The invasion of Ukraine is a defining event of the first half of the 21st century. It will reshape the whole world. The post-Cold War era has come to an end, and Europe will never be the same again.

As the carnage of the battlefield, and the loss of life, both military and civilian, is beamed by television news into our living rooms it is difficult not to reflect how the war has finally awoken us from our dreams and self-obsessions.

The international alarm bells have been ringing for over three decades but as a society, we have become inward-looking.

Debate, often fuelled by social media becomes ever more polarised with increasing narcissism and individualism.

We have become self-obsessed, more focused on our rights than our responsibilities. Many people now seek fame as an end in itself rather than achieving something worthy of fame.

We are also more likely to disagree on trivial matters, such as whether enjoying certain types of music or the name of a long-established sports team amounts to cultural appropriation – classic cases of what the British anthropologist Ernest Crawley called the narcissism of small differences.

While Xi Jinping was resetting the world order through his Belt and Road Initiative and Vladimir Putin was recreating the Russian empire by annexing Georgia and the Crimean Peninsula, we were arguing over gender-neutral toilets and whether or not Snow White and the Seven Dwarves is discriminatory.

The index of political polarisation which measures the intensity of our internal arguments is at its highest for a century. In the United States, partisan disputes are so feverish that Congress has become incapable of passing new laws that everyone knows are in the national interest.

It goes without saying that Presidents Xi and Putin will have noticed all this.

The pseudo-disputes and self-indulgent echo chambers that are western social media will have only emboldened them.

Parts of western society have become decadent in the true sense of the word and whilst we have looked inwards and become self-obsessed, believing that the state should step in to change even the most trivial things we don’t agree with or that make us unhappy, distracting us from the real global challenges of our time, Russia and China have pressed their advantage.

So, as I sat last week in Parliament listening to President Zelenskyy as he made history by being beamed live into the chamber of the House of Commons, my dominant emotion was guilt.

Guilt that our self-indulgence has blinded us to the dangers of what has been unfolding elsewhere in the world for many years. Guilt that I allow my time to be taken up responding to emails asking me how I would define a woman, and guilt that the Ukrainians are dying for the freedoms that we have forgotten how to defend.

As a society, we have been asleep at the wheel. We must remember that with rights come responsibilities and we have a responsibility to defend democratic values.

For too long, we have looked inwards and taken offence with each other over the most trivial and inconsequential of matters, wanting to cancel and stop others from airing views or opinions with which we disagree.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine puts all that into perspective and we may reflect that in the face of totalitarian oppression, having the right to peacefully disagree with each other is exactly what Ukraine is fighting for.

- Dr Dan Poulter is the Conservative MP for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich