"Personally, I think the Western penchant for vilifying our own civilisation has a more straightforward explanation: only a free and affluent civilisation like ours permits people to vilify it. Where else can you take your own political leaders to task in public, even insult and abuse them, without fear of repercussions? You shouldn’t try it in Russia or China, just as you shouldn’t have tried it in Europe before the rights revolution and the liberal constitutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Similarly, where are you free to wage a full-frontal attack on the economic and political institutions under which you live? Where can you make a fuss about problems both real and imaginary? Only in a liberal democracy. But why would you want to bite the hand that feeds you in this way? Such critics have a variety of motives, but perhaps for many, the main appeal is that in doing so they feel they are striking a heroic posture. In a Western democracy, you can pat yourself on the back for courageously “speaking truth to power,” you can even complain about being silenced and censored, while the very fact that you are able to voice these complaints out loud proves them hollow. It’s the intellectual equivalent of a soccer player theatrically flopping down onto the field to feign injury."