Let me start with a tale.
Johan and Arturo are neighbours who share nearly everything: language, community, even the same street address. Yet they inhabit fundamentally different moral universes. One believes in human dignity, the other rejects it entirely.
Arturo discovered the Marquis de Sade in late adolescence, devouring Juliette and The 120 Days of Sodom. He embraced the Sadean libertine doctrine that humans exist only for another’s pleasure and possesses no intrinsic worth. Delbène’s maxim is his creed: “Pray avail me of that part of your body which is capable of giving me a moment’s satisfaction, and, if you are so inclined, amuse yourself with whatever part of mine may be agreeable to you.”
Monthly, or when opportunity allows, Arturo hunts human prey. He drugs his victims, transports them to an abandoned factory, and subjects them to elaborate tortures. His deepest pleasure lies in inflicting savage pain. He would grant his victims eternal life if he could to ensure their everlasting suffering.
Johan represents the moral antithesis. The accidental death of another would destroy him with guilt. He cannot fathom intentional harm, viewing Arturo not as truly human and as someone requiring imprisonment or psychiatric care. Even then, Johan’s compassion extends to his moral opposite. He would seek Arturo’s rehabilitation, not revenge. He’d never wish on him the cruelties Arturo inflicts on others.
From Arturo’s perspective, Johan’s guilt, compassion and “herd morality” represent precisely the weakness that superior beings must overcome. He envisions a transformed humanity: individual, unique, cold, implacable, infinitely cruel yet brimming with life.
These men appear identical externally, yet their internal moral architectures produce incompatible ways of being in the world.
This tale illustrates a general principle: value systems can be fundamentally incommensurable, especially when they shape minds from infancy, encoding divergent patterns of thought and action. This reality carries profound implications for multicultural societies and their educational institutions.
Consider the cultural gap between the West’s late 1960s politics of irreverence — expressed through sexual revolution and student protests — and conservative religious traditions such as Catholicism and Islam. While one might argue that these positions exist symbiotically (irreverence requires authority to rebel against), their adherents operate from incompatible conceptions of the social good. Like the political left and right, they share no common ground. They lean on different historical narratives and envision mutually exclusive futures.
The contemporary rivalry between Western liberal democracy and Xi Jinping’s Marxist-Leninist vision for China exemplifies this dynamic on a global scale. Since 2013, when ideological irreconcilability became apparent around 2017, collision was inevitable. Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) represents more than infrastructure investment. It constitutes a geopolitical design to transform Eurasia into a single economic bloc with China as imperial capital.
The BRI comprises two components: an overland network connecting China to Europe through roads, railways, pipelines and data centres passing through Moscow to reach Rotterdam and Spain; and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road linking Beijing through port cities across the South China Sea, Indian Ocean and Mediterranean to terminate in Greece. As Eyck Freymann observes in One Belt One Road, Chinese Power Meets the World, the BRI “poses a profound threat to US global leadership”, not through direct security threats, but by modelling “a future geopolitical bloc led by China, structured along the lines of a modern tributary system” — a challenge for which the West lacks an adequate response.
This Westward expansion echoes Rome’s imperial strategy: although achieved through military conquest, it was the roads and bridges that enabled centuries of dominance, transforming every town from Britain to North Africa into satellites of Imperial Rome.
China’s transformation from Clinton-era partner to contemporary rival illustrates what I call the “sinister logic of values” — a dynamic with two primary effects.
First effect: the dehumanisation of the Other
When encountering those who reject our fundamental values, we struggle to perceive them as fully human. The reasoning is all-too-common: “If these values apply universally to humanity, and you refuse to acknowledge them, you place yourself outside humanity — making you dangerous and suspect.”
The Western reaction to the Taliban’s 2001 destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas exemplifies this reasoning. Unesco’s World Heritage Convention declared these statues of “Universal Value” and significance to “present and future generations of all humanity”. From the Western perspective, only beings “less than human” could find it acceptable to destroy something whose worth “transcends national boundaries”.
When superpowers such as the US and China hold incompatible values while competing economically and technologically, this dehumanising logic transforms rivals into enemies, aligning smaller powers into opposing blocs and creating conditions for a new cold war.
Second effect: the totalitarian imperative
Values, by their nature, demand universal application. They resist limitation to particular times, places or peoples. A mind committed to a value cannot accept the suggestion that it should apply only in the West but not the East, the North but not the South. If values are truly universal — as they must be by definition — then they must impose themselves on everyone, always, everywhere.
This creates more than a drive toward planetary domination; it generates a terroristic impulse. When values command unconditionally, when nothing else motivates action — not pleasure, money, or renown — then nothing remains off-limits for sacrifice: one’s life, others’ lives, even the lives of fellow believers. Complete governance by values transforms individuals into formidable, terrifying forces — they become the blind instruments of what Freud terms the id.
The logic of values offers no cause for optimism. Its inherent dynamics drive toward conflict, dehumanisation and totalitarian imposition. Understanding these mechanisms can help us navigate a world where moral incommensurability increasingly shapes geopolitical reality, but it provides no easy solutions to the fundamental challenge of living alongside those whose values we cannot — and perhaps should not — reconcile with our own.
Rafael Winkler is a professor in the philosophy department at the University of Johannesburg.