Could Europe Sleepwalk into Apocalypse? Joseph Campbell, Myth, and the Psychology of Imaginary Wars
Overview
Could Europe be sleepwalking towards an apocalypse—not necessarily a nuclear one, but a psychological one?
This essay argues that the growing confrontation between Europe and Russia cannot be understood through military strategy alone. Drawing on the work of Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung and classical Greek thought, it explores how ancient historical memories, unconscious myths and collective fears may be shaping modern geopolitics.
The security dilemma explains why states acting defensively can make each other feel less secure. But Campbell suggests something deeper: that societies never outgrow myth—they simply dress it in modern language. Yesterday's dragons become today's existential threats. Yesterday's prophecies become today's strategic narratives.
The article examines Europe's long memory of invasion from the east, Russia's equally traumatic memory of invasion from the west, and asks whether both sides are caught in a self-reinforcing cycle of fear that resembles the Greek tragedy of Oedipus: attempting to avoid disaster while inadvertently bringing it about.
It also revisits the original Greek meaning of apocalypse—not "the end of the world", but "an unveiling". Perhaps the greatest danger is not that leaders consciously seek catastrophe, but that inherited myths quietly replace objective judgement without anyone noticing.
Whether or not one accepts this interpretation, recognising the psychological dimension of international politics may be as important as understanding missiles, armies and alliances.
Posing the problem
There is an old observation in international relations: nations rarely believe they are the aggressor. Almost every government insists it is acting defensively against an increasingly dangerous opponent. This is not cynicism; it is, more often than not, sincere belief.
Today Europe says it is preparing to deter Russian aggression. Russia insists it is responding to NATO expansion and Western encirclement. Each side experiences itself as reacting rather than initiating. Each can produce a narrative - but neither can produce the kind of hard, falsifiable evidence that would settle the matter for a genuinely neutral observer.
That absence of decisive evidence should give reason to pause and reflect. If both sides sincerely believe they are acting defensively, and yet neither can fully persuade the other - or a sceptical third party - with objective facts, then perhaps we are no longer dealing only with military strategy and budgets. We may be witnessing something older and less rational: a collective psychological drama in which ancient fears, historical scars and half-remembered myths shape how political leaders unconsciously interpret the present.
Joseph Campbell, the American scholar of comparative mythology, would very likely have recognised the pattern at once. Campbell spent a working life arguing that human beings never fully outgrow myth; they merely change its costume. This essay uses his way of seeing things - together with Carl Jung's notion of the collective unconscious and the older Greek concept of hubris - to ask a specific and uncomfortable, to many, question: is the current confrontation between Europe and Russia being driven, in part, by an unconscious mythological pattern rather than by demonstrable fear and strategic necessity? And if so, what does the original meaning of "apocalypse" - unveiling, not annihilation - have to teach us about the way out of this dangerous mess?
1. The Defensive Illusion
International politics has a well-documented structural trap known as the security dilemma. First named by the political theorist John Herz in 1950, and later refined by Robert Jervis in his 1978 article "Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma", the concept describes a situation of pure tragedy rather than villainy: measures a state takes purely to protect itself - new fortifications, larger armies, new alliances, forward-deployed troops - inevitably look, from across the border, like preparations for attack. Herz himself defined it as a structural condition in which the self-help measures states take for their own safety tend, regardless of the intentions behind them, to make other states feel less safe, because each side reads its own actions as defensive and the other's as potentially offensive.
Jervis sharpened the point further. Writing at the height of the Cold War, he observed that many of the very tools a state uses to make itself more secure have the side effect of making its neighbours less secure - security for one is insecurity for the other: a mechanism that operates independently of anyone's malicious intent. Two states, each wanting nothing more than to preserve the status quo, can nonetheless spiral into an arms race and eventually a war neither wanted, simply because neither can be certain the other's build-up is purely defensive. As one recent survey of the theory puts it, no state can ever know for certain that another state's accumulation of power is solely defensively motivated, so each must hedge against the possibility that it is not... and in hedging, each confirms the other's fears.
The sequence is depressingly predictable. One side rearms. The other rearms faster, "just in case". Each insists, and largely believes, that it seeks only peace. Both become convinced that war is becoming steadily more likely, not because either wants it, but because neither can afford to be caught unprepared if the other is lying. Neither side necessarily intends war at all. Fear itself becomes the engine driving events forward, quite apart and separate from anyone's stated objectives.
This is not merely an abstract theory. Historians have long noted that many of the wars of the twentieth century began not because any government actively desired conquest, but because its leaders became convinced that further waiting would be more dangerous than acting ie that the window for a tolerable peace was closing and that the other side's next move, whatever it might be, could not be risked. The security dilemma explains why sincerely peace-seeking governments can still walk, eyes open, into catastrophe.
