When the West Forgot Right From Wrong

Is it just me, or does it feel like the Western world’s morality has been flipped upside down?

I’m not saying people didn’t always hold opinions I find abhorrent. Of course they did. It’s just that lately, those views seem more popular—or at least louder, more confident and less ashamed of themselves.

There are things I thought we had largely agreed on.

Terrorism is evil. Killing someone because they hold different political opinions is wrong. Hating people because of their ethnicity is horrible. The Western world, with all its faults, has been a net positive for humanity. Capitalism is imperfect, but it remains the best economic system we have come up with, lifting billions of people out of poverty.

And yet, looking at the last few years, it sometimes feels like we can no longer agree on even the most basic distinction between right and wrong.

Apparently I couldn’t have been more wrong.

I’ve been trying to figure out why everything feels so off-kilter. I don’t think there is one single explanation. But I can point to a few moments where something seemed to shift.

Covid and the collapse of trust

The first major shift I remember was Covid.

I genuinely believe that period drove many of us a little crazy. Millions of people were forced into lockdown as we watched this mysterious disease spread across the world. One day we were living normally. Then, almost overnight, governments reached into our lives in ways most of us had never experienced before.

We were suddenly dealing with masks, social distancing, lockdowns and vaccine passports. In some cases, people were effectively forced to take a vaccine we were told would protect us and, perhaps more importantly, protect the people around us.

The response was almost immediately divided between fierce resistance and equally fierce agreement.

“Two weeks to flatten the curve” became a refrain. Plenty of well-meaning people took the vaccine because they genuinely believed they were playing their part in solving a terrible situation.

At the time, I wasn’t following politics nearly as closely as I do now. But I remember feeling uncomfortable with how deeply the state was inserting itself into people’s private lives.

I was a live musician, so most of my gigs disappeared.

Even then, I tried to understand. This was something new. Governments were dealing with a disease they did not fully understand, and I didn’t feel I could blame people for being overly cautious.

But as the months dragged on, especially here in Europe, some of the rules became increasingly difficult to make sense of—even for someone like me with absolutely no background in virology.

You could go to a restaurant, but you had to wear a mask while walking through the door, only to remove it once you sat down. You had to remain seated. Singing was banned in some places. And much of this continued even after vaccination.

It was a bizarre time.

Vaccination also became political. If you didn’t take the shot, you were a “grandma killer”, or something close to it. Walking around without a mask could make you a social pariah. Meanwhile, we gradually learned that many of the masks people were relying on offered far less protection than they had been led to believe. Views that challenged the prevailing consensus were often treated not simply as wrong, but as dangerous.

Large public gatherings were condemned, with public-health professionals warning that they could spread the virus.

Then George Floyd happened.

Black Lives Matter protests swept across the world, and thousands upon thousands of people poured into the streets.

Suddenly, some of the same voices that had warned people against gathering in crowds were making an exception. Protesting, we were told, was important enough to justify the risk.

Whatever your opinion of those protests, I think something important happened at that moment.

For a lot of people, the idea that these institutions were operating purely according to neutral scientific principles stopped being believable. It seemed that ideology could influence the rules too.

That damaged trust.

I haven’t spent years studying every Covid policy, every scientific paper or every decision our governments made during that period, so I’m not going to pretend I can neatly separate every justified criticism from every conspiracy theory that came afterwards.

What I do know is that when the restrictions disappeared, we stepped back into a fundamentally different world.

Trust in institutions had taken a massive nosedive.

For good reasons and bad ones.

And once people stop trusting the institutions that are supposed to tell them what is true, everything becomes much harder.

October 7th and the moral split

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine effectively ended the Covid era.

For the most part, especially here in Europe, people seemed to understand what had happened: an expansionist power had launched an illegal invasion of its neighbour.

Even that became politically divisive. In America especially, I thought the Biden administration did a terrible job explaining the war to ordinary people. The conflict was often moralised in a way that seemed to further divide a population already deeply suspicious of its institutions.

But the biggest turning point for me was October 7th.

Hamas broke into Israel and proceeded to massacre whoever they could get their hands on.

They didn’t just brutally kill people. They filmed themselves doing it.

The cruelty, the bloodlust and the euphoria were difficult to comprehend.

Watching those videos, hearing terrorists celebrate as they spilled blood, still sends shivers down my spine.

