The Courage of the First Servant: Douglas Murray on the Crisis of the Western Mind

On 8 November 2025, at the PragerU West Coast Gala in Los Angeles, Douglas Murray delivered one of the most substantial speeches of his recent career. Before an audience drawn from politics, culture, media, and philanthropy, Murray diagnosed with clarity—and unusual frankness—the moral instability now gripping the Western world. His address moved seamlessly from humour to political critique, to literature and moral philosophy, and back again. Yet behind the lightness of delivery lay something weightier: a call for moral sobriety in an age intoxicated with resentment and ideological fervour.

Above all, Murray insisted upon a truth that transcends political cycles: every individual is placed in a particular moment of history, and the duty of each is, as he concluded, “to act the best we can in the times we find ourselves in.”¹

The Return of Old Ideologies in New Dress
Murray began by invoking Martin Luther’s observation that mankind resembles “a drunkard on a horse,” perpetually falling off first to one side, then to the other. This image, both vivid and apt, serves as Murray’s guiding metaphor for the present. The modern West, he says, has fallen off the horse decisively to the ideological left in recent years—and now shows signs of toppling to the right as well.

What characterises the present fall to the left is the revival of third-worldism—a worldview born in the mid-twentieth century, nurtured in academic enclaves, and now mainstreamed through political power. In Murray’s words, it is “the belief that essentially everything we have in the West is the problem.” Any problem abroad—whether abuses in China or conflicts in the Middle East—is explained not by the actions of those regions, but by Western guilt: “the opium wars,” “colonialism,” “the slave trade,” invoked as universal and perpetual absolution for all non-Western wrongdoing.

Murray noted with concern that a politician shaped by this ideology has achieved leadership of “the biggest, most important city in America,” and that this worldview is no longer merely circulating in lecture halls but now shaping municipal, social, and diplomatic policy. The challenge to the right, therefore, is not tactical but civilizational: to respond not merely to specific claims but to the deeper anthropological and moral intuitions they exploit—envy, grievance, resentment, and the allure of blaming others for one’s own failures.

“You cannot reply to appeals to envy and resentment by merely talking about zoning regulations,” Murray warned. The right must learn again to speak to the moral imagination.

The Right’s Drift into Chaos
After diagnosing the left’s intoxication with its ideological extremes, Murray turned—more painfully and more controversially—to the emerging sickness within the right itself. For years, he argued, conservatives profited from the left’s inability to repel its fringe. “Defund the police,” a slogan he described as “stupid, stupid,” cost Democrats crucial races and credibility.

But now, he said, “we on the political right have things that are equally potentially devastating.” In fact, the very forces conservatives once mocked in the left are now infecting elements of their own ranks: absolutism, utopianism, cults of personal infallibility, and the lure of extreme ideological purity.

Murray highlighted the shocking willingness of certain prominent conservative voices to blur boundaries with racists, neo-Nazis, and explicit antisemites—groups whose ideologies are fundamentally incompatible with the Western tradition conservatives claim to defend. His most pointed rebuke was directed toward the incongruity between the harsh treatment some conservatives receive from within their own camp and the indulgent friendliness shown to extremists. To mock the asymmetry, he cited the difference between an “attack interview” of Senator Ted Cruz and the soft treatment of Nick Fuentes: “Nothing,” he said, “is more delegitimizing for the conservative side.”

His warning was clear: if the right does not choose its allies with moral discipline, then its cause—no matter how just—will be discredited by association.

Filling the Spiritual Vacuum: New Dogmas on Left and Right
Murray’s analysis then widened from politics to anthropology. The political dysfunction of the West, he suggested, is inseparable from the spiritual vacuum that has grown steadily in recent decades. As Christianity has declined, it has left what Murray calls “a hole”—and “into the religious vacuum… things would tread.”

On the left, these substitutes include “gender ideology,” racialised activism, and cultic political movements that offer meaning through perpetual agitation. On the right, however, the vacuum has produced something different: a minority enchanted by pseudo-Catholic romanticism, “clerical attitudes,” and historical fantasies unmoored from political reality.

