A New Theory of Everything: Why Leftism and Islamism Share One Big Lie

What if the real problem with politics isn’t left versus right, or Islam versus the West, but something far older and more universal? That’s the provocative argument from Christopher Chantrill, writing at American Thinker, who draws on a thread from Krzysztof Szczawinski on X to suggest that communism, Islamism, and even environmentalism are selling the same soap: the promise of a single, certain answer to life’s mysteries.

Szczawinski’s original point was that communism isn’t best understood as an economic theory or a failed experiment in bread lines and gulags, but as something deeper: a total, institutionalized commitment to lying. Not ordinary propaganda, but a civilizational war against truth itself. He gave two Polish words to describe it: zakłamanie, a state of total, pervasive, socially embedded falsehood, and obłuda, deep, performative hypocrisy.

Chantrill says he sees that same pattern not just in communism but in all politics. The Big Lie, he argues, is not unique to Marxism. It’s the recurring structure of any ideology that claims to have discovered the one true way and demands obedience to a leader who embodies it.

How the Arab world got its revolutionary bent

To make his case, Chantrill turns to Hussein Aboubakr Mansour’s work on how the myth of crisis imprisoned Arab political thought. He tells the story of Rifa’a al-Tahtawi, a Sunni cleric sent to Paris in 1826 as chaplain to the first Egyptian student mission. When Tahtawi returned and published An Overview of Paris, he brought back more than travel notes. He opened a school where generations of Egyptian officials learned to translate French administrative and legal prose into Arabic.

But here’s what Mansour allegedly points out: the Arabs didn’t start with narrative fiction, sentences, punctuation, or the vocabulary needed to describe post-industrial Europe. They had to learn it all from post-revolutionary France, a culture steeped in left-wing radicalism. So the first generation of western-educated Arabs absorbed not just French bureaucracy but French revolutionary fervor. No wonder, Chantrill writes, that Arabs are all total radicals committed to revolution and fundamental transformation—just like our leftie friends.

That history helps explain why radical Islam and radical European leftism are joined at the hip today. They share a DNA, Chantrill argues, even if they’ve spent decades warring with each other. In 1948, Constantine Zureiq gave the Arabs the nakba, the catastrophe, and a few years later Sayyid Qutb became the founding theorist of Islamism. The movements Zureiq and Qutb unleashed—secular Arab nationalism and jihadism—spent the following decades at war with one another. But both, Chantrill says, were built on the same foundation: the idea that everything is a crisis and only total revolution can save us.

Crisis as a secular apocalypse

Chantrill argues that this fixation on crisis is just a secular version of apocalypticism. In Scripture, the end times bring judgment. In French revolutionary thought, in Marx, in modern woke ideology, the same structure appears: the world as we know it is ending, and only by following us can you be saved. Apocalyptic religion, apocalyptic secular ideology, apocalyptic communism, apocalyptic environmentalism—all selling the same soap.

He quotes Mansour’s phrase about the myth of crisis and extends it: permanent crisis is the secular form of apocalypticism. It’s a way of ordering the world that makes one group the prophets and everyone else the sinners. And it’s a way of making people fear the future just enough to surrender their judgment to a leader.

The real temptation

But here’s where Chantrill admits he’s going off the reservation. He doesn’t think communism, Islamism, and even many Christian sects are fundamentally about lying or hypocrisy at the core. He thinks they’re all doing something very human: collapsing the inevitable uncertainty and tragedy of life into a Faith of Certainty. The temptation is programmed into all ideologies, he writes—good, bad, or indifferent. They offer a resolution to all problems. All you have to do is believe and follow the leader.

Chantrill says he believes there is no One True Way because we cannot know it. The universe is a mystery. Whether there was a Big Bang, whether there’s a final moment when all will be well, he says we don’t have a clue—and his faith is that we never will. He doesn’t pretend to know whether leftist friends will lead us into a Wilderness of Woke, whether radical Islam will burn down western Europe, or whether Elon Musk will make us interplanetary. He’s even skeptical that AI will destroy the education system or the administrative state. Don’t get your hopes up, he says.

Living without the Big Lie

So what’s the alternative? Chantrill proposes something almost heretical for a political commentator: humility. He says there has never been a saving faith with the answer to life, the universe, and everything, and there never will be. The beginning of wisdom is to understand that—and yet to live your life with confidence and courage and faith that things will turn out all right. If not for you, maybe for your children.

The source of all problems, he concludes, is the real temptation: to reduce life to a single faith and diminish humans into obedient followers of a Great Leader, whether that leader is mortal, demonic, or divine. In a world of rising extremism and endless crisis rhetoric, Chantrill’s column is a reminder that the most revolutionary act might be to refuse the certainty that so many ideologies offer—and to live in the messy, uncertain middle.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs usgovernmentspending.com. He’s also the author of American Manifesto and Road to the Middle Class.

Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/09/why-lefties-and-islamists-believe-the-way-they-do/