It is worth being precise about what the theory does and does not claim. The security dilemma is not a claim that all wars are accidental, nor that aggressive intent never exists. It is a claim that under conditions of uncertainty about others' intentions - which is the normal condition of international life, since no government can see inside another's head - even purely defensive behaviour generates a self-reinforcing spiral of suspicion. Offence and defence, in other words, become almost indistinguishable in the eyes of the frightened observer, and the observer's fear is not evidence of the other's bad character; it is a nearly automatic by-product of anarchy itself.
Glossary and Key Concepts
Security dilemma — a structural situation, first named by John Herz in 1950, in which one state's genuinely defensive measures appear offensive to another, so that both sides become progressively less secure even though neither desires conflict.
Anarchy (in International Relations) — the condition, central to realist theory, in which no central authority exists above sovereign states to enforce order or guarantee anyone's safety, forcing each state to rely on self-help.
Spiral model — the escalatory process by which reciprocal, mutually reinforcing threat perceptions cause tension to increase even between status-quo powers.
Offence–defence balance — Robert Jervis's variable describing whether prevailing military technology and doctrine favour attacking or defending forces; when offence appears to dominate, the security dilemma intensifies because surprise attack seems more plausible and more rewarding.
Defensive realism — a school of international relations theory, associated with Jervis and later Kenneth Waltz, holding that states seek security rather than dominance, but that the security dilemma can still produce conflict between them.
Structural realism — a theory of international relations that emphasizes the role of power politics in international relations, sees competition and conflict as enduring features and sees limited potential for cooperation. The anarchic state of the international system means that states cannot be certain of other states' intentions and their security, thus prompting them to engage in power politics to ensure survival.
2. The Return of Ancient Fears
The security dilemma explains the mechanics of escalation, but it does not, by itself, explain why the fear feels so ancient, so visceral, on both sides of this particular frontier. For that, we need history - and, following Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung, something beneath history.
Europe's historical memory of invasion from the east is neither invented nor recent. The Huns, under Attila, swept into central Europe in the fifth century, contributing directly to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and leaving behind centuries of folk memory about riders from the steppe. The Mongols under Batu Khan devastated Hungary and Poland in 1241, arriving with a speed and destructive brutality that European chroniclers struggled to describe in anything other than apocalyptic terms; the Mongol withdrawal, precipitated by the death of the Great Khan Ögedei rather than by any European victory, was itself experienced as a kind of reprieve rather than a triumph. The Ottoman advance into south-eastern Europe, taking Constatinople (Byzantium) in 1453 and culminating in the sieges of Vienna in 1529 and again in 1683, kept the "Turkish menace" alive in the European imagination for centuries, embedding itself in art, sermon and popular memory long after the military threat itself had receded.
Layered on top of these deep folk memories are the twentieth century's own eastern traumas: the Eastern Front of the First World War, the Russian Civil War's spillover of Communism into Central Europe, and above all the catastrophic Eastern Front of the Second World War, whose scale of destruction - an estimated 80 per cent of all German military deaths occurred fighting the Soviet Union - has left a permanent mark on the collective memory of the European continent, west and east alike.
These experiences became embedded not merely in history books but in what sociologists call " the collective memory": the shared recollections of formative events that shape a community's sense of who it is and what it must fear, quite apart from whether any individual living today has direct experience of the events themselves. Collective memory does not require conscious recall. It operates through education, commemoration, literature, and the unarticulated assumptions built into a society's institutions - through, in short, culture itself. Whether or not a European voter today could name the Battle of Vienna, the pattern it established - danger arrives pouring in from the east - persists as a kind of background assumption, ready to be activated by new events.
Russia's own historical trauma runs at least as deep, and arguably deeper, because it has more often involved not raids or sieges but full-scale invasions aimed at the destruction or subjugation of the Russian state itself. Sweden under Charles XII invaded in the Great Northern War, reaching deep into Russian territory before his catastrophic defeat at Poltava in 1709. Napoleon's Grande Armée crossed into Russia in 1812 with over 600,000 men and occupied Moscow itself, in a campaign whose catastrophic retreat became one of the defining traumas of European military history. Imperial Germany's armies advanced significantly into Russian territory during WW1, particularly in 1915, when they captured vast areas including the entire Kingdom of Poland and parts of the Baltic states, and the resulting collapse contributed directly to the Bolshevik Revolution. Then came Operation Barbarossa in 1941, the largest land invasion in human history, in which Nazi Germany's assault on the Soviet Union resulted in Soviet losses now generally estimated at more than twenty million dead — a scale of loss without close parallel in the history of any state that survived the war which caused it.
