Word: westernism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...today as a model to my country, frankly I would have to answer negatively. No, I could not recomment your society in its present state as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through intense suffering our country has now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive. Even those characteristics of your life which I have just mentioned are extremely saddening...
...disputed is the weakening of human beings in the West while in the East they are becoming firmer and stronger. Six decades for out people and three decades for the people of Eastern Europe; during that time we have been through a spiritual training far in advance of Western experience. Life's complexity and mortal weight have produced stronger, deeper and more interesting characters than those generated by standardized Western well-being...
...this is visible to observers from all the worlds of our planet. The Western way of life is less and less likely to become the leading model...
This means that the mistake must be at the root, at the very basis of human thinking in the past centuries. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was first born during the Renaissance and found its political expression from the period of the Enlightenment. It became the basis for government and social science and could be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic authonomy: the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher froce above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of everything that exists...
...embraced all that is material with excessive and unwarranted zeal. This new way of thinking, which had imposed on us its guidance, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man nor did it see any higher task than the attainment of happiness on earth. It based modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend to worship man and his material needs. Everything beyond physical well-being and accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtler and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life...