My discovery of Western intellectual tradition

In 2019, I volunteered for the Greens in the federal election.

I believed in what they stood for — environmental protection, social justice, progressive values. I handed out flyers. I talked to voters. I was part of something that felt important.

I had no reason to question the worldview I'd been given.

Around the same time, someone handed me a Book of Psalms along with some free food.

I had nothing better to do, so I flipped it open to a random page. The verse read something like:

"Before I was born, God knit me together in my mother's womb with purpose."

I didn't believe in religion. But I found it insightful. There was something in the idea that life had direction, that existence wasn't accidental, that I was made for something.

I didn't convert on the spot. I just noticed that the words meant something to me.

Later that year, I was listening to one of Jordan Peterson's lectures. He was talking about the Holodomor — the Soviet famine in Ukraine where millions starved to death. He described mothers picking single grains of rice off the ground to feed their children.

I didn't own a vacuum at the time. I was on my hands and knees, picking cotton and lint off the floor while the lecture played.

And suddenly, something shifted.

I wasn't in my room anymore. I was transported into a kind of hallucination — a visceral, full-body experience where I was one of those mothers. I was in a desolate field, picking single grains off the frozen earth, trying to keep my children alive. The horror of it filled me completely.

When it passed, I sat there shaken.

I knew this information came from books. Peterson was lecturing from historians, from primary sources, from documented testimony. And I realised I wanted to read those books myself. I wanted to understand where this knowledge came from.

The next year, an international student reached out to me on Instagram — completely randomly. She invited me to a Bible college event.

I didn't own a Bible, so she convinced me to buy one.

I started reading the New Testament. I read Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. I read Paul's letters. I read the Sermon on the Mount.

And I noticed something strange.

Nothing in it explicitly endorsed fascism.

Nothing in it endorsed slavery.

Nothing in it endorsed racism.

These were the things I had been told. I had been taught — implicitly and explicitly — that Christianity carried with it the seeds of conservatism, of oppression, of dangerous ideology. That these ideas were gateways to the far right.

But the text itself didn't say what I was told it said.

The Sermon on the Mount taught mercy, humility, peace. "Blessed are the meek." "Love your enemies." "Turn the other cheek."

Where was the fascism?

I sat with that realisation for a long time.

If they had lied to me about this — or at best, misrepresented it — what else wasn't true?

I had trusted my education, my political community, my media environment to tell me the truth about ideas. And now I had read a primary source that contradicted the narrative I'd been given.

The choice was clear: I could either dismiss what I'd read and return to the comfortable worldview I'd inherited. Or I could keep reading.

I kept reading.

I began to look into the topics I had been told were evil. The thinkers I had been warned about. The books that were supposed to be dangerous.

I didn't approach them as a believer. I approached them as a reader. I wanted to know what they actually said — not what I had been told they said.

Some of it I agreed with. Some of it I didn't. But the exercise itself was transformative.

I learned that ideas labelled "fascist" often weren't. That thinkers dismissed as "racist" were sometimes making careful empirical arguments. That the synthesis of Greek philosophy and Christian theology — the foundation of Western civilisation — was not a story of oppression, but of inquiry, of reason, of moral development across centuries.

I came to the now obvious conclusion that the people calling these things dangerous had never read it themselves.

I don't say this to attack progressivism, or any political movement.

I say it because it happened to me.

I was inside a worldview. I trusted it. And when I encountered the primary sources, the worldview cracked.

Not because the sources convinced me of any particular ideology. But because they revealed a gap — a gap between what I was told and what actually existed on the page.

Once you see that gap, you can't unsee it.

And so you keep reading.