Why do we instinctively associate the Pyramids of Giza and Mount Rushmore with radically different political ideals? One is viewed as a relic of divine kingship; the other, as a celebration of democratic leadership. Yet both were constructed to immortalize ruling elites. The pharaohs of ancient Egypt sought godhood in stone, while modern America—though rejecting physical mummification—has poured vast intellectual and cultural capital into the deification of its Founding Fathers. Their visages carved into mountains, their writings treated as sacred scripture, and their legacies enshrined in ritual and myth—this spiritual canonization bears an uncanny resemblance to the divine cults of old.
Why, then, do we believe that the modern West, born of blood-soaked conquest and imperial ambition, traces its philosophical lineage to the rational serenity of Ancient Greece? The myth of the West’s Hellenic origins is a relatively recent invention, crafted not in antiquity but in the salons of Enlightenment-era Europe. Confronted by the brutal legacy of the conquistadors, slavers, and colonizers, 18th-century French intellectuals found themselves in need of moral alibis. They sought to distance their culture from the violence that had secured its global dominance. Thus was born the myth: that Western civilization emerged not from genocide and plunder, but from Plato and Aristotle, from the abstract pursuit of truth and virtue.
This mythmaking served a political function. By retroactively grafting the moral prestige of Greek philosophy onto a civilization built by imperial power, Enlightenment thinkers performed an act of civilizational laundering. The West, they argued, was not a project of domination, but of reason and liberty. This narrative survives to this day—not as history, but as ideology.
But is Athenian philosophy truly as unique as we imagine? The German philosopher Karl Jaspers has proposed a more expansive view. In his conception of the Axial Age (circa 800 BCE to 300 CE), the great philosophical traditions of the world—Zoroastrianism in Persia, Vedanta and Buddhism in India, Confucianism and Daoism in China, and pre-Socratic and classical philosophy in Greece—emerged more or less simultaneously, and independently. In each of these regions, thinkers grappled with the central questions of human existence: justice, truth, morality, and the nature of the good life. The idea that such reflection was the sole province of the Greeks is not merely Eurocentric—it is historically false.
If the West, like ancient Egypt, has sacralized its elites, can it truly be said to embody liberty, individualism, and the sanctity of property? In practice, the historical record tells a different story. Over the past five centuries, Western powers have been the most persistent violators of these very principles. The language of liberty has often been used to mask imperial ambition; the rhetoric of rights has accompanied military invasions and economic subjugation. The myth of a 2,000-year-old civilizational arc—from Plato to NATO—has been instrumental in justifying global hegemony. In the twentieth century, the United States offered much of the world a stark choice: conform to our vision of civilization, or face destruction. Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea, Iraq, Libya, and countless others were not offered liberty—they were given ultimatums.
Why, then, do we persist in calling the civilization of the conquistadors and colonizers “enlightened”? Hernán Cortés, in his Five Letters of Relation to the Spanish monarchs, gives a rare glimpse into the complexity of the civilizations he encountered. In the Valley of Puebla, he was received by the people of Tlaxcala, a city-state with a population of 150,000, flourishing markets, and advanced agricultural systems. The Tlaxcalans, lacking a monarch, governed themselves through a council of elders. Before forming an alliance with the Spanish against their long-time rivals, the Aztecs, the Tlaxcalans held public deliberations reminiscent of Athenian democracy. Their decision-making was not autocratic but participatory—based on debate, consensus, and a shared sense of communal interest.
The Aztecs, so often depicted as the archetypal pre-modern empire, were not defeated by a handful of Europeans. It was the Tlaxcalan army—20,000 strong—that played the decisive role. European victory was made possible by native diplomacy, native strategy, and native manpower.
Far from being tribal or anarchic, many Indigenous American societies possessed sophisticated forms of governance, property rights, and individual liberties—arguably more so than the European states of the same era, where kings ruled by divine right and serfs had little autonomy. If the West did come to embrace liberal values, it is not unthinkable that these ideas were influenced, at least in part, by contact with the very peoples it later destroyed.
The tragedy lies not only in the conquest, but in the erasure—in the imperial rewriting of history. The lie that Western civilization is synonymous with liberty, reason, and moral superiority continues to dominate the global imagination, not because it is true, but because it is repeated endlessly in schoolbooks, museums, movies, and speeches.
To begin recovering the truth, we must first ask better questions. History does not answer to those who seek comfort—it answers to those who seek clarity. The myths that uphold modern power structures cannot be dismantled without philosophical courage. We must be willing to confront what we have long ignored: that the foundations of the so-called “civilized world” rest not on marble columns and democratic ideals, but on conquest, myth, and contradiction. Right answers, after all, begin with the right questions.
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