Growing Up Fast in a Dangerous World

There is an old political saying, often attributed to Winston Churchill, though its origins are contested: if you are not a socialist at twenty, you have no heart; if you are not a conservative at forty, you have no brain. However imperfect the attribution, the sentiment has endured because it captures something real about human development. Youth is often generous, impatient, idealistic and morally certain. Maturity, if it comes, is slower, harder, more empirical and more conscious of consequences.

But that saying emerged in an unusually forgiving period of human history.
For much of the post-war Western world, young people could afford to be naïve. We grew up inside the shelter of the US-led rules-based order built after the Second World War. We inherited institutions, alliances, prosperity, energy security, industrial depth and deterrence created by others. Others before us — including the ANZACs we commemorated again on 25 April 2026 — did much of the heavy lifting. We are the beneficiaries of their sacrifice, discipline and foresight.

After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the most visible symbol of the Iron Curtain collapsed — and many in the West mistook a strategic holiday for a permanent condition.

That holiday ended, morally if not formally, on the evening of 6 October 2023.

The next morning, Hamas and allied terrorists unleashed an ancient hatred in modern form. Their violence was directed not just at the only Jewish state, but at some of the most peace-minded Jews in Israel: communities such as Kfar Aza, Be’eri, Nahal Oz and Nir Oz. These were not ideological hardliners. Many were what might fairly be described as peaceniks — Israelis who had spent years advocating coexistence, employing Palestinians, supporting cross-border initiatives and believing, deeply, that neighbourliness might yet prevail.

People like Vivian Silver — a lifelong peace activist who dedicated her life to Israeli–Palestinian understanding — were murdered. Families who had chosen proximity over separation, hope over cynicism, were slaughtered.
They were not killed because they were oppressors.
They were killed because they were Jews.

That fact should have clarified the moral landscape. Instead, across many Western universities, media platforms and political movements, it revealed the depth of our confusion.

Melanie Phillips captured one version of this journey in Guardian Angel: My Journey from Leftism to Sanity, published in 2018 by Bombardier Books. Phillips, once firmly of the British left, describes a long and painful intellectual separation from a worldview she came to see as increasingly detached from reality. Her journey is not simply political. It is civilisational. It is about what happens when moral vanity replaces moral judgment.
The question now is whether we can afford the luxury of a twenty-year journey from ideological youth to civilisational maturity.

I do not think we can.

Young people today are not simply being invited to care about the vulnerable. That would be decent. They are increasingly being taught that the world can be reduced to oppressor and oppressed; that Western civilisation is primarily a system of domination; that Israel is a colonial artefact; and that moral seriousness consists in attaching oneself to the latest cause célèbre.

Some of these movements feel kind. Some slogans feel brave. But not all compassion is wise, and not all activism produces good outcomes.
Gad Saad explores this danger in Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, published in 2026 by HarperCollins. His central argument is that empathy becomes dangerous when detached from reason, consequences and survival. When societies prioritise feelings over reality, signalling over substance, and virtue over viability, they can begin — slowly at first — to undermine themselves.

This is not an argument against empathy.

It is an argument against empathy without judgment.

Western Europe offers repeated examples. Nations outsourced elements of their industrial base to cheaper jurisdictions, including Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey, attracted by cost efficiencies while overlooking long-term strategic dependencies. At the same time, they outsourced energy security to Vladimir Putin’s Russia — effectively funding a regime whose interests were not aligned with their own.

The results are now visible.

Even after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, European states continued purchasing Russian energy at enormous scale while simultaneously funding Ukraine’s defence. The contradiction is not subtle. It is strategic incoherence dressed as policy.

While a cause may feel “nice”, policy must be judged by outcomes.
When industrial resilience is hollowed out, when energy security is outsourced, when deterrence is weakened and when cultural confidence erodes, a nation does not become kinder.

It becomes vulnerable.

We see similar patterns across parts of the Anglosphere.

In the United Kingdom, Keir Starmer’s government has emphasised human rights frameworks, migration management through legal process rather than deterrence, and ambitious climate targets — yet critics argue this has not been matched by sufficient attention to border integrity, policing confidence or national cohesion. In Australia, Anthony Albanese’s government has prioritised constitutional reform debates, an accelerated energy transition, expanded industrial relations regulation, and a foreign policy posture that many believe has too often blurred moral clarity at precisely the wrong historical moment. In Canada, Mark Carney’s government has moved quickly to reset relations with China, including a January 2026 official visit to Beijing, a new Canada–China “strategic partnership”, renewed high-level dialogue, and expanded cooperation across trade, energy, finance, tourism and culture.

