Nihilism is the end of a society and that is where neo-liberalism has led the West
Emmanuel Todd is a French historian, anthropologist, demographer, sociologist and political scientist at the National Institute of Demographic Studies (INED) in Paris
Cross-posted from Emmanuel Todd’s Substack
The copyright on this image is owned by Nicholas Mutton and is licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license
Mr Ochi was born in 1952. I myself was born in 1951. He graduated from Hiroshima University School of Medicine in 1977 and became a professor at Shimane Medical University in 1995. After serving as director of Hiroshima University Hospital, he became president of Hiroshima University in 2015. He is an orthopaedic surgeon specialising in knee joints and sports medicine. Member of the Science Council of Japan (2017-2022), Associate Member of the Science Council of Japan (2011-2017 and since 2022).
‘Today’s Japan facing the moral crisis of the West’ — The choices facing the world and Japan, and a reflection on peace —
On 18 October 2025, at the Kasumi Campus of Hiroshima University, we had the honour of welcoming French historian, demographer and family anthropologist Mr Emmanuel Todd for a lecture entitled “Today’s Japan facing the moral crisis of the West.” Mr. Todd insightfully analysed, from his unique perspective, the ethical and social crisis facing contemporary Western society and offered rich suggestions on the role Japan could play in this context. After the lecture, he met with Hiroshima University President Ochi, deepening the discussion from various angles on the themes of thought, culture and peace.
My lecture
I am very happy and grateful to Mr Ochi, President of Hiroshima University, for inviting me. I am particularly moved to return to Hiroshima. This is my second visit. I came here for the first time 33 years ago, during my first trip to Japan. Invited by the Japan Foundation, I requested that this first trip include a pilgrimage to Hiroshima. I have visited your country more than twenty times since then.
Yesterday, I returned to the Peace Memorial Museum to reflect on the atomic bomb. This museum, which I had already visited 33 years ago, has changed. But what surprised me most was how much more impressed I was this time around. I am clearly more concerned now about the issue of nuclear weapons.
I think I know why. 1992 was a time of optimism. Communism had just collapsed. The Cold War was ending. And even though the nuclear attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki seemed terrible, it really seemed to belong to the past. It was over. A mistake by humanity, a mistake by the United States. But something that was in the past.
The dominant values of the time, around 1992, were those of a liberal and prosperous West. It was first and foremost, even before consumption, production, industrial production. It was freedom, equality: equality between men and women, in the United States equality between whites and blacks. And above all, hope for peace after the Cold War.
But what do we see in the West now? I am not talking about values here, but about reality. We see something completely different. We see deindustrialisation, a decline in living standards, a decline in freedoms.
In the United States, the decline in freedoms will be cancel culture on the Democratic side and then Trump’s anti-liberal attacks in all sorts of directions.
Historically, France is a country of freedom. But I myself, in France, am in a very particular situation when it comes to my freedom. My publisher (Gallimard) is certainly the most prestigious in France. But I can no longer express myself, as I used to, on public broadcasters such as France-Inter, France-Culture or France 2. It is as if, in Japan, I were banned from speaking on NHK. My reputation in Japan has protected me from these French bans. I am infinitely grateful to Japan for protecting me from the new authoritarianism of the French state.
At present, what we are also seeing in the West is no longer equality, but rising inequality: in the United States and in Europe. In the United States, we are no longer moving towards equality between Blacks and Whites, but are witnessing a return to racial obsessions.
On a more global scale, we are also seeing an incredible resurgence of Western arrogance towards the rest of the world.
Above all, and this is the ultimate reason for my presence in Hiroshima, we must acknowledge the return of war. First, war in reality, in Ukraine or the Middle East, but beyond this reality, we are seeing the emergence of an obsession with war in people’s minds.
I will briefly discuss the Western military defeat in Ukraine because it was the analysis of this war that led me to work in depth on the Western crisis as a whole. War is a reality check, and it was the war in Ukraine that prompted me to reflect on the new problem of Western morality.
What is incredible, first of all, is how the United States and Europe overestimated their power vis-à-vis Russia. It is true that, on the eve of the conflict, Russia’s gross domestic product represented only 3% of the gross domestic product of the West (including Japan, Korea and Taiwan). And yet, despite this, Russia, with 3% of the West’s gross domestic product, managed to produce more weapons than the entire West. The war exposed our industrial weakness and revealed that the gross domestic product we habitually measure no longer represents a real capacity to build things.
