My favorite line from Ludwig von Mises is not about economics, but about ideas. In ‘Liberalism’, he wrote: ‘Repression by brute force is always a confession of the inability to make use of the better weapons of the intellect’. Violence, in other words, is the last refuge of bankrupt ideas. Those who cannot prevail in intellectual debate fall back on force, seeking to silence opponents rather than persuade them.
This line has been on my mind in the aftermath of the tragic murder of Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist best known for debating opponents on university campuses. You may not have agreed with his views – I certainly didn’t on many. As an atheist, I could not share his positions on abortion or religion, and on Ukraine I found his stance deeply unconvincing. Still, I often admired his willingness to cite Mises and Hayek when criticising modern economics curricula. But this is not the point. The point is what Kirk himself once said when asked why he spent so much time on campus. His answer was simple:
When people stop talking, really bad stuff starts… when you stop having a human connection with someone you disagree with, it becomes a lot easier to want to commit violence against that group.
It is a bitter irony that violence claimed the life of someone who dedicated himself to conversation.
Why, then, do those who propagate failed ideas so often refuse to debate? The first reason is a misplaced conviction of moral superiority. Those who see themselves as always on the ‘right side of history’ – which for them means siding with victims, real or imagined – exempt themselves from the duty to persuade. If you are always right, why engage with those who are wrong? This logic leads down a dark path. Opponents are not just misguided; they are immoral, reactionary, even evil. Disagreement is not an intellectual clash but a personal affront. And once disagreement is moralised in this way, dehumanisation follows: if you disagree with me, you are not worth listening to. Indeed, not worth living.
The second reason is the pursuit of power as a cure-all. If one believes that every social ill – poverty, war, exploitation – can be solved only through political authority, then power itself becomes the supreme good. This is why scientism and statism so often march together. The supposed activist cast themselves as both omniscient and benevolent, demanding ever more authority to fix society’s flaws. And when their ideas falter in practice, they blame ‘The Crooked Timber of Humanity’ itself, attempting to remake it by coercion. But to ‘change’ human nature is impossible without violence.
In this framework, dissenters are not merely rivals but obstacles to utopia; reactionaries blocking the march of history, defenders of exploitation, enemies of progress. Once politics is cast as a crusade for salvation, those who resist can only be treated as enemies to be crushed.
Paul Collier makes this point perfectly: ‘Ballots, not bullets, should pave the route to power’. He makes that argument in a book whose subtitle is ‘Democracy in Dangerous Places’ – his book is about democracy in poorest countries but It can be interpreted as a sober reminder that when debate is silenced, democracy itself becomes a dangerous place.
For democracy’s strength lies not simply in the ballot box, but in the broader practice of solving disputes through civil means. Elections are one tool, but not the only one. Belarus under Alexander Lukashenko or Russia under Vladimir Putin remind us that ballots without freedom are worthless. What matters is a political culture where problems are addressed without violence – through speech, persuasion, and compromise.
That culture is more fragile than we like to admit. Free societies are not sustained only by constitutions or institutions, but by habits of tolerance, conversation and intellectual humility. Once those are eroded, even the strongest democratic structures can collapse into repression. History is full of examples where the ballot box was preserved in form but emptied of meaning – because debate, dissent, and human connection had already been strangled.
That was Charlie Kirk’s method. On campuses, in debates at Oxford and Cambridge and in countless public forums, he stood for ideas. Whatever one thought of his politics, he did not invite violence. His career was built on dialogue, sometimes heated but always rooted in the conviction that words, not weapons, should settle disputes. And in a free country, no amount of disagreement can justify violence. As Mises reminded us: ‘Only with ideas can one fight against ideas’.
Not every society has the luxury of such a battle of ideas. In many countries, citizens are denied the freedom to debate, write, and criticise authority. But those who do enjoy it must cherish it. For if free debate is abandoned, the alternative is not progress but brutality – and the descent into a world where bankrupt ideas rule through force alone.
