The Illusion of the Isolated Act
Binary Fantasy and Dialectical Reality
Morning Comrades.
By now the majority of us have seen or at the very least heard of the exchange that took place between Trump and Zelensky in the Oval Office over the weekend. Like most of us my immediate reaction was one of shock, it is not that often us peasants get to witness the reality of our collective ruling class on Live TV.
Like clockwork, a well-prepared and often rehearsed communal outrage went viral both off and online across the decaying West at the audacity of Trump’s behaviour, including many in his team of merry gangsters. Within a day pro-Ukrainian protest appeared out of nowhere and way too many people started running around with Ukrainian flags and so on, again, both off and online. It took all of 6 hours for the usual big brain German lefties to throw “Putin apologist” into my DM’s for daring to not entirely debase myself at the altar of Western democratic principles and hell, I had a margarita and went on with my business, which was making Pizza to be entirely honest.
Again, due to the singular reality of everything German, there are books to write about their isolated and increasingly overt fascist/racist world view, but for the time being, I’ll leave it at this very simplified reality: To them, everything east of the river Oder, the current border to Poland, is considered unworthy ( the term “Untermensch”, sub-Human, is specifically meant for the Slavs, in the context ) and they are deathly afraid of Russians, whom they consider today to be the same as the Red Army that rightfully brought this racist parking lot of a country to its knees. With that, any attempt, irrespective of their political allegiances, to offer reality, is met with that contempt, at the very least.
But I digress.
There are several avenues to go down on in regards to the expected, mind numbing response to Trump’s moment of revealing what our Western Capitalism actually looks like. The outrage and hatred for Trump is largely because of his apparent lack of decorum that destroys the debunked fairy tale of a benevolent US and just shows the thuggish, bullying mafia-like reality of the Empire that it is. Genuinely, the only noteworthy assessment to be made from what took place was the safety Trump’s entire team felt showing the reality of the US Empire.
An additional point to the above is that a lot of the feigned outrage over this event is based on a racist reality. I would have an entire country of underfunded infrastructure to sell anyone that believes that this mobbish behaviour is new, and not exactly how we in the West have dealt with every single colonised people around the world for the past 500 years. This is our ruling class. This is who they are.
The more detailed aspect of what transpired afterwards is what I will spend some time on, that being, the inherent, entirely demanded and artificially conditioned binary response to these events.
A does B, hence A is either Good or Evil. No matter the material reality.
And we’ll base our entire belief system on this limited experience of reality and more depressingly, we’ll fight their wars for them over this nonsense. Imagine the point for a brief second, in which we all understand, that all of them, the entire Global Ruling Class is our enemy, who discards us as points on an Excel Sheet to go an die in some random patch of land without any notice for their financial portfolio. Imagine further a reality in which we understand that nothing all of them do is for us, but against us.
In the modern West, there exists a deeply ingrained tendency to interpret reality through the lens of rigid binaries—good vs. evil, democracy vs. authoritarianism, freedom vs. tyranny. This impulse manifests in political discourse, media narratives, and even personal morality, creating a worldview that demands allegiance to one side while vilifying the other. However, this binary mode of thinking distorts reality, reducing complex socio-political issues to simplistic moral battles. To understand this phenomenon, we must analyse its roots in Western social conditioning, psychological mechanisms, and the ideological functions it serves under capitalism.
Social Conditioning and the Construction of Binaries
Western societies, particularly in the post-Enlightenment era, have been shaped by a historical trajectory that privileges dualistic thinking. The Protestant Reformation, for example, reinforced moral absolutism, creating an ethical framework where one was either "saved" or "damned." Similarly, Enlightenment thought, despite its claims to reason and universality, framed knowledge as an opposition between civilisation and barbarism—a justification for colonialism and imperialist expansion. This binary thinking persists in modern political discourse, particularly in foreign policy, where Western states position themselves as defenders of democracy against supposed authoritarian threats.
Media plays a critical role in perpetuating this dualistic perception. As Edward Said notes in Orientalism (1978), "The Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action. It is rather the creation of the West." The Western gaze constructs an "other" that must be opposed, ensuring that political conflicts are framed in absolute terms. This is evident in how wars and geopolitical struggles are narrated: the "War on Terror" depicted the U.S. and its allies as forces of freedom combating an abstract evil, while contemporary tensions with Russia and China are framed as battles between democracy and autocracy, rather than complex power struggles rooted in historical material conditions.
Psychological Drivers: Cognitive Dissonance and Moral Absolutism
On a psychological level, the Western tendency toward binary thinking is reinforced by cognitive dissonance and moral absolutism. Cognitive dissonance, as theorised by Leon Festinger (1957), describes the discomfort people feel when confronted with contradictory information. To resolve this tension, individuals often seek simplifications that reaffirm their existing worldview. For example, when Western intervention in the Middle East results in civilian casualties, rather than reassessing the morality of such interventions, many prefer the comforting binary that "we" are inherently good and "they" are the problem.
Moral absolutism further exacerbates this issue. Western ethical frameworks, influenced by Kantian deontology, emphasise fixed moral principles rather than contextual analysis. This results in a rigid understanding of morality where actions are judged as universally right or wrong without regard for material conditions. This is why many Westerners struggle to comprehend that resistance movements—whether in Palestine, Latin America, or Africa—may emerge not from inherent "evil" but from material oppression and imperialist exploitation. As Frantz Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), "The colonial world is a Manichaean world," referring to how colonisers impose a strict moral dichotomy that justifies their domination.
Binaries as an Ideological Weapon
From a Marxist perspective, the West’s obsession with binaries serves a clear ideological function: it prevents class consciousness by redirecting contradictions outward rather than inward. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in The German Ideology (1846), argue that the ruling ideas of any epoch are those of the ruling class. In a capitalist system, the dominant ideology seeks to mask the fundamental contradiction between labor and capital by creating artificial divisions—between nations, ethnicities, and political camps.
This is why Western political discourse focuses on external enemies rather than the class struggle within. The U.S. working class is encouraged to fear China as an economic threat rather than questioning why capitalists outsource jobs. Similarly, during the Cold War, communism was framed as an existential evil rather than an alternative economic system, ensuring that workers in the West did not sympathise with revolutionary movements abroad.
Gramsci argues that ruling classes maintain control not just through force but by shaping cultural narratives. The binary framework is a tool of hegemony, as it prevents dialectical thinking—the ability to analyse contradictions and recognise that truth is often found in synthesis rather than opposition. As Georg Lukács puts it in History and Class Consciousness (1923), "The illusion of the isolated act... is the bourgeoisie’s ideological weapon to prevent proletarian self-realization." Binary thinking keeps people trapped in illusion, unable to see beyond the immediate appearance of moral conflicts to their material causes.
Toward a Dialectical Understanding of Reality
To break free from this ideological prison, we must adopt a dialectical approach to understanding the world—one that sees contradictions not as simple oppositions but as interconnected dynamics shaped by material conditions. Rather than asking who is "good" or "evil," we should ask: who benefits from this framing? What material interests are at play? Only by moving beyond the Western obsession with binaries can we begin to see reality in its full complexity and challenge the structures that perpetuate oppression. As Marx famously wrote, "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it."
As always, thank you for you time and attention.
Yours, warmly,
V
Works Cited
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. 1961.
Festinger, Leon. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. 1957.
Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. 1971.
Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness. 1923.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology. 1846.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. 1978.