What I Told ARC About Why Liberty Matters

I spoke at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship last week - if you don’t like reading, you can watch it here.

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Ladies and gentlemen, it is wonderful to be here with you all. Philippa and her team asked me to say a few words about the beauty of our civilisation and what we can do to protect, preserve and multiply it. I will confess that I’ve been focussing mostly on the multiplying part: my wife and I just had our second child. Thank you, thank you! The pregnancy was not easy. The hormones, the tears, the mood swings. And it was hard for my wife as well.

It was quite funny, actually, because right before the birth my wife pulled me to one side and said: I need to tell you about my close friendship with Jeffrey Epstein - that’s when I knew she was going into Labour. She couldn’t be here today for obvious reasons: she’s Britain’s new Ambassador to the US.

There’s only two things you need to know to understand British politics.

Britain is like the Titanic where the passengers believe we can save ourselves by constantly changing captains. We’ve had male captains, female captains, clever captains, not so clever captains, we’ve even tried clown captains. We’ve tried everything…except changing course. It’s like soiling your pants and changing your shirt over and over.

The other thing you need to know is we’ve gone from a 2 party system to a 5 party system where we have:

1. The Green Party which is a harmonious coalition of pansexual communists and hardcore Islamists.

2. The Labour Party which used to be the party of the working people and is now the party of the not working people.

3. The Conservative Party is to the right of Labour. At least in theory. Not so much in Government.

4. Then you have Reform, which used to be called the Brexit Party, which used to be called UKIP. They’ve had more name changes than Puff Daddy. Reform are considered super controversial but they basically just think Blair ruined everything and want to go back 3 decades.

5. And finally you have Restore which is just like Reform, except they want to go back 3 centuries.

Oh, and I forgot the Liberal Democrats… But then again hasn’t everyone?

Anyway, where was I?

Ah yes, the beauty of our civilisation.

Over the next three days, we will talk about the many virtues of the West. I would like to focus on just one. One that matters most to me and one that I believe is in greatest peril here in Britain and across the European continent: liberty.

Many today argue that the pursuit of liberty is what has given us a society of disconnected, disassociated atomised individuals. Liberty, they say, contains the seeds of its own destruction. It is becoming a dirty word on both left and right because many now mistakenly associate liberty with the grotesque excesses of liberalism, which has mutated from the pursuit of freedom from tyranny to the pursuit of freedom from reality.

The consequences are all around us: our public finances are a Ponzi scheme that would make Sam Bankman-Fried blush. Our energy policy seems to be set by the moronically-possessed. Our societies openly discriminate in favour of some groups and against others, while calling that equality. And Britain, a country which once famously and somewhat controversially ruled the waves, can’t stop a few rubber boats.

But, like it or not, the heart of our civilisation today lies not here in London but in Washington DC. A bit depressing given that it is known as the Swamp. But there is an upside.

We like to make fun of Americans for not speaking English the way we do. You know, properly. But what people don’t know is American English is actually much closer to the way our ancestors spoke than the way we speak today. Americans preserved the language of their ancestors, while we, as its originators, continued to experiment with it.

This is true of more than language. And it is time to concede that not all of our experiments have been for the better.

When friends across the pond say we in Europe have become authoritarian, that we have weakened ourselves militarily, that we have destroyed our economies in the name of ideology, we must have the courage to admit that they’re right.

They’re not saying anything new, by the way. Here is what Alexander Solzhenitsyn said in his Harvard Address in 1978, almost 50 years ago:

“And what of Europe today? It is nothing more than a collection of cardboard stage sets, all bargaining with each other to see how little can be spent on defence in order to leave more for the comforts of life. The continent of Europe, with its centuries-long preparation for the task of leading mankind, has of its own accord abandoned its strength and its influence on world affairs - and not just its physical influence but its intellectual influence as well. Potentially important decisions, major movements, have now begun to mature beyond the frontiers of Europe. How strange it all is! Since when has mighty Europe needed outside help to defend herself? At one moment she had such a surplus of strength that, while waging wars within her own boundaries and destroying herself, she was still able to seize colonies. A moment later, she suddenly found herself hopelessly weak without having lost a single major war.”