From Moscow's perspective, then, the flat, unobstructed plain stretching from the German and Polish frontier to the Russian heartland has historically meant the difference between survival and near-annihilation.
It follows, on this reading, that the string of buffer states running from Finland through the Baltic states, Poland, and down to Bulgaria and the Black Sea has occupied an entirely different symbolic and strategic register in the Russian mind than it has in the mind of, say, Portugal or Ireland. Whether or not this historical anxiety is proportionate to the actual military capability of a NATO alliance in 2026, it is not manufactured; it is grounded in a documented and catastrophic historical record.
Thus each civilisation carries genuine historical scars, and the tragedy is that these two sets of scars reinforce one another almost perfectly. Europe fears an eastern invader because history has repeatedly delivered one. Russia fears a western invader for exactly the same reason, with an even higher historical body count to justify the fear. Each regards its own historical anxiety as entirely rational - because, considered in isolation, it is - and interprets the other side's parallel anxiety as evidence of aggressive intent, rather than as the mirror image of its own experience.
Glossary and Key Concepts
Collective memory — the shared recollection of historical experiences, transmitted through culture and institutions rather than personal recall, that shapes a society's expectations and sense of danger; a concept associated with the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs.
Buffer state — a smaller state situated between two larger, potentially hostile powers, whose neutrality or alignment is thought to reduce the risk of direct confrontation between them.
Operation Barbarossa — the codename for Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, launched in June 1941; the resulting Eastern Front produced the overwhelming majority of German military casualties of the Second World War.
The Great Northern War — the 1700–1721 conflict in which Sweden under Charles XII invaded Russian territory before its decisive defeat at the Battle of Poltava (1709).
Historical trauma (in political psychology) — a term used to describe the lasting psychological and cultural imprint of collective catastrophe on a nation's later threat perception and political behaviour.
3. Campbell and the Power of Myth
Joseph Campbell's central and most controversial claim was that myths are not primitive fairy tales to be outgrown by rational modernity, but symbolic structures through which every human society - including the most avowedly secular and technocratic - organises its understanding of birth, death, danger, meaning and belonging. In his celebrated conversations with Bill Moyers, later published as The Power of Myth, Campbell insisted repeatedly that mythology is not a matter of history at all but of eternal, recurring psychological pattern, and that the specific cultural clothing a myth wears matters far less than the underlying structure it enacts.
Campbell's larger academic project, beginning with The Hero with a Thousand Faces in 1949, was to demonstrate that hero narratives across radically different cultures — Sumerian, Greek, Norse, Hindu, Native American — share a common underlying architecture, which he called the monomyth: departure, initiation, and return, with the hero repeatedly facing and overcoming a monstrous threat before bringing some form of renewal back to the community. Whether or not one accepts Campbell's comparative method in every particular - and professional folklorists have long debated how tightly the "hero's journey" pattern actually holds across cultures - his broader point about the persistence of mythic structure is harder to dismiss: societies that imagine themselves entirely rational continue to organise their understanding of conflict along essentially mythic lines.
Campbell repeatedly emphasised that myths continue to operate on the human mind even when people no longer consciously recognise them as myths at all. Modern, secular societies like to imagine themselves as having left mythology behind in favour of empirical reasoning and cost-benefit analysis. Yet on Campbell's account the myths do not disappear; they simply change their costume. Religious myths become political myths. Heroic figures become nations, movements, or leaders. Monstrous antagonists become rival civilisations, ideologies, or "rogue states." Salvation - traditionally a spiritual concept - becomes military or economic victory, dressed in the vocabulary of security council resolutions and defence white papers rather than scripture.
Carl Jung, Campbell's most important intellectual predecessor on this point, proposed a mechanism by which such patterns could recur across unrelated cultures without any direct historical transmission between them: the collective unconscious, a stratum of the psyche shared by all human beings and populated by archetypes — universal symbolic patterns (the Hero, the Shadow, the Great Mother, the Devouring Monster) that recur spontaneously in dreams, religions and folklore the world over. Jung's The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious remains the foundational text for this claim; whether or not one accepts Jung's more metaphysical formulations about a literally inherited unconscious, the empirical observation that structurally similar threat-narratives recur across unrelated cultures and eras is difficult to explain away as pure coincidence.
Applying this perspective to contemporary geopolitics is not a category error. Campbell would very likely suggest that today's diplomatic communiqués, defence strategy documents and cable news chyrons are not free from mythology simply because they are couched in the vocabulary of satellite imagery, troop numbers and sanctions regimes. Rather, they are myths continuing to operate, expressed through the modern media of diplomacy, journalism and strategic doctrine rather than through scripture or epic poetry. The dragon has not vanished from the human imagination; it has merely been reclassified as a foreign policy threat assessment.