That moment felt like it set the world on fire.

I found myself scrambling to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I read more history. I tried to understand Gaza, Hamas, the wars, the peace negotiations, the settlements, the land disputes, the Palestinian national movement—all of it.

But the more I learned, the more bewildered I became by the reaction in the West.

People I had once considered intelligent, serious thinkers suddenly seemed incapable of saying something incredibly simple: massacring civilians is evil.

Instead, the terror inflicted upon Israelis became “resistance”.

Rape, kidnapping and torture were explained away, relativised or ultimately laid at Israel’s feet.

Israel was responsible for what had been done to Israelis.

And from there, almost every uncomfortable fact seemed to disappear.

It didn’t matter that Israel had offered the Palestinians a state multiple times. It didn’t matter that Israel withdrew from Gaza. It didn’t matter that Hamas deliberately embedded itself among civilians, fought from civilian areas and operated around schools, mosques and hospitals. It didn’t matter that enormous sums of money had flowed into Gaza while Hamas simultaneously built an extraordinary underground military infrastructure beneath it.

It didn’t seem to matter that Hamas leaders lived incredible lives of luxury abroad while ordinary Palestinians suffered under their rule.

So I kept coming back to the same question:

How could they not see this?

Whatever disagreements someone has with Israel, how could there be any confusion over whether a country was justified in going to war against an organisation that had just slaughtered its citizens, kidnapped hundreds more, and promised to do it again?

This was as close to a clear confrontation between good and evil as I had ever witnessed.

And yet millions of people across the Western world seemed willing to justify, excuse or explain away what happened.

That disturbed me far beyond the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself.

Because the more I watched, the more I realised this wasn’t really about Israel.

It was revealing something much larger about us.

When violence becomes “understandable”

The Israel-Palestine issue became one of the most visceral separations of values I had ever seen.

And as time went on, I started noticing the same moral logic elsewhere.

Luigi Mangione allegedly stalked and killed Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, in cold blood.

The killing itself was horrifying.

But what fascinated me was the reaction.

Brian Thompson quickly became a symbol onto which people projected every grievance they had about the American healthcare system. The internet filled with jokes, celebration, excuses and, in some cases, outright approval.

People like Hasan Piker, along with plenty of others on the Left, talked about “understanding” where that anger came from.

But a man had been killed.

Whatever you think of the American healthcare system, when did assassination become an acceptable political argument?

We seemed to be losing the ability to say something incredibly basic:

You do not murder people because you hate what you think they represent.

That became even more disturbing for me when Charlie Kirk was killed.

That one hit me hard.

I had watched his debate videos for years. I admired his ability to walk into hostile environments and simply talk to people who disagreed with him. He had a young family. He was a Christian conservative who talked constantly about family, personal responsibility and his faith in Jesus.

You did not have to agree with him.

Plenty of people didn’t.

But when he was murdered, what shocked me almost as much as the killing itself was the glee that followed.

People celebrated.

They called him a racist and a fascist and decided that whatever label they had attached to him somehow made his death less tragic.

That is an incredibly dark place for a society to arrive at.

And don’t even get me started on the conspiracy rot that grew around his death. People like Candace Owens and others turning the death of someone they claimed to care about into endless speculation and content.

It’s morbid.

The Lindsay Clancy case has disturbed me for a similar reason.

The deaths of those children are almost impossible to comprehend. A father coming home to discover that his little ones had been taken from him by the mother of his children. Strangled to death, one at a time.

Yet once again, much of the public conversation quickly shifted towards explaining the person accused of killing them.

Mental illness may explain behaviour. It may become incredibly important in determining legal responsibility. But explanation cannot erase the victims.

Three children are dead.

There are many more examples I could pull from, and I’m sure you can think of some yourself.

The point isn’t that every one of these situations is identical.

They aren’t.

The point is that I increasingly see the same moral instinct: if the perpetrator can be placed inside the correct ideological story, people suddenly become willing to excuse things they would otherwise recognise immediately as evil.

The victim becomes an abstraction while the perpetrator becomes the real victim, and morality becomes dependent on which political tribe you belong to.

So what happened to us?

I don’t think this can be explained entirely through politics.

Something deeper has changed.

For decades, much of the Western world has been stripping away the cultural and religious foundations that once gave our societies a shared moral language.