Solzhenitsyn had many talents… Diplomacy wasn’t one of them. It’s almost like he was Russian.

There is no shame in learning from America. We’d only be learning from ourselves. Remember: the American Founding Fathers were born and bred in Britain, educated in British law and political philosophy, and steeped in British constitutional tradition. The very arguments they used to justify independence were British arguments. They believed that the British Crown was violating British principles which they fought a war to defend. What I’m saying is the founding fathers weren’t American.

Many today worry about the strength of the transatlantic relationship. I do not. Because I know that what holds us together is not just a shared history. We are bound together by a shared destiny.

The job of Rome was to spread the ideas of Greece, and the job of America is to spread the ideas of England.

Liberty is one of them.

But let’s be precise about what liberty actually is.The confusion about this is, I think, the source of many of our problems.

Liberty matters not because it maximises individual pleasure. That is liberalism’s mistake. Liberty matters because you cannot be a responsible citizen if you are not free. A man who does the right thing because the state compels him to is not virtuous. He is compliant. And because of that, dangerous for the obvious reason: when the state compels him to do the wrong thing, he will comply as well.

Virtue requires choice. Responsibility requires freedom. And freedom requires responsibility.

They are not opposites, as both the left and the new right increasingly suggest. They are the same thing seen from different angles. The free market without moral responsibility gives you the financialisation of everything. Freedom of speech without the courage to tell the truth gives you a cacophony of noise and no signal. And personal liberty without purpose, without the understanding that freedom is for something is how you get atomisation.

We have kept the freedom and discarded the purpose. We must not compound the mistake by discarding freedom too.

Why are we here, at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship? We did not come together because we had a clear, rigid vision of how we wanted the future to look. We came together because all of us, in our own ways, saw that our societies and our civilisation were drifting. Wherever we looked we saw demoralisation, decline and despair. And those are just the emotions I experienced travelling through East London to get here.

Put simply, we are here because we observe that we are, in fact, not a society of responsible citizens.

We will not change that over the next 3 days. Worse than that, we will not change it in the lifetimes of most of the people in this room.

This will take decades because generations of Westerners have been taught to hate their own civilisation. They’ve been taught that up is down and good is evil.

Everyone is by now familiar with the saying that:

Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times.

The weak men have done their bit and the hard times are here. If you pay attention, you can hear the clamour for strength rising. It will only get louder.

It’s possible that we, here, are in fact the strong men and women, reacting to hard times and fighting back. I hope that’s true. But there is another, less flattering, possibility.

It’s possible that our generations, from the boomers to the zoomers, are in fact the weak men. And that the hard times are just beginning.

That is why I always talk about my children. Because, if that is true, they are the ones who are going to have to do the heavy lifting. Saddled with huge debts by their irresponsible parents and grandparents, facing the greatest and therefore most disruptive technological transformation in human history in a deteriorating geopolitical environment, our children will face hard times.

Our job, then, is to prepare them to be the strong men and women who can rebuild our civilisation.

That is why we must teach them that most-difficult thing: how to be radical without being extreme.

I refuse to accept a future in which our daughters vote for Zohran Mamdani and Zack Polanski, while our sons spend their days watching Bonnie Blue and Nick Fuentes. Although that would be quite the collaboration.

We must teach our children that the gravitational pull of the digital world is always towards a society of atomised individuals. And we are individuals but we do not have to be atomised. Human connection, family, community is what sustains our humanness and no technology will ever replace it.

We must teach them that people who disagree with you about politics are human. Zoomers are seven times more likely than boomers to believe that political violence is sometimes justified.

Above all, we must teach them to separate the comforting lie from the unpleasant truth and give them the courage to want to do that.

There is one small problem with all of this. None of these things can actually be taught. They can only be instilled by example.

And so, in the final analysis, a society of responsible citizens will only be brought into existence by individuals who decide to do that thing that Jordan Peterson was brought into the world to remind us all to do: to take responsibility. Not by Government diktat or through the use of force but by a voluntary choice exercised for the sake of not only your family and community but that of your own soul.

Thank you very much.