A spectre is haunting the West—not of revolution, but of forgetting. It is a quiet, insidious amnesia, not of dates or battles, but of the very intellectual grammar that built the free and prosperous world we inhabit. The syntax of liberty—the complex, humane arguments for limited government, spontaneous order, and individual sovereignty—is fading from the young mind, replaced by a sterile, managerial dialect. One hears it everywhere: in the unexamined assumptions of the freshly graduated, in the limp and predictable consensus of the media, in the deadening bureaucratic language that now passes for discourse on human affairs.
The great and tumultuous conversation that once defined the West, the fierce disputation between collectivism and freedom, has been muted. The vital ideas of thinkers like Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Adam Smith are not being argued against; they are being gently, persistently sidelined through a strategy of neglect. The grand cathedral of classical liberalism stands, but its congregation dwindles, while outside, a new generation is diligently schooled in the cramped, airless chapels of a soft and technocratic collectivism.
The genius of this new orthodoxy lies in its method. It does not burn books; it simply ensures they are never opened. It does not deplatform the heretical professor through force; it ensures his department is never funded, his module never listed, his name never whispered in the corridors that matter. It does not engage with Hayek’s devastating dissection of the ‘fatal conceit’ of central planning; it merely ensures his work is absent from the reading list, his concepts absent from the lecture, his very existence absent from the intellectual horizon of the student.
This is victory by omission, a cultural airbrushing more effective than any censorship. The arguments for freedom are not lost in a fair fight; they are starved of an audience.
Into this silent, cold war of ideas steps a necessary and brilliantly subversive counter-model. Look to Western Australia, to the Mannkal Economic Education Foundation. Its method is deceptively simple, yet its implications are profoundly radical. It operates on a premise that our political class has largely forgotten: that the most potent form of counter-revolution is not a protest march, but a seminar; not a shouted slogan, but a carefully posed Socratic question over a cup of coffee. Mannkal seeks out the bright, the restless, the intuitively dissenting student—the one who feels the stifling conformity of their education like a physical weight, but lacks the vocabulary to articulate their unease. To this student, they provide the lexicon. They hand them The Road to Serfdom not as a period piece or a political tract, but as a master key to deciphering the world around them. They connect them with mentors and peers, creating a community that whispers a vital truth: you are not alone, and these ideas are not dead.
The sheer, urgent necessity for a proliferation of such endeavours across Britain and Europe cannot be overstated. Our great universities, once the roaring engines of intellectual disputation, have largely become finishing schools for a new managerial clerisy. The graduates are fluent in the approved jargon of ‘equity,’ ‘sustainability,’ and ‘inclusion,’ yet they are utter illiterates in the principles of comparative advantage, the price system, or the dispersed and tacit knowledge that Hayek identified as the marketplace’s supreme logic. They are taught, with immense confidence, to see society as a machine—a static, inert contraption to be engineered, optimised, and controlled from the centre. They are expert planners of gardens they have never been told could grow wild, according to rhythms and designs no single mind could ever comprehend. The result is a generation of would-be architects, armed with elaborate blueprints and a terrifying, unearned confidence, who have never been told the sobering parable of the Tower of Babel.
Mannkal’s true genius, however, lies in its strategic target. It wisely bypasses the exhausted, mud-splattered battlegrounds of day-to-day politics. It does not waste its energy on this week’s parliamentary skirmish or that evening’s partisan debate. Instead, it recruits for the intellectual battles that will define the next thirty years. It understands the fundamental law of cultural change: to alter policy, you must first alter the policymakers; and to alter them, you must capture their imaginations in their formative state, when the mind is still porous, curiosity is alive, and careerism has not yet hardened the arteries of thought. It invests not in policy papers for today’s news cycle, but in the very neurologies of tomorrow’s barristers, editors, entrepreneurs, and prime ministers. It seeks to create not a transient electorate, but a permanent, influential alumni.
This is long-game warfare at its most sophisticated: the patient planting of oak trees under whose shade you know you will never sit.
The task, therefore, for any individual of means and foresight who truly values the oxygen of a free society, is clear. It is not merely to fund a political party or a single-issue campaign, though those have their place. It is to fund the antidote. It is to systematically invest in the intellectual and moral antibodies needed to fight the poison currently being drip-fed into the educational bloodstream of the West. We require a quiet, persistent, and deeply scholarly network of such foundations—not loud, not dogmatic, not partisan in the crude sense, but irresistibly engaging and uncompromising in their commitment to first principles. Their mission must be the reintroduction of the dangerous and exhilarating ideas of freedom. To demonstrate that liberty is not the mere absence of restraint, but the radiant presence of possibility: the necessary precondition for genuine creativity, for compassion, for scientific discovery, and for true human dignity. To show that the market is not a cold spreadsheet, but a ceaseless, shimmering conversation; that prices are not mere numbers, but sublime vectors of condensed information; and that the humble, unplanned, daily actions of millions, coordinating without a coordinator, constitute the most wondrously productive and liberating force ever known to mankind.
Without this deliberate, cultural rearmament, we risk a grim fate. We are not raising a generation of philosophers or citizens. We are raising a generation of highly skilled technicians, meticulously trained to service a cage whose walls they have been taught do not exist. They will polish the bars, debate their optimal geometric arrangement, and devise ever more intricate systems for their maintenance, all while never knowing they were meant to fly. To place the ideas of Hayek into their hands is to give them the sight to finally see the cage for what it is, and the intellectual tools to imagine a world without one. This is the most profound act of conservation possible: not of landscapes or old buildings, but of the very light—the intellectual light—by which we see everything else. All else, the politics, the noise, the passing crises, is merely decoration. This is the foundation. And it is, unmistakably, cracking. The work of Mannkal, and the replication of its model, is not a hobby for philanthropists. It is the essential repair of the load-bearing wall of civilisation, coming handily at a time when the youth of Australia and Britain are both seeing the realtime failures of socialism.
Dominic Wightman is the Editor of Britain’s Country Squire Magazine, works in finance, and is the author of five and a half books including Conservatism (2024).
This piece was first published in Country Squire Magazine, and is reproduced by kind permission.
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Where is this “free world” we inhabit? We will never be free until income tax is banned.
In the proverbial nutshell: “… the fundamental law of cultural change: to alter policy, you must first alter the policymakers…”
And that’s it. Whether we live in a “free world” or a “relatively free world” or whatever, we know that nothing can change without the personalities who are running this world, change.
An interesting piece.