One doesn’t always appreciate what one has until it’s too late. Cheaters look upon their wrecked families and suddenly see that their pre-affair life was comparatively idyllic. Youth is famously wasted on the young, who use their health and energy to binge on toxic substances and attempt to be as miserable as possible.

A similar phenomenon is at play in the politics of the West. We have built the most peaceful, most prosperous, most humane, most progressive civilisation the world has ever known, after centuries of battle – physical, moral and philosophical; carnage and bloodshed.

And now, just 80 years after Auschwitz and 30-odd years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we are apparently already bored of our hard-won liberty and stability. The zeitgeist of the current age is to smash things up while pretending to be building a better world.

Only, as some are beginning to find out, what begins as a performative theory of progressivism ends up in murder, mayhem and misery.