With everything going wrong, networks of people are rising to set things right.

It’s early days and there’s no guarantee of success.

But a start is being made.

A key source of inspiration is the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference.

I was privileged to attend the first in 2023 in London and then return last week for the third.

Versions have been held in Australia, the most recent last February called Aspire.

It’s easy to be cynical. Conferences can degenerate to talkfests. And over three days there was a lot of talking.

But I’ve come home with renewed hope.

Serious people are applying serious effort to the serious problems Western countries like Australia, the UK and America face.

When the young have been taught to hate their civilisational inheritance, they can’t afford a house, families can’t hold together, suicide is a leading cause of death for young men, radical Islam is muscling in, we are destroying the source of our wealth by shuttering cheap energy, debt and government spending is out of control and political leaders continue to offer no answers - just more of the same managed decline, it is difficult not to lie on the floor in the foetal position.

ARC is reminding us it doesn’t have to be this way.

Executive chair Baroness Philippa Stroud says enough of the deconstruction, it’s time for reconstruction.

“This far and no further,” she told the 4000 strong crowd on the opening day at London’s Olympia convention centre in Hammersmith.

Who else talks like this?

Davos for conservatives, as the left-wing Guardian dubbed ARC, is not a bad descriptor. For ARC offers a better story.

Davos preaches response to “climate crisis” as a collective organising principle, the result being “you will own nothing and be happy”.

ARC preaches taking responsibility that leads to flourishing and abundance.

It begins with self and progresses to family, community, the environment and the nation.

I know what vision is more compelling.

But there’s a mountain to climb, a conversation to shift.

As ARC advisory board member Konstantin Kisin pointed out, countries like the UK are like the Titanic.

“We’ve tried everything except changing course.”

This was a reference to the Prime Minister swap taking place last week from Keir Starmer to Andy Burnham – Britain’s seventh PM in 10 years.

Australia’s revolving door of PMs, only temporarily halted by the lacklustre Anthony Albanese, also screams leadership crisis.

“It’s like soiling your pants and changing your shirts,” Kisin quipped.

The freedom project in the West has gone off track and again, the ever-insightful Kisin reminded us that the liberal project once sought freedom from tyranny but now seeks it from reality.

Hence Stroud’s insistence that we begin again to focus on re-laying the foundations of Western civilisation.

If you want the good old days back, the legitimate cry of the orange wave sweeping Australian politics and the Reform insurgency in the UK, it’s vital to understand what made the good old days good.

More so than the first ARC conference, last week pushed the envelope on Christianity as the source of what built that which we’ve lost.

While of course not always applied well, Christianity is unique in world views for containing within itself the capacity to confess its wrongs, repent and return home to the truth.

As Os Guiness said, there’s no other framework upon which to build a society of freedom and flourishing.

“Confession is going on the record against yourself”, Guiness, who is related to the founders of the dark brew, said.

At an ARC dinner in Pall Mall I attended, Guiness said the inability to confess wrong was Trump’s problem.

That which began with a burning bush in the desert and smoke on a mountain provided a model of law and government based on the consent of the governed that is equal to none.

In setting up a system of government based on the Sinai covenant, the American revolutionaries were simply demanding of their British overlords their inheritance of freedom charted from Runnymede to the Glorious Revolution.

Law based on morality and objective truth, not the simply the will-to-power whims of a king or our modern woke elites hell-bent on cancel culture.

But as Ayaan Hirsi Ali pointed out, Western politics keeps trying atheistic communism in the hope that only if it is done differently this time it will work.

Other foundations to be re-built include a return to the reality of gender.

To that effect Australia’s Sall Grover embarrassed our nation by reminding an international audience she lost her “what is a woman” court case, with judges ruling a biological man can be a woman.

Dr Hilary Cass, whose review led to the closure of Britain’s child gender clinics, was a reminder that Australian politicians continue to ignore her work.

Katy Faust, whose quest it is to restore children’s rights by overturning same-sex marriage in the US, proclaimed that marriage is what secures a child’s right to his or her mother and father.

Adults have no right to tamper with this, even though the West has caved.

ARC is big on economic flourishing and there is no greater key to economic flourishing than abundant, cheap and reliable electricity.

While the UK’s Ed Miliband and his Australian equivalent Chris Bowen their war on the living standards of those who can’t afford luxury beliefs, Bjon Lomborg reminded ARC that $16 trillion has been spent on the so-called energy transition and there has been no energy transition.

Kemi Badenoch, the much-improved UK Conservative Leader who should not be written off, told ARC she would use North Sea oil and gas to bring down electricity bills.

That is anathema to the woke elites in Whitehall but shows the conversation is shifting in the right direction.

David Cameron, Theresa May or Rishi Sunak would not have said that. Liz Truss might have but that probably explains why shy only lasted 49 days.

ARC has been an oasis for people like me to certify our sanity.

Serious people – some of the world’s top intellects are now more fully engaged in the culture war. And it is a war for the soul of civilisation.

Stroud’s final address was emotional and passionate. It was appropriate.

Afterall, our kids’ and grandkid’s, who for the first time will inherit conditions worse than their parents’ generation, are facing a hard future created by weak men.

Stroud quoted Aragorn’s battle cry from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings where, facing hopeless odds at the Black Gate of Mordor, he said: "A day may come when the courage of Men fails... but it is not this day... This day we fight!"