Glossary and Key Concepts
Myth (Campbellian sense) — a symbolic narrative expressing enduring, recurring patterns of human psychological and spiritual experience, as distinct from a factual account of historical events.
Monomyth / The Hero's Journey — Joseph Campbell's proposed universal narrative structure — departure, initiation, return — which he argued underlies hero stories across widely separated cultures.
Collective unconscious — Carl Jung's concept of a shared, inherited layer of the human psyche, distinct from the personal unconscious, populated by universal archetypes common to all humanity.
Archetype — in Jungian psychology, a universal, symbolic pattern - such as the Hero, the Shadow, or the Devouring Monster - that recurs across unrelated cultures and historical periods.
Demythologisation — the (contested) idea that modern, secular societies have discarded mythological thinking in favour of purely rational or empirical modes of understanding; Campbell's work is largely a sustained argument against this idea.
4. Apocalypse Means "Unveiling"
Modern colloquial usage treats "apocalypse" as a straightforward synonym for global catastrophe - nuclear war, civilisational collapse, the end of the world in the most literal and terminal sense. This usage, though now dominant, inverts the original meaning of the term.
The word derives from the Greek apokalypsis, formed from apo- ("away from," "un-") and kalyptein ("to cover" or "to conceal"). Its literal sense is "unveiling" or "revelation" - the removal of a covering so that something previously hidden becomes visible. This is precisely why the final book of the Christian New Testament is titled, in Greek, the Apokalypsis, and rendered in English as "Revelation": the text presents itself not primarily as a prophecy of destruction for its own sake, but as an unveiling of a hidden spiritual reality behind the visible, historical world.
The Book of Revelation is certainly saturated with terrifying imagery - beasts rising from the sea, seals broken in sequence, bowls of wrath poured out upon the earth, a final battle at a place called Armageddon. Yet biblical scholars, including Bart Ehrman in his 2023 study Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says About the End, have long argued that its deeper structural purpose is disclosure rather than mere annihilation: the symbolic destruction of a corrupt or exhausted order of things is presented as the necessary precondition for the emergence of a renewed one - a "new heaven and a new earth," in the text's own phrase. Reading the text purely as a countdown to worldwide destruction, while historically common, arguably misses this deeper structural logic of unveiling followed by renewal.
Campbell viewed apocalypse as one expression of the universal cycle:
- Order becomes corrupt
- Chaos destroys the old order
- A new world emerges.
Campbell interpreted apocalyptic narratives of this kind, and their equivalents across other mythological traditions, including Norse Ragnarök and Hindu cosmological cycles of dissolution and rebirth, through a consistently psychological angle. For Campbell, the "end of the world" in myth typically represents three intertwined ideas: the death of an old identity or way of life that has become unsustainable; a transformation achieved specifically through crisis, rather than in spite of it; and a renewal that becomes possible only after, and because of, that destruction. In myth, apocalypse is therefore rarely pure annihilation for its own sake. It is transition, often violent, always disorienting, but structurally oriented towards what comes after rather than towards the ending of itself.
The danger, on this reading, arises specifically when literal interpretations strip the symbolic story of its psychological function and convert it instead into a concrete political or military expectation, when "the old order must symbolically die so a new consciousness can be born" hardens into "a specific army must physically destroy a specific enemy on a specific timetable". It is this hardening from symbol into blueprint that transforms a resource for psychological and spiritual insight into a genuinely dangerous political programme.
Glossary and Key Concepts
Apocalypse — from the Greek apokalypsis, literally "unveiling" or "revelation"; in its original sense, the disclosure of a hidden reality rather than simply the end of the world.
Eschatology — the branch of theology concerned with the "last things": death, judgement, and the ultimate destiny of humanity and the cosmos.
Book of Revelation — the final book of the Christian New Testament, presented as a symbolic vision of cosmic conflict, judgement and renewal, traditionally attributed to John of Patmos.
Ragnarök — in Norse mythology, the foretold destruction of the gods and the world, followed by its rebirth; frequently cited by comparative mythologists as a structural parallel to Christian apocalyptic literature.
Literalism (in eschatology) — the interpretive stance that treats apocalyptic imagery as a direct, factual forecast of future historical events rather than as symbolic or psychological narrative.
5. When Myth Becomes Politics
The question of whether political leaders can sincerely hold apocalyptic beliefs - and indeed whether those beliefs shape their conduct in office - is not merely theoretical. It has a documented history, and it repays careful, non-partisan examination.
