Editor’s Note: In his opening speech at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship 2026, Konstantin Kisin humorously reflects on the state of British politics before transitioning to a serious critique of contemporary society. He argues that modern liberalism has mistakenly conflated the pursuit of liberty with a “freedom from reality,” leading to significant demoralization and decline across the West. Ultimately, Kisin emphasizes that the path forward requires cultivating a society of responsible citizens who voluntarily choose to build a better future for the next generation. (June 23, 2026)
TRANSCRIPT:
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Good morning. Philippa and her team asked me to say a few words about the beauty of our civilization and what we can do to protect, preserve and multiply it. And I’ll confess, I don’t really know what to say because I’ve been focusing mostly on the multiplying part. My wife and I just had our second child. Thank you, thank you.
Pregnancy was not easy, the hormones, the tears, the mood swings. It was hard for my wife as well. It was quite funny actually because right before the birth my wife pulled me to one side and she said, “I need to tell you about my close friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.” That’s when I knew she was going into labor. She couldn’t be here this morning for obvious reasons.
She’s Britain’s new ambassador to the US. They’re taking the time to reach you guys, but I’m glad you’re enjoying it. By the way, I apologize to our foreign friends for making jokes about British politics.
A Brief Guide to British Politics
There’s only really two things you need to know about British politics. First of all, if you followed the news, Britain is like the Titanic, where the passengers believe we can save ourselves by constantly changing captains.
We’ve had male captains, female captains, clever captains, not so clever captains. We even tried clown captains. We’ve tried everything really except changing course. It’s like soiling your pants and changing your shirt over and over.
The other thing you need to know about British politics is we’ve gone from a two-party system, Conservative and Labour, to a five-party system.
So now we have the Green Party, which is a harmonious coalition of pansexual communists and hardcore Islamists. Then you have the Labour Party, which used to be the party of the working people and is now the party of the not working people. The Conservative Party is to the right of Labour, in theory, not so much in government.
Then you have Reform, which used to be called the Brexit Party, which used to be called UKIP. They’ve basically had more name changes than Puff Daddy, and Reform are considered super controversial, but basically they just think Tony Blair ruined everything and want to go back three decades. And finally you have Restore, which is just like Reform except they want to go back three centuries. Oh, I forgot the Liberal Democrats, but then so is everyone else.
Liberty: The Virtue in Greatest Peril
Anyway, where was I? The beauty of our civilization, right, sorry, I’ll focus. Over the next three days, we will talk about many virtues of the West. I’d like this morning to focus on just one. One that matters most to me and one I believe is in greatest peril here in Britain and across the European continent.
Liberty.
Many today argue that the pursuit of liberty is what has given us a society of disconnected, disassociated, atomized individuals. Liberty, they say, contains the seeds of its own destruction. Liberty is becoming a dirty word on both left and right, because many now mistakenly associate liberty with the grotesque excesses of liberalism, which has mutated from the pursuit of freedom from tyranny to the pursuit of freedom from reality. The consequences are all around us.
Our public finances are a Ponzi scheme that would make Sam Bankman-Fried blush. Our energy policy seems to be set by the moronically possessed. Our societies openly discriminate in favor of some groups and against others, while calling that equality. And Britain, a country which once famously and somewhat controversially ruled the waves, can’t stop a few rubber boats.
The Heart of Our Civilization
But like it or not, the heart of our civilization today lies not here in London, but in Washington, D.C. A bit depressing given that it’s known as the swamp, but there is an upside.
We like to make fun of Americans for not speaking English the way we do, you know, properly. That joke is based on a thing that most people don’t know, which is American English today is actually much closer to the way our ancestors spoke than the way we speak in the present time. Americans preserved the language of their ancestors while we, as its originators, continue to experiment with it. This is true of more than language.
And it’s time to concede that not all of our experiments have been for the better. When friends across the pond say we in Europe have become authoritarian, that we’ve weakened ourselves militarily, that we’ve destroyed our economies in the name of ideology, we have to have the courage to admit that they’re right.
Solzhenitsyn’s Warning
They’re not saying anything new, by the way. Here’s what Alexander Solzhenitsyn said in his Harvard address in 1978, almost 50 years ago.
“And what of Europe today? It is nothing more than a collection of cardboard stage sets, all bargaining with each other to see how little can be spent on defense in order to leave more for the comforts of life. The continent of Europe with its centuries-long preparation for the task of leading mankind has of its own accord abandoned its strength and its influence on world affairs, and not just its physical influence, but its intellectual influence as well. Potentially important decisions, major movements have begun to mature beyond the borders of Europe. How strange it all is, since when has mighty Europe needed outside help to defend herself?
