TRIGGERnometry - The West's True Story - Konstantin Kisin

Episode Date: February 14, 2025

The Best of Our Inheritance: Restoring Our Foundations is a collection of essays on the foundations of our civilisation, published by the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC). With contributions from 15 of the world’s top thinkers, including Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Nigel Biggar, Brian Griffiths, Matt Ridley, Andrew Roberts, Bjorn Lomborg, Os Guinness and Konstantin Kisin, the book recalls the foundations of Western Civilisation and asks how we renew and strengthen them to equip us to face current and future challenges. The book is available for pre-order at £20 from the ARC website: https://www.arcforum.com/store/p/the-best-of-our-inheritance-arc-research Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Substack! https://triggernometry.substack.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I sold my car in Carvana last night. Well, that's cool. No, you don't understand. It went perfectly. Real offer, down to the penny. They're picking it up tomorrow. Nothing went wrong. So, what's the problem?

That is the problem. Nothing in my life goes to smoothie. I'm waiting for the catch. Maybe there's no catch. That's exactly what a catch would want me to think. Wow, you need to relax. I need a knock on wood. Do we have wood?

What is this table wood? I think it's laminated. Okay, yeah, that's good. That's close enough. Car selling without a catch. Sell your car today on... Carvana. Pick up these may apply.

Jordan Peterson's Alliance for Responsible Citizenship asked me to contribute an essay to a book about the unique foundations of Western civilization. Here it is. Across the Western world, we live in an age of almost unlimited prosperity, freedom and opportunity. While much of the rest of the world continues to suffer from the scourges that have plagued humanity since the dawn of time, the average Western citizen is remarkably free from the risk of starvation, preventable disease and crushing poverty. And although the threat of war has come closer, we enjoyed close to eight decades of almost entirely uninterrupted peace. Yet most of us are profoundly unaware how unusual and precious our freedoms and comforts are. They are an inheritance which all too often we take for granted, which instead

we should cherish and protect. What is more, even those of us who grasp the astonishing scale of these achievements frequently struggle to articulate how we reach them. Indeed, many of us are now confused about the concept of the West itself. In recent years, some have begun to ask questions about why countries all over the globe, from Australia to the United States, are all described with the same geographical designation. This, often deliberate confusion, is a sign that we have forgotten who we are. The critics are right. The West is not a geographical location. It is a set of cultural and philosophical ideas we have inherited from the ancient Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman civilizations. These ideas are not the same as they were 2,000 years ago.

On the contrary, they've been refined, filtered and improved through the centuries to bring us the technological progress, individual liberty and prosperity we now enjoy. Curiously, many Westerners now deny the very existence of our disproportionate success. To describe our extraordinary achievements, risks being accused of being some sort of supremacist who is merely describing his own sense of unearned superiority and not the reality on the ground. But the evidence is very clear. The world is and has been voting with its feet for some time. One need only visit any Western country to see the extraordinary pull our societies have for those who, like me, were not

fortunate enough to have been born here. Millions of people risk their lives every year to enter Western countries by any means they can, and no one does the opposite. One does not see large movements of people emigrating to Vladimir Putin's Russia, Xi Jinping's China, Kim Jong-un's North Korea, or the theocracy in Iran. This extraordinary fact, which we all take for granted, requires some sort of explanation. Why is this happening? To describe an entire culture in a short chapter is, of course, impossible. Whole libraries have been written about the evolution of our thinking that explore what makes us

different. We ought to begin, however, by deciding not to be afraid of the word different. If we acknowledge the reality that our civilization generates different outputs to others, we must then necessarily acknowledge that the inputs must be different too. When asked what makes us different, we often reach for words like democracy, freedom and capitalism, but many of us have forgotten why they're valuable and what they actually mean. Let us therefore focus on three critical pillars of the modern West, which sit underneath the slogans.

The first of these is the central premise of our civilization, the idea of the sanctity of the individual. This notion, which would have been considered radical throughout most of human history and remains so outside of our civilization, posits that every individual has an inherent moral value, which cannot be forcefully denied for the needs of the collective. This comes from the Judeo-Christian concept of Imago-Day,

human beings made in the image of God, and thereby having innate human dignity. From this central tenor of our worldview, the form of government we now call democracy, which evolved from the idea of representative government. That one should have a say in how one is governed is another radical Western idea, which is a natural consequence of the belief

that every individual matters. In many other cultures, the people who rule over you are not viewed as a choice, but rather as an act of God or a natural ascendancy of power. Sometimes the rule is bad and that must be endured. At other times, he is good and for that we must be thankful. Like any system, government by consent has both strengths and weaknesses. Its big strength is a responsiveness to feedback

and the ability to either hold failing leaders to account or to remove them. This impetus seeps into all the hierarchies of our society, which become flatter and less rigid as a result. The armies of Western countries, for example, fight better because the feedback from the soldier on the ground is more likely to reach the generals through more transparent and accountable channels of communication. The second pillar of our civilization is derived significantly from the first,

but nonetheless has a prominence and function of its own. We believe that wherever possible, the freedom of human beings to speak their mind, pursue their interests and engage in business, research and creativity of every kind, ought not to be constrained without a significant and pressing reason. Put simply, we think that all other things being equal, the more freedoms we enjoy, the better. But of course, this does not mean the freedom to, do whatever you want without any constraint whatsoever. Clearly, even in a democracy, freedom is

