What is the world really like?

Is everything awesome?

It’s October 2019. The Master of the Ceremony goes on and on. Then someone from the local government steps up to say a word or a three. Then follow the award recipients, three inspiring, excited young people. Of the three minutes allotted to each presentation they spend four thanking their academic supervisors and the sponsors.

The crowd finally look up from their smartphones when the main attraction steps up. Steven Pinker, a world-renowned scientist and author, takes the stage to discuss his new book, “Enlightenment Now.” He bids good evening and starts, without much acknowledgement of the occasion or the place.

For about an hour, Pinker delivers a well-rehearsed presentation offering systematic, irrefutable proof that the world has become a significantly better place over the last few centuries. One PowerPoint slide after another shows that tendency towards the upper right corner, or the lower right, if the phenomenon is negative. Poverty, childhood mortality, happiness, democracy, health, hunger, anything that you can measure and that can broadly be correlated to human progress has improved by several orders of magnitude over the past few centuries, roughly since the age of the Enlightenment.

Pinker concludes abruptly and receives a thunderous applause. He takes a few questions and leaves. His argument is completely irrefutable. We are living in the best of times, and I leave the hall inadvertently humming that catchy song from the Lego Movie – Everything is Awesome.

The Parisian dilemma, part one

This time we’re in Paris and it’s early 2020. The venue is the Grand Palais, a magnificent Beaux-Art structure built for the world fair of 1900. The event is called ChangeNOW; the idea is to bring together people eager to change the world through sustainable finance and technology.

In a side auditorium, away from the buzz of the main hall, a young bespectacled venture capitalist is in her power pose on a stage overlooking a half-full room. The audience is in the dark and she can’t quite achieve eye contact; this distracts her, she begins to pace.

Then she suddenly turns to the crowd and says, “We urgently need more impact investing!”

Half an hour later on an open stage, wearing one of those headsets with a microphone that comes in from the right ear to the front of the mouth, a nervous-looking man in a tweed jacket and jeans, the classic business casual combo, reads off his slides:

“The problems of the world are systemic. The solution is impact investing.”

Later, he is sitting down, hosting a panel. Three more people have sprung up to join him. It’s time to “stop talking” and look for “concrete solutions,” says a handsome executive in his fifties. “I urge you all to think about impact investing.”

Towards the end of the day, a woman with a broad, genuine smile is presenting an opinion poll. Ninety percent of the youth surveyed believe that companies do good only when they want to “brandwash” themselves or when obliged to by the law; less than five percent think companies genuinely try to do good.

She, too, sits down and a panel emerges. She throws the question out – what is to be done? You’ve guessed the answer by now.

The Parisian dilemma, part two

Across town that evening – another event. The audience doesn’t seem that different in terms of age and look, although here there are almost exclusively students in attendance. Thomas Piketty is giving a lecture at the Sorbonne, Paris’s famed university. The tickets sold out fifteen minutes after they went on sale.

One of the most referenced books on economics over the past 20 years, Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century warns of an unsustainable trend in accumulation of wealth among the top class. His central thesis is that when the rate of return on capital is greater than the rate of economic growth over the long term, the result is concentration of wealth. He predicts an age marked with politics of hatred and social tensions as a consequence.

Piketty is greeted like a rock star. Students are loving what he has to say. Impact investing is not mentioned. The word “revolution” is, a few times, both by the speaker and by those asking questions.

What is happening here?

Is nothing awesome?

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been setting its Doomsday Clock since the dawn of the nuclear age in 1947. The Clock has been used as a metaphor for how close humanity is to self-annihilation through nuclear conflict. In January 2020, three months after Pinker gave his address, it was set to 100 seconds to midnight, and it had never been closer – not during the Cuban Missile Crisis, not during the Reagan years.

The Bulletin team justified this with the “abnormal normal” time in which we live, and in which

“fact is becoming indistinguishable from fiction, undermining our very abilities to develop and apply solutions to the big problems of our time. The new abnormal risks emboldening autocrats and lulling citizens around the world into a dangerous sense of anomie and political paralysis.”

The International Panel on Climate Change’s 2018 Special Report on Global Warming, the most comprehensive study ever done on the topic, warned that we were living in the “most important years in history” given the already-cataclysmic effects of climate change. The future will already be bleak as it is; if we do nothing on climate, it will be disastrous – millions more hungry and poor, entire islands disappearing from the face of the Earth, broad social unrest and potential for conflict, thousands of living species disappearing.

Our World in Data, perhaps the world’s best-known data interpretation and visualization website, has lately offered a few interesting revelations to puncture the “everything is awesome” narrative. The trust in the government is declining in rich, western countries, and elsewhere in some places. In the U.S. the trust is at record lows. The young are lonelier than any other demographic. The millennials might be the first generation poorer than their parents. The number of people killed in wars and terrorist incidents is rising. The number of people living in democracies is falling.

In countries like Russia, China, Hungary and others non-democracy or quasi-democracy appear to not only work but be delivering results. Those regimes are strong, stable, and seemingly loved by their people. Many other countries are democracies in name only, effectively ruled by an oligarchy, a plutocracy openly controlling the political system through corruption which is either ignored or rendered legal. Whatever moral high ground the Western powers may have had they seem to have lost in the past decade via waging cynical wars, engaging in drone strike campaigns and torturing people in illegal ways.

World Economic Forum’s 2019 Gender Gap Report reveals that the world isn’t really serious about gender equality. Despite all the posturing, at the current rate of progress we will achieve equality in 100 years, give or take. The status quo seems to have survived the recent push towards more meaningful empowerment of women, personified by the MeToo movement.

The Purge film franchise has been one of the most successful globally in recent years. The premise is that the US, taken over and ruled as a dictatorship by people calling themselves the New Founding Fathers, has introduced a law whereby for one night of the year all crime is legal. The annual event keeps social tensions under control, reduces the population of the homeless and the poor. The movie features a scene where a rich, white, diamond necklace-wearing crowd watches from behind a bulletproof glass, but while remaining fully visible, two groups of survivors battling it out and dying in the hall below.

So, then, are we living in the worst of times?

A set of facts looking for a narrative

If all of the above remarks about our world are true, and it is also true, as we’ve already established elsewhere, that the sense of injustice and discontent is growing, then how can we explain this?

Clearly, even put together and taken for granted, our observations don’t point to one single narrative, but many. Depending on your point of view, any one of the below headlines could explain what we are seeing:

Headline 1: “The world is getting better. So educate yourself before you complain. Everything is going according to plan.” Keyword: Reason

Headline 2: “Human ingenuity and technology have created remarkable progress, but also resulted in minor problems which we can fix with the right market incentives.” Keyword: Profit

Headline 3: “Human ingenuity and technology have created remarkable progress, but also resulted in major injustices which we must fix through regulation.” Keyword: Justice

Headline 4: “Human ingenuity and technology have created remarkable progress, but also resulted in systemic problems that cannot be solved through that system.” Keyword: Revolution

These four points of view are ontologically so different that people holding them can scarcely have a meaningful conversation with one another, even though they are looking at the same set of facts.

Therefore, the best, if unsatisfactory, answer to the question, “What is the world like and where is it headed?” is “It is too early to say.” The coming years will send us down the path of one of the above narratives, depending on what social forces end up prevailing. Thirty years from now, a historian will look back and see only one trendline coming out, the same way we only see one when looking at the 1920s, or the 1780s. Future analysts will no doubt scold us for not seeing clearly the writing that was on the wall.

We the Changemakers must traverse the different narratives with ease, so as to engage the people believing in them, and so as to shape the outgoing trendline, above all avoiding scenario number 4.