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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

Escaping Geopolitical Groupthink

Beyond West and Anti-West

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

1. The Problem of Geopolitical Groupthink

In an age of information saturation, the most insidious form of bias is not ignorance but belonging. Geopolitical groupthink—the pressure to interpret world events through the lens of one's “side”—has replaced genuine inquiry with identity maintenance. For many, positions on war, power, and morality are no longer conclusions of thought, but badges of affiliation.

The term groupthink originally described the conformity pressures within small policy teams, such as those that led to the Bay of Pigs disaster. Today, its scope has expanded to whole civilizations. The Western public sphere is split between two opposing narrative communities: the pro-Western and the anti-Western, each filtering facts through a moralized story of civilization and decline. Between them lies an ever-shrinking space for nuanced realism.

2. The Four Corners of the Debate

The most vocal critics of Western hypocrisy—thinkers like Jan Krikke and Joseph Dillard—often begin with valuable insights. Dillard was, in fact, the first to raise the topic of Western groupthink on Integral World, pointing to the unexamined conformity of Western narratives about morality and power. His critique of moral framing in international affairs inspired a broader debate about how Western commentators unconsciously reproduce their own cultural assumptions.

Krikke extends this challenge by exposing the Eurocentric blind spots of Western “realism.” Yet both frequently fall into mirror-groupthink: rejecting Western distortions by embracing their opposites. In denouncing Western self-righteousness, they risk romanticizing the counter-civilizational forces they once sought to analyze.

3. How Groupthink Works in Geopolitics

Groupthink thrives on three cognitive temptations:

Moral Simplification. The world is divided into oppressors and victims, freedom-lovers and fascists. Once a camp is labeled “the good,” atrocities are rationalized as unfortunate necessities.

Epistemic Tribalism. Facts are filtered through sources that confirm the group's worldview. Western liberals quote the New York Times; anti-Western critics cite RT or The Grayzone. Each tribe has its saints and heretics.

Spiritual Inflation. Especially among integral and post-integral thinkers, critique of the West can feel like a spiritual awakening—a rise to meta-perspective. But this can easily become an ego of transcendence, where one identifies not with humanity but with the feeling of being “beyond” the crowd.

In such conditions, independence of thought becomes a lonely path. To criticize the West invites accusations of treason; to critique its opponents risks being called an apologist for empire.

4. The Dilemma of the Independent Critic

Krikke's critique of Western “realism” is useful insofar as it reminds us that Russia, China, and the Global South have their own civilizational logics. But when he contrasts these with a decadent, hypocritical West, he constructs a civilizational morality play—the very structure he seeks to transcend.

Dillard's criticism of Western moral framing in Gaza, too, makes an important point: the discourse of “good vs. evil” obscures the deeper logic of justice and reciprocity. Yet in practice, his sympathies drift toward the anti-Western coalition as the presumed bearer of multipolar justice.

Both thinkers fall prey to a “negative identification”: defining oneself not by allegiance to truth but by opposition to Western narratives. The mirror image is no less distorted than the original.

5. Why the Middle Ground Is Not Centrism

Escaping groupthink is not a call for “balance” in the journalistic sense of giving equal time to both sides. That, too, can be a form of evasion. The aim is depth over symmetry—to situate both Western and anti-Western worldviews within the same systemic frame.

The middle ground is not the midpoint between extremes but a higher-order integration. It recognizes:

• The West's Enlightenment legacy as both emancipatory and imperial.
• Non-Western civilizational resurgence as both necessary correction and potential regression.
• That “multipolarity” can mean pluralism—or just plural empires.

Such discernment requires holding multiple partial truths without surrendering to any of them as ideology.

6. Steps to Avoid Geopolitical Groupthink

Recognize the Emotional Reward of Belonging. Every ideological camp offers psychological comfort: certainty, moral superiority, and comradeship. The first step is noticing that pleasure and resisting its seduction.

Interrogate Your Sources. Read outside your bubble—but not as token exposure. Practice epistemic empathy: understand why the other side believes what it does without adopting its worldview.

Distinguish Critique from Negation. To criticize the West is not to side with its rivals. To critique Russia or China is not to side with NATO. Each system contains both human and inhuman elements.

Cultivate Contextual Thinking. Historical consciousness breaks the spell of moral immediacy. Empires rise and fall; civilizations repeat patterns. A long view immunizes against panic and propaganda.

Practice Integral Detachment. In Wilberian terms, a truly integral stance would transcend and include—acknowledge Western rationality and rights-based systems as partial truths, but also integrate the non-Western emphasis on community, sovereignty, and tradition. Integral detachment means refusing to collapse into either.

7. The Role of Integral Critique

The Integral movement itself has been ambivalent about geopolitics. Its emphasis on interior development often leaves power unexamined. But when integral thinkers do engage geopolitics, they risk re-enchanting power with metaphysical meaning—casting “Eros in evolution” as the hidden driver of world history.

Integral analysis, properly understood, could instead become a discipline of meta-perspectival sobriety. It asks: how do our interpretive lenses—moral, realist, civilizational, spiritual—co-construct the world we see? That question dissolves tribal certainties not by declaring neutrality but by deepening awareness of our participation in them.

8. Toward a Post-Tribal Geopolitics

What would a genuinely post-tribal geopolitics look like? Perhaps something like this:

• It would treat power as real but not sacred.
• It would regard morality as context-dependent but indispensable.
• It would affirm plurality without lapsing into relativism.
• And it would recognize that civilizations are not moral subjects but adaptive systems driven by both necessity and aspiration.

In such a framework, the task is not to choose between the West and its Others but to understand the systemic dynamics that bind them—competition for resources, status, security, and meaning.

9. Conclusion: The Courage to Stand Alone

Escaping geopolitical groupthink requires a rare courage: the courage to think without a tribe. For most, identity feels safer than truth. But as the ideological battlefield expands—from Ukraine to Gaza, from the South China Sea to cyberspace—the need for unaligned, psychologically mature observers grows urgent.

Jan Krikke and Joseph Dillard remind us of the value of dissent against Western orthodoxy. Yet dissent must not curdle into inversion. True independence begins when critique no longer defines itself by what it rejects, but by the quality of its seeing.

In the end, avoiding groupthink is not about neutrality. It is about fidelity—to complexity, to curiosity, and to the fragile possibility that truth might still be larger than any civilization's story.