflicts to full-scale war.
The emerging technocratic militarist model—merging military power, financial capital, and digital infrastructures into a unified apparatus—represents an attempt to resolve systemic contradictions that now confront serious limits in temporal and spatial displacement. This techno-military capitalist oligarchy does not only supply tools but wields power and capital concentration to define threats, shape responses, and direct government policies, military doctrine, and foreign affairs. Existing order reserves have been depleted to fund ongoing operations (rearmament, security, surveillance) and massive AI investments. This heightens the risk that instrumental rationality will become more effective in pursuit of anti-human objectives.
It is vital to remember that this rationality, devoid of moral limits, produced the camps: a vast social engineering experiment and a grotesque factory-like system where humans were raw material and death the manufactured product—units counted daily on production charts, as Zygmunt Bauman observed (7). Nazism, stripped of folkloric narratives, reveals itself as a distinctly modern enterprise: racial hygiene, eugenics, Lebensraum planning, and total mobilization presupposed technical-scientific rationality. Faced with the threat of systemic self-destruction, capitalism birthed the Nazi-fascist regime as a lifeline.
Yet another crucial point is that this project failed not due to morality but because the logic of unlimited expansion, purification, mobilization, and radicalization—where every success became a new starting point—created unsustainable overload.
The real impediment to resolving internal contradictions was external: the Soviet Union, whose resistance capacity—rooted in its different social, political, and economic system—had been gravely underestimated. Soviet victory was inconceivable under capitalist logic that asserts no alternative to the existing order.
Defending humanity from the barbarism of this anti-human project offered millions of Soviet citizens a meaningful horizon—something missing for those treated merely as instruments.
Today, as before, accumulating contradictions and rising entropy force the system to seek outlets. Yet it faces opposition from entities like China, Russia, and Iran—sovereign, large-scale civilization-states that reject the notion there is no alternative to a hegemonic project prioritizing capital accumulation above all, including human life.
____
(1) John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)
(2) Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789)
(3) Harry K. Wells, Pragmatism: Philosophy of Imperialism (1954) and Enciclopedia Sovietica “Pragmatism”, Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3ª ed., vol. 20 (1975)
(4)José Vasconcelos, Ética (1932), cited by Terrance MacMullan, “Pragmatism as Gunship Philosophy: José Vasconcelos’ Critique of John Dewey”, Inter-American Journal of Philosophy, vol. 6, n. 1 (maggio 2015).
(5) This argument draws on Ishay Landa, The Apprentice’s Sorcerer (2009)
(6) Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009)
(7) Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (1989)
About the Author
