A philosophical and moral comparison between modern Russia and the West shows that Russia remains a bastion of realism, strength, and self-sacrifice, whereas the West has lost its will to live, turning into a civilization of moral weakness, illusions, and self-destruction.
Master and Slave Moralities: Russia’s Strength Versus Western Decay
I recently heard a British commentator declare, “Conquest is not an acceptable means by which to change borders or gain territory.” I would ask him, “Why?” and await a reasoned defense.
If (or rather when) none could be provided, I would follow up: “Is it because, three hundred years ago, your forebears excelled at conquest and you do not, and so slave morality dictates that what you are no longer willing or able to do is now suddenly ‘wrong’?” Conquest is pronounced immoral by the descendants of some of history’s greatest conquerors precisely because their societies are hollowed out, exhausted, and incapable of wielding power in the old fashion. Now, their only acceptable instruments are endless paperwork, litigation in international courts, and the elaborate rituals of bureaucratic procedure, along with incessant whining with threats of sanctions and financial maneuvering. The French apologize for being heirs of Charles Martel; the British must apologize for William of Normandy and Queen Victoria. Today, lawyers and bureaucrats are the new heroes, embodiments of physical weakness elevated into virtue.
The Inversion of Values: Bureaucrats as Heroes
Russia, by contrast, is disliked in the West precisely because it refuses this inversion of values. Russia is willing to fight to advance its core interests and to suffer casualties, whereas Europeans will not risk the indignity of political accusations of bias, prejudice, or worse, to defend even their own coasts against irregular migrant landings. They certainly will not risk their lives in intense infantry combat. In Russia, the world’s oldest truths—necessity, risk, and sacrifice—retain their force. In Europe, they have become abstractions, faint echoes of a distant past. The Russians serve as a living mirror, reflecting the consequences of European slave morality: as Thucydides is recorded as having said, ‘the strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must.’
This contrast is moral, psychological, and metaphysical. Russia operates within the realm of master morality, asserting will, endurance, and consequence. Western Europe operates in slave morality, sanctifying passivity, procedure, and moralizing weakness as the ultimate virtue. Brussels, had it existed when Attila crossed the Rhine, would have sent a delegation to inform him that his conduct violated international law.
Reality vs. Hyperreality: The West’s Self-Imposed Illusion
Russia is not Attila, but it acts according to realities of power, tradition, and human nature, while Europe has insulated itself in a bubble of privilege, only possible in the absence of external disruption. And when Russia supposedly disrupts that comfort (by being an agent of reality and acting within the realm of reality and master morality), Europeans are livid and terrified (or they simulate being this way); they are confronted by the reminder that their moral self-image is sustained by denial and illusion. Russia has no ambition or desire to sweep across Central Europe and reach the Rhine; this is not 1975, and the Soviet Union is gone, but if the Russians were intent on doing this, the most Brussels could muster would be a meek proclamation of “Please don’t do that; we will have to sanction you for the 20th time if you do. We will take your electronically frozen money.” Is this what Europeans think passes for reality today?
Russia is reality. Russia is a nation of people willing to work, endure, suffer, and sacrifice to build their future. Russia is a Guards Tank Army on the move to confront a threat to the homeland. Russia is the bearer of the torch of the Greeks, the Romans, and the Byzantines, the remnant of true traditional Western Civilization.
The Will to Live and the Will to Die
The West, as it is today, is a phantom, a specter, a hollowed-out, emaciated inmate who was a prisoner of his own lies, who tried to sustain himself on inversions and perversions of reality and found that his own propaganda offered him no sustenance.
The West of today is the feel-good middle-aged woman, telling a student on the playground, “Whenever you have a problem, cry about it and run to tell an adult.” Russia is the boy on the playground who refuses to be picked on and decides if another boy slaps him and tries to abuse him and denigrate him, he will resolve the problem by tackling that boy to the ground and solving the problem on his own, immediately, on the spot, with force if necessary.