A political leader can certainly hold a sincere belief in a broadly literal apocalyptic timetable without any defect of intelligence or education; the two operate, for most believers, in largely separate registers. Such a person typically regards scripture as divinely inspired rather than as ordinary historical literature; belongs to a religious community that reinforces a particular eschatological interpretation through repeated teaching; holds a broader theological conviction that history unfolds according to divine providence rather than pure contingency; and may draw on specific personal or communal experiences that appear, to the believer, to confirm the pattern. Such convictions are documented and widespread within some branches of evangelical Christianity, and have close analogues in other religious traditions with their own end-time expectations, including strands of Shia eschatology centred on the return of the Mahdi and currents within the Zionist ideology concerning messianic redemption.
Not every believer in a religious eschatology interprets the relevant texts identically. Theologians generally identify at least four broad interpretive postures. A literal approach holds that the events described will occur largely as written, in a more or less predictable future sequence. A symbolic approach reads the imagery as representing an ongoing, timeless struggle between good and evil rather than a specific forecast. A historical (sometimes called preterist) approach situates the prophecy primarily within the events surrounding the Roman Empire at the time of writing, treating it as commentary on first-century persecution rather than as a forecast of the distant future. A mixed approach combines elements of these, treating some passages as symbolic and others as pointing towards genuine future events. A leader's political conduct may differ sharply depending on which of these interpretive postures they actually hold - a distinction routinely collapsed by commentators who treat "evangelical" as a single undifferentiated category.
The consequential question is not whether apocalyptic beliefs are true or false as theology - a question well outside the scope of this essay - but whether, and to what degree, they measurably influence political judgement. Several political figures have been widely discussed in this connection. Ronald Reagan is on record making remarks, on more than one occasion, suggesting that contemporary geopolitical developments might resemble biblical prophecy, and his interest in the subject has been documented by several biographers, though historians remain divided on how far, if at all, such remarks shaped his actual arms-control and Cold War decision-making, which was in practice heavily shaped by conventional strategic and economic considerations. Mike Pence's evangelical faith and its relationship to his political positions, particularly on the Middle East, has been extensively reported and discussed. Jimmy Carter, by contrast, was by his own account a deeply and sincerely religious man whose Baptist faith was central to his identity, yet his major foreign policy decisions — the Camp David Accords being the clearest example — are generally understood by historians as reflecting mainstream diplomatic, humanitarian and strategic reasoning rather than apocalyptic expectation as such.
This variation matters. It cautions strongly against the lazy inference that because a leader has spoken about biblical prophecy in a speech or interview, their subsequent policy decisions must therefore be substantially driven by that belief. Democratic leaders, whatever their private theology, continue to operate within dense institutional, legal, military, economic, bureaucratic and diplomatic constraints that heavily circumscribe the practical scope for any single set of beliefs — apocalyptic or otherwise — to determine outcomes on its own. The evidence base for asserting that any major twentieth or twenty-first century policy decision was driven solely by apocalyptic conviction is, on the historical record, thin. The more defensible and more interesting claim is the softer one: that such beliefs can colour the interpretive lens through which ambiguous events are read, even where they do not dictate the ultimate decision.
Glossary and Key Concepts
Premillennialism / Dispensationalism — theological frameworks within evangelical Christianity that read biblical prophecy as describing a broadly literal future sequence of events, including a period of tribulation preceding Christ's return.
Preterism — the interpretive view that biblical apocalyptic prophecy refers primarily to events that occurred in or around the first century, particularly the Roman persecution of early Christians, rather than to the distant future.
Messianism — belief in the eventual arrival of a redemptive figure who will bring about a final, transformative resolution of history; found across Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions in differing forms.
Camp David Accords (1978) — the peace framework between Egypt and Israel brokered by President Jimmy Carter, generally cited by historians as a case of religiously devout leadership pursuing conventional diplomatic strategy.
Belief–policy gap — the analytical caution that a leader's stated personal or religious convictions cannot be assumed, without direct evidence, to determine their specific policy choices.
6. The Oedipus Effect
Greek mythology offers its own, older warning about the relationship between belief and outcome, one that requires no theology at all to take seriously.
In the myth, King Oedipus is told by the oracle that he is fated to kill his father and marry his mother. Horrified, he flees the city he believes to be his home, in a deliberate attempt to escape the prophecy. It is precisely this flight - undertaken specifically to avoid the fate foretold - that places him on the road where he unknowingly kills his actual father, and in the city where he unknowingly marries his actual mother. His very attempt to escape the prophecy is the mechanism by which it is fulfilled. Had he never heard the prophecy, and never fled, the encounter might never have occurred at all.
Modern sociology, quite independently of the myth, has arrived at essentially the same structural insight and given it a technical name: the self-fulfilling prophecy, a term coined by the American sociologist Robert K. Merton in 1948. Merton defined it as a false definition of a situation that nonetheless evokes new behaviour which makes the originally false belief come true - the prophecy itself becomes a direct cause of its own fulfilment, operating through the changed behaviour of the very people who hold it.
