Why the World Is Spinning Out of Control

This Is the Age of Extinction — And It’s Beginning To Trickle Up

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Think with me for a moment about how the world’s changed. In just one decade.

Ten years ago, how different was it?

Politics was…night and day. By and large, our civilization was still making progress towards democracy. It was the heyday of liberalism. And then a right wing tsunami swept the globe. Today? The list of nations that’ve turned far to the right is startlingly long, and growing. America. Britain. India. Poland, Hungary. China, and of course, Russia. Even former bastions of liberalism and democracy, like Sweden and Italy.

In just ten years. Global politics has undergone its greatest transformation since the 1930s. Perhaps even greater than the 1930s, because it’s arguable that more has been lost today. One decade. Name a country without a far right party in power, or contesting it, and I’ll show you one that…doesn’t exist anymore. That’s a shockingly fast shift. In historical terms, the breakdown of democracy and the rise of what once used to be the fringe on the extreme right? It’s happened so fast it’ll make history’s head spin.

But it’s not just politics that has undergone a sea change. What else is different? In just ten years, our economies are completely different, too. Ten years ago was a time of what economists called relative “price stability” — and wages to match, too. Today, though? Our economy, worldwide, has plunged into stagflation. Prices go on skyrocketing, and real incomes keep on falling. Meanwhile, central banks, baffled, bewildered, keep on raising interest rates, which only makes the problem worse, adding to people’s burdens, because now all that debt they’ve taken on is that much more expensive, too.

Think what else changed in the last ten years. The mega-scale impacts of climate change arrived. Ten years ago? If I’d told you that by 2023, region-sized megafires would be visible from space, getting worse every summer, while mega-monsoons would drown entire countries, you’d probably have laughed at me. If I’d told you a pandemic would sweep the globe, and those, too, are effects of rising temperatures, you’d have looked at me, baffled. What is this guy even on? And yet here we are. Just one decade later. How bad is this summer going to be? Canada’s boreal forests are already on mega-fire. Spain’s droughts are the worst they’ve ever been. I could go on. Summer’s barely begun. This one’s going to be worse than the last one.

Meanwhile, our societies are in brutal states of disrepair. Social bonds and ties have ruptured. People barely trust one another anymore, and take their resentments and rage out on an expanding circle of scapegoats. As a result the social contracts of modernity are now under profound threat. That’s easiest to see in America — where all of a sudden, fundamental freedoms aren’t just “under attack,” they’re going, going gone. For women, who are now suspected criminals to be “aided and abetted.” For kids, who are to learn…history…science…literature…art…the way that fanatical demagogues want them to…or not. Books, banned. Entire ways of existence, being erased. Don’t say gay, or else. Teachers are criminalized — threatened with being made third degree felons — just for that.

That trend is expanding, too — shortly, Brexit Britain’s going to have (I’m not kidding) Nat-C conference, for “National Conservatism,” which its PM is apparently a supporter of. Totally normal stuff! Nobody worry about the rise of the…Nat-Cs.

One decade. That’s all it’s taken to get here. To levels of self-destruction that have already rocked the world. From Brexit, to the rise and return of Trump, to the way an axis of authoritarianism from DeSantis and his ilk are eviscerating social contracts, to a global economy that’s visibly badly broken, but nobody knows how fix.