The Price of Forgetting Who We Are: A Personal Reflection on the West’s Drift Toward Self-Destruction

I was born to Pakistani immigrants who came to Europe in search of a better life - one of freedom, opportunity, and dignity. Like so many from the Muslim world, my parents saw the West not through the lens of colonial guilt or cultural critique, but as a shining beacon of individual liberty and the rule of law. They worked hard, paid their taxes, respected the law, and never once forgot that the life they built here was only possible because of the foundational values of their adopted homeland: liberal democracy, secularism, freedom of speech, and equality before the law.

As a child growing up in the West, I was taught to appreciate these values - but I didn’t fully grasp their depth until much later. I went through a phase of youthful idealism, seduced by the rhetoric of the political left. At university, I absorbed the language of decolonization, privilege, and power dynamics. I was told that the West was built on oppression and that our institutions were inherently racist. I began to see everything through that reductive lens - capitalism as exploitation, patriotism as chauvinism, and Western values as tools of domination.

But life - and honest reflection - have a way of clearing the fog.

As I grew older, I began to question the premises I had so easily absorbed. I started to see that many of those who spoke loudest in defense of tolerance were often the most intolerant of dissent. I watched as the left, once the proud standard-bearer of universal rights and secularism, began excusing the inexcusable - so long as it came wrapped in the garments of minority identity. I saw so-called progressives defend Islamist preachers under the guise of multiculturalism, even as those same preachers openly denounced the very freedoms that allowed them to speak. I saw women’s rights, gay rights, and freedom of conscience sacrificed at the altar of cultural sensitivity.

That’s when I realized something profoundly unsettling: the West is on a self-destructive path, not because of external enemies, but because of a growing internal failure to defend what makes it unique and precious.

Democracy is not merely majority rule. It is a fragile ecosystem of checks and balances, grounded in Enlightenment values. It guarantees not just the right to vote but the right to dissent, to believe - or not believe - freely, to express unpopular opinions without fear. These principles were not handed down easily. Generations of Westerners bled and fought for them. And yet today, large parts of the political and cultural elite treat them as disposable - relics of an oppressive past rather than the bedrock of a free society.

As a child of Muslim immigrants, this betrayal feels particularly personal. My family left behind a society where dissent could mean death, where blasphemy was punishable by mobs, and where women’s rights were constrained by religious orthodoxy. We came to the West for its freedoms. And yet, I now watch in disbelief as those very freedoms are being undermined - ironically, in the name of tolerance.

Demographic change alone is not the problem. People have always migrated, and many migrants - like my parents - embrace the values of their new home. But when integration fails, when large groups cling to illiberal beliefs and are told by their hosts that all cultures are equally valid, then we are not witnessing enrichment - we are witnessing erosion. Western societies are importing illiberalism and lacking the moral confidence to demand assimilation to liberal norms. Worse, the political left, which should be a bulwark of secular universalism, has too often been complicit - paralyzed by post-colonial guilt and a fetishization of victimhood.

Liberal democracy is not eternal. It can be - and has been - voted away. History is littered with examples of societies that allowed free systems to be dismantled through free means. The West is not immune. Its greatest threat today is not fascism or capitalism or conservatism. It is the hollowing out of belief in its own values. A society that cannot say, “This is who we are, and these are the non-negotiables,” will eventually become a society of fragments - disunited, confused, and vulnerable.

I still believe in the West. But belief is not enough. What’s needed now is a quiet revolution of clarity and courage - a reawakening of moral confidence among those who understand what’s at stake. We must defend our freedoms not just from overt authoritarianism, but from the slow, polite, and well-meaning erosion from within. As someone who has lived both worlds, who knows what freedom costs and what its absence feels like, I say this with urgency and love:

We forget who we are at our peril.