We live amid the ruins of borrowed certainty. Our political moment is dominated, not by builders of institutions or preservers of truth, but by performative ideologues who scorn the very frameworks they inherit. They cry liberation, yet they forget that liberty is costly, hard-won, and sustained by discipline and sacrifice. They demand justice, yet they ignore the deep and often invisible foundations without which justice has no coherent meaning. They speak fluently of systems, yet they deny the cultural and moral architecture that makes systems possible and stable.

This is the paradox of dependent ideologies: they presume what they dismantle, demand what they did not cultivate, and function only so long as the old scaffolding holds. Once the structure collapses, they cannot stand on their own. And so they fall, not because they are attacked from without, but because they are hollow within.

The Foundational Illusion

Every viable order arises from long and often painful accumulation: habits forged over generations, trust earned through patient civic practice, institutions formed by the slow convergence of prudence and tradition, and an understanding of human nature that resists both cynicism and naivety. These are not the accessories of civilisation; they are its very substance.

Nevertheless, today’s ideological movements treat this inheritance with contempt. They cast it not as a legacy to steward, but as a burden to escape. They promise radical transformation while quietly assuming the stability they do not know how to create. They deconstruct tradition but retain its syntax. They inhabit a moral grammar that predates them, yet claim authorship of its every clause.

This is not progress. It is iconoclasm dressed as enlightenment. It is cultural amnesia parading as moral vision. It is the wilful disavowal of what sustains meaning and coherence, the attempt to harvest fruit while cursing the roots.

Roger Scruton warned that radicals use the liberties they inherited to abolish the institutions that made those liberties possible. Edmund Burke foresaw that a revolution unmoored from tradition does not produce freedom, but vertigo and collapse. Once the foundation is cast off, the structure must eventually tilt.

Marxism and the Ghost of Capitalism

Marxism positioned itself as a prophetic negation of capitalism, but even Marx conceded that communism could not materialise without the industrial and economic foundations built by the bourgeois order. It was, paradoxically, capitalism that would midwife the proletarian state.