My Disaffection With the West

I started writing this post yesterday as a lookback on my first week in Phnom Penh, but I realised that I didn’t have much to say beyond what I had said to friends and family in phone calls and voice-notes. You can only grumble about the traffic and the lack of ceiling fans so much before you bore yourself. But today I read two essays which helped me better articulate my deep disillusionment with the West. The first article says something new and interesting about a topic on which it feels like everything that can be said has already been said. Western intellectuals have rightly accused of moral cowardice, intellectual dishonesty, rank hypocrisy for their silence after Oct 7. But, as the author pointed out, moral cowardice is a choice, moral stupidity is an instinctive response to a truth that is too difficult to comprehend—that the international liberal order is rotten to the core. Confronting this truth would entail rethinking one’s belief about the nature of Western society and one’s place in said society. The denialism that this dissonance births are deeply troubling to someone who is not from the West. The other article was a memoir by an Indian writer who was lured to the West by the promise of an intellectual life that Western universities are so good at selling. He, like I, had no illusions about empire, but felt like they could carve space for themselves in Western academic to do meaningful work while enjoying a comfortable standard of living. That space has been squeezed to such an extent that it feels impossible to escape the slime. We were well-read, well-educated, progressive post-colonial subjects that were primed for a world that no longer existed. The only way out is to leave, unless one has compelling reasons to stay.