"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
The Western world has always believed this. No one imagined, however, that it could also work against us.
The picture is not Istanbul. It is Cologne.
The Central Mosque on Venloer Straße, Germany's largest, built by the Turkish state's religious authority and inaugurated by Erdoğan himself in 2018 - in the city where Europeans once spent 632 years raising a cathedral, because they built for someone they would never meet themselves.
One can think many things about the building.
But one cannot take one thing from it.
Someone has dreamed it. A state, a movement, a faith has looked a hundred years ahead and placed stone upon stone after what they saw. Buildings are not just architecture. They are dreams that have solidified. They tell who still believes that the future can be shaped - and who has left it to others.
The Americans dream. About Mars, about machines that think, about the next century being theirs as well.
The Chinese dream. About rebuilding an empire that measured its patience in dynasties, and they plan in horizons we can no longer make out. And barely understand.
The Muslims dream. About a world that one day bows in the same direction - and they build, give birth and pray after that dream, also in the middle of Cologne and the rest of Europe, where they raise power centre after power centre that spreads their culture, faith and way of thinking Human and society, as they become more and more numerous.
The Europeans dream too. About lower interest rates. About longer weekends. About cheaper or free Wegovy. About the pension holding, and someone else taking care of the rest. We have not stopped dreaming. We have just stopped dreaming about anything other than ourselves.
And look what has happened to the dreams along the way. They have all become smaller than the life that dreams them. Not one of them reaches beyond our own death date. Not one of them requires that anyone exists after us. The American's dream needs a next century. The Chinese's needs a next dynasty. The Muslim's needs a next generation - therefore he gets it.
Our dreams only need a next pay cheque, so we can pay off last year's extra tax - the one that was exchanged for even more welfare. And votes.
That is what comfort does to a culture, when it becomes the highest. It turns all arrows inward. A human being who dreams of something greater than himself can endure pain, can wait, can give up - for there is something the sacrifice is for. A human being who only dreams of comfort can endure nothing, for the pain does not point to anything. It just has to go away. Hence Ozempic. Hence the interest rate. Hence an entire continent that has made frictionlessness its last great shared vision.
But a society is in its substance an agreement between the dead, the living and the unborn. That is what a nation is - a dream that is too large for one life, and which must therefore be passed on.
Cut off the unborn, and the agreement becomes an estate to be divided. Cut off the dead, and there is no one who has given us anything we owe to carry forward. What remains are the living alone with the inheritance in their hands and only one question - what can I get for it?
That is where we stand.
Not because anyone took the dream from us.
We laid it down ourselves, because we have become so weak, so fragile - and for some so culturally self-hating - that we could no longer bear that it weighed anything.
And that is where it becomes serious.
For a dream is the only thing a human being voluntarily sacrifices something for. The one who dreams of something greater than his own life can build for 632 years.
The one who only dreams of comfort cannot even defend what he has inherited - yes, many cannot even muster daily forces to fight for their own health - for comfort requires no sacrifices, and what requires no sacrifices builds nothing and holds onto nothing.
A civilisation does not die when it is attacked.
It dies when it can no longer answer what it is for.
And the future belongs to those who dream of something other and more than themselves.
Dream Denmark.
Dream Danes.
NO ONE does it for you!
And those who do - as in those who have dreamed in Cologne - only quite rarely have what you actually dream of, as the future you want for yourselves.
❤️🔥🪽