Are we living through the fall of civilisation? | The Reith Lectures 2025

We live in an age where billionaires dodge their taxes. Politicians perform

instead of govern and media barons profit [music] from lies and hatred. The

Roman elite fiddled while Rome burned.

Our elites live stream [music] the fire and monetize the smoke.

Immorality and inseriousness.

Those are the two defining traits of today's leaders. They are not accidental

today's leaders. They are not accidental flaws, but the logical outcome of what I call the survival of the shameless.

Today, it's not the most capable who rise, but the least scrupulous.

Hello, my name is Rocker Breman, and in my first BBC reef lecture called A Time of Monsters, I'm going to talk about the decline, the decadence, and the

corruption of our age. And I'll ask what are we going to do about it?

As the son of a preacher, I learned long ago that every good sermon consists of three parts. Act one, [music] misery,

three parts. Act one, [music] misery, act two, redemption, and act three, thankfulness.

Now, this is going to be a hopeful series of lectures about the extraordinary era of human history we're living through, about humanity's wild possibilities, and about the power of small groups of dedicated citizens

[music] to determine our collective destiny. But I'm afraid that in this

destiny. But I'm afraid that in this first lecture, we're [music] going to have to spend most of our time on act one, misery. From an early age, I've

one, misery. From an early age, I've been fascinated by stories of upheaval and collapse. Growing up in the

and collapse. Growing up in the Netherlands, I was especially gripped by the tales of how our small country was occupied by the Nazis. And I endlessly asked myself, what would I have done?

Would I have had the courage to do what's right?

>> Dutch were doomed to defeat.

>> As an adult and as a historian, I still ask those questions and they feel more urgent than ever. I know I have made a name writing hopeful books about the

goodness in humanity and the utopias we can build together. But today it would feel dishonest to begin on an optimistic

note. As the Italian philosopher Antonio

note. As the Italian philosopher Antonio GSKY wrote in 1926, scribbling in a notebook from a fascist prison, [music] "The old world is dying and the new

world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters." To grasp the depth of our current misery, I think it helps to start with a classic story of collapse.

When the great historian Edward Gibbon described the decline of Rome, he didn't speak in vague abstractions. He gave us names, dates, and details, page after

page of cowardice and corruption.

Reading the decline and fall of the Roman Empire is like watching a civilization rot in slow motion.

sadistic emperors and guilded thrones, generals who sold out their own armies, and senators who cared more for spectacle [music] than statecraft.

And yet, what shocks you most when you read Gibbon today isn't the depravity.

It's the familiarity.

Gibbon wrote about politicians who lacked seriousness, elites who lacked virtue, and societies that mistook decadence for progress. 2,000 years

later, we live in an age where billionaires dodge their taxes, politicians perform instead of govern, and media barons profit from lies and

hatred. The Roman elite fiddled while

hatred. The Roman elite fiddled while Rome burned. Our elites live stream the

Rome burned. Our elites live stream the fire and monetize the smoke.

Immorality and unseriousness, [music] those are the two defining traits of today's leaders. They are not accidental

today's leaders. They are not accidental flaws, but the logical outcome of what I call the survival [music] of the shameless.

Today, it's not the most capable who rise, but the least scrupulous. Not the

most virtuous, but the most brazen. I'll

get to Europe later, but first, let's cross the Atlantic to the place where this logic has reached [music] its purest forum, the United States.

I won't bore you with an exhaustive summary of all the madness [music] of the past few years. On the one side, we had an establishment propping up an elderly man in obvious mental decline, and on the other, we had a convicted

reality star. When it comes to staffing

reality star. When it comes to staffing his administration, he's a modernday Caligula, the Roman emperor who wanted to make his horse a console. He

surrounds himself with loyalists, grifters, and sickopans.

Yet, what interests me is not left versus right. It's courage versus

versus right. It's courage versus cowardice, virtue versus vice. And the

truth is the decay is everywhere. The

moral rot runs [music] deep across elite institutions of every stripe. If the

right is defined by its shameless corruption, then liberals answer with a paralyzing cowardice.

