The Psychocultural Fracture of the Western Civilization

León F.R. · Mankind Quarterly (2026)

Resumen

Is the West a community of shared values? In particular, we must ask whether the populations of the nine ex-Communist Catholic countries in its eastern border, from Estonia to Croatia, presently share the West’s values and individualism. An analogous question follows from the fact that Mediterranean Western countries (Italy, Spain, Portugal) are outside the West’s ecological niche. This study, using data from multiple nations’ samples, shows that former communist countries of the West plus the Mediterranean Western countries and Ireland are fractured from the core West in terms of freedom, responsibility, emancipative values, and/or individualism. The core West is formed by Protestant populations plus those of Austria, Canada, France, and Luxembourg, all maximizers of Western values and individualism which differ in this regard from geographically and psycho-culturally peripheral Western countries. The study results demonstrate that the fracture is attributable in part to religion and in part to political system or ecology. Germanic ethnicity remains a possible source of the core West despite its disconfirmation in regression analysis; there is a need for studying its relationships with the religion, political past, and ecology of Western countries and their provinces, to better understand the Western fracture in values and individualism.

Instituciones: Universidad San Ignacio de Loyola