Not All Cultures Are Equal
“Almost without exception, prosperity blossoms where people and governments embrace the light of Western culture and norms. Individuals and governments who do, on average, outperform those that don’t.”
Tony Morley, September 8th, 2026
“If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.” — Karl Popper – The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1945
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Tony Morley
Not All Cultures Are Equal
The polite and fashionable fiction of our age is that all cultures are equal. They are not. The West is being lured into, and conditioned to accept and embrace, a toxic but pervasive dogma, toward the belief that all cultures and institutional systems hold equal value, and deserve equal respect and acceptance. More and more, those preaching from the soapbox of barbarism go a step further, lamenting Western culture as inferior, destructive and oppressive.
The idea that all cultures are equal, or that cultures whose values and systems, which are diametrically opposed to those of the West are superior, is not just objectively wrong; it is a recipe for stagnation, decline and the contraction of freedom, liberty and hard-won progress in raising living standards.
Many in the West, particularly Gen Z, are growing apologetic, tolerant, and even fond of individual and broader cultures and systems of governance with an unapologetic track record of poverty, destruction, and unbridled immiseration. We’ve begun to confuse selective tolerance with a blank check to embrace difference as equal, no matter the objective results.
We’re being asked to, at best, shrug our shoulders at systemic barbarism in the name of cultural sensitivity, and at worst, embrace it as a peer, or even a mentor.
Tolerance may well be a virtue, but extending it to those who promote the destruction of Western civilization, and the culture and systems that built the prosperity and abundance of the modern age, is not owed, no matter how vehemently it is demanded. Healthy cultural tolerance is the natural byproduct of a free, high-trust society, not a suicide pact that commands we respect and embrace the ideologies that seek to destroy liberty, and embrace death and darkness.
That said, all people, irrespective of the culture into which they are born and raised, are worthy of equal moral dignity; that principle itself was a byproduct of Enlightenment thinking, a historically novel and revolutionary departure from millennia of previously established cultural norms. A rejection of the idea that a person’s or culture’s objective value lay in bloodlines, theocratic decree, or the dictate of a monarch. The claim that Western culture is superior is not a moral claim that people born in the West are superior by birth; they are no Númenóreans. What we must evaluate are not people, but collective practices; not individual actions, but rather the greater systems of belief, institutions and governance, which on average make up a broader cultural system, and that either encourage or hinder human flourishing.
Some cultural constructs deserve contempt. Honour killing is contemptible. Child marriage is contemptible. Female genital mutilation or the legal and social inferiority of women are not culture; they are abhorrent. The relativist rebuke, “who are we to judge?” is not humility; it is cowardice, dressed up as tolerance and multiculturalism. An ill-founded belief that reserves tolerance for the intolerant, and preaches open arms and open borders for the barbarians at the gate.
“The relativist rebuke, “who are we to judge?” is not humility; it is cowardice, dressed up as tolerance and multiculturalism.”
Western culture is, at its core, an expression of boundless optimism about the human condition; an absolutely steadfast conviction that no person or people should be permanently resigned to, or deserving of, poverty, ignorance, or tyranny by virtue of their geography or ancestry.
Western culture, and Enlightenment values crafted over centuries, aren’t the best system of values and institutions for some arbitrary reason, but rather because these values and systems, at the individual and national scale, when unmolested, deliver the greatest freedom, the highest living standards, the most prosperity, and the best shot at a good life. The record for which is written in the indisputable and immutable data of human progress. It is measured in economic growth, the eradication of poverty, the decline of child mortality, and the steady climb of living standards and abundance. Every conceivable metric of well-being for what the average person would consider the “good life” is greater in those cultures that have embraced the Enlightenment and its fruits.
Almost without exception, prosperity blossoms where people and governments embrace the light of Western culture and norms. Individuals and governments who do, on average, outperform those that don’t. It is a fertile field of prosperity that command economies, theocracies, and monarchies have never delivered. The people themselves have historically voted with their feet, moving toward societies of freedom and tolerance, not away from them. Where given the opportunity, they have moved to the West in the hope of a better life, and where the opportunity is restricted, they have swum, climbed walls, dug tunnels and braved sinking rafts, barbed wire and minefields to escape the cultural and economic competition of Western culture.
The cultural and institutional charter for civilisation’s wealthiest, healthiest, longest-lived, and most abundant period in history is scarcely gate-kept. The playbook has been broadly available for over a century. At the macro level, foster, embrace and maintain democracy, capitalism, free markets and trade, freedom and liberty, including free speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of individual self-expression, rationalism, reason and empiricism, entrepreneurialism, secular government, the rule of law and property rights, the marketplace of ideas, scientific and material progress, and the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness.
In just the last fifty years alone, the world has improved in lockstep with, and to the degree it has embraced Western values, and as trade and globalization have spread, life expectancy has climbed, and poverty has fallen. In the period between 1976 and 2026, global life expectancy grew from 61 years to 74 years, while extreme poverty fell over the same period from 48 per cent to 11 per cent. That was no mere correlation; it was causation. Western influence fostered and drove the clearest example of a “rising tide lifting all boats.”
Cultures that reject these values naturally and inevitably decline into barbarism, collectivism, theocracy, and ultimately, sustained decline, suffering ignorance and want. They become a culture, governed by a system, that rather than producing prosperity, must actively and relentlessly consume its own people and their individual prosperity and freedom to maintain subsistence. They descend into a darkness of oppression and poverty from which it is difficult to escape.
We must reject the pretence that cultures which stone their dissidents, oppress women, stifle freedom, impose totalitarian and authoritarian rule, which seek war over trade, and collectivism over economic freedom, are simply and rightfully equal alternatives to Western values, or an acceptable alternative route to the “good life.” It is tyranny, oppression and the root of poverty and ignorance, the antidote to which is not a relativistic shrug of imposed acceptance, but rather the steadfast conviction that what works is what has delivered, namely the Western culture and systems born of the Enlightenment.
We must discard the intellectual cowardice of cultural relativism. All cultures aren't equal. A culture built on the admiration for, and drive to achieve, freedom and prosperity, and one that works toward a better future is measurably better than those that burn books, subjugate the individual, and tolerate or promote poverty as an acceptable or even desirable state of man. The rejection of cultures and systems which do not further human flourishing is not intolerance; it is the maintenance of the conditions through which tolerance and prosperity are possible at all, a metaphorical “put on your own oxygen mask before assisting others”
The Western package of values and systems works and is reproducible; it is why South Korea’s living standards far exceed those of North Korea, and why the modest Western-leaning liberalisations of modern China have taken it from an average life expectancy of just 48 years in 1950 to 80 years today.
It’s time to unapologetically defend the Western culture and systems that have fostered such unparalleled prosperity and progress. If human progress is to thrive, and if living standards are to continue to climb in the century to come, it will require the flame of Western civilisation not just to sustain but to spread. Not by the sword, but by the envy and adoption of those seeking the fastest and most secure route toward prosperity, abundance and liberty.
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