When our ‘weird’ civilisation becomes vulnerable

Joseph Henrich’s “WEIRD” describes our civilisation at its best: Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic. “VULNERABLE” warns what happens when those strengths — openness, empathy, tolerance, trust and liberty — are severed from judgment, memory, duty and courage.

In The WEIRDest People in the World, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2020, Henrich explains how Western institutions, law, literacy and markets formed people who were individualistic, rights-conscious and willing to cooperate with strangers. That inheritance produced liberal democracy, scientific inquiry, free markets and representative government. It is rare and fragile.

The WEIRD world is VULNERABLE because it believes kindness requires credulity, inclusion requires self-erasure and safety requires freedom from discomfort. Gad Saad describes one expression as “suicidal empathy”: compassion detached from wisdom, courage and boundaries. Untethered empathy becomes an open gate.

V — Virtue-Signalling

Vulnerability begins by substituting visible virtue for actual virtue. We measure morality through slogans and tribal badges rather than conduct and consequences. Virtue asks: what is true, who is harmed, and what is my duty? Virtue-signalling asks: how do I appear to my tribe?

Since the Hamas massacres of 7 October 2023, anti-Israel activism has been framed as justice while minimising the murder, rape, kidnapping and torture of Jews. Even now, the West struggles to recognise the Palestinian terrorism exemplified by Hamas, preferring euphemism and moral equivalence. A revealing test is whether one accepts Israel’s right to exist. This requires neither agreement with every government nor approval of every military decision. It means accepting Jewish national self-determination and Israel’s right to defend its citizens. Those who cannot begin with the murdered, raped, burned and abducted are rarely offering moral clarity. Antisemitism is diagnostic: a culture ignoring the Jew under threat is performative, not compassionate.

U — Unmoored

A society can survive disagreement, but not amnesia. Much of the West is detached from family, faith, nation, duty, sacrifice, memory and moral limits. We inherited civilisation without understanding it.

This is not nostalgia. The West has contained slavery, sectarian hatred, imperial arrogance and racial injustice. A mature civilisation can acknowledge its flaws without declaring its inheritance worthless.

The unmoored citizen is easily manipulated: rights without duties, feelings without formation and opinions without historical depth. Woke ideology becomes corrosive when it reduces life to oppressor and oppressed, assigns guilt by identity and presents Western civilisation only as…

L — Low Threat Perception

Many Westerners have lived in safety so long they mistake it for nature. They assume peace is normal, prosperity automatic and hostile actors misunderstood.

Predators do not disappear because we dislike predation. Ideologues do not abandon their objectives because we are inclusive. Tyrants do not respect polite weakness.

We struggle to look beyond left–right argy-bargy. There are monsters on this planet. They are not Australia’s Senator Pauline Hanson, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or US President Donald Trump. We may disagree with them, but ideological bile directed at democratic opponents is neither courage nor strategic awareness. It distracts us from those seeking to terrorise, subvert and destroy.

ASIO’s 2026 Annual Threat Assessment warned that terrorism, sabotage, espionage and foreign interference were degrading Australia’s security environment. Yet public culture remains unserious about danger. We fear difficult conversations more than hostile networks, while adversaries map infrastructure, manipulate information and exploit social fractures. A society unable to distinguish disagreement from malevolence cannot meet danger.

N — Naïve Empathy

Naïve empathy is compassion severed from judgment: feeling for the aggressor before protecting the victim and explaining the offender before comforting the wounded.

We should understand causes, but explanation is not exculpation. Hostile ideologies exploit open societies while rejecting their obligations.

Compassion must not suspend consequences. Violence, intimidation, terrorism and criminality require lawful punishment. Citizenship is not merely a travel document; it is allegiance and reciprocal duty. Empathy must distinguish the broken from the predatory. Kindness to the wolf can become cruelty to the sheep.

E — Educated Into Fragility

Children are resilient, but adults increasingly train them to experience disagreement as harm, discomfort as trauma and independence as neglect.

Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation identifies the decline of play-based childhood and rise of phone-based childhood. We protect children from minor risk while handing them devices exposing them to pornography, bullying, addiction and adult predation. We have moved danger from the visible world to the invisible one.

Skinned knees and failure are evidence of childhood properly lived. Confidence comes from testing limits, falling, recovering and trying again. A serious society would restore outdoor play, teamwork and guided courage.