Applied to the current confrontation, the mechanism is not difficult to trace. Imagine two rival powers, each of which sincerely believes the other is quietly preparing for attack. Each therefore mobilises additional forces, purely as a precaution. Each side's mobilisation is then observed by the other and interpreted - not unreasonably, given the absence of any way to verify the other's true intentions - as confirmation of the very aggressive intent that was originally only feared rather than demonstrated. The prophecy, in other words, manufactures its own supporting evidence, in a closed loop that neither party can easily see from the inside, because each new defensive step by either side is genuinely experienced, by its author, as purely reactive.
Hubris - a Greek term denoting the excessive confidence that leads individuals or nations to overestimate their capacity to control events, and which occupies a central place in Greek tragedy generally - then frequently completes the cycle. A government convinced it can manage escalation with precision, deploy deterrent signals with surgical accuracy, and calibrate the exact threshold at which the other side will back down, may in practice discover that its interventions in a highly uncertain system generate exactly the outcome the intervention was designed to prevent. Instead of preventing disaster through careful management, the very attempt to control the course of history becomes, in Oedipus's own words to himself, the mechanism through which disaster arrives.
None of this requires either side to be lying, or to secretly desire war. That is precisely what makes the pattern tragic in the strict, classical sense of the word, rather than merely regrettable: the outcome flows not from villainy but from the structural interaction of sincere, mutually reinforcing fears, amplified by each side's confidence in its own ability to read and manage the other's intentions.
Glossary and Key Concepts
Self-fulfilling prophecy — a term coined by sociologist Robert K. Merton (1948) for a belief that alters behaviour in ways that make the originally false or uncertain belief come true.
Hubris — in Greek tragedy, excessive pride or overconfidence, particularly the belief that one can control fate or outmanoeuvre destiny, which typically precipitates the tragic hero's downfall.
Oedipus Rex — Sophocles' tragedy in which King Oedipus's attempt to evade a prophecy becomes the direct mechanism of its fulfilment.
Tragic irony — a dramatic structure in which a character's own actions, undertaken in good faith, bring about the very outcome they were intended to prevent.
Escalation spiral — the international-relations analogue of the Oedipus effect, in which reciprocal precautionary measures by two or more parties generate the conflict each measure was intended to avert.
7. Are We Witnessing the Closing Psychology of an Empire?
History offers a further, less comfortable pattern: ageing empires and civilisations in structural decline frequently develop a heightened, and not always proportionate, perception of external threat.
Real dangers, of course, certainly exist in every era; this pattern is not a claim that threat perception in declining societies is invariably false. The claim is narrower and more precise: that internal uncertainty tends to amplify the perceived scale of external threats, quite apart from any independent change in the threats themselves. Economic stagnation, political fragmentation, demographic decline and a more diffuse loss of collective confidence together tend to encourage governing elites - not necessarily through conscious calculation, but through a kind of psychological convenience - to locate the explanation for domestic difficulties in an external adversary rather than in internal structural failure.
Oswald Spengler, writing in his 1918 - 1922 work The Decline of the West, proposed a strikingly relevant concept for exactly this phenomenon, which he termed Weltangst - "world-fear." For Spengler, world-fear was not simply an emotion incidental to cultural decline but a genuinely creative and formative psychological force within a civilisation, one that shaped its art, its mathematics, its religion and - though Spengler wrote before the atomic age - one could readily add, its foreign policy. Arnold Toynbee, whose twelve-volume A Study of History both engaged with and diverged from Spengler's more deterministic cyclical model, argued instead for a "challenge and response" framework: civilisations decline not on a fixed timetable but specifically when their institutions lose the creative capacity to respond adequately to challenges, whether those challenges are external invasions or internal social pressures, and this loss of creative capacity is frequently accompanied - as both historians document across numerous case studies - by a hardening, brittle, defensive posture towards the outside world, precisely at the moment when flexibility would serve the civilisation better.
Edward Gibbon, in his still-influential account of Rome's fall, emphasised a related mechanism: the late Roman Empire's growing reliance on external mercenaries for its own defence, a strategy adopted precisely because internal manpower and institutional cohesion were already eroding, which in turn deepened the very vulnerability to external pressure it was meant to address - a historical instance of the Oedipus effect operating at civilisational scale, though Gibbon of course did not use that term.
