The Decline of the West and the New Philosophy of Multipolar Reality
# Pravdist (Правдист)
We are living in a rare historical moment, where the fundamental assumptions of the entire world order are disintegrating before our very eyes. For decades, the West presented its particular model of governance, economy and human rights as a universal truth – applicable to all peoples at all times. This was not merely a political project. It was a spiritual project, based on a specific philosophical structure: the division between the particular and the universal, between concrete phenomenon and the abstract essence that governs it. Today, that structure is collapsing. The rise of civilizational poles – Russia, China, Iran, India and the broader Global South – has shattered the illusion of a single, universal order.
In this context, the work of the philosopher Santiago Mondejar, “The Ontology of Multipolarity: Foundations for an Eschatological Renewal,” arrives not as an academic exercise but as an urgent intellectual intervention. His central argument is deceptively simple yet radically profound: if we are truly to build a multipolar world, we must first reconsider the nature of reality itself. To understand the magnitude of the current transformation, we must first understand the philosophical foundation upon which Western universality was built. The modern West inherited from classical Greek philosophy, particularly Plato and Aristotle, a spiritual framework that privileges the abstract over the concrete, the universal over the particular. In this view, solid, specific, local phenomena are merely imperfect copies of an abstract, universal ideal. Justice, freedom, democracy – these were defined in abstract terms and then imposed upon diverse societies as if they were mathematical theorems, applicable everywhere.
This philosophical structure reached its most ambitious expression in the European Enlightenment. Kant’s categorical imperative, Hegel’s absolute spirit, and the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man – all shared the same premise: reason can discover universal principles valid for all humanity. The specificities of culture, history, religion and geography were seen not as sources of meaning to be preserved, but as obstacles to be eliminated. The twentieth century saw the devastating consequences of this thinking. Colonialism was justified in the language of universal civilization. The Cold War was fought between two competing universalisms, liberal capitalism and Soviet communism, with each claiming to represent the final destination of human history. After 1991, Francis Fukuyama famously declared the “end of history,” arguing that liberal democracy had proven itself as the final form of human government. This was the apex of Western spiritual arrogance – the notion that one particular civilizational model could represent all of humanity.
But history did not end. The 21st century has been defined by the revolt of the particular against the universal. Russia, under Vladimir Putin, rejected the role of a defeated great power and began to assert its civilizational identity. China followed its own path of development, rooted in Confucian tradition and Leninist organization, explicitly rejecting Western models of political liberalization. Iran, despite decades of sanctions and military threats, preserved its Islamic revolution, an anti-modern theocratic-democratic hybrid that defies Western categorization. India, under Narendra Modi, has increasingly articulated its foreign policy in the language of civilizational heritage rather than abstract liberal norms. These are not merely geopolitical shifts. They represent a fundamental philosophical challenge. Each of these civilizations is asserting that truth is not found in abstract universals imposed from above, but in the concrete specificity of history, culture and lived experience. This is what Mondejar means when he calls for a new existentialism of multipolarity: a way of understanding reality that honors, rather than reduces, the diversity of civilizational expressions.
The recent Ramadan war between Iran and the US-Israeli alliance – although not confirmed as a direct war as of 2026, and taken here as a philosophical example for analysis – has been interpreted by some thinkers as an existential rupture. In his essay published on Geopolitica.ru, Sayyid Said Musawi argues that this conflict cannot be reduced to political or military confrontation. Rather, it must be understood as a historical rupture in which Iranian society, through collective resistance, rediscovered “an epic, existential relationship with truth.” What does this mean in philosophical terms? For Iran, the war was not merely about territory, sanctions, or nuclear capability. It was a matter of existential meaning – the right of a people to define, on its own terms, its relationship with history and truth. Western analysts, trapped within their own universalist frameworks, could only see the conflict through the lens of “rational actor” theory: Iran must have calculated some strategic advantage. They could not understand that sometimes nations act not out of utilitarian calculation, but out of existential necessity – the need to affirm one’s very existence in the face of annihilation. This is precisely the kind of reality that Western spiritual science cannot comprehend. It has no category for it. And yet, it is this reality that is reshaping the world.
If the revolt of the particular represents one dimension of the current transformation, the other dimension is the desperate attempt by Western elites to preserve unipolar dominance through technological means. Alexander Dugin’s analysis of the Palantir manifesto reveals a project greater than any single political administration: the construction of a Western techno-state. Palantir, a data analysis company deeply embedded in US military and intelligence operations, explicitly calls for the creation of a system of total control by combining artificial intelligence, surveillance, and military power. This is not science fiction; it is stated openly in corporate documents. The goal is to preserve Western dominance not through democratic persuasion or economic competitiveness, but through algorithmic governance – a world where every transaction, every movement, every communication is monitored, analyzed, and potentially controlled. This is a desperate move of a declining power. Having lost the philosophical argument, having failed to convince the world of its universal claims, the West now seeks to impose its will through technology. But this project carries its own contradiction: a system built on surveillance and control cannot claim to represent freedom and democracy. The mask is slipping. The universal rhetoric that once justified Western domination is now exposed as a cover for raw power.
