[junta]

The man was a bit crude yet where is he wrong? The best answer is by garbanzo with the "middle ages", but even that era showed more civilizational tendencies than some parts of the world do today. Why is the West succesful? The rest of the world does not even ask that at best immigrants just come to take part of our success, but in doing so only grasp it as some sort of magic or to reclaim something they claim was stolen from them in some long forgotten past era.

[garbanzo]

The West is successful because it developed the right set of ideas - if it were genetics then why did it take until ~400 to 500 years ago (out of roughly 400,000 years Homo sapiens sapiens has been around) for Europe to take off? Some massive genetic switch happening around 1500AD?

One of those key ideas was openness to other cultures and civilizations. The West didn't take the NIH (not invented here) attitude some places took and thrived. But the Renaissance eats it own children - as intolerance creeps back into the Western mind.