This industrial shortcoming reminded me of the United States’ poor capacity to train engineers. Russia, with a population two and a half times smaller than that of the United States, trains more engineers. This is the key to Russia’s victory.
When it comes to training engineers, France and the United Kingdom are similar to the United States. But Japan and Germany are more like Russia, because both countries retain a strong capacity to train engineers. My analysis of the war led me to take an interest in the crisis in education in the United States, the decline in educational potential, both in terms of the number of students per generation and the intellectual level of those students.
Then, in order to understand the decline in education, I arrived at the ultimate factor, the one from which everything else stems: the religious transformation of the United States. What had made the United States, England, and indeed the heart of the West so strong was the educational power of the Protestant religion. The disappearance of Protestantism explains the collapse of American education.
My reflections on war, on what everyone can see by watching the television news (our daily spectacle), have therefore led me to a new interest in religion as a historical factor. Observing the consequences of the disappearance of religion in the present day has even opened up a completely new field of research for me. When I describe the history of the disappearance of religion, I now distinguish three stages: active religion, zombie religion, and zero religion.
Active religion is when people believe in their god and worship him. I am talking here about religion in a Western, monotheistic sense. I am thinking of Christianity, I am thinking of Judaism.
Then, the second stage is the zombie stage, when belief in God has disappeared, when worship has disappeared, but in a social world where the moral habits associated with religion are still alive. Individuals remain bound by a system of values, they remain capable of collective action. Religion is replaced by substitute ideologies, such as national sentiment, class sentiment, and all kinds of ideological groups that replace the original religious affiliation.
And then there is the third stage, the one we are in now, the stage of zero religion, in which the values inherited from religion have disappeared. We are entering a world where the individual is truly deprived of fundamental values; they are now alone, deprived of the capacity for collective action. They are weakened individuals because the values instilled by religion, and later reused by ideology, were a source of strength for their personality.
This state zero of religious beliefs is not experienced by the individual as true freedom. Human beings find themselves confronted with the very common problem of the meaning of life. What are they doing on earth? What is the purpose of their existence? In this kind of context, we see the emergence of what I call nihilism.
The fear of emptiness turns into glorification, into deification of emptiness. A passion for the destruction of things, the destruction of men, the destruction of reality, gradually emerges. The current psychological state of the West is partly this: nihilism, which leads to a passion for war in people’s minds, and a preference for war in geopolitics. We understand the moral background to the West’s new preference for war.
I will mention some of the wars for which the West is responsible, but without Westerners, who are nihilists without knowing it, being able to understand their responsibility. That is what is striking today: Westerners provoke wars and fuel wars by telling themselves that they are on the side of justice.
Let’s start with the war in Ukraine. The war in Ukraine is seen in the West as a Russian invasion of Ukraine, and I admit, of course, that it was the Russian army that entered Ukraine. But the historical reality is that NATO’s expansion towards Russia, through Ukraine, and the war waged by the Ukrainians themselves, pushed by the West, against the Russians in Donbass, are the real causes of the conflict. It is absolutely true that, for the Russians, this war is defensive. It is obvious to me that the Americans and Europeans are the aggressors, having arrived less than a thousand kilometres from Moscow. That is the objective situation. What is fascinating is that these aggressors think they are being attacked and that they themselves are forced to defend themselves. There is an element of madness in our situation in Europe.
And then there is the even more obvious example of the genocide in Gaza. The genocide was started by the State of Israel, which is another historical fact, but in my opinion, the State of Israel is being controlled by the United States. Without American weapons and so many other forms of support, the Israeli army could not have done what it did, just as the Ukrainian army, without American weapons, could not have waged its war of aggression in Donbass.
And once again, what is striking, beyond the violence and war, is the clear conscience of the Americans and Israelis, after 60,000, 70,000, 80,000 Palestinians have been killed.
These days, we are coming up against a very interesting problem of historical understanding. The United States, for a long time, and Trump more recently, have encouraged, perhaps even decided, Israeli action. Trump, during his first presidency, established the US embassy in Jerusalem. When we read the writings of people who support Trump, we find a genuine adoration of the State of Israel. Trump was the first to imagine that Gaza could be transformed into a seaside resort emptied of its inhabitants. Trump is behind the attempted genocide. But here’s the problem.
