Ready to launch your business? Get started with the commerce platform made for entrepreneurs. Shopify is specially designed to help you start, run and grow your business with easy customizable themes that let you build your brand. Marketing tools that get your products out there. Integrated shipping solutions that actually save you time from startups to, online, in-person and on the go.

Shopify is made for entrepreneurs like you. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at

Shopify.com slash setup.

Jordan Peterson's Alliance for Responsible Citizenship asked me to contribute an essay to a book

about the unique foundations of Western civilization. Here it is. Across the Western world,

we live in an age of almost unlimited prosperity, freedom and opportunity. While much of the rest

of the world continues to suffer from the

scourges that have plagued humanity since the dawn of time, the average Western citizen

is remarkably free from the risk of starvation, preventable disease and crushing poverty.

And although the threat of war has come closer, we enjoyed close to eight decades of almost

entirely uninterrupted peace.

Yet most of us are profoundly unaware how unusual and precious our freedoms and comforts are.

They are an inheritance which all too often we take for granted, which instead we should cherish

and protect. What is more, even those of us who grasp the astonishing scale of these achievements

frequently struggle to articulate how we reach them. Indeed, many of us are now confused about the

concept of the West itself. In recent years, some have begun to ask questions about why

countries all over the globe, from Australia to the United States, are all described with the same

geographical designation. This, often deliberate confusion, is a sign that we have forgotten who we are.

The critics are right. The West is not a geographical location. It is a set of cultural and

philosophical ideas we have inherited from the ancient Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman

civilizations. These ideas are not the same as they were 2,000 years ago. On the contrary,

they've been refined, filtered and improved through the centuries to bring us the technological

...