The West’s response to rising anti-Western violence has become grimly predictable: capitulate to antagonists and silence those who resist. A recent incident at a vigil for victims of the Bondi Beach terror attack crystallized this dynamic.

A serial protester disrupted the memorial with pro-Palestine slogans and demands that Israeli flags be removed. Police escorted her away as she shouted accusations that others were “politicizing” the tragedy — a striking case of projection from someone who had just politicized a moment of mourning.

This episode reveals a broader pattern across the Anglosphere. When confronted with violence, authorities increasingly treat public opposition as the problem rather than the violence itself. The message to citizens is clear: Sit down, be quiet, and perhaps the attacks will stop. It recalls the Victorian-era euphemism “lie back and think of England,” allegedly advice to wives that unwanted intimacy was simply the price of marital security.

Today, populations are told that lowering expectations is the path to peace.

But accepting diminished standards represents an admission of failure from leaders who lack the competence to address fundamental problems. Rather than confronting terrorism, illegal immigration, or social unrest, contemporary politicians practice evasion. They tinker at the margins, hoping issues resolve themselves, ready to claim credit if circumstances improve by chance. This is governance by Dunning-Kruger effect — officials too incompetent to recognize their own incompetence.

Those who have lived through previous eras of decline understand three truths: being told to accept lower expectations is an admission of institutional failure; such diminishment is temporary in societies built on aspiration; and the only remedy is to demand more and work toward something better. Lowered expectations are fundamentally un-Western. We may endure reduced circumstances temporarily, but never accept them as permanent solutions.

The behavior of figures like Berkon — protesting at a terror victim memorial while demanding depoliticization — suggests something deeper than mere political disagreement. It resembles Stockholm Syndrome, the psychological phenomenon in which captives develop sympathy for their captors. The condition takes its name from a 1973 Stockholm bank robbery where hostages grew emotionally attached to their armed captor during a six-day siege.

History offers other examples: Patty Hearst joined the Symbionese Liberation Army after her 1974 kidnapping and participated in their crimes. Elizabeth Smart, held captive for nine months by a homeless couple, repeatedly declined opportunities to escape or seek help. Experts now recognize she exhibited classic Stockholm Syndrome features.

Researchers identify several key symptoms: positive feelings toward the abuser; negative feelings toward those attempting rescue; support for the abuser’s justifications and behaviors; reciprocal positive feelings from abuser to victim; supportive behaviors by the victim; and inability to engage in actions that might facilitate escape.

These conditions increasingly characterize Western societies. Citizens face genuine threats from terrorism and social violence. Authorities offer minor concessions — “small kindnesses” — while maintaining that more fundamental security measures are impossible or undesirable. Media and institutional narratives isolate citizens from alternative perspectives on these threats. And the political class insists that no real alternatives exist, that escape from current conditions is impossible without abandoning core values or inviting greater catastrophe.

Under such circumstances, some citizens begin identifying with the worldview of those who threaten them. They internalize the notion that Western resistance to attack is itself the provocation. They grow hostile toward their own societies and those who would defend them. They support narratives that justify violence against their communities. This is Stockholm Syndrome writ large — a civilization developing sympathetic attachment to its antagonists.

The psychology becomes self-reinforcing. Each act of violence produces calls for the victimized population to show greater understanding, exercise more restraint, and accept further limitations. Meanwhile, those suggesting actual remedies — border security, cultural confidence, willingness to defend social norms — are cast as extremists whose resistance escalates danger.

This dynamic cannot hold indefinitely. Western societies were not built on managed decline and therapeutic accommodation of threats. They emerged from confidence in their own values and willingness to defend them. The current posture — demanding citizens embrace diminished expectations while treating self-defense as provocative — inverts the foundations of functional governance.

Eventually, populations tire of being told that accepting worse is the path to better. They recognize that lowered expectations are not solutions but admissions of elite incompetence. And they begin demanding leaders capable of actual problem-solving rather than psychological manipulation — officials who will address threats rather than gaslight citizens into sympathizing with them.

The alternative is continued descent into a civilization-scale Stockholm Syndrome, where Western societies grow ever more sympathetic to forces that wish them harm, more hostile to their own defenders, and more isolated from the perspectives that built successful, secure nations in the first place.

Once again, Herb Stein’s Law is in play: Things that cannot go on forever will stop.

This cannot go on forever.