Whether any of this accurately describes the condition of contemporary Europe is a genuinely open and contestable question, and reasonable, well-informed people will disagree sharply about it depending on their assessment of European institutional cohesion, demographic trends, economic competitiveness and political unity. This essay does not attempt to resolve that debate, and readers should treat any confident answer to it - in either direction - with appropriate scepticism. What can be said with rather more confidence is that the historical pattern itself - internal uncertainty externalised as heightened threat perception, precisely at the point of institutional strain - recurs often enough across sufficiently different civilisations and eras that it deserves serious consideration as one lens among several, rather than dismissal as mere pessimistic rhetoric.
Glossary and Key Concepts
Weltangst ("world-fear") — Oswald Spengler's term for a formative, civilisation-wide anxiety that he argued shapes a culture's art, thought and politics, particularly in its later stages.
Challenge and response — Arnold Toynbee's framework in A Study of History, holding that civilisations rise or decline according to their institutional capacity to respond creatively to challenges, whether external or internal.
Cyclical theory of civilisations — the broad historiographical tradition, associated especially with Spengler, that treats civilisations as organism-like entities passing through predictable phases of growth, maturity and decline.
Externalisation of threat — the psychological and political pattern by which internal weaknesses or anxieties are attributed to, or projected onto, an external adversary.
Reliance on mercenaries (late Roman pattern) — Edward Gibbon's observation that the late Roman Empire's dependence on foreign troops for its own defence both reflected and deepened its underlying institutional decline.
8. A Balanced Perspective
Three broad, non-exclusive explanations present themselves for the current confrontation between Europe and Russia, and intellectual honesty requires holding all three in mind simultaneously rather than collapsing the picture into a single preferred narrative.
The first is strategic realism, in the classical sense used by international relations theorists: Russia and the states of Europe may simply possess genuinely incompatible security interests regarding the disposition of the territories between them, quite apart from any mythology or psychological projection. On this view, the confrontation requires no deeper explanation than ordinary great-power competition over buffer territory, energy transit routes, and alliance architecture - the sort of dispute that has recurred between neighbouring powers throughout recorded history, myth or no myth.
The second is straightforward political self-interest, operating at the level of domestic institutions rather than grand strategy. Political and bureaucratic elites in any system may derive tangible electoral, budgetary or institutional benefit from emphasising an external threat, whether or not that threat is proportionate to the resources mobilised against it; defence establishments, in particular, have obvious institutional incentives to see their missions as urgent. This explanation requires no appeal to myth or archetype whatsoever - only ordinary organisational self-interest, of the kind familiar from the study of bureaucratic politics in any domain.
The third is the psychological and mythological explanation developed throughout this essay: historical memory, unconscious archetype and half-recognised mythic pattern shape how societies perceive and interpret danger, quite apart from - and sometimes in the near-total absence of - the kind of concrete, falsifiable evidence that would normally be demanded before mobilising for war.
These three explanations are not remotely mutually exclusive, and treating them as competing hypotheses to be adjudicated against one another, with a single winner declared, likely misunderstands the nature of the phenomenon. All three plausibly operate simultaneously and continuously reinforce one another in practice. Genuine strategic interests provide the raw material and the vocabulary that self-interested elites can then amplify for domestic political purposes; and the resulting rhetoric of existential threat, once amplified, draws with particular ease and force on precisely the ancient mythological and historical patterns discussed above, because those patterns are already present, dormant, in the cultural memory of the audience being addressed. A strategic dispute dressed in mythological language becomes measurably harder to resolve through negotiation than the same dispute described in the plain, disenchanted language of interests and trade-offs — because a negotiated compromise over territory or alliance structure is achievable in a way that a negotiated compromise between civilisation and annihilation, in the mythic frame, structurally is not.
Glossary and Key Concepts
Strategic realism — the international relations tradition holding that state behaviour is best explained by objective security interests and the relative distribution of power, rather than by ideology, psychology or domestic politics.
Bureaucratic politics model — an analytical framework, associated with Graham Allison's work on the Cuban Missile Crisis, explaining policy outcomes as the product of competing institutional and organisational interests rather than unified rational strategy.
Threat inflation — the deliberate or semi-deliberate exaggeration of an external danger, typically for domestic political, budgetary or institutional advantage.
Overdetermination — a situation in which a single outcome has multiple, mutually reinforcing sufficient causes operating simultaneously, making any single-cause explanation incomplete.
Mythic framing (of conflict) — the rhetorical and psychological process by which a concrete, negotiable dispute over interests is recast in the register of existential or civilisational struggle, making compromise structurally harder to achieve.
9. Final Thoughts
Joseph Campbell's central and most enduring insight was that myths never simply disappear from human affairs; they evolve, migrate, and reappear in unrecognised form. The monsters do not vanish from the collective imagination - they acquire new uniforms, new insignia, new technical vocabularies. The apocalypse does not stay confined to sacred texts and stained-glass windows; it migrates, largely unnoticed, into newspaper headlines, defence white papers and cable news chyrons, where it continues to do exactly the same psychological work it always did, only now under the guise of hard-nosed strategic analysis.