Dozens of corporations, media networks, universities, and museums have already bent the knee to the new regime. Some of

the most prestigious law firms rushed to pledge their loyalty.

But let's not pretend that this was a fall from grace. These firms spent years defending Wall Street criminals, tobacco conglomerates, and opioid profiters.

They didn't betray their principles.

They revealed them. Their loyalty has never been to justice or democracy, but to power and profit. And where were these loyalties forged? The answer is

simple. at the world's most celebrated

simple. at the world's most celebrated universities at the greatest bastions of science and reason in secular temples with grand columns and mottos inscribed

in stone truth at Harvard light and truth at Yale [music] and in the nation's service and the service of humanity at Princeton.

Every year thousands of brilliant teenagers write beautiful application essays about the global problems they aspire to solve. climate change, world

hunger, infectious disease. But a few years later, most have been funneled towards companies like McKenzie, Goldman Sachs, and Kirkland and Alice. A friend

of mine who studied at Oxford calls it the Bermuda Triangle of talent.

Consultancy, finance, and corporate law.

A gaping black hole that sucks up so many of our so-called best and brightest. a dark chasm that has tripled

brightest. a dark chasm that has tripled in size since the 1980s. [music]

Sure, I know such companies like to spray a thin layer of purpose or corporate responsibility over their dubious business models. Did you know that tobacco giant Philip Morris has a

stellar ESG [music] score? Have you

heard that British American tobacco was named both a climate leader and a diversity leader by the Financial Times?

And they really deserved it. Their CO2

compensation programs are state-of-the-art and their inclusivity trainings are among the best in the business. They are doing so much good

business. They are doing so much good while killing millions of people.

Please, let's not kid ourselves. There

has been no moral awakening in the corporate world. Business for good,

corporate world. Business for good, conscious capitalism, social impact, it was all mostly a sham. Beneath the talk, the cultural tide has been running the

other way for decades.

Just look at the American Freshman Survey, which has tracked the values of firstear college students since the 1960s.

Half a century ago, when students were asked about their most important life goals, 80 to 90% named developing a meaningful philosophy of life, just 50%

prioritized making a lot of money.

Today, those numbers have flipped. Now,

80 to 90% say that getting rich is what matters most. only half still value a

matters most. only half still value a meaningful philosophy of life. Remember,

this isn't human nature. It's human

culture. The kids are merely holding up a mirror and what they reflect back is what we've been teaching them.

Currently, around 40% of Harvard graduates end up in that Bermuda triangle of BS jobs. And if you include big tech, the share rises to more than

60%. And the work there is often just as

60%. And the work there is often just as meaningless. In the infamous words of a

meaningless. In the infamous words of a math prodigy who ended up at Facebook, "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click

ads." That sucks.

ads." That sucks.

On both the left and the right, [music] America has been betrayed by its elites.

Like Rome in its waning days, the empire is corroding from within. Not by the absence of talent and wealth, but by the lack of courage and virtue.

I would love to be able to say that things are much better on this side of the Atlantic where I'm recording this lecture that Europe has become the new leader of the free world. But we're not

obviously.

Although our politics is not as brazenly corrupt, the same spirit of decadence haunts the old world. The truth is that the defining traits of Europe's elites

aren't [music] just immorality and inseriousness. It's also

inseriousness. It's also irrelevance. If America resembles the

irrelevance. If America resembles the fall of Rome, spectacular and vulgar, then Europe is reliving the slow death of Venice. One empire collapses in

of Venice. One empire collapses in flames, [music] the other sinks in silence. One is consumed by fire, the

silence. One is consumed by fire, the other lost in fog.

Perhaps you're familiar [music] with the story. At its peak, Venice was a marvel

story. At its peak, Venice was a marvel of commerce and [music] innovation. A

small city built on a lagoon had become a maritime empire dominating Mediterranean trade for centuries. Its

success was rooted in a [music] relatively open system. Merchants could

rise through merit. Trade was well regulated and institutions like the great council struck a balance between aristocracy and accountability. But by

the 14th century that openness began to vanish. The seeds of decline were swn in

vanish. The seeds of decline were swn in 1297 with the serata or closing of the great council. Membership became

great council. Membership became hereditary creating a class of entrenched nobles who guarded their privileges fiercely and this selfishly monopolized government positions blocked

newcomers and rewrote the rules to protect their wealth and power.