We were told that we could keep the morality while getting rid of everything underneath it.

Maybe we were wrong.

I grew up going to church. And I can honestly say that much of my moral foundation came from the Bible and the stories of Jesus.

It was there that I learned about grace, kindness, forgiveness and sacrificial love, along with the idea that every human being has value. I learned that you should love your neighbour, control your worst impulses and tell the truth even when it costs you something. I learned that strength and mercy are not opposites.

Trying to model myself around those principles grounded me from a very early age.

Which is why, personally, I think I’m going to start cracking my Bible open again.

That may not be your cup of tea.

But I increasingly believe that what we are witnessing has something to do with spiritual emptiness.

We have reduced human beings to the material.

We tell people that fulfilment comes from success, money, politics, sex, identity, status, attention or belonging to the right cause.

And then we wonder why so many people are desperately searching for something bigger than themselves.

The New Atheists believed that once God disappeared from the picture, humanity might ascend into a new age of critical thinking and rational morality.

But that isn’t what happened.

Human beings did not stop being religious. They simply found new gods. Politics, identity, activism and ideology increasingly became substitutes for religion.

Unlike Christianity, these new faiths often offer very little forgiveness. There is no redemption, no grace and no repentance. There are only oppressors and oppressed, victims and victimisers, the righteous and the damned.

Islam has also found fertile ground in this vacuum. Whatever you think about the belief system itself, one thing is undeniable: many Muslims believe deeply in what they believe.

Some are willing to organise their entire lives around it.

Some are willing to die for it.

Meanwhile, much of the West struggles to articulate what it believes in at all. We have rights but little sense of duty, freedom but increasingly little understanding of what that freedom is for, and comfort but very little meaning.

Christianity without Christ

On a more tangible level, many of the values that shaped the Western world were born from, or profoundly influenced by, Christianity.

Whether people like hearing that makes no difference.

The Left often prides itself on compassion, kindness and care for the vulnerable.

But increasingly, I don’t think what we are seeing is compassion at all. It is the language of compassion used as ideological performance. The words are still there—empathy, justice, liberation, protecting the vulnerable—but whether that empathy is actually extended to someone increasingly depends on whether they fit the political story.

If you belong to the right group, almost anything done in your name can be explained away. If you belong to the wrong one, even your suffering can become irrelevant.

That isn’t compassion.

Real compassion does not first ask which political tribe the victim belongs to.

What we are left with is a kind of Christian moral vocabulary stripped of the principles that gave it meaning. There is little grace, little forgiveness and increasingly little belief in universal human worth. Truth becomes secondary to the cause.

And eventually even the language of kindness can be used to justify cruelty.

Some on the Right have their own version of the problem.

They use Christianity as an aesthetic—a cultural symbol or a flag to wave against their political enemies—while ignoring the actual demands Christianity places on the person claiming to believe it.

That is empty too.

Christianity without Christ is hollow whether it comes from the Left or the Right.

What do we do?

So what is the solution?

I actually think the answer is fairly simple—and kind of boring.

We need to build strong, loving families and teach our children to think critically rather than seeing themselves as victims. We should teach them that the world does not owe them happiness, and that telling the truth matters even when it makes them unpopular.

We need to stop being ashamed of loving our countries and cultures, and learn to be proud again.

Enough with the self-hatred.

Part of that means teaching our history honestly.

Western civilisation has done terrible things. Obviously.

But history did not begin with Western civilisation, and evil is not uniquely Western. Obviously.

Students learn endlessly about slavery while often hearing comparatively little about the extraordinary movement that eventually destroyed it. Slavery had existed across civilisations for millennia. What emerged in the West was the revolutionary idea that slavery itself was morally abhorrent and should be abolished.

That matters.

We should be able to acknowledge the sins of our civilisation without pretending there was nothing good about it.

We should be able to recognise injustice without teaching entire generations to despise the societies they inherited.

And above all, we need something worth believing in—something bigger than politics and bigger than ourselves.

We find ourselves in an incredibly strange time. Maybe things get worse before they get better.

But I still believe truth wins in the end.

Our job is to be courageous enough to speak it, take care of our families, raise decent children, stand up for what we believe in and live lives that make the lives of the people around us a little better.

Maybe the way back is simpler than we think. Maybe it starts there.