Very recently, Trump decided that it was over. He ordered Israel to stop. He told Netanyahu to apologise to Qatar, which had been bombed. He imposed a truce without difficulty, from which we can draw two conclusions. First, proof that it is indeed the United States that is waging war in the Middle East, since it controls both the brake and the accelerator. First thing.
Secondly, something extraordinary. An American president, who one day promotes genocide, demands the Nobel Peace Prize the next day because he has changed his mind and established a truce. This reversal is an illustration, or rather proof, of a total lack of moral sense. Zero morality resulting from zero religion makes it possible to want genocide one day and the Nobel Peace Prize the next.
So far, I have mainly talked about the American risk. But I believe it is important for the Japanese to be aware of the emergence of a new European risk in the progression of nihilism.
At the time of the Iraq War, when I came to Japan, I said: ‘The Americans are dangerous, but the Europeans are reasonable people, and the Japanese should align themselves with the Europeans, since the Japanese themselves are reasonable.’
However, what we have seen emerge recently in Europe is a specifically European Russophobia, a specifically European warmongering, centred on Northern Europe, on Protestant Europe.
Protestant Europe is the United Kingdom, it is the majority of Germany, it is Scandinavia, it is two of the three Baltic countries. I have been in contact with or even visited several countries following the translations of my latest book, and I have found that Spain, Italy and Catholic countries in general are neither Russophobic nor warmongering.
To conclude this lecture, I would like to try to explain why Protestantism is more dangerous in its purest form than Catholicism. Protestantism is more capable of leaving behind a nihilistic society. I will then attempt to situate Japan, perhaps too quickly, in relation to this difference between Protestantism and Catholicism.
Protestantism, and the same could be said of Judaism, was a very demanding religion. There was God, there were the faithful, and the world was secondary. The beauty of the world in particular was rejected, among other things, with a refusal of images and a refusal of the visual arts. When such religions, obsessed with transcendence, disappear, nothing remains. The world is not interesting in itself, it is empty. This intense emptiness opens up a particular possibility for nihilism.
Catholicism is a less demanding, more human religion, which can accept the idea that the world is beautiful in itself. Images have not been rejected in the Catholic world, and the Catholic world is full of artistic wonders. In a Catholic country, if you lose God, you are left with the feeling of the beauty of the world. If you are French, you are left with the feeling that you live – an illusion, no doubt – in the most beautiful country in the world. If you are Italian, you do indeed live in the country with the most beautiful things in the world, since Italy itself has become an object of art. In such contexts, the fear of metaphysical emptiness is less intense, and therefore the risk of nihilism is less great. In my opinion, the European country least threatened by nihilism is Italy, because in Italy everything is beautiful.
I now come to Japan, to conclude, and I apologise if I say anything silly about Japan. The Japanese often define themselves as a people without religion and do not seem very anxious about this absence of religion. In fact, this has not always been true: Japan used to be a very religious country. Japanese Buddhism has had some rather violent phases, I am thinking in particular of the rise of the Jōdo Shinshū sect, the true Pure Land sect, which led to peasant uprisings and whose simplicity of doctrine was reminiscent in some ways of Protestantism. But Japan has always maintained great religious diversity and complexity, with several Buddhist sects and a Shinto background that is itself very varied and close to nature. To summarise very broadly, I would say that religion has never diminished the sense of beauty in the world in Japan.
I believe that the attainment of a zero state of religion in Japan must have produced a state of mind closer to that of Catholic countries than to that of Protestant countries. Which is another way of saying that Japan does not seem terribly threatened by nihilism to me.
To reinforce this intuition, before visiting the Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima, my daughter Louise and I went to Miyajima, where the sense of beauty in the world is truly impressive.
Thank you.
Our discussion with Mr Ochi
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Mr Ochi: Mr Todd, what kind of child were you?
Mr Todd: I was very kind and very quick-tempered. Now that I am older, I am still kind but I am no longer quick-tempered.
Mr Ochi: I believe that Mr Todd is still capable of getting angry about certain things.
Mr Todd, I feel that at the root of your research lies a spirit of “resistance to ideology”. How did you cultivate this way of thinking since childhood? And what is the most important thing you learned in this environment, having the philosopher Paul Nizan as your grandfather and Claude Lévi-Strauss as a distant relative?
Mr Todd: I think that, fundamentally, I haven’t changed and I still feel anger towards injustice. My family is rooted in left-wing thinking. The most important thing I learned in this environment is ‘to be free in the face of dominant thinking’. It’s not a question of personal courage, but rather a kind of intellectual immunity that my family passed on to me.
