Western imperialist thinking

I recently had occasion to remember a conversation many years ago in which a Saudi diplomat remarked to me that my insistence on the existence of objective facts and what he derisively characterized as "Cartesian logic" was a narrow Western cultural outlook. He believed what he "knew" emotionally to be true, and this was the higher truth.

The way he expressed himself suggested that he picked up this way of describing his thinking during the years he had been sent to an American university. It also reminded me of something I thought about years earlier when I worked on African affairs: That one of the most damaging effects of colonialism was that the Europeans took the best and brightest children of the local elites and educated them in British and French universities, where they were exposed to the economic and social thinking of Marxist professors whose advice would never be taken seriously in a modern, working society. But those young leaders then took these nutty ideas and tried to transplant them at home when they came to power, helping set the continent back another two decades in potential development.

If you really want to find a Western imperialist conspiracy against the Third World, that's it. And it was devastatingly effective.