Over the centuries Venetian politics devolved into rent seeking. The ruling

families extracted profits from trade monopolies without reinvesting in innovation. They poured their wealth

innovation. They poured their wealth into palaces and casinos and ignored growing threats from emerging powers like the Ottoman Empire.

Young elites didn't want to become merchants and admirals anymore. Instead,

they preferred a life of leisure and luxury.

Over time, Venice became a shadow of its former self. Beautiful on the outside,

former self. Beautiful on the outside, hollow on the inside.

Now, does that remind you of anything?

Today, the whole of Europe is turning into one big Venice, a beautiful open air museum, a destination for Chinese

and American tourists, a place to admire what was once the center of the world.

Just look at our most valuable companies in the US and China. The commanding

heights of the economy are in technology and industry. AI, electric cars, solar

and industry. AI, electric cars, solar panels, batteries, whatever you think of big tech and its oligarchs. These are

power industries shaping the future. In

fact, all the American giants, Microsoft Apple Amazon Nvidia Alphabet are individually worth more than the entire German or French stock

market. By contrast, Europe's top 10

market. By contrast, Europe's top 10 companies [music] are dominated by big fashion.

Dior, Louis Vuitton, L'Oreal. We've

become the continent of handbags instead of hardware. At the same time, our

of hardware. At the same time, our societies are rapidly aging. Birth rates

are plummeting, growth is stuttering, and Europe's wealth has become largely dynastic.

In Germany, three out of four billionaires inherited their fortunes.

In the UK, families with children haven't seen their incomes rise for 20 years, while pensioners incomes have kept on growing. In France, the elderly now enjoy higher incomes than the

working age population, and that's a first in world history.

Politically, we've become naval gazers, mainly obsessing over immigration, even though only 10% of us were born outside the EU and will need those newcomers to sustain all those pensioners and

inheritors.

Sure, Europe has long fancied itself as the continent of values. We love to lecture others on democracy and human

rights, but just look at us this year.

While Israel dropped the equivalent of six Hiroshima's worth of bombs on Gaza, European leaders could barely bring themselves to express their concerns

over the humanitarian situation, as if this was some kind of natural disaster.

But while Europeans aren't very successful at restraining others, we've become very good at regulating ourselves.

China is the world's industrial powerhouse. The US is the world's

powerhouse. The US is the world's technological powerhouse. And we lead

technological powerhouse. And we lead the world in rulemaking.

We've trained a whole new class not of builders and creators, but of compliance officers, ESG auditors, sustainability verifiers, and data protection consultants. Regulate before you

consultants. Regulate before you innovate. Supervise before you create.

innovate. Supervise before you create.

That's Europe's mindset right now. We

proudly announced our AI act to the world even though we had no frontier AI companies to speak of. We're brilliant

at governing industries that we don't have.

Just like Venice in the 14th century, [music] we have an economy that rewards those who increase complexity and extract [music] rats.

Now, don't get me wrong. I am an old-fashioned European social democrat.

I'm not here to pedal anti-government or anti-EU cliches. I am well aware that a

anti-EU cliches. I am well aware that a recent large-scale study found that so-called BS jobs, jobs employees [music] themselves see as socially meaningless, are three times more common

in the private sector than in the public sector.

And I also know that even after Brexit, the UK government's pathologies are worse. For example, its tax code now

worse. For example, its tax code now runs to 22,000 pages, the longest in the world.

In Europe, we should be proud of our strong welfare states and our ambitious climate efforts. And we definitely need

climate efforts. And we definitely need to regulate [music] big tech. But social

democracy should focus on building the future, not just regulating the [music] present. and regulation should be

present. and regulation should be simple, transparent, and open for newcomers, not dense, obscure, and protective of the status quo.

