Michael: Here’s a wild thought. We are, by nearly every historical measure, the safest, healthiest, and wealthiest humans to ever live. Yet, we’re also killing ourselves at the highest rates in decades. What is going on? Kevin: That is a staggering contradiction. It feels like we have all the tools for happiness—smartphones, instant delivery, medical miracles—but the instruction manual is missing. We’re all dressed up with nowhere to go, emotionally speaking. Michael: That paradox is exactly what Ben Shapiro tackles in his book, The Suicide of the West. And this isn't just another political rant; it's a deeply philosophical book that became a #1 New York Times Bestseller, which is pretty rare for a work that dives this deep into history. Kevin: Right, and Shapiro himself is a polarizing figure. He graduated from Harvard Law, co-founded The Daily Wire, but he's also known for his very intense campus debates. So, you know this book is going to be provocative. Michael: Exactly. He argues we're in this mess because we've forgotten something fundamental about ourselves. And his diagnosis is that we are, in effect, committing civilizational suicide by choice. Kevin: Whoa. That’s a heavy accusation. ‘Suicide of the West.’ It’s not exactly a light beach read. Where does he even begin to build that case? Michael: He starts right there, with that first big paradox. The mystery of why things are so good, and why we seem so determined to throw it all away.

Michael: Shapiro opens the book by just burying you in data that proves how good we have it. He wants to establish a baseline: we live in the best world that has ever existed. For instance, he points out that in 1900, about one in every 100 mothers died in childbirth. Today, that rate has dropped by 99%. Ten percent of infants died before their first birthday. We can’t even conceive of that now. Kevin: It’s true. We complain about Wi-Fi speeds in a world where our ancestors worried about plagues and famines. We’ve solved so many external problems. So what’s the ‘but’? What’s the dark side of this progress he points to? Michael: The dark side is internal. He lays out this brutal counter-narrative. Suicide rates are at a 30-year high. Depression has skyrocketed. For the first time in modern history, American life expectancy has actually declined for several years in a row, largely due to drug overdoses and suicide—what he calls "deaths of despair." Kevin: And politically, it feels like the center has completely fallen out. Michael: Precisely. He uses the 2016 election as a perfect snapshot of this. On election day, only 38% of voters had a favorable view of Donald Trump, and only 43% for Hillary Clinton. Think about that. A majority of the country actively disliked both choices for the most powerful job in the world. Trust in our core institutions—the government, banks, newspapers, even the healthcare system—is at rock bottom, hovering around 30%. Kevin: Okay, but hold on. Is our division today truly worse than in the past? The book itself mentions we’ve had a full-scale Civil War and the domestic terrorism of the 1960s. Are we really more divided now, or does it just feel that way because of the 24/7 news cycle and social media outrage machines? Michael: That’s the crucial question, and Shapiro’s answer is nuanced. He’d say it’s not that the events are necessarily worse, but that our ability to handle them has collapsed. In the past, even during deep divisions, there was an underlying shared set of values, a common story about what America was. He argues that story is now gone. We no longer agree on the basic rules of the game. Kevin: So it’s not the storm that’s bigger, it’s that the ship’s foundation is rotten. Michael: Exactly. And he argues that the popular explanations for this rot—things like economic inequality or racial tension—are insufficient. Inequality has been worse before. And while racial tensions are real, by many metrics, like the approval of interracial marriage, we've made enormous progress. In 1958, only 4% of Americans approved of it. By 2013, it was 87%. Kevin: So if it's not money and it's not just race, what does he claim is the root cause of this societal decay? Michael: He says the problem is philosophical. We’ve abandoned the two ideas that made the West successful in the first place. He frames the entire history of Western thought as a product of two ancient cities: Jerusalem and Athens.

Kevin: Jerusalem and Athens. It sounds like a travel show. What does he mean by that? It's a powerful metaphor, but I've heard critics say it's a bit of an oversimplification of thousands of years of history. Michael: It's definitely a simplification, but it's a useful one for his argument. For Shapiro, "Jerusalem" represents the Judeo-Christian moral framework. It’s the source of our belief in purpose. Before Jerusalem, he argues, the world was pagan. The gods were chaotic, amoral, and capricious. Humans were just their playthings. Kevin: Right, like in Greek mythology, where Zeus is just running around causing trouble for his own amusement. Michael: Exactly. But Judaism, and later Christianity, introduced a radical idea: a single, rational God who created an ordered universe with a purpose. And most importantly, this God made humans "in His image," which meant every single individual had inherent worth, free will, and a moral responsibility to choose good over evil. This wasn't just about appeasing gods with sacrifices; it was about striving for holiness. Kevin: Can you give an example from the book of how this changed things? Michael: He uses the biblical story of Abraham arguing with God over the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham, a mere mortal, challenges God, bargaining with him: "Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked?" He haggles God all the way down from 50 righteous people to 10. The point is, this is a God you can reason with, a God who operates on principles of justice, not just raw power. That was revolutionary. It gave individuals a profound sense of purpose and value. Kevin: Okay, so that's Jerusalem: moral purpose and individual worth. What about Athens? Michael: "Athens" represents Greek reason and philosophy. The Greeks gave us the idea of telos—that everything in nature has an inherent purpose or end. The telos of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The telos of a knife is to cut. And for Aristotle, the telos of a human being is to use reason. Our unique capacity is to think, to deliberate, to understand the world. Kevin: Hold on, you threw out the word 'teleology.' Can you break that down? What does it actually mean for a human to have a 'telos'? Michael: It means our fulfillment comes from acting in accordance with our highest nature. For the Greeks, that meant living a life of virtue guided by reason. They believed we could discover how to live a good life by observing nature and using our minds to understand its rules. This is the foundation of natural law, and it’s what gave birth to science—the belief that the universe is intelligible and we have the tools to figure it out. Kevin: So you have Jerusalem giving us a divine purpose and Athens giving us a natural purpose through reason. They seem like they would be in conflict. How did they ever come together to form "the West"? Michael: They were in conflict for a long time! He tells the story of the Maccabean Revolt, where Jews fought to the death against Greek attempts to force them to abandon their laws. But Shapiro argues that Christianity, and later medieval thinkers like Thomas Aquinas, performed a grand synthesis. They merged Greek philosophy with Judeo-Christian theology. Aquinas, for example, argued that faith and reason were two wings of the same bird, both leading to God. Studying the natural world (Athens) was a way of understanding God's creation (Jerusalem). This fusion, Shapiro claims, is the secret recipe for the West. It created a civilization that valued both moral purpose and scientific inquiry, individual rights and rational governance. Kevin: That’s a huge claim. So if that combination was so powerful, where did we lose the recipe? What went wrong? Michael: Well, according to Shapiro, we decided we were smart enough to cook without the recipe. We kept the reason of Athens but threw out the moral purpose of Jerusalem. And that, he says, is where the unraveling began.