constrained by the rule of law. And yet the law is there to protect freedom for everyone and ensure that when one person exercises their freedoms, they do not infringe or undermine the freedom of other people. Freedom is not the right to do what we want, but what we ought to. It is the freedom to live up to the very best of our potential, to create, to innovate, to debate, explore, question, believe and flourish. This is not true of other more collectivist cultures, where the individual's first job is to subjugate his own preferences to the needs of the group. While the collectivist system has some advantages, it is necessarily a break on innovation and growth. Innovation is a process of changing the status quo, and that requires doing things differently. Societies which encourage their citizens to suppress their own

differences stymie their technological, scientific, cultural, and economic development. A key product of the value we place on freedom of all kinds is freedom of expression, which is fundamental to everything our societies are and do. Representative government is impossible without the free expression of political opinions and robust debate. Pioneering research is impossible in an environment in which people dare not express controversial ideas because pioneering ideas are by the very nature frequently controversial. But even more fundamental is the fact that human beings cannot think without speaking.

The scientific reasons for this are outside of my areas of expertise, but we all know the experience of talking or writing in order to understand our own thoughts. Not only that, we also all know the experience of listening to someone who is freely expressing their ideas and modifying our thinking as a result. In other words, to think well, one has to be able to speak freely and hear and consider the free speech of others. Finally, the unbelievable increase in the living standards we've witnessed, not just of Western citizens, but of the entire world, has only occurred in the last two centuries. Before that, everyone but a handful of monarchs and their aristocrats lived in miserable crushing poverty. The reason humanity no longer suffers under these conditions has its roots in the Industrial Revolution, which converted the gains of science into technological achievements that have transformed the world and continued to do so.

that this revolution occurred in England was no accident. As we just discussed, it was facilitated by a number of factors, including the intellectual freedoms of the Enlightenment, which fostered a culture of scientific inquiry and innovation, and also a strong legal system whose basis was the evolving notion of the need to protect the rights of individuals. But crucially, prominent among these rights was the right to private property, under the law, which protected investments and encouraged innovation.

Western culture, more than any other, has the intellectual and legal framework which is a facilitator of capitalism. We believe that if you create something of value to your fellow citizens, you should enjoy the rewards of your contribution and be protected from their arbitrary seizure or expropriation. Contrast this protection, for example, with a communist worldview in which people who accumulate wealth and necessarily eyed with suspicion and hostility. During the Soviet period, everyone from the aristocracy all the way down to the rich peasants was stripped of their property for precisely this reason. To this day, many countries do not have true private property rights. Mejokovsky, for example, was believed to have been the richest man in Russia, until he crossed Vladimir Putin,

at which point he was imprisoned, and almost all of his property was removed from his possession under various pretenses. The same is true of Chinese billioners who remain prosperous only as long as they remain loyal servants on the Chinese Communist Party. The horrors inflicted on both the Chinese and Soviet people by these regimes are truly unspeakable. From the millions who starved as a result of government mismanagement to millions more who found themselves sent to hard labour camps were simply executed for the crime of speaking their mind or having the temerity to disagree with their government, the extent of the cruelty collectivist ideologues necessarily inflict on their citizens is beyond

measure. One only has to read Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago or accounts of the Cultural Revolution in China or any of the memoirs published more recently by the survivors of North Korea's prison camps to know this. Capitalism creates unprecedented prosperity because instead of applying a collectivist top-down model, it has instead harnessed the greatest driver of human behavior. Incentives. When properly aligned, the capitalist system encourages us to act in the service of our fellow man, precisely because doing so is beneficial to us. Rather than attempting to beat out of us usher in utopia, the West invented capitalist model deals with reality. In societies with rigid hierarchies where frequently a single man and his entrenched service bureaucracy are in charge,

this is not the case. It is not to your benefit to serve your fellow man will benefit to you the most is serving the hierarchy, often to the detriment of your fellow man. These three principal values, the sanctity of the individual, freedom of expression and other basic freedoms such as freedom of conscience, association and assembly, and innovation, including private property rights and entrepreneurialism, are the reason for our success. And the proof of their power is in the fact that other countries which were not traditionally part of our civilization, but which adopted them, such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, now enjoy many of the same benefits,

millions lifted out of poverty, children who would have once died in infancy living to adulthood, and freedoms their ancestors could never have imagined. The question is increasingly being asked as to how best to preserve and protect these achievements. There are many things that we can campaign for and demand from our elected representatives. However, the most powerful thing each of us can do

is pass on the understanding of the uniqueness of our great inheritance to our children. In a society that is as comfortable as ours, that is no small task, but it is possible. One of the most effective tools for doing so is travel. As we say in Russian, everything is understood in comparison. The more we see the world beyond the confines of our own civilization, the more our privilege stands out. There is always room for improvement, of course, and as the technological, geopolitical, social and cultural landscape changes, we must continue to adapt these values to the reality of the present day. As long as we retain the right to choose

who governs us, are able to speak freely and can profit from improving the lives of our fellow citizens, we're sure to do so. This episode is brought to you by Netflix's remarkably bright creatures. What if a Pacific octopus held the key to a mystery that could heal your heart? Well, that's Tova's reality, an elderly widow working at an aquarium. Tova forms an unlikely friendship with the crumudgeonly Marcellus, whose remarkable intelligence leads her to a a life-changing discovery. Remarkably bright creatures is now playing only on Netflix.