When Society Stops Believing in Tomorrow

For the past decade, much of my writing has revolved around an enigma that followed me while living in Europe. The West is currently richer, safer, and by far more technologically advanced than it has ever been. Its citizens, or at least the majority of them, enjoy a standard of living higher than that of kings only a few hundred years ago and have access to amounts of information previous generations could hardly have imagined. Modern democratic structures have expanded equality before the law and individual rights across much of the West. Social safety nets have been created, and medicine has dramatically reduced many causes of death that were once considered unavoidable, including those related to childbirth. And still, with all of this said, something inside Western society appears to be slowly disintegrating.

The signs are not difficult to see. Families are weaker. Communities are thinner. Political institutions are increasingly distrusted. Men and women often speak about each other less as partners in a shared society and more as opposing groups. Political disagreements have become moral disagreements. Friendships and even families break over elections, opinions about wars in faraway lands, public health, immigration, gender, race, or ideological affiliation. The ability to disagree without questioning the character of the other person seems to be disappearing.

I have written about different parts of this process for years. In Back to Ourselves, I was already trying to understand how modern communication, fear, social structures, and shared beliefs could simultaneously unite humanity and divide it. Later, in Meaning in the Age of Absurdity, I argued that the West was facing a wider meaning crisis: the old structures that organised individual and collective life had weakened without being replaced by anything sufficiently coherent. In The Slow Walk to Tyranny, my attention moved toward democracy itself and to the possibility that the political system could not remain healthy while the cultural and social structures beneath it continued to deteriorate.

At the time, I thought I was writing about different problems. I am less certain of that today.

The more I have worked on these questions, the more I have come to believe that they are different expressions of the same deeper problem: human beings need a sufficiently stable world in order to live together.

This may sound almost trivial. Of course stability is useful. Of course people prefer security to chaos. But I do not mean stability only in the political or physical sense. I mean something more fundamental: a minimum expectation that the world around us will remain coherent enough for our actions today to still make sense tomorrow.

In my forthcoming book, Toward a Philosophy of Coherence, I examine the relationship between meaning, purpose, and coherence by bringing my recent work on Energetic Consciousness Theory into dialogue with important philosophers of the past. While this inquiry initially seemed separate from much of my previous writing, I began to realise how closely these questions were connected when I reached Thomas Hobbes.

Hobbes is normally introduced as the philosopher of the state of nature and the defender of political sovereignty. His argument is often reduced to the idea that without a strong authority human beings will fall into conflict, and that the fear of this conflict justifies the creation of a powerful state.

I do not think this is the most interesting part of Hobbes for our present situation. What I found more interesting is what exists underneath his political argument: Hobbes understood that human life changes when predictability disappears.

If I cannot trust that you will respect an agreement tomorrow, the agreement loses its force today. If I cannot trust that you will not attack me, I have a reason to prepare myself against you. If you see me preparing, you now have a reason to prepare yourself against me. Neither of us needs to begin as evil, violent, or irrational. Uncertainty itself is enough to reorganise our behaviour.

And perhaps most importantly, the perceived possibility of threat may be enough to generate defensive behaviour even before the threat materialises. In this sense, mistrust does not require an actual breakdown of order. The expectation of breakdown can already begin to change behaviour.

Once I started looking at Hobbes from this angle, I began to see something that I had previously approached mainly through meaning and culture. Before a person can meaningfully build a future, he needs to believe that a future exists in a form sufficiently connected to the present.

Think about how much of ordinary civilisation depends on this.

We work for years toward qualifications because we believe they will still have value when we finish. We save money rather than spending everything immediately. We take mortgages for twenty or thirty years. We start businesses whose success may come only after years of effort. We marry, have children, build homes, make promises, develop careers, and contribute to institutions whose benefits may appear only much later.

All these actions require something more than hope. They require confidence in continuity. Not certainty. Life has never offered certainty. But enough predictability for tomorrow to have weight today.

This is why Hobbes, in my view, is not simply a philosopher of political authority. He is a philosopher of the floor beneath social life. And I increasingly wonder whether this floor is exactly what is weakening in the West.

The problem may therefore not be that people believe society will collapse tomorrow. It is that they no longer know exactly what they can rely on. The more I thought about this, the more convinced I became that the distinction matters.

A society can remain materially functional while becoming psychologically unstable. The courts can remain open. The police can remain on the streets. Elections can still take place. People can continue going to work, restaurants, and airports. From the outside, everything can appear normal. But underneath, the relationship between the individual and the wider structure can change.

People begin to shorten their time horizons, become more suspicious, trust institutions less, and increasingly see political opponents as threats rather than fellow citizens. As confidence in the wider structure weakens, they begin searching for smaller structures in which the world still appears understandable.

This is where Hobbes connects, for me, with one of the most worrying developments of our time: tribalism.

We usually explain tribalism through ideology. The left becomes more radical. The right becomes more radical. People become nationalist, progressive, religious, anti-religious, feminist, anti-feminist, globalist, populist, or something else. But this describes the content of the tribe. It does not necessarily explain why the tribe becomes psychologically necessary.

