Politicians who think they can uproot a civilisation, erase its traditions and expect its people to simply adapt are making a grave mistake. This was one of Martin Heidegger's deepest insights: human existence is never abstract or free-floating. We are not detached minds that can be rearranged at will. We are always already situated - absorbed in practical activities and thrown into a particular cultural and historical world that shapes what we are able to see, value and become. This view stands in direct conflict with one of the most influential assumptions of modern progressive thought: that human nature is highly malleable. Marxism rests on the belief that changing the economic structure will transform human beings themselves, producing a new kind of person free from the limitations of previous history. Much of modern liberalism and multiculturalism shares a softer version of the same idea - that individuals and communities can be detached from deep historical particularity and recombined into new forms without serious loss. Culture becomes a set of optional costumes rather than a constitutive inheritance. Heidegger’s philosophy suggests this is a profound misunderstanding. We are constituted by the traditions, practices and languages we inherit, and we cannot simply reinvent ourselves according to political design. Attempts to treat human beings as infinitely plastic often produce alienation rather than liberation. Technological and social “progress” that uproots people from meaningful forms of life can leave them disoriented, even when material conditions improve. The same logic applies to radical multiculturalism. If human beings are deeply shaped by specific historical cultures, then a society that treats all cultural frameworks as interchangeable risks dissolving the shared background of meaning required for a coherent common life. Heidegger does not offer a political programme. But he challenges the modern confidence that human nature can be endlessly reshaped. Rootedness is not an obstacle to freedom. It is one of the conditions that makes a recognisably human existence possible at all.

Nobody planned the modern world. Millions of people built it by pursuing their own interests. When individuals are left free to pursue their own aims - to invent, to trade, to save, to experiment, and to risk failure - they generate progress that no central authority can plan or predict. The steam engine, modern medicine, the smartphone, and the astonishing abundance of food in ordinary shops did not appear because a committee decided they should exist. They arose as the unintended consequence of millions of people chasing their own ambitions, responding to prices, and cooperating voluntarily through markets. This is the spontaneous order that F.A. Hayek described: a vast, decentralised process of discovery far more intelligent than any top-down design. Knowledge is scattered among countless individuals. Only when they are free to act on what they know does that knowledge become useful to society as a whole. Collectivist systems reverse this logic. By subordinating the individual to an abstract “greater good”, they suppress the very source of innovation and progress. Personal initiative is penalised or replaced by official direction. Creativity slows. Living standards stagnate. The historical record is consistent: wherever the individual is reduced to a servant of the collective, progress withers. The secret to human progress is that nobody needs to be in charge of it. The greatest advances in human welfare have come not from forcing people to serve collective goals, but from protecting the right of each person to live for their own purposes. A society that defends individualism does not become fragmented. It becomes prosperous, inventive, and free.