https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2025/12/05/18882009.php
by Maike Gosch
[This book review posted on 10/14/2025 is translated from the German on the Internet, http://www.nachdenkseiten.de.]A new Mausfeld is always a welcome event. Since his lecture “Why Are the Lambs Silent?”, the professor emeritus of perception and cognition research at the University of Kiel has enjoyed a loyal fan base. Similar to Noam Chomsky in the US, he is an intellectual, scientist, political analyst, and incorruptible moral authority all rolled into one. His latest book, “Hegemony or Downfall – The Last Crisis of the West?”, is dedicated to the “crisis of the West” and skillfully dismantles the concepts and discourses that justify and conceal the violence and injustice of the West, using current events as examples. A review by Maike Gosch.
The ice water that Mausfeld throws on the overheated fog of modern discourse is refreshing. This is no longer a “delegitimization of the state”; it is a filleting of vague and distorted concepts and narratives with the sharp scalpel of his intellect in order to reveal their original meaning and denounce the misuse of these concepts by those in power, as in this passage on the current crisis of democracy:
“However, it would not make sense to call the current social crisis a crisis of democracy. At least not in the original sense of the egalitarian guiding principle of democracy as individual and thus also social self-determination. For the organizational form of the state, this civilizing guiding principle implies a radical socialization of power through a strict vertical separation of powers and the subjugation of all state apparatus to the legislative sovereignty of the social base. Since democracy in this sole sense, which deserves this designation, does not exist in our era, the assertion of its crisis would be nonsensical. The current severe crisis in the West cannot therefore be a crisis of democracy, since the prerequisites are not met. However, there are good reasons to assume that this is a crisis whose roots can be found precisely in the centuries-long prevention of democracy.” (Mausfeld, p. 11)
After a brilliant introduction (more on that below), Mausfeld first takes a historical look back and traces how the narratives of the “West” arose and what they contained.
“What exactly is ‘the West’? At first glance, this term may sound as if it describes natural phenomena. However, in its current meaning as a cultural space based in a special way on reason, science, and freedom, thereby enabling a linear social progress from “primitive” to “higher” social conditions, it is of comparatively recent origin. (…)
A self-image of the ‘West’ as a linear social progression from ‘primitive’ to ‘higher’ social states only developed in conjunction with the Western construction of its opposite poles, the ‘East’ and the ‘Orient’, between the 17th and 18th centuries. The historical origins of the “West” already show that it has always derived its identity from its construction of “others,” namely those it considered its “enemies.” In the Middle Ages and during the colonial era, these were the “uncivilized,” the ‘barbarians’ who needed to be civilized, i.e., “Westernized.” Who was to be considered “uncivilized” changed depending on the material interests and power needs of the West.“ (Mausfeld, pp. 16/17)
Mausfeld thus highlights the continuities in the narratives of the ”West” from the 17th century to the present day. He successfully zooms out of the present and also out of the 21st and 20th centuries, leading us as readers out of the thought structures in which we often find ourselves without even noticing. Reading these paragraphs, it immediately becomes clear that much of the current political communication on Russia, the Arab world, the Palestinians, but also China, moves within these patterns of thought and argumentation. Just think of Borrell’s famous garden versus jungle metaphor or the ongoing rhetoric of Israeli politicians (when it is not openly genocidal) about defending Western civilization and values against the “barbarians” (meaning the Palestinians). This narrative has been around since at least the Crusades. But not for Mausfeld:
“This myth of the West, of a civilizational mission arising from its special position in the world—the master narrative of the West—is the foundation for the Western ideological pseudo-reality with which the West seeks to conceal its organized violence. The global expansion of Western power was by no means based on its higher morality or its ‘higher culture’. It was based on military and technological superiority. It was based on colonization, the slave trade, imperial wars, and economic blackmail. The expression “civilizing mission” – like its modern variants – is a moralistic cloak intended to conceal the continuity of a five-hundred-year process of violent economic exploitation of the world.” (Mausfeld, pp. 91/92)
Only the last chapter, “Does the emancipatory project of civilizing violence still have a chance today?”, remained a little too abstract and theoretical for me. But Mausfeld is not an activist, civil society organizer, or politician. He therefore does not offer any instructions for action or concrete solutions. But by describing current political events and structures with crystal clarity and exposing many lies and double standards, he creates a strong intellectual foundation from which resistance and change can be built intellectually. Sentences such as the following demonstrate the clarity and sharpness of his analysis:
“Our era must therefore be seen as an era of creeping de-civilization of violence, persistently carried out by the powerful. In other words, we are living in a time of radical counter-enlightenment. No event in the Western world illustrates this more relentlessly than Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians. The epochal crime of this genocide is accompanied by the crime of silence on the part of the public in Western countries. In particular, the silence of almost the entire class of public intellectuals.” (Mausfeld, pp. 173/174
The book contains some familiar material for Mausfeld readers, which they already know from earlier books and lectures. However, thanks to its intellectual depth and clarity, it certainly can’t hurt to read some of his thoughts several times in order to truly penetrate and internalize them. In his magnificent introduction (“Shocks”), Mausfeld writes:
“Current crises and wars seem to be closely interrelated. This is becoming increasingly clear. And that makes them all the more threatening. The determinants of geopolitical conflicts and their historical continuities and causalities are difficult to grasp intuitively. Only through painstaking collective analysis can they be better understood. In contrast, social crises, as they often have a direct impact on our everyday lives, are easier to notice and intuitively understand in some basic features. However, a deeper understanding of their causes can also only be achieved on the basis of collective efforts.” (Mausfeld, p. 10)
And this is precisely where the book – and Mausfeld’s entire work – comes in: he provides tools, arguments, and interpretations to initiate and facilitate these collective analyses. Regardless of whether one agrees with all of his premises, theses, and assessments, this raises the level of discourse and creates clear lines and areas. A very negative review of his first book, “Why Are the Lambs Silent,” in the Süddeutsche Zeitung in 2018 described it as a book for “left-wing angry citizens” and accused the author of “crude know-it-allism.” . This does not do justice to Mausfeld’s texts in any way – they are a call to return to rational analysis, to “use one’s own mind,” to analyze and understand. Mausfeld does not underchallenge his readers, he does not spare them, but he always respects them and speaks to them on an equal footing. The book is certainly polemical and sharp, but this indignation is well-founded and based on the results of his historical, political, and psychological analyses.
The book’s greatest strength does not lie in its proposed solutions and instructions for action. The economic analyses may also be somewhat one-sided and perhaps too undifferentiated in places, but the book shines where the author’s core competence lies: in perception and cognition research. Mausfeld takes a very close look at words and traces their original meaning, as well as their political instrumentalization and distortion over time. This repeatedly sheds interesting light on terms and intellectual concepts such as “democracy,” “the West,” “freedom,” “progress,” but also “genocide,” leading to valuable moments of insight while reading. He analyzes discourses and discourse prohibitions and describes propaganda and emotional influence in public political discourse. Much of what one has intuitively felt is found here expertly and thoroughly broken down, described, and explained.
One of the most powerful passages in a book rich in powerful passages is his discussion of “The deliberate creation of social pseudo-realities.” Here he writes:
“The current power elites have created such an ideological vault to secure their power. This fantasy construct is the product of psychological dynamics triggered by the current crisis in the West among its power elites. These include, above all, the highest, mostly unconscious fears about their privileged status, denial of their own responsibility, projection onto guilty parties by constructing suitable enemy images, exaggerated self-affirmation, and exaggerated fantasies of their own greatness, with which they direct their thoughts, feelings, or actions in such a way that they correspond to their desired goals. With all their psychological power, the power elites created an illusion of reality that makes their desires, thoughts, and actions meaningful again. They then use this fantasy construct as an instrument of manipulation, seeking to anchor it in the minds of the population with the megaphones of all the media channels at their disposal.” (Mausfeld, pp. 74/75)
“In Western pseudo-reality, it is hardly possible to take an outside perspective at all. It resembles a closed vault, beyond which no outside world is conceivable.” (Mausfeld, p. 77)
Mausfeld describes here what right-wing (and left-wing) angry citizens occasionally refer to as the “world of clowns”: the growing contradictions in the official narrative, which have led many, and presumably a growing number of people, not only to cognitive dissonance but also to emotional discomfort, to the point of making statements such as: “I think I’m going crazy” or “What is the difference between reality and satire anymore?”
The great value of Mausfeld’s book lies in the fact that it creates precisely this “outside” – an intellectual standpoint outside the currently dominant concepts and narratives in the political arena of the West, which allows us to view, examine, and correct them from the outside.
Rainer Mausfeld: Hegemony or Downfall – The Last Crisis of the West? Neu-Isenburg 2025, Westend Verlag, paperback, 216 pages, ISBN 978-3987913341, 24 euros.