One of the great confusions in modern Australia is the belief that niceness equals alignment.

Every Australian has had a pleasant interaction with a shop owner from a different culture. They are polite. They smile. They ask about your day. You walk away thinking: What a nice person. What’s all this hysteria about fanaticism?

That conclusion feels humane. It is also naïve.

Westerners increasingly mistake courteous social behaviour for shared civilisational values. This confusion is a product of moral flattening, the idea that all value systems are interchangeable so long as everyday interactions remain pleasant. Hospitality becomes proof of harmony. Manners become evidence of ideological convergence.

But values do not live horizontally. They live vertically.

It is almost impossible for a modern Westerner to comprehend what could persuade a family to honour-kill their own daughter. We assume such acts require the absence of love. That assumption is comforting and wrong. The parents who commit such acts often do love their children in a recognisably human way. What differs is not affection but hierarchy: which values sit above others, and what may be sacrificed to preserve them.

That vertical structure still operates, even when it is invisible.

A person can be generous, friendly, and perfectly integrated into daily Australian life while retaining a moral framework in which loyalty to transcendent obligations ultimately outranks individual autonomy. The shop owner is fully capable of being kind to you today while never forgetting what must be sacrificed for what, should circumstances demand it.

This is not an argument for demonisation. Nor is it an endorsement of extremism. It is a warning about civilisational illiteracy.

The West has lost the ability to recognise value hierarchies, including its own. In doing so, it has become dangerously confident that surface-level harmony equals deep moral agreement.

History suggests otherwise.