The entire world was Westernized very rapidly and all that remains is people looking for an alternative way forward than the ’official’ (US) roadmap, sometimes turning to their own history (generally through the lens of Western ideas) and sometimes turning to Western futures.
The problem that arises in the search for ‘authenticity’ is always technology. Technology depends on its own ’cosmology’, a highly specific worldview. There is an alternative to accepting this view outright, but (and this is the trap) this alternative is the route the West took!
Thus, the search for ‘authenticity‘ is inevitably doomed to recapitulate the West’s historical quest to remain ‘authentic’, which, as we now know, degenerates into nihilism. Traditionalists worldwide throw themselves unwittingly into the flames of liberalism.
Every non-Western country faced this problem long ago: ‘How do we adopt Western technology without losing our identity?’ But the West had faced a version of it before them (‘how do we adopt technology without losing our identity?’) and supplied the solution (modern epistemology).
What’s the solution? There isn’t one. From the perspective of the worldview that underpins technology, culture itself is instrumentalized. There is no possibility of ‘authenticity‘, there is only the possibility of mastery.