What we're now getting is a huge waste of talent. Our best minds aren't

of talent. Our best minds aren't building startups or solving real world problems. They're writing reports and preparing for audits. In the name of climate and equity, we've built a

compliance economy, one that punishes productivity and rewards bureaucracy.

The state has lost much of its capacity to deliver because civil servants who once knew how to build have been replaced by consultants.

So you might wonder where is the push back? Surely in the face of so much

back? Surely in the face of so much decay a new left, a new progressive movement would have risen. One

determined to make government great again. But no, a big part of the modern

again. But no, a big part of the modern left, especially in Europe, has turned into the party of no. No to growth, no

to building, no to ambition. Its new

gospel is degrowth.

To be fair, the degrowth movement names something real. Our economies cannot go

something real. Our economies cannot go on like this. Cutting down forests faster than they can regrow, emptying the seas of fish, and flooding the

atmosphere with carbon. The warning of degrowththers is serious, but their answer is not. They are allergic to technology and suspicious of prosperity.

They wave away stubborn facts of supply and demand, pretending that you can half housing prices by decree or abolish poverty by slogan. What they offer is not a practical program for solving

problems, but a deeply unpopular and elitist ideology of [music] managed decline.

Most baffling is the commandment [music] issued in certain corners of the left to have no children anymore. Demographers

tell us that across the developed world, the drop in birth rates is overwhelmingly driven by people on the left opting out of parenthood. Now,

think about that for a moment. The

tradition that once stood for the future now [music] treats the most beautiful thing in the world, new life, as a crime against the planet. If you wanted to design a strategy to make your movement

irrelevant within a generation, you could hardly do better.

The deeper tragedy is that the left once believed in [music] progress. The idea

that people and nations could grow, develop, mature. [music] This was a

develop, mature. [music] This was a tradition of education and emancipation.

As the American historian Nelson Likenstein has written, "All great reform movements from the crusade against slavery to the [music] labor upsurge of the 1930s defined themselves

as champions of a moral and patriotic nationalism [music] which they counterpost to the parochial and selfish elites which stood at their vision of a virtuous society.

But today that utopian horizon has dimmed. Instead of inspiring people with

dimmed. Instead of inspiring people with a vision of a better future, the left has turned inward, fragmenting into ever smaller moral circles, it has become

quick to cancel, slow to compromise, [music] quick to judge, slow to persuade. The catharsis of public

persuade. The catharsis of public shaming has replaced the grind of building coalitions. [music]

building coalitions. [music] So today we have pronouns but no progressive taxation, land acknowledgements [music] but no affordable housing, inclusive language

but exclusive zoning. We've got the optics but not the outcomes. Should we

really be surprised then that the left is losing across the developed world? Of

course not. When you stop building and organizing, you don't just lose elections, you lose the people. And when

the left steps back, the void doesn't just stay empty. Others are ready to rush in.

So now the bad news.

If you think the fall of Rome or Venice was scary, let me assure you it could get much worse.

Yes, we have clowns and cowards among us, but we also have actual fascists in our midst. We could end up ruled by

our midst. We could end up ruled by feudal rent seekers who slowly drain the life out of our society, but we could also be taken over by people who destroy it outright.

I recently attended an exclusive Silicon Valley conference. Over dinner, the

Valley conference. Over dinner, the conversation was dominated by a tech bro who spoke in ways that reminded me of 1930s fascists like Mussolini. I pointed

this out to him and he replied without irony, "Yeah, I think we should get a little fashy.

This wasn't just one guy. He's part of a broader resurgence of fascism across the Western world. Do we really need to use

Western world. Do we really need to use the F-word? Yes, we do. Just as genocide

the F-word? Yes, we do. Just as genocide scholars can clearly classify what's happening in Gaza, scholars of fascism can identify the signs of what's rising

now. We see armed troops patrolling the

now. We see armed troops patrolling the streets. We see masked men dragging

streets. We see masked men dragging people into vans. We see raids on the homes of political opponents. We see the rise of a paramilitary force that's loyal to one man alone. It is no

coincidence that some of the leading experts of fascism have left the United States. One of them said that the lesson

States. One of them said that the lesson of 1933 is to get out early, not late.

