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

How Societies Self-Destruct

Looking around the globe today, you’ve probably gritted your teeth and wondered: “Wait! Aren’t 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 their mega-rich. Why should an operation cost $500,000? 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 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 wretched. 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.

When the social order breaks, demagogues arise.
Where do demagogues come from? According to present-day American thought, the rise of demagogues in France, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Turkey, Australia, and, of course, America, is something like a comet striking the earth: a coincidence, fate, a negative miracle with no cause. That’s absurd, no? When so many societies see so much demagoguery arising at once, there must be a shared socioeconomic cause.

That cause is the breakdown of the social order. It’s a frightening thing to live through. When the social order breaks, people lose a sense of optimism, of structure, of meaning, of purpose. They feel weak and powerless and hopeless. They think their kids and grandkids will live worse lives than them. Along comes a demagogues, who says: “we will be great again!” or “the pure blooded first!” — and suddenly, a sense of safety, optimism, meaning, and purpose are reborn. Like anyone who is traumatized, shocked, terrified, people living through breakdowns of social order are easily pliable, manipulable, willing to believe in fantastic and fabulous things, just to feel safe and protected again, to feel a place and purpose again. Hence, the collapse of a social order produces demagogues, as people seek refuge in the arms of strongmen, just as it did in Bolshevik Russia or Nazi Germany. When a social order breaks, the people in it do, too.

When people get broken along with the social order they live in, strongmen give them strength.
Why do people turn to strongmen? Well, they are really saying that authoritarianism might be able to give them what democracy cannot — decent lives. When economies stagnate, and the social order breaks, people lose everything that matters to them (even if, as American economists love to point out, they have bigger TVs and cars) — they lose their dignity, meaning, possibility, their communities, families, their sense of self-worth and efficacy and power.

When you’ve lost all that, it’s not so hard to see why authoritarianism might seem like a tempting alternative — you might give up a few freedoms, but at least you’ll have a decent life again. You’ll feel good, safe, happy, strong. Now, wasn’t that decent life the point of those freedoms in the first place? So if those freedoms can’t give it to you, what’s their purpose? Why not give them up? So the point is not to blame those turning to strongmen — but to understand them. From their perspective, democracy is a dismal failure. And in a way, they are right.

Strongmen give people strength. That is why people turn to them. And that tells us that people feel weak, broken, battered, and shattered, by the way things are — stagnating economies, collapsing social orders, fracturing societies, and the failed politics beneath them.

If strongmen are giving broken people strength, politics as usual can’t be.
Authoritarianism always tells us that both “sides” or “parties” have failed, usually catastrophically. Failed at what? Offering people all the above: dignity, meaning, purpose, community, belonging, self-worth. Ultimately, a social contract, which is made up of public goods like healthcare and transport and education and so on, is there to result in all those human outcomes — to give people a sense that their lives matter, count, endure, mean something. But the rise of authoritarianism tells us that no such social contract is on offer, from either side. That is why people must turn to authoritarians to gain these fundamental things they are missing.

That is the case in America today, isn’t it? No side or party offers people dignity, meaning, purpose, belonging, a sense that their lives mean something or matter — both sides reduce people to their productivity and utility. They feel broken. I don’t blame them. How would you feel living in a society where nobody offers you a decent life? And that is why they turn to authoritarianism, seeking strength from strongmen.

Authoritarianism is defeated by offering people the lives they want to live (not by prosecutors, scandals, judges, or celebrity tweets).
So. How do we defeat authoritarianism? If you understand all the above, it’s pretty simple: offer people a sense of meaning, purpose, dignity, self-worth, community, belonging, optimism again. Craft a social contract made of public goods whose goal is to endow people with all the above. Nothing else is going to work — you might “bring down” one strongman, but broken people are seeking strength, and they’ll just turn to the next one.

The problem, of course, is that politics as usual in failing societies make crafting a better social contract impossible. Take America: both “sides” will never discuss what such a social contract looks like, ever — they would rather debate the same old ideologies forever (“deficits!” “no!! tax cuts!!”). But that is also why Trump’s approval rating never really falls. Why would it? There is no alternative to demagoguery — at least the strongman gives his broken followers a sense of meaning, purpose, and strength. Politics as usual only reduces them to losers and nobodies — who do you suppose they will follow? Funnily — or sadly — enough, this is precisely how German politicians failed and allowed Nazism to rise. Authoritarianism is defeated by a better social contract — not by bickering with it over its daily transgressions.

Democracy is the most fragile way of life of all.
We live in a time when democracy is taken for granted — its rise, spread, and triumph. But the truth that history tells us is very different. Democracy is like a little shaft of wheat: the most fragile political system, way of life, of all. Not only is most of history made of feudalism, tribalism, and tyranny — but time and again we’ve seen even the most robust democracies collapse. Not in centuries, or decades, but in years. That’s the story of modern-day Russia, Turkey, Poland, and America, too. The reason is all the above: when economies stagnate, and the social order breaks, people turn to authoritarianism, seeking decent lives again.

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