Konstantin Kisin. We are where we are because our culture is special.

How do we define the West?
Australia is a western country situated in Asia. If you were to conduct an experiment to prove that Western civilisation is special, you would do what the British did in Australia. You would find a barren continent, you would collect a bunch of your least law-abiding citizens and ship them over, you would leave them there for a couple of centuries and then come back and have a look.

What you would see then is a society that, broadly speaking, is thriving. By thriving, I mean how many Australian citizens are putting their children in rickety boats and braving shark infested waters to move somewhere else? Yet thousands of people are doing the exact opposite to come here and to other Western countries around the world.

Surely this requires an explanation. Why is the West so attractive to people that they are prepared to risk their lives to come to the West?

The reason is that our Western societies are better, not superior. They are better at producing the things that human beings seem to want. What are the things that people want? Not just the abstract ideals of “freedom” and “democracy”, which are good, but why are they good? People are not able to answer that question easily.

We are unable to articulate the reasons why our civilisation is as successful as it is.
We do not know what the words freedom and democracy mean, and we cannot explain to our children why they should value these things.
Very few people risk their lives to come to our country for “freedom” and “democracy”. The reason they come is because our societies are very good at providing the things that people want: safety and prosperity.

Why are our societies so good at creating safety and prosperity? The first principle of Western civilisation that has made us as successful as we are, what we call democracy, is really the idea of government by consent. The idea that the individual matters enough that, when he is governed by others, it is by consent. This is very different to many other societies around the world.

This doesn’t just apply to politics; it applies to every level of society. For example, our armies fight better because the lower ranks can pass information up the chain of command.

In almost every aspect of society, that freedom of the individual and the fact that the individual matters, creates better results and better outcomes.

In our system, our leaders are kept firmly on the ground and their egos are held in check. We do not create those power vacuums where one person controls everything and we are not able to speak truth to power.

The second pillar of Western civilisation is freedom of thought, freedom of expression and freedom of research. Freedom of speech is important because you cannot think without speaking. You have to think to speak. And when you speak, you will very often find out that what you speak is crap, because other people will tell you. This sharpening of idea against idea is the reason that Western societies have produced scientists, thinkers and researchers who have been able to ask and answer questions which you could not even raise in other societies. The technological superiority that the West has enjoyed for ages cannot be explained in any other way.

We think comparatively freely because we are comparatively free of the dogma of religious control,government control, authoritarian control and social and cultural restriction. This has very real consequences.

I am not suggesting that the West has a monopoly on genius. But the West is successful in developing technologies because it has an incentive structure which encourages people to pursue innovation in a way that is completely impossible anywhere else.

What do I mean by that? I mean capitalism but what capitalism really means is private property and,the rule of law. These two things are rare in other parts of the world.

Why does this matter? If you don’t get to keep the things that you create, then the incentive is not to innovate, the incentive is to comply. The reason we innovate in the West as much as we do is because we get to keep the benefit of our creations. This incentive structure means that we are of service to our fellow citizens.

In Russia today, or in other authoritarian regimes, the way you get ahead is not looking after the needs of people and creating things that people want to consume or buy. You get ahead by pandering to the corrupt regime in charge or to the clique of people who service the corrupt regime in charge. Capitalism is a way of aligning our incentives to create things that are of real value to our fellow citizens. That is why we have the innovation we have.

This system drives our prosperity and prosperity drives our strength and the stability that we have had. Government by consent, freedom of expression (freedom more generally) and capitalism are the three pillars of our civilisation. All three pillars are under threat today, not only from the outside but
from the inside.

Our young people are not being brought up to understand why capitalism is the system that has produced the amazing things we have. Freedom of expression is being eroded.

Why is this happening? We have two or three generations of people in our society who have not been taught the things that we just discussed. Instead, they have been taught to hate their own societies. They have been taught to hate the values of their own civilisation. Orwell said, “He who controls the past, controls the future”. If we do not understand our past and where we come from, we will not get to a bright future that we want. We are where we are because our culture is special. We are where we are because our culture is unique.

Our culture is very important, and it is worth fighting for.