We Are All Fundamentalists

This is the text of a presentation given to the Sydney Traditionalist Forum on 30 November 2024

as part of the Forum’s “Quarterly Inquiry Series”. Dr. Menzies argues that the current state of Western liberalism is characterised by an absolutist insistence on its own epistemology, which leads to an intolerance application of one worldview to the exclusion of others. Specifically, Western fundamentalism uncritically celebrates markets, democracy and sexual freedom, which logically leads to selfish chaos, because while it has a strong idea of ‘freedom from’, it has no concept of ‘freedom for’.

Gordon Menzies is an Associate Professor in the Economics Discipline Group

at the University of Technology (Sydney) Business School, where he researches and teaches ethics and economics, international economics, monetary policy and econometrics. His prime focus is to investigate how economic thinking can negatively impact society, particularly when it ignores the human side to economic interactions, or when markets become an over-riding metaphor for all social life. He is the author of Western Fundamentalism: Democracy, Sex and the Liberation of Mankind (2019).

Friedrich Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: the Errors of Socialism (University of Chicago Press, 1988)

Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto (1848)