And all the while, white supremacists are celebrating.

8 years ago, you were an extremist if you protested being replaced by immigrants, a leading neo-Nazi recently wrote on Twitter. Now it's official White House policy.

Or look at the rise of neofascist influencers like the blogger Curtis Jarvin. He wants to dismantle democracy

Jarvin. He wants to dismantle democracy and replace it with a techno monarchy led by a CEO with absolute power.

Someone like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos.

Jarvin has inspired billionaires like Peter Theel who in turn helped bankroll the rise of JD Vance the [music] current vice president. And others go further

vice president. And others go further still. Michael Anton, one of the most

still. Michael Anton, one of the most influential MAGA intellectuals, has popularized the idea of red Caesarism, a form of one-man rule that he describes

as halfway [music] between monarchy and tyranny.

These people are ruthlessly power seeking. They literally believe it's

seeking. They literally believe it's time for a new Napoleon or right-wing Lenin to take over. And like Lenin, they know they're deeply, deeply unpopular,

that they would never win free and fair elections, which is [music] why they're against democracy, and why they're betting on our apathy. They want us to plug out, to scroll, to binge, to put on

our VR glasses and noiseancelling [music] headphones while they take over the world.

If you're horrified by the news today, then I urge you, expand your imagination. Picture yourself 10 years

imagination. Picture yourself 10 years from now reading a history of the common decade. [music] If it told the story of

decade. [music] If it told the story of an authoritarian takeover, then what you're seeing today is [music] exactly what you'd expect in the opening chapters.

I did warn you this lecture was going to be misery.

A decade ago, when Donald Trump was first elected, liberal elites spent countless hours analyzing and debating the divides between their values and those of millions across America and

Europe.

If only we'd listen and feel empathy for Trump voters or Farage voters or Le Pen voters or AFD voters or Wilders voters, then we could heal the world. Or so it

was said. The educated elites didn't

was said. The educated elites didn't realize that their true betrayal had not been a failure of listening or empathy.

It was not a lack of checking your privilege. It was a lack of using your

privilege. It was a lack of using your privilege. It's been a failure to

privilege. It's been a failure to genuinely contribute to society.

So that is what I want to emphasize at the end of the first lecture in this series. This is not just a story about a

series. This is not just a story about a certain number of people. [music] It's

about a deeper failure of leadership across the western world. A generation

of elites has inherited extraordinary privilege, access to the best education, [music] the most powerful institutions, and used it not to serve the public, but to serve themselves.

We've taught our best and brightest how to climb, but not what ladder is worth climbing. We've built a meritocracy of

climbing. We've built a meritocracy of ambition without morality, of intelligence without integrity. And now

we are reaping the consequences.

Declining trust, rising cynicism, and a new generation that sees power as inherently corrupt and all virtue as performance.

Of course, not everyone in power is like this. Not all ambition today is hollow.

this. Not all ambition today is hollow.

There are still leaders and citizens trying to hold the line. Civil servants

who resist political pressure.

Journalists who risk their safety for the truth. Lawyers and judges who refuse

the truth. Lawyers and judges who refuse to betray their principles. But they

remain exceptions, [music] outnumbered and outshouted. Their sparks have yet to

and outshouted. Their sparks have yet to catch [music] fire. What we need now is not just better policies or better

politicians. We need a moral revolution.

politicians. We need a moral revolution.

We need to revive an ancient idea almost laughable in today's [music] climate that the purpose of power is to do good.

And that is the goal of this lecture series [music] to argue that the most urgent transformation of our time is not technological or geopolitical or

industrial but moral. We need a new kind of ambition not for status or wealth or fame but for integrity, courage and

public service. a moral ambition.

public service. a moral ambition.

This may sound naive and yet it's precisely because things can get much worse that they can also get much better. History is not just a record of

better. History is not just a record of declines. It's also full of astonishing

declines. It's also full of astonishing turnarounds. And in my next brief

turnarounds. And in my next brief lecture, I will show how moral revolutions have shaped the past and how we can make it happen again.

Thank you.