At least China, or even Saudi Arabia to some extent, are honest about how they want to live as societies. Europe, and the states born of its culture, have a great deal of unaddressed baggage and have still not settled the question of ‘is democracy the optimal form of governance?’ I often catch hell for saying it, but what many people in the West want is for someone with more wealth and power and pretty clothes to tell them what to do and how they should live. This is mutually exclusive to anti-corruption efforts, to genuine progress on human rights, and, in some cases, even to progress on issues like the environment or climate change. Are pampered elites, surrounded by police, really indicative of the future that so many in the West want to see, and how does this reflect on the West’s rhetoric when comparing itself to supposedly less virtuous authoritarian systems?