He warned these new zealots that their desire to impose “Catholic clerical law in the United States in the 21st century” is not merely unrealistic but suicidal. With sharp wit, he reminded them: “I wasn’t alive in Europe in the 16th century, but I did hear about it,” adding that, far from establishing a Catholic order, they would be swiftly “hanged from the lamp posts by the Protestants.”

His underlying thesis is profound: political movements cannot be grounded in unreality—neither in the left’s utopian anthropology nor in the right’s neo-medieval fantasies. A civilisation must choose its principles not only for their beauty but for their truth, and for their possibility.

The Temptation of Scapegoating
Murray then addressed a phenomenon he sees as growing within certain corners of the right: the turn toward scapegoating Jews, particularly in relation to immigration policy. He acknowledged candidly that “many open borders organisations are dominated by prominent liberal Jews,” but he insisted that this cannot justify collective blame—especially when conservatives themselves bristle at being collectively blamed for the statements of their own religious leaders.

This is where he delivered one of the most striking lines of the night:

“The most prominent open borders advocate in recent years has been the pope…. Do you want us who are not Catholics to blame Catholics in America for your liberal open-borders popes? I hope not… So don’t do it to the Jews.”

By reframing the issue through an analogy that conservatives themselves would find unpalatable, Murray cut directly to the moral core: injustice is still injustice, even when committed by one’s political allies.

Aspiration and Gratitude: Counterweights to Resentment
Having disarmed both left and right of their most destructive impulses, Murray argued that the conservative answer must centre on two great civilisational virtues: aspiration and gratitude.

Aspiration, he said, is the defining American promise: “the knowledge that if you work hard, you will improve your lot in life and the lot in life of the people you love.” When aspiration is real, envy loses its power; when aspiration collapses, resentment becomes politically contagious.

Alongside aspiration stands gratitude—the ability to recognise that America’s freedoms, especially its religious freedoms, are extraordinary achievements rather than historical inevitabilities. Murray recalled Jefferson’s epitaph, which proudly listed the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom: an achievement that “broke something that had torn Europe apart for years and solved it.”

These freedoms survive only if citizens remember that they are gifts, won through sacrifice and guarded through discipline.

The Forgotten Power of the Individual
Finally, Murray turned to the deepest level of his argument: the place of the individual in history. The left, he argued, “talks in grandiose terms, but also non-human terms… systems… structures… class struggle.” Such abstraction dehumanises society and leads to policies driven not by conscience but by theoretical purism.

Against this, Murray defended the enduring significance of individual action. “Individuals do make the course of history,” he insisted. It is a moral falsehood—and a political sedative—to pretend otherwise. Here he invoked C.S. Lewis and Shakespeare’s King Lear. Lewis’s insight becomes Murray’s final exhortation: “We are not the playwright… not the producer… not even the audience. We are on the stage.”

The unnamed “first servant,” witnessing Gloucester’s torture, “understands the present scene” and intervenes. He dies moments later. But he is, in Murray’s words, the one who “acted best” because he acted justly in the moment before him, without waiting for permission or certainty of outcome.

This is the ethic Murray believes the West must recover: moral clarity without fanaticism; courage without extremism; action without ideological intoxication.

Conclusion
“We don’t know which scene in the play we’re in,” Murray told the audience. “We don’t even know if it’s a comedy or a tragedy.” But we know this: a civilisation survives only through the courage of individuals who, like Shakespeare’s first servant, see what must be done and do it.

At a time when both left and right are “falling off the horse,” Murray’s challenge is not merely political but moral. The West must rise, not through slogans or tribalism, but through the steady, courageous fidelity of ordinary men and women who refuse to stand by when evil is done, who reject the intoxicants of resentment, and who choose—however small their part may seem—to “play well the scene in which they are on.”

Douglas Murray, address at the PragerU West Coast Gala, Los Angeles, 8 November 2025. Video published by PragerU, 13 November 2025.
St John Paul II, Address to the Jewish Community, Mainz, 17 November 1980, and subsequent magisterial texts on Christian–Jewish relations.

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