The economic dimension of this transformation is equally significant. Atul Aneja’s analysis of the rise of the petro-yuan reveals how China’s oil trade with Iran, increasingly conducted in yuan rather than dollars, represents a strategic mechanism to bypass sanctions and weaken the dollar-centric financial system. This is not merely a technical adjustment to trade arrangements. It is an existential change in the global economy. The dollar system was never just a monetary arrangement; it was a mechanism of control, giving the United States the power to sanction any nation, any company, any person anywhere in the world. By creating alternative payment systems, China and its partners are not just conducting trade; they are reasserting their sovereignty over their own economic existence. A multipolar financial order is emerging, in which nations can choose between multiple currency zones and payment systems rather than being forced into a single dollar-denominated structure. This is the economic dimension of the existential pluralism that Mondejar describes.
Constantin von Hoffmeister’s philosophical essay on Hegel and Iran offers another perspective on the current transformation. Hegel, perhaps the greatest philosopher of Western universality, saw world history as the gradual unfolding of Absolute Spirit through successive civilizations. Von Hoffmeister argues that contemporary Iran represents a convergent stage where ancient Persian memory, Islamic revolutionary identity, modern statecraft, and multipolar sovereignty are synthesized. In this reading, contemporary Iran is not a “rogue state” or a “backward theocracy”, but a civilizational synthesis that challenges the linear narrative of Western progress. If Hegel’s World Spirit is returning through Iran, then the entire architecture of Western universality collapses. The end of history is canceled. History is in motion again, but not toward the liberal democratic endpoint that Fukuyama predicted.
The transformation we are witnessing is not without risks. Roberto Giacomelli’s “The Reign of Terror” explores how regimes in crisis, from revolutionary France to communist terror and contemporary surveillance capitalism, use fear as an instrument of mass control. Similarly, Roberto Pecchioli’s “Nudging: Gentle Totalitarianism” argues that contemporary authoritarianism no longer operates primarily through open repression. Instead, it uses gentle power, behavioral engineering, algorithmic persuasion, and “nudges”. These analyses are important because they remind us that the decline of Western universality does not automatically lead to liberation. New forms of domination are emerging, many of them more sophisticated and less visible than the old ones. The question is not only whether we will have a multipolar world, but what kind of multipolar world we will build.
The inclusion of Nepal in this geopolitical discussion is particularly noteworthy. A report claiming that the Nepali government is preparing to designate a “Mustang Special Zone” under the Pax Silica framework, granting special access to US-Australian technical teams for uranium processing, raises profound questions about sovereignty and resource governance. However, the Nepali government has not officially responded to these claims. The very fact that such discussions are taking place within global geopolitical analysis indicates the extent to which peripheral nations are being drawn into the vortex of multipolar geopolitics. Nepal, traditionally seen as a buffer state between India and China, is increasingly becoming a site of competition over resources, connectivity corridors, and strategic influence. This is the concrete reality of multipolarity. It is not an abstract philosophical debate, but a living experience for nations across the world. For countries like Nepal, the central question is: can they navigate this complexity without losing their sovereignty?
Mondejar’s use of the term “eschatological” in his title signals that the transformation we are experiencing is not merely political or economic, but civilizational and cosmic in scope. What is ending is not the world itself, but a particular way of understanding the world. The existentialism of Western universality – with its sharp division between the particular and the universal, the concrete and the abstract, the body and the spirit – is ending, and something new is emerging. What that new existentialism will look like remains unclear, but its contours are already visible: a pluralistic understanding of truth that honors the diversity of civilizational expressions; a rejection of abstract universality in favor of rooted, concrete knowledge; and an intuition that reality is not a single, uniform substance, but a rich tapestry of interconnected but different ways of being. This is the eschatological renewal that Mondejar calls for: not the end of the world, but the end of a world – the world of Western spiritual domination – and the birth of a new philosophical framework adequate to the reality of multipolar civilization.
This collection represents more than isolated analyses of current events. Old certainties are crumbling and new possibilities are emerging. From the existentialism of multipolarity to the rise of the petro-yuan, from the philosophical significance of the Ramadan war to the dark warnings of techno-authoritarianism, these writings map the terrain of our present historical moment. For those of us who seek to understand and shape this transformation, a twofold task lies ahead. First, we must engage in the philosophical work of deconstructing the spiritual assumptions that underpin Western universality – we cannot build a new world with the conceptual tools of the old. Second, we must attend to the concrete realities of power, economics, and technology that are reshaping the global landscape. Philosophy without political economy is hollow; political economy without philosophy is blind.
Multipolarity is not a destination, but a horizon. It is not something that will simply arrive. It is something we must actively construct, through intellectual labor, political struggle, and civilizational dialogue. The foundations of this renewal are being laid – in the philosophical work of thinkers like Mondejar, in the strategic choices of sovereign nations, and in the resistance of peoples who refuse to be absorbed into a homogenizing global order. Our task is to recognize these foundations and to build upon them with clarity, courage, and conviction.
