Growing up in Italy, especially in certain university circles, , I’ve often had the feeling that saying something positive about the West is somehow embarrassing.

If you defend the free market you are ‘ultraliberal’. If you speak well of the US you are ‘servile’. If you say that capitalism has improved the world, you automatically first have to make a half-hour long preamble to explain that yes, of course, there are also problems, inequalities, historical mistakes and all that.

As if recognising what the West has done right is now culturally suspect.

Yet one only has to look at reality without ideological filters to realise something quite obvious: the modern world was largely constructed by the liberal West.

Not perfectly. Not without error. But still so.

Individual freedom really changes societies

The real Western revolution, in my opinion, was not only economic or technological. It was above all philosophical.

The idea that the individual counts for something.

It may sound like a platitude said in 2026, but historically it is a huge thing. For centuries, the individual almost always existed as an instrument of the state, the ruler, religion or the community. The modern West, on the other hand, slowly began to build a different system: where the individual could have his own rights, his own freedoms and the possibility of building his own future.

And that is where everything else comes from.

The modern free market is born. Birth of the idea of social mobility. Contemporary civil rights are born. Freedom of speech is born. Birth of the possibility to create something without having to ask permission from the state for everything.

In the end, when you leave people free to think, invest, risk and innovate, a company inevitably grows.

Why America still continues to attract the world

One thing I often notice when talking to many Europeans is this almost cynical attitude towards the United States. But then an interesting thing always happens: as soon as someone has real talent, ambition or a desire to build something great, they very often look to America.

This is no accident.

Because the United States, with all its problems, continues to be a place where ambition is not seen as a fault. Where success does not have to be justified all the time. Where the idea that the future can be better than the present still exists.

And that is a huge cultural difference compared to much of Europe.

Here, those with ambition are often looked upon with suspicion. Profit is portrayed almost as something morally dirty. There is a culture ofsocial envy that we pretend not to see but which actually weighs heavily.

In the United States, on the other hand, there is still a much more risk, innovation and growth-oriented culture. It is no coincidence that Silicon Valley was not born in a system obsessed with regulation and control, but in an ecosystem that rewarded those with new ideas.

Capitalism is not perfect. But the rest has worked worse

One of the things I find most absurd in the European debate is this tendency to talk about capitalism as if it were just exploitation and greed.

Capitalism is flawed, of course. But one only has to look at the last two centuries to realise that no other system has ever produced a similar level of innovation, economic growth and improved living conditions.

Internet. Modern aviation. Contemporary medicine. Digital technology. Artificial intelligence. Most of the innovations we use every day originate in relatively open, capitalist Western societies.

This is no coincidence.

Innovation almost always arises where there is economic freedom, cultural freedom and the possibility of failure without being destroyed by the system.

We remain different

Today it is very fashionable to say that ‘all cultures are equivalent’ and that there is nothing special about the West, which is too fashionable and untrue.

Honestly, this seems to me to be quite a difficult position to sustain when looking at the real world.

Western societies remain those where there are more individual freedoms, more civil rights, more possibilities for social mobility and more room for political dissent.

We do not see people risking their lives to enter North Korea. We do not see madmen trying to move to the Iran of the Ayatollahs or Putin’s Russia.

People still want to live in Europe and the US for a very simple reason: the West, despite all its problems, remains the place where the individual matters most.

And in my opinion we should start saying it openly again, without that constant fear of sounding arrogant or supremacist.

A civilisation that should believe in itself again

The feeling I often have is that the West has lost faith in its own identity just as the rest of the world continues to yearn for what it represents.

Freedom. Stability. Innovation. Opportunity. Rights.

Perhaps the problem is that we Westerners have become so used to these things that we consider them normal. But they are not normal at all.

That is why I think that defending the West today does not mean denying its mistakes. Rather, it means defending those liberal values that have made possible the greatest economic, scientific and human development in modern history.

And frankly, I find it absurd that in 2026 this should almost seem like a counter-cultural position.