How false virtues are unmaking the West

A poisoned chalice rarely announces itself as poison.

It gleams. It is lifted with ceremony. It is presented as an honour, an invitation, perhaps even a moral duty. The danger is not obvious at first. Indeed, that is the point. The cup must appear worthy before it can do its work. Its surface must sparkle long enough to capture the eye and dull the senses.

Shakespeare gave the phrase enduring force in Macbeth. The poisoned chalice was not merely a vessel. It was consequence. What a man pours for others may one day be commended back to his own lips. The same is true of nations and civilisations. We may believe we are offering compassion, sophistication, tolerance or progress, only to discover later that we have imbibed confusion, weakness and moral inversion.

Civilisations are not always destroyed by barbarian armies at the gate.

Sometimes they are weakened first by beautiful lies inside the walls.

Sometimes the fatal ideas arrive not as threats but as virtues. They come dressed in the language of justice, peace, inclusion, science, humanity and care. They are applauded in universities, repeated in parliaments, rewarded by cultural institutions, and taught to children before those children have been given enough history to recognise danger.

In our time, three such chalices are being offered to the West:

Palestinianism, antizionism dressed as benign political opinion, and climate transformed from science and stewardship into a substitute religion.
Each contains a fragment of legitimate concern. Palestinians are human beings and their suffering matters. Israeli governments, like all governments, may be criticised. The natural world should be protected, and human beings should act as careful stewards of creation. These propositions are not the problem.

The problem begins when concern hardens into ideology. It begins when compassion becomes coercive, when criticism becomes demonisation, when science becomes catechism, and when the West is taught to see its own prosperity, history and confidence as a moral stain.

These ideas are dangerous precisely because they do not look dangerous to those who first consume them. They appear compassionate. They appear sophisticated. They appear morally obvious. They are the civilisational equivalent of fast food: convenient, emotionally satisfying, socially approved and easy to consume. They require less intellectual preparation than a balanced diet of history, prudence, tragedy, gratitude and moral complexity.

Morgan Spurlock’s 2004 documentary Super Size Me followed a thirty-day experiment in which he consumed only McDonald’s food. For those who have not seen it, Spurlock ate McDonald’s three times a day, accepted the “super size” option whenever offered, and documented the physical and psychological effects on his body. By the end of the experiment, he had gained about 24.5 pounds, or just over 11 kilograms, while also reporting lethargy, mood changes, headaches, reduced energy and sexual dysfunction. Contemporary reporting also noted depression, low libido, rising cholesterol and liver stress.

The film became famous because it dramatized cumulative effect. The lesson was not that one meal would kill him. The lesson was that breakfast, lunch and dinner, day after day, changed the body. As an aside, if you have not watched Super Size Me, it is worth doing so. You may find it allegorical to the more serious civilisational problems outlined in this essay: what is convenient, pleasurable and socially normalised in the short term can become profoundly damaging when consumed without discipline, balance or reflection.

So it is with bad ideas. One slogan does not destroy a civilisation. One march does not collapse a university. One distorted lecture does not ruin a generation. But a steady diet of moral simplification, historical illiteracy and fashionable cowardice will eventually change the health of the body politic.
The West has been supersizing its own delusions.

For several decades, we have allowed young people to be taught that grievance is wisdom, that inherited civilisation is guilt, that national borders are suspect, that energy abundance is immoral, that Jewish sovereignty is uniquely illegitimate, and that the loudest activist in the room is usually the conscience of mankind.

This is not education. It is malnutrition.

The first chalice: Palestinianism

The first poisoned chalice is Palestinianism.

By Palestinianism, I do not mean concern for Palestinian civilians. That concern is proper. Nor do I mean the desire for Palestinians to live in dignity, prosperity and accountable peace. That, too, is legitimate. I mean something narrower and more dangerous: the ideological elevation of the Palestinian cause into a moral solvent that excuses violence, erases Jewish indigeneity, demonises Israel, intimidates Western institutions, and makes peace less rather than more likely.

The surface of the chalice is attractive. Who could oppose freedom, justice, equality and self-determination? The Australia Palestine Advocacy Network says it works for Australian policy supporting “Palestinian freedom, justice and self-determination.” The International Centre of Justice for Palestinians describes its principal objective as supporting and coordinating legal work for the rights of Palestinians. National Students for Justice in Palestine presents itself as a movement for “Palestinian liberation” on university campuses. Taken at face value, the language is noble.

That is the attractive surface of the chalice.

But slogans are not strategy, and virtue words do not settle moral questions. The test is not whether a cause can describe itself beautifully. The test is what it produces when it meets reality.

Alan Dershowitz has given this phenomenon a name. In Palestinianism: The Newest Attack on Peace, Human Rights, and Democracy, published by Skyhorse Publishing in 2025, he argues that Palestinianism should not be confused with ordinary concern for Palestinian welfare or support for a peaceful Palestinian state. Rather, he presents it as an ideological movement that has too often become a vehicle for demonising Israel, excusing or minimising violence, fuelling antisemitism, and obstructing the compromises necessary for peace. It is a severe argument, but a useful one, because it forces the reader to distinguish between compassion for Palestinians and an activist ideology that already harms Palestinians, Jews, Israel and the wider West — and, if left unchallenged, will continue to do so.
This distinction is essential. A person who wants Palestinian children to grow up free from Hamas, corruption, indoctrination, poverty and war is not the problem. A person who wants accountable Palestinian leadership, economic development and peace with Israel is not the problem. The problem is the ideological activist who has no serious plan for Palestinian flourishing, no interest in Palestinian dissenters, no moral vocabulary for Hamas tyranny, and no curiosity about why Palestinian leadership has so often rejected compromise.

The result is not compassion. It is theatre.

Western streets fill with slogans. Universities become stages. Diaspora Jews are made to answer for events thousands of miles away. Hostage posters are ripped down. Terrorism is contextualised. Israel is described as uniquely wicked in a world containing Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Venezuela, Cuba, Syria and many other theatres of human suffering.

The second order effect is that Palestinians themselves are betrayed. The ideological West rewards maximalism, grievance and rejectionism. It encourages Palestinian politics to remain externally focused rather than internally accountable. It treats Palestinians as symbols rather than moral agents. This is not solidarity. It is a form of condescension.

A movement that truly cared for Palestinians would ask hard questions about Palestinian governance. It would ask why billions in aid have not produced Singapore on the Mediterranean. It would ask why generations of children have been fed maps without Israel. It would ask why dissent against Hamas is so dangerous. It would ask why corruption, rejectionism, terrorism, martyrdom culture and external patronage have repeatedly sabotaged opportunities for peace.

But Palestinianism often asks none of these questions. It prefers the simplicity of accusation. It locates all agency in Israel and all innocence in Palestinians. It therefore traps Palestinians inside a permanent politics of grievance. It tells them that their liberation depends less on reforming their own political culture than on indicting the Jewish state before the court of Western opinion.

That is not a path to peace. It is a road away from it.

Here lies the poison. Palestinianism presents itself as compassion for the oppressed, but too often produces moral indulgence for violent actors, institutional intimidation of Jews, and the infantilisation of Palestinians. It promises justice but rewards rejection. It promises liberation but deepens dependency. It promises peace but feeds a politics that makes peace harder.

The chalice gleams. The poison works.

The second chalice: antizionism as benign and appropriate

The second poisoned chalice is the claim that antizionism is benign, appropriate and morally respectable.

Here again, the distinction matters. Criticism of Israel is not antisemitism. Israelis criticise their own governments with a passion and frequency that would exhaust most democracies. Israel’s prime ministers, generals, judges, journalists, settlers, activists, religious parties, secular liberals and security services are all proper subjects of scrutiny. No democracy is beyond criticism. No army is beyond review. No government is beyond moral assessment.

But antizionism is not merely criticism of Israel. At its core, it is opposition to Jewish national self-determination. It says that the Jewish people, uniquely among the peoples of the earth, may not exercise sovereignty in their ancestral homeland.

The opposing case is familiar. Jewish Voice for Peace argues that criticism of Zionism should not be conflated with antisemitism, and that many anti-Zionists object to Israeli policy, ethno-nationalism or the treatment of Palestinians. At the 2024 Munk Debate in Toronto, Mehdi Hasan and Gideon Levy argued against the motion that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, while Douglas Murray and Natasha Hausdorff argued for it. The debate was useful because it presented both sides of the question in serious public form.
That is the most sympathetic version of the argument. It deserves to be heard. But it does not survive the deeper test.

The issue is not whether Palestinians may criticise Israel. Of course they may. The issue is whether the Jewish people may be denied a right granted instinctively to others. If national self-determination is legitimate for Palestinians, Ukrainians, Poles, Greeks, Armenians, Irish, Czechs, Lithuanians, Indians and scores of others, why is Jewish self-determination uniquely illegitimate?

The American Jewish Committee puts the matter directly, describing anti-Zionism as opposition to Jews having a Jewish state in their ancestral homeland and as a denial of the Jewish people’s historical connection to the land of Israel.

This is why the anti-Zionist argument so often collapses into discrimination. It does not merely criticise a government. It denies a people. It does not merely object to a policy. It contests a nation’s legitimacy. It does not merely ask Israel to behave better. It asks Israel to disappear in its present form.

Joshua Dabelstein’s essay Crossing the Line, published on Substack on 5 May 2026, is useful here. He argues that contemporary antizionism functions as an ideology that denies the legitimacy of Jewish self-determination and assigns collective blame to Jews in relation to the existence of the Jewish state. His deeper point is that antizionism often does not engage with actual Zionism. It constructs “Zionism” as morally corrupt and dangerous, in a manner that echoes older habits of treating Jewishness as a corrupting force.

This is why merely explaining Zionism often fails. The anti-Zionist is frequently not arguing against Zionism as Jews understand it: the national liberation movement of the Jewish people and the restoration of sovereignty in their ancestral homeland. They/them are arguing against a demonological fiction called “Zionism” — a word into which colonialism, racism, capitalism, militarism, white supremacy, apartheid and global conspiracy can all be poured.

The word “Zionist” then becomes a laundering mechanism. It permits people to say things about “Zionists” that they would be ashamed to say about Jews. It permits activists to target Jewish students while pretending to target a political ideology. It permits cultural institutions to exclude Jewish artists while claiming to oppose oppression. It permits Westerners to treat the one Jewish state as uniquely illegitimate while congratulating themselves on their moral refinement.

Natasha Hausdorff has been one of the clearest public voices on this point. At the Munk Debate, she argued for the proposition that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, alongside Douglas Murray. The value of that debate was that it exposed the real dividing line: whether anti-Zionism is merely criticism of a state, or whether it has become the principal respectable vehicle through which antisemitism now travels.

One need not argue that every anti-Zionist is consciously antisemitic. That is not my claim. My claim is more precise: antizionism has become the principal socially acceptable vehicle through which antisemitic ideas now travel in educated Western society.

It does not always look like old-world antisemitism. It does not always come with racial pseudoscience, religious contempt or crude conspiracy theories. It often comes with university language, human rights vocabulary, fashionable slogans and the theatrical solemnity of the morally certain. But the functional result is familiar. Jews are singled out. Jews are collectively blamed. Jews are told they may remain in polite society only if they renounce the national expression of Jewish peoplehood.

No other people is routinely asked to perform this act of self-erasure as the price of acceptance.

This is especially perverse because Zionism was not born as an imperial project. It was born from the Jewish experience of exile, persecution, vulnerability and repeated abandonment. It was an answer to a long and terrible question: what happens to a people who are everywhere a minority and nowhere sovereign when the societies around them turn murderous?
The twentieth century answered that question with unbearable clarity.

Jewish civilisation has given the world some of its deepest moral language: the idea of being a light unto the nations, the obligation to repair what is broken, the insistence that power answer to law, that kings are not gods, that the widow, the orphan and the stranger matter. Tikkun olam — repairing or improving the world — has become one of the great moral phrases associated with modern Jewish social thought.

But noble moral instincts can be distorted. Compassion detached from truth becomes sentimentality. Universalism detached from particular responsibility becomes self-erasure. A people called to be a light unto the nations is not called to assist in the extinguishing of its own lamp.
That is what antizionism ultimately asks of Jews: be moral, but not sovereign; be ethical, but not armed; be historical, but not national; be tolerated, but not self-determining.

This is not justice. It is moral inversion.

The third chalice: climate as religion

The third poisoned chalice is climate transformed from science and stewardship into religion.

I choose those words carefully. I am not arguing that climate does not change. Climate has always changed. Nor am I arguing that human activity has no effect. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states that it is “unequivocal” that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. Its synthesis report states that human activities, principally through greenhouse gas emissions, have caused global warming, with global surface temperature reaching 1.1 degrees Celsius above 1850–1900 levels in 2011–2020.

A serious civilisation should care for land, water, air, forests, oceans, farms, cities and future generations. Stewardship is not weakness. Prudence is not hysteria. Conservation, properly understood, should be a conservative instinct as much as a progressive one.

The problem begins when climate concern ceases to be science and becomes catechism.

A religion has priests, prophets, sins, heresies, indulgences, rituals, sacred texts and apocalyptic warnings. Much of contemporary climate politics now displays these features. Carbon becomes sin. Offsets become indulgences. Activists become prophets. Children become moral authorities. Dissent becomes heresy. Industrial prosperity becomes guilt. The West becomes uniquely fallen and therefore uniquely required to atone.

This is why the phrase “climate as religion” is not merely rhetorical. It describes a pattern of thought. In a religious mode, facts are not weighed; they are sorted into orthodoxy and heresy. Questions are not welcomed; they are treated as signs of bad faith. Trade-offs are not examined; they are condemned as moral weakness. The young are not educated into prudence; they are initiated into dread.

A more disciplined environmental politics would distinguish between concern and panic, between science and certainty theatre, between stewardship and civilisational self-harm. That distinction sits near the centre of Bjørn Lomborg’s work. Lomborg, the Danish political scientist and author of False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Plane — published by Basic Books in 2020 — does not argue that climate change is fake. He argues that climate panic produces bad policy. His case is that the world should respond to climate change through innovation, adaptation, prioritisation and cost-benefit analysis rather than through apocalyptic politics.

That is a vital distinction. To say climate change is real does not require us to say every proposed climate policy is wise. To say emissions matter does not require us to pretend energy poverty is moral. To say the planet should be cared for does not require us to deindustrialise the West, weaken defence production, increase household energy costs, or make ourselves strategically dependent on authoritarian powers that have no intention of following our example.

Ian Plimer, the Australian geologist, represents a more sceptical Australian line. His book Heaven and Earth: Global Warming — The Missing Science, published in 2009 by Connor Court Publishing in Australia and Quartet Books in London, argues against reducing climate change to CO₂ alone.

Plimer is controversial, and some of his claims have been heavily disputed. That should be acknowledged. But his broader warning against single-variable dogma points to a real danger: climate is not a simple machine controlled by one lever. It is a complex system involving atmosphere, oceans, ice, land, biology, solar influences, human behaviour, technology, adaptation, substitution and feedback loops.

This is where complex adaptive system theory becomes useful. A complex adaptive system is not a billiard table, where one cause produces one neat effect. It is a dynamic environment of interacting variables, feedback loops, thresholds, adaptations and unintended consequences. Climate, economies, energy markets, societies and strategic competition all have this character.

Linear projections are seductive because they feel clean. Reality is messier. A model may be useful without being prophecy. A trend may be concerning without requiring civilisational self-harm. A policy may be well-intentioned and still produce adverse second and third order effects.

Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It, published by Rodale in 2006 and released alongside the documentary film, became one of the most influential works of climate persuasion in modern history. It also demonstrates the danger of theatrical certainty. Gore became the high priest of climate alarm for a generation. Whether one regards him as prophet, advocate, entrepreneur or alarmist, his influence is beyond dispute. The problem was not that he asked the West to think seriously about climate. The problem was that the movement he helped popularise often rewarded linear projection, emotional certainty and moral panic in a domain that is complex, adaptive and resistant to single-variable explanation.

Here again, precision matters. Some claims about Gore have themselves been exaggerated by critics. But the broad point remains: in 2007, a UK High Court judge identified nine significant errors in An Inconvenient Truth, while still allowing the film to be shown in schools with guidance notes. One commonly discussed example concerned the film’s treatment of Mount Kilimanjaro’s shrinking ice cap.

Other examples identified by the court included the film’s presentation of a possible twenty-foot sea-level rise from the melting of Greenland or West Antarctica, which the judge regarded as alarmist in the time frame implied; the claim that some Pacific islanders had already been forced to evacuate to New Zealand because of rising seas; the suggestion that the Gulf Stream could shut down and plunge parts of Europe into dramatic cooling; the treatment of polar bears drowning after swimming long distances in search of ice; and the discussion of coral reef bleaching, where the court noted the difficulty of separating climate effects from other pressures such as over-fishing and pollution.

One need not reject climate science to see the problem. The issue was not that Gore raised serious environmental concerns. It was that a complex field was presented with a level of theatrical certainty that blurred the line between evidence, advocacy and prophecy.

Occam’s razor — the principle that the simplest explanation is often the best place to begin — is useful here. Gore may have been sincere. He may have been well-intentioned. He may have believed deeply that he was warning humanity about a genuine danger. But sincerity does not settle the question of consequence. Nor does moral intensity remove financial incentive from human affairs.

Gore’s post-political career also illustrates how easily moral causes can become industries. He co-founded Generation Investment Management, a sustainability-focused investment firm, and his wealth has been reported to have grown dramatically after leaving office. Forbes estimated in 2013 that Gore’s net worth was at least US$300 million, and CBS reported the same Forbes estimate after the sale of Current TV. The Atlantic also noted that Gore’s financial disclosures showed a net worth of between US$1 million and US$2 million when he ran for president, before he later became, by any normal measure, a very wealthy man.

That does not prove bad faith. It does, however, make the charge of “climate grift” intelligible. When apocalypse becomes a market, environmental entrepreneurs will appear. When policy creates subsidies, mandates, trading schemes, offsets, consultancies and investment themes, money will follow. Some of that money may do good. Some may accelerate genuine innovation. But some will reward alarm, capture regulators, and turn public fear into private advantage.

The greater cost may not be Gore’s fortune, or anyone else’s. The greater cost may be the corruption of prudence. Sensible environmental policy has too often been hijacked by activists, consultants, investors, bureaucrats and politicians who discovered that fear is a powerful organising principle. The result is not science in the service of civilisation. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy in which panic justifies policy, policy rewards panic, and dissent is treated as sin.

The lesson is not that climate concern is fraudulent. The lesson is that politics rewards drama, not prudence. And when drama becomes doctrine, the West begins to make strategic decisions that weaken itself.

The second and third order effects are already visible. Children are taught to fear the weather more than tyranny. Young people absorb the message that their future is doomed. Energy abundance is treated as sin rather than the foundation of health, prosperity, defence, transport, agriculture and industry. Nuclear power is resisted by many of the same people who claim emissions are an existential emergency. Western nations impose burdens on themselves while China continues to build industrial, naval and strategic power. The poor are asked to pay more for energy so elites can feel clean.
This is not seriousness. It is ritual.

A civilisation that cannot distinguish between stewardship and self-harm is in trouble. A civilisation that teaches its children panic before gratitude is in trouble. A civilisation that cannot maintain reliable energy, heavy industry, military production and social confidence because it has come to regard prosperity itself as morally suspect is in deep trouble.

Climate changes. It always has. Human activity matters. It plainly does. Prudence is required. Stewardship is required. Innovation is required. But panic is not policy, and apocalypse is not analysis.

The shared pattern

These three chalices appear different, but they share a structure.

First, each begins with a legitimate moral concern. Palestinians matter. Jews and Israelis may be criticised. The environment should be protected.

