Has Western Man Become a Snivelling Peter Pan?

From Google’s motto “Don’t Be Evil” to Emmanuel Macron’s party name, “En Marche,” a new syndrome is deeply afflicting Western civilization: the Peter Pan syndrome. Childish naiveté has turned into a powerful ideology of consensus.

The brave journalist and writer Eric Zémmour just said that France’s new president, Mr. Macron, exactly fits the figure of “Peter Pan at the Eliseo” (the French presidential palace). The European élites created Macron in a laboratory according to the three D’s: Derision, Deconstruction and Destruction. Derision of Western culture, deconstruction of the Western society and family, and Destruction of the very possibility of self-defense.

Macron, with his secular optimistic millennialism, is the eternal youth syndrome, “the God of the consumer society,” as Zémmour said. Richard Millet, another brilliant and non conformist essayist, wrote that we are witnessing the “macronization of France.” Macron is everything you want: left, center and right, hetero and homo.

Macron’s year-old political movement En Marche! (On the move) is itself a start-up. He raised lots of excitement in the community of French destroyers. “With entrepreneurs, there’s something of the alter-ego in Macron,” said Guillaume Fourdinier, co-founder of Agricool, a sustainable food start-up. Macron-appointed ministers are already a bunch of bien pensants, from a “militant” feminist known for her extensive blogging for the Huffington Post, Marlène Schiappa, as the “Secretary of State in charge of Equality between Women and Men,” to the new Minister of Culture, Françoise Nyssen, who signed a petition in favor of the clandestine migrants of Calais.

Macron was chosen by a system that desperately needed to forget its own decomposition. It is controlled by a handful of post-leftist men who introduced gender ideology, euthanasia, gay marriage, assisted procreation, genetic manipulation, voting of foreigners, and all the other cultural products of nihilism that the system presents as the only version of “progress.”

Macron is the man who claimed that “there is no French culture.” France passed from the insignificant François Holland to the glorious Emmanuel Macron. Michel Houellebecq’s new novel, Soumission, tells the story of a French professor, François, a secularized single man who indulges in sexual pleasures and finds comfort in Islam. It is the symbol of a decaying Europe.

But the Western Peter Pan Syndrome is also represented by the sacred triad, Amazon, Google and Facebook, the US liberal techno-determinists that are filtering and deciding what people read, listen to and see. In 2016, for every dollar spent on online advertising, 85 cents went to Google and Facebook. These are the good guys who are reshaping our understanding of how free societies work — people such as Nicholas Negroponte at MIT, who even suggested that digital technology would lead to “greater harmony in the world.”

Google’s former ethics officer, Tristan Harris, said that “if you control the menu, you control the choices.” These liberal visionaries of Silicon Valley see themselves as superior beings, more intelligent than the masses, who need to be re-educated. Amazon, Facebook and Google have a detrimental effect on Western culture with their cult of sentient life, lysergic techno-utopism, gayism, post-genderism, New Leftism, new age spiritualism and hippy rebellion, leading to a paradise here and now. Under their dominion, the Western individual will be deprived of any connection with society, state, culture, religion, sex, and even the physical world. In a name, Emmanuel Macron.

The erasure of war from the horizon of our history has led to the disappearance of masculinity in Western societies and to the Peter Pan Syndrome. Macron and the Silicon Valley are examples of this phenomenon. The signs of the Western deviralisation are visible: degradation of education, refusal of responsibility for crimes and offenses, victimization of the perpetrators, purely compassionate interpretation of conflicts, fear of the dangers of history, feminization of the functions of government.

Ben Sasse in a new book called it “The Vanishing American Adult.” It is a much deeper phenomenon. It is the vanishing Western Man turned into a snivelling Peter Pan.

Giulio Meotti, cultural editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author. He is the author of three books: A New Shoah: The Untold Story of Israel’s Victims of Terrorism (Encounter Books); J’Accuse: the Vatican Against Israel (Mantua Books), and La fine dell’Europa, about the Christian and demographic decline in Europe. He is a columnist at Arutz Sheva and his writings have appeared in publications including the Wall Street Journal, FrontPage, Commentary, and The Geller Report.