Mr Ochi: I get the impression that the ideological biases you challenge are linked to contemporary criticism of “elitism”.
Mr Todd: Yes. It’s true that the proportion of highly educated people has increased, creating a gap with real society. I believe that for a society to function healthily, people who work with their hands, who make things — those who practise what might be called a “trade” — must be respected within the community.
The theory of “family” that resonates in Japan — What lies behind the cultural resonance
Mr Ochi: Your typology of family systems has had a great resonance in Japan. Why is it so well received by Japanese readers?
Mr Todd: The reason is clear. It is because Japan is a country of ‘lineage families’, which passed on the inheritance to one child, usually the eldest son. In a peasant culture that values family continuity, the basic unit of social order and human relations is rooted in the family itself. That is why, in Japan, my research is understood without really needing to be explained. Conversely, in French society, which is based on the ‘nuclear family’ and where, particularly in the Paris basin, only couples with children have ever existed, individual freedom is certainly considered the supreme value. But I would say that people are, so to speak, prisoners of an injunction to ‘be free’. Carrying a burden in the name of freedom—that is the paradox of the West. Admitting an anthropological determination of freedom is unbearable.
Mr Ochi: So that means that countries with a family culture, such as Japan and Germany, share a common mental structure.
Mr Todd: Exactly. Both countries share a respect for discipline and order. However, the Japanese have a sense of humour, while the Germans are perhaps a little too serious (laughs).
The multipolar world that will emerge after ‘the decline of the West’
Mr Ochi: You have proposed the concept of ‘the defeat of the West’. What future do you envisage for the world after the spread of nihilism?
Mr Todd: I don’t think the whole world will sink into nothingness. On the contrary, it will become more diverse. We will enter an era where nation states of all sizes will coexist, each with their own values. The important thing is how we can stabilise a world that is not dominated by a single power.
Mr Ochi: That is also the path to a “multipolar and peaceful world”.
Mr Todd: Yes. With population decline, the motivations for war will weaken in the long term. However, the real danger lies in those nations that are on the verge of losing their power. The instability of decline is the spark that can set the world ablaze.
Beyond ‘excessive perfection’
Mr Ochi: You mentioned the ‘beauty’ of Japanese society. In a rapidly changing world, with immigration and changing values, what do you think will happen to this beauty?
Mr. Todd: The ‘beauty’ I am referring to is not that of the landscape, but ‘the sensitivity that allows one to perceive the world as beautiful.’ Japan’s problem is not nihilism, but an excessive pursuit of perfection. Doesn’t accepting a little ‘imperfection’ sometimes lead to human maturity?
Questioning the essence of peace — Since Hiroshima
Mr Ochi: Finally, I would like to ask you about nuclear power and peace. You take a position that tolerates nuclear weapons. What is your reasoning behind this?
Mr Todd: It is the idea that ‘the balance of terror is preferable to asymmetry’. In other words, a state of balance of terror between countries that possess nuclear weapons is preferable to an asymmetrical situation where one country possesses them and its adversary does not. Nuclear weapons are a reality that already exists, and the issue cannot be resolved by a simple dichotomy between good and evil. The essence of peace is to face difficult choices rationally.
Mr Ochi: It is the duty of every citizen to think and act to protect Japan from other countries. However, when it comes to nuclear weapons, here in Hiroshima, these words carry particular weight. I think that nuclear deterrence, both logically and ethically, is difficult for the citizens of Hiroshima to accept. Japan, where the population does not own firearms, is safer than American society, where people protect themselves with weapons, and I believe that if the world becomes nuclear-armed, the nuclear risk will also increase. However, I hope that we can overcome our differences of opinion and move towards true understanding through dialogue. I am convinced that the university is precisely the place where this ‘rational dialogue’ can take place.
Mr Ochi: One last question, Mr Todd, if you were to promote a movement for the abolition of nuclear weapons, what strategy would you adopt?
Mr Todd: I never think about impossible things. Life is too short.
In conclusion
Mr Ochi: Through this dialogue, I have felt once again that peace is not a static ideal, but the result of ‘dynamic thinking’ that is constantly being questioned. Hiroshima University will continue to cultivate dialogue, uniting knowledge and awareness of the world, and to train people capable of creating lasting peace.
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