He presents this as pragmatic diversification in response to new global realities. My concern is different: when a Canadian prime minister courts Beijing so energetically while the Anglosphere and Five Eyes system face intensifying pressure from authoritarian powers, the effect may be to loosen one of the West’s most important strategic families from within.
A policy may be sold as sophistication. It may, in time, be judged as strategic seduction.

These are complex policy environments. But the broader concern is consistent: policy settings that prioritise moral signalling over national resilience risk weakening the societies they intend to improve.
This invites an uncomfortable historical comparison.

Neville Chamberlain is remembered for appeasement — a policy often reduced to caricature. Yet context matters. He lived in the shadow of the First World War, then known as the war to end all wars. The desire to avoid another catastrophe was deeply human.

The Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 attempted to outlaw war as an instrument of foreign policy. It was noble in aspiration, but catastrophically naïve in effect. It placed hope above historical precedent, sentiment above strategy, and legal idealism above the hard reality that aggressive regimes are rarely restrained by the moral preferences of their intended victims. Within a decade, that illusion had helped create the conditions in which millions would die.

The danger is not that history repeats in costume. It is that human weakness repeats in pattern. Starmer, Albanese and Carney are leaders unlikely, in my judgment, to be treated kindly by history. Worse than Chamberlain? Time will tell. Those of us who hope to live another 25 years will have a front-row seat.

Yet, objectively, it is not all the fault of leaders.

In a democracy, people get the leaders we deserve.

The mob is always right in the narrow democratic sense — it chooses, and then it lives with the consequences. But the mob can be misled. It can be sedated. It can become addicted to the political equivalent of Valium: comfort without resilience, slogans without strategy, compassion without consequences.

We have lost our instinct for danger.

That instinct once lived closer to the surface. Previous generations understood war, scarcity and the fragility of order. Many modern Western citizens know only the fruits of stability, not the cost of preserving it.
This is why political balance matters.

I do not make these arguments for base political purposes. While I grew up in a Hawke Labor household, I have impartially and apolitically served governments of a variety of political persuasions from 1994 to 2026 as a soldier. I take the same apolitical approach to my work combating antisemitism: tell an uncomfortable truth, explain concerns with calm reasoning, draw on history and contemporary evidence, and allow others to ask questions — answering respectfully until they may decide, for themselves, whether they concur or not.

Healthy societies are best served when the political centre holds — when governments oscillate responsibly either side of it, as seen in the Hawke–Keating and Howard–Costello eras.

But that centre is under strain.

Movements such as the Australian Greens and the so-called Teal independents have, in my view, pulled debate away from civilisational seriousness towards a more performative politics. At the same time, protest-driven populism in Australia, and movements surrounding Brexit in the United Kingdom, reflect a different but related breakdown: a loss of trust in institutions and elites.

These are symptoms of the same underlying condition.

A democracy drifting away from its centre.

How much blame belongs to politicians and their backers — figures such as Simon Holmes à Court — is an open question. Political entrepreneurs do what they have always done: they identify emotional currents and organise around them. Some do so for power. Some for influence. Some for money. Often, for all three.

But citizenship demands more than emotional participation.

It demands judgment.

I often think of democracy in sinusoidal waves. A society drifts too far in one direction, then reality pulls it back. The problem is timing. Democracies tend to correct only once the consequences are undeniable — and by then, the cost of correction is higher.

Churchill saw the danger in the 1930s. He was not fashionable. He was criticised heavily. Much like contemporary figures such as Peter Dutton, Angus Taylor, Mike Kelly, Nova Peris, Michael Danby, Pauline Hansen and Andrew Hastie, who attract significant criticism today. No leader is beyond scrutiny, and none should be treated as beyond error. But a mature electorate must distinguish between necessary criticism and the reflexive dismissal of serious warnings.

How much worse must things get before enough Australians recognise that something is wrong?

That is for us to decide.

Part of the solution lies with adults recognising that this has happened on our watch.

The other part may come from young people themselves — but only if they grow up faster.

The information age accelerates everything: ideas, movements, misinformation and correction. A young person can be influenced quickly. But they can also wake up quickly.

The task is not to extinguish youthful idealism.

It is to discipline it.

The West does not need a generation without heart.

It needs a generation whose heart is connected to judgment, resilience and memory.

On 6 October 2023, many in the West still believed history had ended.
On 7 October, history returned.

Most in Australia remain blissfully unaware, even after the murders at Bondi on 14 December 2025.

The question is no longer whether danger is coming. It is here. The only question is whether we will grow up fast enough to meet it — or leave that terrible inheritance to our children.

Colonel Michael Scott CSC retired from the Australian Army in 2026 after more than three decades of service. His career included operational deployments to East Timor, Bougainville, Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as a 27-month posting in Jerusalem as Head of Military for the United Nations Truce Supervision Organisation, operating in Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egy