By Dee Smith
About a decade ago, we entered into a period of escalating social and political chaos, increasingly “hot” geopolitical conflict, and growing economic crises — a time that seems uncharacteristic given the previous decades. Unfortunately, the current period may represent a return to the norms of human history. The relatively peaceful, prosperous time we lived through may have been the deviation.
While not halcyon days, the 70 years after 1945 were a period in which great-power conflict was avoided, more than a billion people were lifted out of poverty, life expectancy — due to advances in sanitation, medicine, and living conditions — increased significantly, and norms regarding the value of human life changed dramatically. Murder, for example, was very common in most societies 200 years ago as a means of “solving problems.” Today, it is much less so.
The financial stability of recent decades was also new. There were no true global depressions, and highly disruptive events like sovereign defaults by major economies were absent. This was not true in the past.
Simply put, this relative economic stability was purchased by an overwhelming surfeit of debt. Two occasions on which this debt was used stand out: to rescue institutions deemed “too big to fail” in the financial crisis of 2008, and to stabilize world economies during the Covid pandemic. But debt has mounted continuously in most countries. In the US, public (government) debt is over $36 trillion. Private US debt is between $20 trillion and $30 trillion, depending on how it is counted. The extreme efforts to avert financial disasters mean that markets have never been allowed to clear. Like a forest in which fires are suppressed and undergrowth is never cleared by smaller burns, the fire, when it comes, may be cataclysmic.
After many years of increases in democratic governance in the 20th century, the 21st is seeing considerable backsliding. According to Transparency International:
In every region of the world, democracy is under attack by populist leaders and groups that reject pluralism and demand unchecked power to advance the particular interests of their supporters, usually at the expense of minorities and other perceived foes.
The form of democracy endures. In 2024, more people voted in elections than ever before in history. But with the rise of illiberal democracies, many countries are preserving the form but not the substance of democracy as it has been defined over the past 250 years. It is of particular interest that young people in many places are increasingly dissatisfied with democracy.
Why is all this happening? There are many interacting reasons, but I would suggest that four factors should be singled out.
First, as I have written before, are the broken promises so many people perceive in their lives. They feel that they played by the rules and were promised that their lives would improve and their children’s lives would be even better than their own. If anyone reading this sincerely believes this now, I would be surprised.
Second, the underlying conviction that economic well-being is the primary motivation of almost everyone and the most reliable source of human happiness — and that humans are rational self-interested agents who pursue and maximize their own well-being. This is the basis of not only capitalism, but also socialism and communism.
But, as it turns out, Marx was wrong in his estimation that economics is the moving force of history. It could rather be said that economic forces are moving history away from economics and toward identity politics. As people move or are moved en masse for jobs and economic production, community structures come apart, engendering an urgent need for identity. That need frequently takes the form of a desire to belong to some group that excludes others (social, religious, political, economic, even place-based).
A third factor is technology, particularly the technology of connectivity, and most particularly, mobile visual connectivity (smart phones, tablets, etc.). Not only do these devices demonstrably increase loneliness and affect cognition, as continues to be shown in studies, they also contribute two additional, crucial elements. The first is transparency. People now are intimately aware of how other people live to an extent that has never occurred previously. Whether such accounts are exaggerated, false, or accurate doesn’t matter much, the effects are often the same: envy, sadness, depression, and anger.
Second, mobile visual connectivity allows people with similar interests and thoughts — including politically aggressive and polarizing ideas or destructive and self-destructive desires — to find one another, create relationships, share and develop ideas, and then act on them. It is perhaps most important that they are all able to do this from a distance and almost instantly. In the past, it was much more difficult for people whose thoughts were outside the norm to find one another and act in concert.
Fourth, much of the avoidance of major wars during the past 8 decades was due to the so-called Pax Americana, a system imposed on the world by the United States and made possible by American military power. Recently, with changes in military technology and the rise of other powers as near peers in military terms, this superiority begun to erode. Other factors are contributing to the eclipse of the Pax Americana, especially the debt load mentioned above. For the first time, the US last year spent more on government debt service than on its military.
All of these factors augur a more conflictual, impoverished, and insecure world. In other words, reversion to the conditions of most of human history. Perhaps some change or series of changes can avert this fate, and we should hope that they do. But if trends continue on their current path, life may be very different.