Second, each expands that concern into an ideology. Palestinian suffering becomes a total explanation of Middle Eastern conflict. Criticism of Israel becomes denial of Jewish sovereignty. Environmental stewardship becomes climate confession and industrial guilt.

Third, each punishes dissent. Ask hard questions about Palestinian leadership and one is accused of cruelty. Defend Zionism and one is accused of racism. Question climate alarmism and one is accused of denying science.

Fourth, each produces institutional cowardice. Universities bend.

Corporations bend. Governments bend. Cultural institutions bend. The adult world becomes frightened of children with slogans.

Fifth, each weakens the West’s civilisational confidence. The West learns to apologise for itself, doubt itself, disarm itself morally, and mistake performative compassion for wisdom.

This is why the three ideas mutually coexist. They are not identical, but they feed the same civilisational weakness. They train the mind to see the West as guilty, Israel as uniquely illegitimate, grievance as authority, energy abundance as sin, and moral complexity as evasion.

They produce a civilisation that cannot defend itself because it has lost the moral confidence to believe it deserves defending.

The interest test

I am not making a party-political argument. I am not seeking office. I am not trying to flatter one tribe against another. I write as someone who served from the age of seventeen in 1994 until earlier in 2026, in the profession of arms, and who was trained to ask a different question.

What protects the nation?

What strengthens social cohesion?

What preserves deterrence?

What helps free people remain free?

What prevents the innocent from being sacrificed to fashionable illusions?
On those tests, these three ideas fail.

They may be popular. They may be applauded. They may make their adherents feel kind, brave and enlightened. But feeling virtuous is not the same as doing good. A civilisation can die congratulating itself.

Generations before us gave so much to bequeath what we inherited.

Penicillin. Parliamentary democracy. The rule of law. Energy abundance.

Literacy. Public sanitation. Deterrence. The post-Second World War order.

The long peace of the Cold War’s aftermath. The relative safety that allowed many of us to mistake peace for the default setting of the human condition.
It was never the default setting.

Peace is made. Order is made. Trust is made. Prosperity is made. Civilisation is made. And what is made can be unmade.

We are behaving like lemmings approaching a cliff. There is comfort in the crowd. There is warmth in belonging. The line moves forward and no one wishes to be the first to step aside. Indeed, the closer the edge, the more urgent the collective motion can feel. There may even be a moment of exhilaration as the feet leave the earth and the body enters the air.
But gravity is not suspended by consensus.

Like jumping from an aircraft without a parachute, the first seconds may feel like flight. Then the ground reminds us that reality was never abolished.
The West does not need more slogans. It needs discernment. It needs courage. It needs historical memory. It needs adults willing to say that compassion without truth is sentimentality, that criticism without consistency is prejudice, that science without humility becomes dogma, and that moral confidence without responsibility becomes vanity.

We have allowed young people to be trained by social Marxists, grievance merchants and therapeutic revolutionaries. We have allowed schools and universities to transmit suspicion rather than gratitude, activism rather than wisdom, deconstruction rather than inheritance. We have allowed institutions built by civilisation to become platforms for attacking civilisation.

We caused much of this mess by looking away.

We must now fix it by looking directly at the chalices before us and naming them for what they are.

Palestinianism is not the same as care for Palestinians. Antizionism is not the same as criticism of Israel. Climate religion is not the same as environmental stewardship.

Each is a distortion of a legitimate concern. Each is made more dangerous by the virtue-signalling language in which it is wrapped. Each glitters with moral promise. Each carries poison within.

We do not need to smash every cup placed before us. But we do need to inspect what we are being asked to drink.

A civilisation worthy of the name must know the difference between compassion and surrender, between justice and inversion, between science and superstition, between confidence and arrogance, between humility and self-hatred.

The chalices are before us.

We should put them down.

Michael Scott served for thirty years as a professional soldier with the Australian Defence Force. He is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the 2023 Foundation, a nascent global charity dedicated to harm minimisation, combatting antisemitism, and fostering peaceful coexistence. Following the November 2024 Amsterdam pogrom—an event that underscored the global nature of antisemitic violence beyond the Middle East—he has taken a more active role in the information war over narratives shaping public perception.