PRIVILEGE IS CIVILIZATION.

A Victor Hanson observation might ordinarily be part of a Friday short take.  "Civilization alone permits humans to pursue sophisticated scientific research, the arts, and the finer aspects of culture."

The column, though, might be a reminder that good times produce weak people.

[T]he great achievement of Western civilization - consensual government, individual freedom, rationalism in partnership with religious belief, free market economics, and constant self-critique and audit - was to liberate people from daily worry over state violence, random crime, famine, and an often-unforgiving nature.

But so often the resulting leisure and affluence instead deluded arrogant Western societies into thinking that modern man no longer needed to worry about the fruits of civilization he took to be his elemental birthright.

Cue the ekpyrosis.

As a result, the once prosperous Greek city-state, Roman Empire, Renaissance republics, and European democracies of the 1930s imploded - as civilization went headlong in reverse.

We in the modern Western world are now facing just such a crisis.

Weak people produce hard times. "Westerners are systematically destroying the very elements of our civilization that permitted such fantasies [as the Great Reset or whatever] in the first place."