US leads the way in reversing cultural decline of the West
KONSTANTIN KISIN
Since speaking at the last Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London, it’s clear that the tide is turning and our American friends are leading the way.
Diversity, equity and inclusion, a system of anti-meritocratic discrimination, is being dismantled.
This is happening not just in the US government but, much more importantly, across the global corporate world. We can once again dream that our children will be judged on the content of their character and not the colour … of the square they post on Instagram.
Government profligacy and corruption is being exposed on an industrial scale. DOGE may not be perfect but according to one report, USAID gave $US3m ($4.7m) to a rapper in Gaza who makes anti-Semitic songs. Whatever your politics, we can all agree that is a waste of taxpayers’ money.
Kanye West would have done it for free!
Thanks to the end of censorship on X, we have the ability to express reasonable and widely held views. Because of this, other social media companies are wary of being so aggressive in their censorship too.
So that’s the positives, but there has been lots of bad too: if you want to understand how bad the crime problem has got, British people used to deal with crime by moving criminals to Australia.
Today, British people deal with crime by moving to Australia.
I know there’s a lot of frustration with the state of Britain and much of the Western world.
But let’s keep things in perspective: of all the things human beings have invented over the past two hundred years, our culture and its values are responsible for most of them. I’m not saying we have a monopoly on ingenuity. One of simplest things most people no longer understand is that we don’t lead the world on innovation because we are richer. We are richer because we lead the world on innovation.
But all of this is at risk because we are in danger of forgetting how we got here.
We need to understand that we’ve been lied to. For decades, people went on TV and told you that your history is all bad and your country is plagued by prejudice and intolerance. I have debated these people many times and I always ask them the same question: If you were a woman or an ethnic minority or someone who was spirit gender or whatever, where would you live rather than the West? None of them ever answer.
Because we all know the answer.
We are being accused of performing terribly on the very things we lead the world in.
A healthy sense of your own self-worth is not a conservative value or liberal value, it is the value of every successful group of people in history. Decline is a choice. And the good news is this: most people don’t want managed decline. Most people don’t want to be browbeaten and chastised for their history.
Most people don’t want their children to be poorer than them.
Recent election results around the world bear that out.
Like him or loathe him, the reason millions of people admire Elon Musk is not his charismatic speeches and ill-advised hand gestures.
They admire him because he builds big things and in doing so reminds us that we are meant to reach for the stars.
We are a civilisation that is waiting to be inspired. So let’s stop listening to the people who want us to fail. Let’s ignore the counsel of our enemies. But to do so we’re going to have to win the arguments.
On free speech, we’ve allowed ourselves to be backed into a corner.
The attack line against us is that we want to return to some cruel time when people could be mean and nasty. But the truth is, we don’t believe in free speech because we want to go back to the past. We need to speak freely in order to think freely and if we can’t think freely we won’t move forward.
Free speech is not a rightwing value or a left-wing value, it’s a Western value.
The second argument we must win is on identity politics and multiculturalism. For several decades now, our societies have attempted these two failed experiments. The result is tension, disunity and a toleration of the intolerable for the sake of “community cohesion”.
Multiethnic societies can work, multicultural societies cannot. We must be British and American and whatever else we are first, and white, black, male, female and all that other stuff a distant second.
And the final argument we must win is about whether human beings are good.
In 1968, Paul Ehrlich published the Population Bomb in which he argued that human population growth was about to outstrip food supplies leading to mass starvation, societal collapse and the need for drastic measures to control population growth.
None of this happened. He was completely wrong. But his ideas live on, unaffected, in the minds of our political and media elites. At the core of the net zero agenda is a fundamental sense that human beings are a pestilence on the planet. That if only we could find a way to stop them reproducing and encourage them to die out peacefully, the planet would finally be safe. This has become so ingrained that many people now say they will not have children because of climate concerns.
We must never get used to this because what it represents is a grotesque moral inversion. The birth of a child is a universally celebrated thing. At a cultural level, any successful civilisation in history would see more of itself being created as an unalloyed good. What do you imagine happens to civilisations that don’t? So we must say, without apology, the solution to climate change can’t be poverty. Before the industrial revolution, nearly 40 per cent of children died before they hit puberty.
The promise of a better tomorrow is not just a nice thing to have: it’s the debt we owe to our children. We have to make energy cleaner, yes, but we also have to make it as cheap and abundant as possible. And once we in Europe win that argument, we will finally have the one thing that’s been missing: an economic vision that can inspire people to believe that the future will be better than the past.
Konstantin Kisin is a satirist, author and co-host of the popular podcast Triggernometry. This is an edited version of a speech he delivered at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London.
