by

Dapo Ladimeji

There is a popular image of the Enlightenment reflected by passages such as:

‘What was the Enlightenment?

The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that sought to improve society through fact-based reason and inquiry. The Enlightenment brought secular thought to Europe and reshaped the ways people understood issues such as liberty, equality, and individual rights. Today those ideas serve as the cornerstone of the world’s strongest democracies.’¹

This above description from the Council of Foreign Relations reflects the idea of the Enlightenment as the birth of modern values such as democracy, equality, liberty and individual rights. From a philosophy department we have:

‘For Enlightenment thinkers themselves, however, the Enlightenment is not an historical period, but a process of social, psychological or spiritual development, unbound to time or place. ………..   Enlightenment philosophers from across the geographical and temporal spectrum tend to have a great deal of confidence in humanity’s intellectual powers, both to achieve systematic knowledge of nature and to serve as an authoritative guide in practical life. This confidence is generally paired with suspicion or hostility toward other forms or carriers of authority (such as tradition, superstition, prejudice, myth and miracles), insofar as these are seen to compete with the authority of one’s own reason and experience. Enlightenment philosophy tends to stand in tension with established religion, insofar as the release from self-incurred immaturity in this age, daring to think for oneself, awakening one’s intellectual powers, generally requires opposing the role of established religion in directing thought and action. The faith of the Enlightenment – if one may call it that – is that the process of enlightenment, of becoming progressively self-directed in thought and action through the awakening of one’s intellectual powers, leads ultimately to a better, more fulfilled human existence.’²

This latter version hints at the crucial issue: the Enlightenment would have been as sceptical of the ‘scientific establishment’ as they were about the Church. Just as the Church claimed that only specialist qualifications allowed one to intervene in religious discourse, so did the ‘scientific establishment’ claim that specialist knowledge was required to engage in scientific debate and the rest of us should follow the edicts or encyclicals of the ‘scientific establishment’. A curious distortion of the Enlightenment ‘think for yourself’ into ‘follow the experts’ has led to the disastrous situation that the exact opposite of what the  Enlightenment explicitly sought is now promulgated in its name – obedience to experts. During Covid we were told to ‘follow the science’ as determined by an unaccountable body. We are now told that it is the Enlightenment that brought us secular thought when most of the relevant thinkers were deists. Any suggestion that Enlightenment brought ‘liberty’ would have been met by the question: ‘liberty from …’ as none of the philosophers ever recommended licentiousness … i.e. do whatever you want.

Not only was the utter distortion of fact successfully embedded, it left out the fact that far deeper ideas had existed for millenia. “Know yourself’ written on the temple walls in Africa was more profound than ‘think for yourself’.

In order to build up the Enlightenment into this mega new project, the past had to be rewritten. People had to be told that before the  Enlightenment people thought the world was flat, could not think logically, had no science and all believed in witchcraft and miracles. None of this is true. Steam engines were invented in the classical world. Epicureans believed the world was made up of atoms and the void. Appian and Tacitus had totally materialist explanations of human and political conduct. Many ‘Enlightenment’ philosophers were steeped in the classics so the suggestion that they first invented such ideas would have scandalised them.

We have the glorification  of a false enlightenment and the deification of hollow heroes.  All of this was certified and blessed by a corrupt Western academia.

Western academia and philosophical thought that prior to WW2 was steeped in racism  and taught racism as natural, obvious and ever  a part of the Western tradition, began to discover the need for another doctrine in a world of the US empire. The doctrine of ‘universality’ was at hand and was reworked to suit modern needs.  Universalism is better suited to Buddhism and Christianity. Buddhism’s ‘all sentient beings’ and Christianity’s ‘ all God’s creatures’ are better suited to universalism than ‘all people are equal’. In fact, in the Western canon, universalism and equality come into direct conflict.

 ‘Equality’ has no other use in modern Western thought than to justify rapine, enslavement and genocide. In the Universal Declaration of Human Rights the first clause states:

‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. ‘³

Western natural scientists and economists set about this idea with vigour. According to certain economists, a citizen had the freedom and equal right to enter the market, and if the answer was poverty or enslavement, so be it. Markets treat the spectrum of characteristics ‘equally’ according to their worth. Certain natural scientists would argue that social allocation of status and distribution of opportunities is or should be based on the distribution of natural characteristics, and they can provide the necessary information to ensure that people with equal characteristics are treated equally. This is where Kant’s dictums become the cornerstone of scientific racism.

