The line has been wheeled out for centuries like a battered abacus: count the cost. It appears whenever tempers run hot, sabres rattle, and a decision is about to be made by people who do not personally pay for it. The ancient warning, attributed to Sun Tzu, remains stubbornly relevant because nothing about human impulsiveness has improved. Technology has advanced, budgets have ballooned, rhetoric has softened, but the old habit of charging headlong into conflict without a ledger has endured like a hereditary condition.

The slogan arrives every time a new database is wheeled out of Whitehall on a sack barrow: if there is nothing to hide, there is nothing to fear. It is delivered with the cheery confidence of a man selling extended warranties. And yet, somewhere between the scanner and the shredder, court records and archives are now being quietly ordered into deletion. A nation urged to accept total recall is simultaneously being asked to forget.

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” — George Orwell.

The West did not collapse in a weekend. It did not wake up confused about gender, debt, borders and meaning because of a poorly moderated comments section. The long unravelling began, as most respectable catastrophes do, with a monk, a hammer, and a document pinned to a church door in 1517. The moment Martin Luther decided Rome required a theological performance review, Europe’s spiritual plumbing was knocked loose. Five centuries later, the pipes are still rattling.

Britain has perfected a modern agricultural ballet: paving over fields at home while ordering dinner from abroad, preferably via several borders, two currencies, and a shipping lane having a nervous breakdown. It is a choreography of cranes, lorries, planning notices and supermarket aisles, all moving in opposite directions with absolute confidence and no visible sense of irony.

There are many ways to unsettle the powerful. One may march, shout, draft legislation, or commission a commemorative mural of interpretive despair. But nothing quite rearranges the furniture of authority like a simple, inconvenient sentence spoken aloud at the wrong moment. The old Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci once observed that telling the truth is revolutionary. He was correct, not because truth carries a red flag, but because it carries a crowbar.

Money collapses, socialism rises. Socialism rises, society wobbles. Society wobbles, capitalism strolls back in wearing a hard hat and carrying a ledger. It is less a Theory than a recurring British pantomime — except nobody enjoys the interval and the popcorn costs £11.

Civilisation, on closer inspection, has always been run by people who read quietly, doubted themselves often, and took far too long to clear their throats, while being shouted over by louder specimens who mistook volume for wisdom and enthusiasm for competence. William Butler Yeats spotted the problem over a century ago and summarised it with surgical efficiency: the thoughtful hesitate, the reckless roar, and history usually hands the megaphone to the wrong lot.