Perhaps today's greatest danger, on the reading offered in this essay, is not that any one government consciously and deliberately seeks a final, apocalyptic confrontation. It is the considerably more unsettling possibility that all sides sincerely believe they are working to prevent precisely such an outcome - and that this very sincerity, filtered through inherited historical trauma, unconscious archetype, and each side's confident hubris about its own capacity to manage the crisis, generates exactly the escalation spiral each side believes itself to be resisting. History repeatedly demonstrates, across an unsettlingly wide range of otherwise dissimilar conflicts, that wars often begin precisely because every participant genuinely believes themselves to be acting defensively, right up until the moment escalation becomes irreversible.
The greatest tragedies, in the strict classical sense of that word, are therefore sometimes born not from malicious intent on anyone's part, but from mutually reinforcing fears that neither side can fully see from the inside, because each new defensive step, viewed from its author's own perspective, is experienced as nothing more than prudent caution.
The real apocalypse under discussion here may therefore be neither primarily religious nor primarily military in character. Returning to the word's original meaning, it may instead be the quiet, largely unremarked moment at which myth substitutes itself for a clear-eyed reading of reality - and at which nobody involved notices the substitution has occurred until the position has already become very difficult to reverse. If there is a genuinely useful and actionable insight to be drawn from Campbell's work for the present confrontation, it is this: unveiling - apocalypse in its original and more hopeful sense — remains available to both sides, right up until the moment it is not. The task, on this reading, is not to abolish myth, which is almost certainly impossible for any human society to achieve. It is to recognise myth operating in real time, precisely so that it can be examined rather than simply obeyed.
Consolidated Glossary
Anarchy (International Relations) — the absence of a central authority above sovereign states, forcing each to rely on self-help for its own security.
Apocalypse — from the Greek apokalypsis, "unveiling" or "revelation"; commonly but imprecisely understood today as simply the end of the world.
Archetype — in Jungian psychology, a universal symbolic pattern recurring across unrelated cultures and eras.
Buffer state — a state situated between two larger, potentially hostile powers, whose alignment or neutrality is thought to reduce the risk of direct confrontation between them.
Collective memory — the shared, culturally transmitted recollection of historical experience that shapes a society's expectations and threat perception.
Collective unconscious — Carl Jung's concept of an inherited, shared psychic layer populated by universal archetypes.
Defensive realism — the school of international relations theory holding that states pursue security, not dominance, but can nonetheless be drawn into conflict by the security dilemma.
Eschatology — the theological study of the end of history and humanity's ultimate destiny.
Hubris — excessive confidence, particularly in one's ability to control fate, that precipitates downfall in Greek tragedy.
Monomyth / Hero's Journey — Joseph Campbell's proposed universal narrative structure of departure, initiation and return.
Myth (Campbellian sense) — a symbolic narrative expressing enduring truths of human psychological experience, as distinct from literal history.
Oedipus effect / Self-fulfilling prophecy — a belief or prediction that, through the behaviour it provokes, brings about its own fulfilment.
Offence–defence balance — Robert Jervis's variable describing whether military technology and doctrine favour attacking or defending forces, affecting the intensity of the security dilemma.
Security dilemma — the structural situation in which one state's defensive measures appear offensive to another, causing both sides to become less secure.
Threat inflation — the deliberate or semi-deliberate exaggeration of an external danger for domestic political or institutional advantage.
Weltangst ("world-fear") — Oswald Spengler's term for a formative, civilisation-wide anxiety shaping a culture's art, thought and politics, particularly in decline.
Evidentiary Notes and References
Butterfield, Herbert. History and Human Relations. London: Collins, 1951.
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949.
Campbell, Joseph. The Power of Myth, with Bill Moyers. New York: Doubleday, 1988.
Ehrman, Bart D. Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says About the End. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023.
Gibbon, Edward. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. London, 1776–1789.
Herz, John H. "Idealist Internationalism and the Security Dilemma." World Politics 2, no. 2 (1950): 157–180.
Jervis, Robert. "Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma." World Politics 30, no. 2 (1978): 167–214.
Jung, Carl G. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959.
Mearsheimer, Structural Realism, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offensive_realism
Merton, Robert K. "The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy." The Antioch Review 8, no. 2 (1948): 193–210.
Spengler, Oswald. Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West). Munich: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1918–1922.
Toynbee, Arnold J. A Study of History. 12 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934–1961.
The Holy Bible, Book of Revelation.
Previous article: "The Danger of Apocalyptic Governance," Living in the Air, March 2025.
