The three-cornered war

The Captain sees the conflict as not "Islamofascism vs. The West" (although we probably agree on how many of these our planet has room for ;-)), but as a three cornered conflict between Islamism, "philosophical idealism" (as expressed politically in the EU and other transnational post-democratic organizations), and "materialist empiricism" (the way of capitalist liberal democracies, the US most prominent among them). "P-idealism" is the oldest, with roots in ancient Greek philosophy; "materialist empiricism" is a product of the same forces as the Reformation and the Enlightenment; radical Islamism as a political movement is fairly young.

The basic competition at all levels between the rising force of empiricism and the existing entrenched p-idealism has a long and bloody history. Empiricism dominated the US and still does, but p-idealism has spent most of the last hundred years trying to challenge that, as yet unsuccessfully. In Europe, it's been more complicated with a long and strong competition between empiricism and p-idealism for control, and the balance of power changing constantly, but since the end of WWII p-idealism has largely come to dominate in western Europe.

P-idealism is based on a teleological ["final goal-oriented", FB] world-view, and it is at its core fundamentally elitist and autocratic.

But like all generalizations about each of the three forces, that isn't universally true. In fact, it's nearly impossible to make any statement about any of these forces which is universally true without also being trivial and uninteresting.

When the economic theory of communism was developed, it was embraced by p-idealists. As a theory, it has the kind of esthetic elegance which meant that it had to be true, teleologically speaking.

To a great extent it was also embraced by p-idealists as an alternative to Christianity. In a real sense, Marxism has become a secular religion for many p-idealists. Which is why up until the 18th century, p-idealism in Europe was pretty closely associated with Catholicism, whereas most modern p-idealists tend to view any theistic religious belief with contempt.

[...]
Even for p-idealists, it has become more and more difficult to ignore the empirical evidence that socialism is a failure and that capitalism isn't going to destroy itself. But that leads to cognitive dissonance, because teleologically speaking capitalism is inelegant, and thus should fail, while socialism is clean and beautiful, and thus should succeed. Since it hasn't worked out that way, it raises the possibility that teleology itself might be invalid. But teleology is a priori true, since it is elegant and thus must be true. Besides which, if it's all wrong, the consequences would be terrible. Thus cognitive dissonance.

[...]
Part of current p-idealist political dogma is a new "post-modern" idea of transnationalism, where nations (and nationalism) are seen as bad, and a rise of world governance run according to Socialist principles would replace the existing system. In this new Utopia, deep political disagreements which led nationalists to go to war would instead be settled by diplomacy and/or mediation. And the reason why that would work was because it was obviously elegant and clean; thus according to teleology that meant it would work. (And empiricist arguments to the contrary based on historical analysis and game theory were irrelevant.)

By and large, as he sees it, "p-idealists" have no love lost for Islamism (who in turn view them as weak and decadent), but have such fear and loathing for the US that they are willing to try and "drive out the devil with Beelzebub" (as the Dutch expression goes). Well, the same language that gave us the word "Beelzebub" (ba'al-zvuv = [freely] lord of the flies) has a proverb about golems arising against their makers...

Go read the whole thing.