War of Ideas Framework

The foundational worldview of the West — rooted in divine order, human dignity, and the moral law. Its power lies in its capacity to renew, to turn even broken cultures back toward truth. But it is divided, and in much of the modern world, it fights to reclaim its own inheritance.

A total civilizational system — religious, legal, and political — that seeks to order society under God. Islam remains a coherent global force, strengthened by demographic growth and the conviction of mission. Yet in many places, its unity is strained by modernity, nationalism, and corruption.

Once a revolutionary ideology of the working class, now reborn through cultural and institutional forms. It seeks to upend hierarchies and redefine morality through material equality. Though its economic vision failed, its moral language still infiltrates Western politics, education, and media.

The reigning worldview of the modern West — centered on individual autonomy, reason, and secular human rights. It has brought freedom and prosperity, yet now drifts into relativism and self-doubt. Its strength has become its weakness: freedom without truth collapses into confusion.

 The four global competing ideas do not exist in isolation, other forces act upon them from without. External pressure refers to the demographic, cultural, or geopolitical forces that press upon a civilization from outside — migration, economic dependency, military threat, or the spread of rival ideologies. These pressures test a worldview’s cohesion and often expose its weaknesses.

Internal subversion is the rot that begins inside an idea or civilization. It occurs when elites, institutions, or movements betray the principles they claim to defend (e.g., greed, corruption). Further, smaller ideologies that lack global reach or universalist aspirations can subvert the dominant ideas of their host civilizations in order to shape the world to their adherents' benefit.

 Drift represents ideological movement over time—the slow redrawing of allegiance. Within a worldview, it means shifting between subschools of thought, such as from Classical to Progressive Liberalism. Across worldviews, it occurs when a civilization gradually abandons one idea and adopts another entirely, such as drifting from Liberalism into Marxism.