Seven Lessons We Should Have Learned From History — But Didn’t

How Societies Self-Destruct

Image

Looking around the globe today, you’ve probably gritted your teeth and wondered: “Why the &%!# are we repeating history?” Authoritarianism, nationalism, tribalism — extreme inequality, social breakdown, rising demagoguery — check, check, check. You’d be right. So here are seven lessons we should have learned from history but didn’t.

When too much money piles up in too few hands, economies stagnate. This was the first lesson of World War II. Germany was made to pay war reparations for World War I that it simply couldn’t afford — and it’s economy was driven to ruin. The same is happening today, in a slightly different way: too much money is piling up at the top of economies within countries (in America, Britain, Russia), and that is making middle classes flatline, collapse, and shrink. 

Americans might not think so, but they’re paying the equivalent of reparations, too — call them taxes or fees or hidden costs or shifted costs — only not to another country, but to billionaires and the ultra-rich. Why should an operation cost $170,000? It doesn’t anywhere else: the number is a pure fiction. Or when Zuck makes billions by imploding democracy, or when Walmart pays workers so little they need welfare just to live, that’s a net loss, a reparation, a flow from the middle to the top, by any other name, for no real value created. Reparations, taxes, tribute, paid upwards — result: a stagnant, brutal, grim economy. Poverty, as we will see, produces authoritarianism, fatalism, and extremism — and the chain reaction of social self-destruction begins.

When economies stagnate, the social order breaks. Every modern society has a pretty simple social order: a broad middle class, a tiny number of rich, and a slightly larger number of poor. The problem is that when economies stagnate, this order gets upended. The middle become the new poor. The old poor become the truly desperate. And the rich become the ultra-rich. In this way, a social order breaks apart. And that also means that that societies lose faith, trust, and hope in themselves — and the people in them lose a sense of belonging, meaning, mattering.

Social classes grow to mistrust one another. Bonds break between families, cities, regions. Distrust, suspicion, and paranoia reign — and an atmosphere of happy, pleasant tolerance soon enough becomes one of hostility, scapegoating, and rage. A society blows itself apart and becomes predatory — people must feast on one another to survive now, because the social product is shrinking. That’s the case in America — where an imploding middle class is a phrase that masks the desperation of living in a society without an order, which has become something like a jungle. Kids can be shot in school, the elderly can be exploited for pennies, and so on. When the social order breaks, society becomes a predatory place.