R — Risk-Averse

A vulnerable society teaches its young to avoid discomfort and interpret difficulty as harm. In some sociology departments, the gravest risk appears to be misgendering someone or stumbling over pronouns. Courtesy matters, but a civilisation that treats verbal error as trauma while neglecting courage, duty and competence has lost proportion.

Risk is the price of creation. Entrepreneurs risk capital, innovators risk error, soldiers risk life and parents risk heartbreak. Civilisation advances through people who act before outcomes are guaranteed.

The West prospered because it produced explorers, engineers, farmers, founders, scientists and builders. Too many institutions teach young people to critique before creating and deconstruct before building. A serious country should want more entrepreneurs than activists, more engineers than bureaucrats and more builders than commentators. Risk is not always a pathology. Sometimes it is the doorway to meaning.

A — Appeasement-Minded

Appeasement is not peacemaking. Peacemaking requires strength, clarity and costs imposed on those choosing violence. Appeasement is the fantasy that hostility can be softened by concession alone.

The West seeks dialogue with those who despise it and inclusion of those who reject reciprocity. We pressure the peaceable rather than confront the violent.

Civilisation sometimes depends upon restraining predators. Valuing human life is compatible with lawful force against those posing a lethal threat to the innocent. A society signalling that escalation works and intimidation buys concessions invites more of both.

B — Boundaryless

Every living system requires boundaries. Families need roles, classrooms need standards, democracies need laws and nations need borders. Compassion requires limits; without them it becomes confusion and collapse.

Borders are not hatred but the political expression of responsibility. Immigration can enrich a country, but a nation must control who enters, on what terms and with what obligations. A boundaryless society cannot distinguish asylum from migration, protest from menace, liberty from licence or compassion from surrender. Refusing to draw lines is often crueller than drawing them.

L — Loss of Agency

Citizens in a healthy democracy are actors. In a vulnerable democracy they become spectators, waiting for institutions, experts or royal commissions to repair what citizens must confront.

Liberal democracy requires people who speak, organise, serve, build and defend. It assumes citizens confident enough to say: this is true; this is false; this is right; this is wrong; this is ours; and this must not happen here.

E — Exposed

A VULNERABLE society is wealthy but morally uncertain, connected but lonely, educated but historically illiterate, compassionate but undiscerning, rights-rich but duty-poor and emotionally intense but strategically naïve.

Australia is under-defended: an island continent dependent upon trade, fuel, ports, undersea cables, cyber networks and alliances. The 2023 Defence Strategic Review stated that the ADF’s force structure was not fully fit for Australia’s strategic circumstances. Yet we confuse process with preparedness and announcements with deterrence.

Israel’s circumstances are different but instructive. Israel behaves like a nation that understands consequence; Australia often behaves as though others will carry the burden. National security is the ability to deter, fight, recover and prevail.

What Can Be Done?

We must recover consequences, rebuild childhood, restore boundaries, teach history honestly and treat national defence as an urgent bipartisan duty. We need industry capacity, recruitment, reserves, fuel resilience, cyber protection and sovereign manufacturing.

We should introduce a serious national service model. This need not mean every eighteen-year-old becomes infantry. Service could include the ADF, reserves, emergency services, cyber defence, aged care, disaster relief, border support and remote community service. The Israeli model is illustrative, not transferable. Its lesson is civic formation: young people meet beyond their social circles, accept shared burdens and learn that citizenship is not consumption.

Exercise agency. Speak. Write. Organise. Build institutions. Support courageous teachers, police, parents, journalists, clergy, veterans, community leaders and elected representatives. Refuse lies, cowardice and the temptation to outsource conscience.

My instinct is that we are sleepwalking towards a cliff. Necessary changes will either be implemented by choice or forced upon us by events. The West need not remain vulnerable. WEIRD societies became remarkable because they formed people capable of trust, cooperation, sacrifice, invention and responsibility beyond tribe. Those capacities can be renewed, but not through comfort. Renewal requires citizens willing to remember what they inherited, recognise what threatens it and act before the lights go out.

We are vulnerable. But we are not helpless.

Colonel Michael Scott CSC Ret’d is a former Australian army officer and the founder of The 2023 Foundation, an initiative dedicated to combating antisemitism.