This is the end of Western civilization. Or so they say.

Western civilization is due to be overwhelmed by the military power to its immediate East, the economic force of the Far East, and the cultural dominion of the Middle East. We’ve heard it all before.

In particular, we're told by these political versions of barstool philosophers that we face the domestic threats of Islamic fundamentalism and Communism, and indeed that caricatures of Sharia Law and Far Left ideology have already overtaken our greatest cities through the liberal administrations of the progressive mayors of London and New York.

This is the end of our world, and we have to fight like wolves to defend it. We have to transform our multicultural and cosmopolitan societies into realms of suspicion and fear. We have to become authoritarian dictatorships in order to protect our freedom and democracy.

Yet it is of course precisely those political leaders who scream the loudest about their draconian solutions to these catastrophes whose own machinations have engineered the crises we face.

Their isolationist policies – whether Farage’s Brexit or Trump’s tariffs – have wreaked inestimable damage on national, western and global economic systems.

Their hate-filled rhetoric has divided and weakened the societies they purport to strengthen and unite, radicalizing those they exclude, and eroding their own stability and security.

This is because they fail to realize, or refuse to acknowledge, that a civilization is neither an empire nor a monoculture. It's not something set in stone. A living, thriving civilization evolves and involves – always learning and developing as it broadens its perspectives.

They cannot see that strong, sustainable leadership isn't vengeful, but is based in generosity and open-mindedness.

When in December it emerged that the current President of the United States had added beneath the portraits of his illustrious predecessors plaques bearing his own ranting, scathing attacks on their legacies, he sealed his reputation as a tantrum-fueled tyrant, an emotional toddler who amuses himself by screaming insults at his opponents, mocking people with disabilities, and boasting of his assaults upon women.

"Quiet, quiet, piggy," the grown-up world is too grown-up to say back at him.

Meanwhile, the technologies promoted and promulgated by some of Mr. Trump's closest allies are causing the very societal collapse they blame on everything else and on everyone else.

The great lords of tech once posed as champions of liberal values, but at the moment of Trump's second inauguration, they swarmed round him like hungry baby velociraptors around their adopted tyrannosaurus dad, clamoring for the scraps he'd promised to feed their greed.

We know that online shopping has destroyed our high streets, and that the algorithms of social media are playing havoc with our notions of truth, our hopes for democracy, and our children's mental health. Yet, across the world, any ambitions to introduce ways to ensure these tech multinationals pay proper taxes, to regulate their operations and monopolies, and to safeguard our families have been stymied by an American administration's threats of all-out trade war if his billionaire buddies are in any way inconvenienced.

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And the worst these tech oligarchs have in store for us is, of course, yet to come – the greatest threat our civilizations have ever known: the mind-sapping, soul-destroying hegemony of artificial intelligence. The machines won't need to launch Skynet or the Matrix to take over our world. They just have to lull us into a false sense of security, so that we won't realize they're now making all our decisions for us, and are draining away our self-respect, our agency, our curiosity and imagination, our capacity for free will and true happiness, and our own knowledge, intelligence and sanity.

The whole thing is, of course, snake oil, the promise of a magical technology which will transform our world for the better – but which in truth will devastate economies and ways of life.

We were once promised that robots would do all the dirty, dangerous, back-breaking jobs no one really wanted to do – from mining minerals to collecting our trash – but it turns out that those jobs are too difficult for the tech to handle – so instead the bots are taking over creative industries, customer services, counselling, healthcare, journalism, administration and management.

Recent research has even revealed that rather than talking to each other on dating apps, hopeful romantics are increasingly using generative AI to do the talking for them.

This technology is also taking over education, despite the warnings from many experts that it represents "the most existential crisis for education in our lifetimes" and produces "soulless, boring abominations" – because schools and universities (which were once truth’s last line of defense) are so exhausted and so strapped for cash they no longer have the will to resist anything that promises to cut corners for them.

Far from solving our planet’s greatest problems, it has been predicted that by the end of this decade, AI usage will add 50 per cent to global levels of power consumption – and so Western nations are starting to build dedicated nuclear reactors to serve the demands of these new data centers.

In November, it was reported that one of the founders of a $1 billion artificial intelligence company had admitted that his company's $100-a-month transcription service had originally started as "two guys surviving on pizza" and pretending they had already completed the development of their revolutionary software.

He said: "We told our customers there's an 'AI that'll join a meeting'. In reality it was just me and my co-founder calling in to the meeting sitting there silently and taking notes by hand."

This seems like an apt enough metaphor for the illusory panacea – the false miracle – offered by AI.

In December, the governor of the Bank of England announced that the proliferation of artificial intelligence is set to displace people from jobs at the scale the Industrial Revolution managed two centuries ago. This is our brave new world.

So, here's a question to pose to all of the champions of this transformative technology. If I told you I'd invented a technology whose resource and energy consumption would massively exacerbate freshwater paucity and global warming, and which would steal intellectual property, put hundreds of millions of people out of work, increase wealth divides, diminish human creativity, criticality, knowledge, intelligence and agency, undermine learning and wellbeing, promote cultural homogenization, and give unprecedented power and influence to transnational corporations and oppressive regimes, would you encourage that technology's use?

But what if its use allowed you to become lazy, seemed fashionable, fostered dependency, and gave you a mild dopamine rush? Might you be as tempted to build the future of our civilizations on its treacherous foundations as so many of our leaders seem to be?

As the US president ignores due legal process to deploy heavy machinery to demolish a large part of the White House, with plans to dedicate the tasteless edifice he wants to build in its place to his corporate sponsors, as he threatens any media outlets which oppose him will multi-billion-dollar lawsuits and tries to get his political opponents thrown into jail – and as Western leaders fall into line with his demented schemes – it may sometimes seem difficult to see how our versions of liberal democracy can survive.

But the call to freedom remains resilient within the human soul, and there have been villains bigger, smarter and nastier than Trump, Musk, and Farage whose attempts to turn our societies into prisons of violence and fear, to suborn justice and subvert truth, have long since gone the way of all mortal flesh.

So, let’s strive never to lose hope – because sometimes hope’s all we’ve got – and, just sometimes, it might perhaps turn out to be all we need.