In the unipolar moment, the ideology of human rights and universalism ran amok. Any failures by the US were simply failures on the road to nirvana. ‘”The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” ⁴. This was now used to cover up mass murder and genocide, the suppression of sovereignty on a global scale and multiple assassinations of national leaders.

US neo-liberalism used foreign countries as test-beds, among them Nigeria. Financial control of universities/academic thought and of politicians by money was tested successfully in Nigeria. Western leftists looked on with disdain and not a little contempt. Now, President Trump is using these same tools to tame US universities, starting at the top of the ladder with the Ivy League. These same universities that hardly brooked serious dissent in the past and happily distributed the official version of the world for the Empire, expressed  ‘faux outrage’ at Trump’s demand that the official versions be updated for the new needs of the Empire. This was effective domination by a plutocracy. Plato had already identified the likely disaster of plutocratic rule. These small-minded plutocrats with big pockets would not always identify their true interests and would effect policies that in fact worked against their interests.⁵ At its heart, the issue was: the plutocrats understood money but not power. This is highly visible in Nigeria, where politicians generally pursue money, not the rewards of power. Or put differently, for them, the only reward of power was money. Lenin, Ho Chi Min, Nehru, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and many others would burst out laughing. However, the current US plutocracy is pushing the US decisively in that direction. This US  media is full of allegations, true or false, of the money machine that was the Clinton and Biden ‘crime families’.

While all this is happening, where is the Western left? Nowhere to be found. In large part, they have been drinking ‘white supremacy’ Kool-Aid and have even been paid handsomely by the CIA.⁶ This is hardly hidden, as Gabriel Rockhill has shown by easily exposing it.

This Western empire is not based solely on violence, but relies on an empire of the mind. Additionally, controlling the modern mind-space is essential for controlling and motivating the domestic population. Whole generations around the world have fallen under US soft power and its idealised self-image. Academia plays a vital role in this.

It is remarkable how much university teaching resembles a process of mass hypnosis.

 When the Chinese backers of DeepSeek revealed that they only hired locally Chinese trained staff they were implying, true or false, that at the leading edge the US universities were teaching false science so that foreign students would return to their own countries with serious misunderstandings which would be distributed locally and hinder the development of their own country’s competitive edge. US researchers would enter corporate research facilities where the truth would be taught. Booby trapped mobile phones are of a similar level of deviousness. So one cannot dismiss this suggestion out of hand.

CONCLUSIONS:

Until now, throughout history, it has been almost a dogma that ‘power and money’ did not equal truth. With the neo-cons and neo-liberals, this was reversed to ‘power and money’, the verdict of the market was the sign of and symbol of truth. Mathematical theorems can be presented to prove that the maximal value represented by the market will be the optimum, and those persons who represent these values are themselves optimum people.

Here we are at the bankruptcy of Western academia, where funding determines truth, where billions are paid to ‘independent reviewers’ of the peer review process. Trump’s explicit seizure of the syllabus and the limits of acceptable speech are not violations of history but reminders, however crude, that these items have always been subject to control and potential available to the highest bidder.

7 June 2025

Endnotes

1.  (“What Is the Enlightenment and How Did It Transform Politics?” 2023)

2.   (Bristow 2023)

3.   (Nations, n.d.)

4.  (“Theodore Parker Papers | Harvard Library,” n.d.)

5.  (Plato 1883, bk. 1)

6.    (The Red Nation 2024) (Rockhill 2021)

REFERENCES

Bristow, William. 2023. “Enlightenment.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman, Fall 2023. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2023/entries/enlightenment/.

Nations, United. n.d. “Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” United Nations. United Nations. Accessed June 7, 2025. https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights.

Plato, Aristocles. 1883. The Republic. Translated by B. Jowett. Oxford UK: Clarendon Press.

Rockhill, Gabriel. 2021. ““The Myth of the ’68 Thinkers”.” February 6, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/.

The Red Nation, dir. 2024. Western Marxism Is Not Anti-Colonial w/ Gabriel Rockhill. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciINv0GlDkU.

“Theodore Parker Papers | Harvard Library.” n.d. Accessed June 7, 2025. https://library.harvard.edu/collections/theodore-parker-papers.

“What Is the Enlightenment and How Did It Transform Politics?” 2023. CFR Education from the Council on Foreign Relations. February 17, 2023. https://education.cfr.org/learn/reading/what-enlightenment-and-how-did-it-transform-politics.