I recently watched the Whatever podcast—a rage-bait show that vilifies young women who lack discernible wisdom and seem to attract poor choices. One of the hosts, known for “using logic,” argues that women don’t appreciate men and that they owe a moral debt because much of our society was built by men and the systems they created.
The idea presented is that men are often disrespected and emasculated, yet they have made immense contributions to society—through systems, markets, and technology.
That’s all fine and good—I do believe men are often vilified. But to impose a moral debt simply because everyone benefits from existing systems is an absurd standard.
The fact that these feats were carried out and that women benefit from them is merely a byproduct. Men built these systems to create order, and primarily to profit and elevate their own status. Men of all races, immigrants, and even animals benefit from these contributions. So why, then, are women being singled out?
On the other side, the left argues that the negative contributions of men—particularly white men—are rooted in oppression, slavery, patriarchy, and colonialism. From this perspective, men collectively owe a debt to all marginalized people, usually paid in the form of money or entitlements.
We’re constantly told that certain groups—whether defined by race, gender, or nationality—deserve special recognition or compensation for their historical contributions to society. This narrative of collective debt has become so pervasive that questioning it is often treated as heresy. But this entire framework is fundamentally flawed. It reduces complex human achievement to crude tribal scorekeeping and demands that we pay indefinite tribute to groups based on accidents of birth rather than individual merit. Let me explain why this logic falls apart under scrutiny.
From the conservative perspective, the oft-quoted argument is that today’s society exists primarily because of the contributions of white men or Western European civilization. Advocates of this view claim that any significant achievement can be traced back to some Judeo-Christian ethic or modern European framework. This idea of collective debt and collective contributions—especially when tied to race and framed with euphemisms like “Western European contribution”—is problematic. According to this logic, people of color are expected to bow to the supposedly superior moral ethics of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Yet history reminds us of the corruption of the church, the Spanish Inquisition, and the burning of heretics. More people have died in the name of God than outside of it. For many right-wing extremists, the world would supposedly become a paradise if everyone converted to Christianity.
Let’s break this down into first principles. Every idea has an origin in previous ideas, and ideas evolve over time. People combine or reframe ideas, but no one can claim ownership of them in isolation because they are inherently connected and interrelated. For example, law is not the exclusive province of the Abrahamic faith—other cultures have contributed to society, such as the Code of Hammurabi.
Take mathematics, a subject shaped by many different cultures and peoples. We don’t feel compelled to constantly single out specific groups. Ancient Greece, the Arab world, India, Europe—all had a hand to play. No one can claim absolute dominion, and mathematics continues to evolve.
Many contributions to concepts in AI modeling have come from Indian data scientists. Yet I don’t argue that white people must bow and scrape to Indians simply because they’ve contributed to machine learning models, which are foundational to modern society. That would be an absurd argument, and I would never make it. One could counter by noting that the underlying principles of machine learning are rooted in mathematics, and that white people have contributed through funding and advancing those endeavors.
Some other fallacies to note from conservatives: one is the claim that Europeans had the most ideas, therefore they are superior (but what about the ones that failed?). Another is the belief that most Western countries incorporate law because of Judeo-Christian ethics, and that countries which don’t are “unsavory places,” making the West morally superior (really? Is that why we see people fleeing Western countries to places like Dubai?).
I hate to make blanket statements, but this notion of moral debt and superiority is often a pretext for racism. It’s easy to conflate European cultural empowerment with racist ideology that seeks to exclude non-whites from certain countries. I am against illegal immigration, and I do believe that if you come to a country you should respect and honor its traditions. But to suggest that people who legally immigrate to Western countries and fully assimilate are still not “real citizens” is just veiled racism.
I’ll even go so far as to acknowledge that Western Europe has made many important contributions. However, to suggest that only they have contributed, and that society therefore owes them some kind of moral debt or deference, is an absurd standard.
I believe we should honor the legacy of people who have contributed. For example, World War II veterans—I give them a lot of respect because they died for our freedom, and they deserve it. That has nothing to do with the color of their skin and everything to do with their contributions.
The point I’m making is simple: whether positive (past contributions) or negative (past harms), you cannot collectively hold these over an entire group of people—whether by race, culture, or gender. No one owes anyone anything.
Conservatives cannot go around talking about European contributions or the legacy of systems in the same way liberals cannot invoke the ghosts of slavery and colonialism to desecrate our institutions.
The British subjugated Indians for decades. Yet I don’t hold any animus toward the British, nor do I expect them to give me anything on behalf of my ancestors. If I trace my lineage back to a tribe that Genghis Khan annihilated, do the Mongolians owe me reparations? Clearly not.
Society is slowly starting to change. We see that Indians are making significant contributions—for example, Sundar Pichai of Google and Satya Nadella of Microsoft.
However, we should not forget that those individuals also benefited from contributions made by their ancestors and by other cultures they conquered or controlled. To suggest that their achievements were solely their own ignores the fact that any idea, when traced back, can be attributed to multiple cultures that mixed and matched ideas into frameworks and solutions that all human beings have contributed to and benefited from.
One of the “solutions,” if you can call it that, is conservatives attempting to handle moral debt by rolling back and rescinding rights. They talk about returning to the “good old days,” when women’s rights could be taken away, women confined to the home, and immigration cut off. But the cat’s out of the bag—society has changed. We’ve become a global society, and rolling back rights is not only incendiary and impractical, it would most likely lead to civil conflict or a breakdown of social cohesion requiring police and military intervention—and that is not a good idea.
Such efforts would provoke moral outrage and backlash, and I don’t believe they would work in men’s favor, even if coercive measures were used to try to make it happen. Society—and men in particular—has been socialized to be far more egalitarian and outward-looking. Because of this, it would be almost impossible to roll back those changes on a large scale, even if a small group of detractors continues to oppose them.
The uncomfortable truth is that history is messy, interconnected, and doesn’t fit neatly into the moral debt framework that activists and ideologues try to impose on us. Every culture has borrowed, built upon, and sometimes stolen from others. Every advancement we enjoy today stands on the shoulders of countless contributors across time, geography, and identity groups.
The real question isn’t who we owe or what debts must be paid—it’s whether we can move forward as a society without constantly weaponizing the past. We can honor genuine contributions and sacrifices, like those of WWII veterans, without buying into the absurd notion that entire demographic groups deserve perpetual deference or compensation.
The changes we’ve seen—whether in gender dynamics through feminism or demographic shifts through immigration—weren’t driven primarily by moral enlightenment. They were driven by economic necessity and pragmatic self-interest. Understanding this doesn’t make us cynical; it makes us realistic. And that realism tells us that trying to turn back the clock, as some conservatives fantasize about, is both impractical and impossible. Society has fundamentally transformed, and we need to deal with the world as it is, not as it was or as we wish it could be.
The sooner we abandon the politics of collective guilt and collective debt, the sooner we can focus on building a society based on individual merit, genuine achievement, and shared prosperity—not tribal grievances and historical scorekeeping.
Life is not black and white—it’s gray. I subscribe to neither conservative nor liberal points entirely. There is some measure of truth in both, but it’s more narrative than truth.