At one moment she had such a surplus of strength that while waging wars within her own boundaries and destroying herself, she was still able to seize colonies. A moment later, she suddenly found herself hopelessly weak without having lost a single major war.”
Solzhenitsyn had many talents, diplomacy wasn’t one of them. It’s almost like he was Russian.
Learning From America
My point is there is no shame in learning from America. We’d only be learning from ourselves. Remember, the American founding fathers were born and bred in Britain, educated in British law and political philosophy, and steeped in British constitutional tradition. The very arguments they used to justify independence were British arguments.
They believed that the British crown was violating British principles, which they fought a war to defend. I don’t mean to offend our American friends, but what I am saying is the founding fathers were not actually American.
Many today worry about the strength of the transatlantic relationship. I do not, because I know that what holds us together is not just a shared history. We’re bound together by a shared destiny. The job of Rome was to spread the ideas of Greece, and the job of America is to spread the ideas of England. Liberty is one of them.
What Liberty Actually Means
But let’s be precise about what liberty actually is. The confusion about this is, I think, the source of many of our problems.
Liberty matters not because it maximizes individual pleasure. That is liberalism’s mistake. Liberty matters because you cannot be a responsible citizen if you’re not free. A man who does the right thing because the state compels him to is not virtuous. He’s compliant. And because of that, dangerous. For the obvious reason, when the state compels him to do the wrong thing, he will comply as well.
Virtue requires choice. Responsibility requires freedom. And freedom requires responsibility. They’re not opposites, as both the left and the new right increasingly suggest. They’re the same thing, seen from different angles.
The free market, without moral responsibility, gives you the financialisation of everything. Freedom of speech, without the courage to tell the truth, gives you a cacophony of noise and no signal. And personal liberty, without the understanding that freedom is for something, is how you get the atomization. We’ve kept the freedom and we’ve discarded the purpose. We must not compound the mistake by discarding freedom too.
Why We Are Here
Why are we here at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship? We did not come together because we had a clear, rigid vision of how we wanted the future to look. We came together because all of us, in our own ways, saw that our societies and our civilization were drifting. Wherever we looked, we saw demoralization, decline and despair. Those are just the emotions I experienced driving in from East London today.
But simply, we are here because we observe that we are in fact not a society of responsible citizens. We will not change that over the next three days. Worse than that, I don’t know if we will change that in the lifetimes of most of us here in this room. It will take decades because generations of Westerners have been taught to hate their own civilization. They’ve been taught that up is down and that good is evil.
Hard Times and the Call for Strength
Everyone is by now familiar with the saying that hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times. The weak men have done their bit, and the hard times are here. If you pay attention, you can hear the clamor for strength rising. It will only get louder.
It’s possible that we here are in fact the strong men and women reacting to hard times and fighting back. I hope that’s true. But there is another less flattering possibility. It’s possible that our generations are in fact the weak men and that the hard times are just beginning.
Preparing the Next Generation
That’s why I always talk about my children. Because if that is true, they’re the ones who are going to have to do the heavy lifting. Saddled with huge debts by their irresponsible parents and grandparents, facing the greatest and therefore most disruptive technological transformation in human history in a deteriorating geopolitical environment, our children will face hard times. Our job then is to prepare them to be the strong men and women who can rebuild our civilization.
That is why we must teach them that most difficult thing, how to be radical without being extreme. I refuse to accept a future in which our daughters vote for Zohran Mamdani and Zack Polanski, while our sons spend their days watching Bonnie Blue and Nick Fuentes. Although that would be quite the collaboration.
We must teach our children that the gravitational pull of the digital world is always and everywhere towards a society of atomized individuals. And we are individuals, but we do not have to be atomized. Human connection, family, community is what sustains our humanness and no technology will ever replace it.
We must teach them that people who disagree with you about politics are human. Zoomers are today seven times more likely than boomers to believe that political violence is sometimes justified.
Above all, we must teach our children to separate the comforting lie from the unpleasant truth and give them the courage to want to do it.
The Beauty of Our Civilization
Now, there is only one small problem with all of this. None of these things can be taught. They can only be instilled by example. And so, in the final analysis, a society of responsible citizens will only be brought into existence by individuals who decide to do that thing that Jordan Peterson was brought into the world to remind us all to do, to take responsibility.
Not by government diktat, not through the use of force, but by a voluntary choice exercised for the sake of not only your family and your community, but that of your own soul.
The fact that we can do that is the beauty of our civilization. Thank you.
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