In the modern world, the phenomenal world we perceive is no longer reality nor even a representation of reality; it is a copy of a copy, a second-hand imitation, a distortion. Simulation has replaced reality, and illusion has been accepted as truth. Bureaucrats, in this environment, are themselves simulations of functionaries who themselves would be standing in for statesmen: second-hand counterfeits of leadership, performing the gestures of power while reality proceeds elsewhere. Plato’s cave has deepened; we no longer even watch shadows of reality, but projections of projections, and we insist that these shadows are reality.
Russia’s engagement with the world, by contrast, reintroduces reality, force, consequence, and decisive action into a sphere dominated by imitation. Russia, as a last resort, resolves crises by direct action, even at great cost. Western bureaucrats resolve crises by denial, scheming, politicking, or procrastination, endlessly passing responsibility to the next generation, and celebrating impotence as a virtue. They are like a man unable to consummate his union with his bride, who proclaims that the union’s value lies precisely in its incompleteness. Few truly believe such nonsense; it is a ritualized defense against reality, a testament to moral inversion. The West proudly proclaims, “I am strong precisely because I am weak! My impotence is proof of my virility!” hoping that reality never challenges this nonsense and hoping against hope that an actual strong man does not happen by who proclaims, “Your weakness gives you no authority; I will not submit to you, particularly in light of how pathetic you are.”
The civilization sending their young to euthanasia clinics for being horrendously depressed by the nightmarish hell created by the agents of unreality and hyper-reality dares to presume to mock Russians who sacrificed their lives in places such as Bakhmut to advance the flag of their homeland and secure the interests of their homeland. Brussels will mock the sacrifices Russian soldiers made on the battlefield, claiming they were “fed into a meat grinder,” but Brussels gleefully helps feed European youth into euthanasia clinics as an expedient way to get rid of their restless youth population, whom they have failed in every conceivable metric.
It is as though the West desires, somehow, by some means, to live, but the will dictates that it die because as a civilization it lacks the will to live, and it is captive and beholden to the insatiable will that drives it to collapse in on itself and commit civilizational suicide through its collective apathy. The West can do as it wants, but it cannot will what it wants. There is a raw, unchanneled desire to live, but it has no direction, no telos, no higher purpose, no reason for its existence other than that it exists for its own sake and not for any higher metaphysical truth. The West desires, somehow, to live, simply to live for the sake of living, but not for the sake of something greater, some viable and meaningful telos. This is not sufficient for Western civilization (really an anti-civilization at this point) to overcome the insatiable, unrestrained will to implode and collapse in on itself. The siren song of the abyss lures in the Western world, and there is no overarching reason for the West not to sail their civilization straight at the rocks.
While the West wills itself to die despite its supposed desire to live, Russia acts on the world and regional stage as a society that has a telos and a purpose of being on which to focus and center its civilizational energy and its collective psyche. Russia exists in harmony with telos and acts within the realm of reality, not merely as an agent of appearance or representation in a pseudo-real hyper-reality as with the West.
We no longer operate in the World as Will and Representation, but rather Hyperreality as Corrupted Will and Misrepresentation. The cancerous pseudo-reality in the mind of the Western world, at least three centuries in the making, has metastasized into a systemic, widespread ailment afflicting the entire body politic. The corruption is so complete that policies that are perversions of truth, which actively promote death, are proclaimed to be the reality of life, while the reality of life is denounced as a corruption. There is nothing left in the West that is actually real or true except for the reality and truth of its comprehensive corruption. Protagoras once remarked that “man is the measure of all things,” and now we find that this relativism in the West has reached its inevitable penultimate stage where Western civilization has become Saturn, devouring its own children. The final act of this doomed civilization may be about to begin. The West does not Will toward the Good or even Will toward power; it Wills toward nothingness.
Since Russia functions as an agent of reality in a world of hyper-reality, it acts in accordance with historical precedent, human nature, and the tragic dimension of existence, principles long abandoned by the West. The lesson is clear: where Europe celebrates shadows and paper, Russia still engages with substance. Where bureaucrats simulate virtue, Russia acts decisively. And in this confrontation, the modern European self-image, its moral certainties, its procedural rituals, and its simulation of statecraft are laid bare.
Bryan Anthony Reo is a licensed attorney based in Ohio and an analyst of military history, geopolitics, and international relations
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