The White Ants are Already Advanced in Eating Away the Foundational Timbers of the West
Civilisations rarely die from a single external blow. More often they hollow out from within, the structural beams quietly chewed away until a roof that looked solid suddenly sags. Our Aussie image of white ants, termites working unseen in the wood, is apt for the claim that the West is being eaten not just by unassimilated outsiders, but by forces generated and sustained by Westerners themselves.
The diagnosis runs roughly as follows. The cultural and economic dominance that shaped the modern world rested on a particular inheritance: individual rights under law rather than group entitlements, open inquiry rather than enforced narrative, markets that reward competence over pedigree or identity, and a respect for accumulated experience that treated the young as apprentices rather than oracles. Anti-capitalism, identity politics, and the cluster of attitudes often labelled "wokery" are said to attack these foundations simultaneously. They recast economic success as systemic predation, treat group identity as the primary moral unit, and elevate subjective grievance or ideological purity above measurable outcomes and historical continuity. At the same time, contemporary culture frequently discounts the wisdom of age and lived experience, preferring the moral urgency of the newly awakened to the caution of those who have already seen cycles of enthusiasm and disillusionment.
The claim is that the more decisive damage is internal: institutions, universities, corporations, media, and political classes that once transmitted Western strengths have internalised critiques that treat those strengths as original sins. Self-criticism, long a Western advantage, becomes self-flagellation. Equality before the law mutates into equity of outcome. Free speech becomes a privilege contingent on the right conclusions. The result, on this view, is a civilisation that continues to export technology, capital, and popular culture while losing confidence in the habits that produced them.
There is evidence that fits the pattern. Declining trust in core institutions across much of the Anglosphere and Europe is measurable and long-running. Educational systems that adopt ideological frameworks over empirical competence produce graduates fluent in the language of power analysis, yet often weak in the technical or historical knowledge that built the systems they critique. Corporate and bureaucratic capture by identity metrics can divert attention from performance. Generational attitudes sometimes treat tradition as mere prejudice and experience as complicity. When lived history is discounted, societies become more vulnerable to utopian experiments that ignore trade-offs, incentives, and human nature; experiments whose failures are then blamed on residual "systemic" forces rather than on the experiments themselves.
Moreover, the West has never been a static essence. It has absorbed, adapted, and reinvented itself under pressure from Christianity, the Enlightenment, industrialisation, mass democracy, and successive waves of migration. The claim that the current internal critique is uniquely destructive must be weighed against earlier periods of radical doubt: the Reformation, the French Revolution, the cultural upheavals of the 1960s, that also appeared, to contemporaries, like civilisational suicide. The white-ant metaphor is powerful, but metaphors can oversimplify. Termites destroy wood; ideas can also prune and redirect growth.
What remains hard to dismiss is the warning about lived experience. Societies that systematically elevate the moral authority of the young and the ideologically pure over the testimony of those who have watched policies fail in practice risk repeating avoidable errors. Competence, reciprocity, and the capacity to distinguish signal from narrative are not automatic. They are cultural achievements that require transmission. When transmission is treated as oppression, the timber weakens regardless of the particular ideology doing the chewing.
The practical question is not whether the West should remain frozen in 1950 or 1850. It is whether the institutions that still generate most of the world's scientific, technological, and institutional capital can retain enough confidence in their own operating system to adapt without self-sabotage. External pressures: demographic, geopolitical, technological, will continue. The more urgent variable is whether the internal conversation recovers the capacity to distinguish reform from demolition, and evidence from moral fashion.
White ants work quietly. The first visible sign is often a sudden crack. Civilisations that notice the dust early still have options. Those that treat every warning about internal decay as proof of reactionary prejudice may discover, too late, that the roof was load-bearing after all. Then, it all falls down.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2026/07/business-robbery-etc-148/
