The mystery of Western self-hatred

Compared to Islam which is probably the most powerful religion in the world today, egalitarian liberalism is probably second most powerful religion. It's when people are absorbed by this idea they cease to think in terms of facts -- the facts don't matter, they can ignore the facts or if they discover the facts they're perfectly happy to suppress them. ... All of these people who are trained to hate themselves they seem to take a real pleasure in it, these white people do.  A friend of mine points out that white people love to feel good about themselves by feeling bad about being white -- this is a source of great virtue, of self exaltation for them.  [Jared Taylor, from a conversation with Stephen Molyneaux]

I would substitute "Western" for "white" (or add the two together); but other than that, it's a salutary little thought process Jared Taylor expressed there. It reminds me of the much longer thought process the great poet, philosopher and statesman, Michel de Montaigne (16th century), articulated in his essay, On Cannibalism -- which I analyzed in an old essay on my former blog, The Hesperado -- in which that paradox of, essentially, "loving to feel good about yourself by feeling bad about being who you are" is developed to an exquisite absurdity, the perverse clarity at the heart of it:  

We are worse because we are better!

As Jared Taylor is mulling over this paradox in his discussion with Stephen Molyneaux, he confesses:

Where this comes from for me is in fact a mystery...

I think he's quite right to wrestle with this as essentially a mystery; for all too often, Westerners in understandable frustration and exasperation leap to Real-Problemerist explanations to fill the explanatory vacuum.  As he's conjecturing why it may have come about, he alludes to what I have many times concluded, that these almost freakish (and certainly deleterious) facets of politically correct multiculturalism seem to have evolved as hectic aberrations out of our Judaeo-Christian/Graeco-Roman virtues.  Of course, this doesn't really dispel the mystery; it just peers more closely at its odd entrails.