Michael: The unraveling, in Shapiro's telling, really kicks into high gear with the more radical elements of the Enlightenment. He draws a sharp contrast between the American Revolution, which he sees as grounded in both reason and Judeo-Christian morality—"endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights"—and the French Revolution. Kevin: Ah, the French Revolution. That’s where things always seem to get messy in history class. Michael: Deeply messy. The French revolutionaries tried to build a society on pure reason alone, completely divorced from any traditional morality. They literally created a "Cult of Reason," converting the Notre Dame cathedral into a temple for it. But without the moral guardrails of Jerusalem, their "reason" quickly devolved into the Reign of Terror. Robespierre famously said, "Virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent." It was a bloodbath justified by utopian logic. Kevin: So the argument is that reason without a moral compass becomes monstrous. How does he connect that to today? A 'Cult of Reason' from the 1790s feels very distant from modern life. Michael: He argues that the spirit of the French Revolution never died. It just mutated. It led to what he calls the "isms" that plagued the 20th century: romantic nationalism, communism, and fascism. All were attempts to create a new, man-made purpose to fill the void left by God. And now, he says, it has mutated again into the identity politics of our time. Kevin: Okay, that's a big leap. How does he connect the Reign of Terror to modern campus protests? Michael: He uses his own experiences as a bridge. He tells this absolutely insane story of being on the Dr. Drew Show in 2015. He was debating the Caitlyn Jenner story and stated that, biologically, Jenner is a male. Another guest, a transgender reporter named Zoey Tur, became enraged, grabbed him by the back of the neck on live TV, and threatened him, saying, "You cut that out now, or you'll go home in an ambulance." Kevin: On live television? That’s unbelievable. Michael: And the shocking part for Shapiro wasn't just the threat, but the reaction. The other panelists were horrified—at him. For "insulting the pronouns." His appeal to biological fact was seen as an act of violence. This leads him to another story, where he's speaking at Berkeley, and protesters are chanting, "SPEECH IS VIOLENCE!" Kevin: So when Shapiro talks about a 'return to paganism,' he means a return to a world where subjective feeling and tribal identity are more important than objective truth and reason. Michael: Exactly. He argues that modern identity politics, especially the theory of intersectionality, creates a new kind of tribalism. It's no longer about a shared national identity or universal values. It’s about your identity as a member of a victim group. And in this framework, your subjective experience of oppression gives you moral authority, an authority that can even override science and reason. Kevin: That’s where you get stories like the former Harvard president, Lawrence Summers, being essentially forced out for even suggesting that biological differences might play a role in the distribution of men and women in STEM fields. Michael: Precisely. For Shapiro, that is Athens being sacrificed on the altar of a new, secular religion of victimhood. It’s a world where "my truth" replaces "the truth." And a society with millions of competing, subjective truths has no common ground. It just has power struggles. That, he concludes, is the suicide of the West: the willful destruction of the very tools of reason and shared purpose that allowed us to build this prosperous, free, and, until recently, relatively happy civilization.

Michael: Ultimately, Shapiro's argument is that our freedom and prosperity are not the default state of humanity. They are the fragile and extraordinary result of a specific, powerful combination of ideas—that life has a purpose rooted in something beyond ourselves, and that we have the God-given capacity, through reason, to pursue it. Kevin: And when you try to have one without the other—reason without morality, like the French Revolution, or a search for meaning that rejects reason, which he argues is happening now—the whole structure becomes unstable. Michael: Exactly. When you remove those twin pillars, you don't get a more enlightened, liberated society. You get what we're seeing now: tribalism, despair, and a world where we can't even agree on basic reality. The book is a warning that we are trading a shared civilization for a collection of warring tribes. Kevin: It leaves you with a really challenging question: Are we strong enough to rebuild those foundations? Or are we content to just manage the decline? Shapiro's answer is a call to action, especially for parents, to teach these foundational ideas. Michael: He quotes Ronald Reagan, who said, "Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same." Kevin: It’s a heavy but vital conversation. It forces you to ask what you truly believe holds society together, and whether we're doing enough to protect it. Michael: We'd love to know what you think. Do you see this 'unraveling' in your own lives, or is this an overly pessimistic view? Let us know your thoughts on our social channels. We're always curious to hear your perspectives. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.