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It’s been 25 years since 19 terrorists hijacked four airplanes and smashed into two skyscrapers in New York City as well as the Pentagon, and caused the fourth plane to plunge into a Pennsylvania field after brave passengers fought back against the hijackers, who likely intended to hit the White House.

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I remember well September 11, 2001. I was living in Victoria and was the B.C. director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. In the early hours, a producer from a Vancouver radio station, where I was scheduled for an interview later that morning, left a cryptic phone message: “Given what’s happened this morning, we obviously need to cancel this interview.”

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Mystified, I turned on the television to see repeating video footage of planes crashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

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Anyone old enough to recall 9/11 will remember the horrific images: People jumping from the Trade Center towers to escape the flames; people fleeing lower Manhattan to escape the two towers before and after their collapse; firefighters, police, and a Franciscan friar who perished, carried away by those who survived.

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9/11 marked a definitive end to the 20th-century belief that only economic battles mattered — the postwar idea contest between free enterprisers and Marxists about which economic system could best deliver the goods.

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What 9/11 did was dramatically end the assumption that every outcome has a material cause, i.e., that poverty is always the cause for terrorism and that if only people were prosperous, revolutionary discontent might be muted. This belief was most famously articulated by Francis Fukuyama, a political scientist, who wrote of the “end of history,” in a famous 1989 essay and later in a 1992 book.

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Fukuyama’s claim was not that conflict would cease in the future, but that significant challengers to western liberalism, democracy and market economies seemed to be mostly absent with the collapse of communism. Fukuyama theorized that because western liberalism addressed the need for “recognition,” meaning participatory democracy for the individual, and because free markets were the best engine for prosperity, new challengers to liberalism and capitalism were unlikely to arise in the West or anywhere else. “Moreover, the logic of modern natural science would seem to dictate a universal evolution in the direction of capitalism,” wrote Fukuyama in his 1992 book.

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In that book, Fukuyama cited radical Islam as one potential counter to the West, but quickly moved on to other thoughts about the world we lived in. In short, even though there were early warning signs — including the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, terror attacks albeit mostly outside of the West, and the first (1993) attack on the World Trade Center — significant challenges to western civilization seemed few, and most of us were blissfully unaware.

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Then 9/11 happened and the 19 men who attacked the symbols of the West were deeply committed fundamentalist Islamic radicals who possessed a worldview distinctly different than that which developed in the West. Many came from Saudi Arabia, a mostly prosperous nation; the chief architect behind 9/11 was Osama bin Laden, who himself came from a wealthy Saudi family.

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And it didn’t matter that Americans had even funded Islamic Mujahideen resistance to Soviet communists in Afghanistan in the 1980s (of which bin Laden might have been a beneficiary). Bin Laden had a grudge against the West for his own reasons and his own ends.