oikophobia

Etymology

From Ancient Greek οἶκος (oîkos) + -phobia. In the political sense, coined in a 1993 journal article by Roger Scruton.

Why this word is great

OIKOPHOBIA — [Noun] An aversion to or fear of one's own home, culture, or society, often manifesting as self-criticism or rejection. From Ancient Greek οἶκος (oîkos, "home, household") + -phobia ("fear"). The political sense was coined by Roger Scruton in 1993. Unlike "xenophobia" (which recoils from the foreign) or "nostophobia" (which dreads homecoming), oikophobia is a reflexive disdain for the familiar—the intellectual's sneer at tradition, the exile's restless contempt for the place they fled, the activist's ritual denunciation of their own society's sins while ignoring worse elsewhere. It is the scholar who romanticizes distant cultures but scorns their own, the heir who disdains the family estate, the citizen who mistakes critique for virtue—a peculiar affliction of those who, in rejecting home, find themselves adrift in a world with no sanctuary.

noun

  1. Ecophobia; fear of a home environment.
  2. Dislike of one's own culture or compatriots.“So, unlike the 60s, you have a dynamic in which both sides are behaving like radicals, in which the establishment isn’t yelling “stop,” and in which oikophobia is more evenly distributed, relative to its Boomer-era baseline.”