A tribe does something extremely useful for a person living in an unstable environment: it simplifies the world. It tells you who you are. It tells you who is responsible. It tells you what has gone wrong. It tells you which information can be trusted and whom to fear. It gives you allies and enemies. And perhaps most importantly, it gives uncertainty a shape.

This is why I no longer think the growth of political tribalism can be understood simply as a failure of education or intelligence. Intelligent people can become extraordinarily tribal. Educated people can become incapable of tolerating disagreement. In fact, education sometimes gives people better language with which to defend the tribe they have already chosen.

The problem is deeper.

When the larger world becomes difficult to trust, the smaller world becomes more important. And the more important the smaller world becomes, the less flexible it can afford to be.

A person who holds a political opinion lightly can tolerate somebody disagreeing with him. A person who needs that political position to make the wider world coherent cannot. For him, disagreement is no longer merely disagreement. It threatens the structure.

This may help explain something that has concerned me greatly in recent years: our declining capacity to disagree while remaining in relationship with each other.

Families have divided over politics. Friends have stopped speaking to one another. People increasingly decide whether another person is morally acceptable based on positions on subjects that, only a few years earlier, would have been treated as political or social disagreements.

This affects every aspect of our lives and can be seen in an extreme form in the relationship between men and women in Western society in recent years. I believe this is worth noting because a society in which the basic relationship between men and women becomes politically tribalised should concern us far beyond the specific arguments being made. The family is one of the oldest structures of human continuity. Once even the relationship between the sexes is interpreted primarily through ideological competition, fragmentation has reached very deeply into the social fabric.

On many levels, tribalism is political. Or perhaps more accurately, it is what politics begins to become when trust is eroded.

Democracy is often described as a system of elections, institutions, rights, and checks and balances. All of these are essential, but they are not enough. Democracy also requires a particular kind of citizen.

A democratic citizen must be capable of losing.

He must accept that people he believes are wrong may govern him for several years. He must tolerate speech he dislikes. He must cooperate with people he does not fully trust. He must accept that compromise is sometimes preferable to victory. He must recognise his political opponent as a legitimate member of the same society.

These are psychologically expensive behaviours. They require trust. Not only in other people, but in the system itself and in its capacity to hold a sufficiently stable future.

If I believe that my opponent merely has a different view of taxation, education, immigration, or welfare, compromise is possible. On the other hand, if I believe that my opponent represents fascism, communism, racism, tyranny, the destruction of women, the destruction of men, the destruction of the nation, the end of democracy, or the extinction of civilisation itself, compromise becomes morally impossible.

Instability pushes people toward tribes. Tribes create stronger identities. Stronger identities make disagreement more threatening. Threat produces more hostility. Hostility weakens trust in the wider society. And weakened trust creates an even greater need for the tribe.

We then reach the strange situation we increasingly see today: every group believes it is defending society while behaving in ways that make a shared society harder to maintain.

This is the part of Hobbes that I believe we should take more seriously.

The state of nature does not necessarily begin when the police disappear. It may begin much earlier. It begins when people stop expecting the wider system to protect the rules of cooperation. It begins when trust in institutions is replaced by trust in one's group. It begins when citizenship becomes weaker than political identity. It begins when the future feels too unstable to justify restraint in the present.

In the Hobbes essay in Toward a Philosophy of Coherence, I try to place this problem within a wider architecture. Meaning, in the way I now understand it, helps organise experience into a coherent structure. Purpose directs that structure toward the future. Identity carries continuity across time. But Hobbes forced me to recognise that these higher structures themselves require something underneath them: baseline stability.

Before meaning can organise a life, life must be stable enough to carry meaning. Before purpose can direct us toward the future, the future must be predictable enough to matter. Before democracy can ask people to tolerate disagreement, they must trust the common structure enough to survive disagreement.

This does not mean that stability is the highest value. It certainly does not mean that every form of order should be defended. Tyrannies can be stable. Oppressive cultures can be coherent. Families can preserve harmful structures. Political systems can maintain peace by eliminating freedom.

Stability alone is not enough.

But without a certain degree of stability, many of the higher values we celebrate cannot function for long. This is where I think some modern political conversations begin too late.

We tell people to find purpose while their economic future becomes increasingly uncertain. We tell them to trust democracy while institutions appear unable or unwilling to respond to problems that concern them. We tell them to tolerate disagreement while political movements on both sides describe the other camp as existentially dangerous.

We speak about community while families become weaker. We speak about inclusion while the common and local cultures that once supplied continuity and belonging are weakening and are increasingly treated as structures to be questioned rather than inherited. We speak about freedom while individuals are increasingly left alone to construct their own identity, meaning, purpose, and social world from scratch.

Then we are surprised when they search for tribes.

A person standing on unstable ground does not first search for complexity. He searches for something solid.

This does not excuse extremism, intolerance, or violence. Understanding the function of a structure does not make the structure morally acceptable. A political tribe may stabilise a person and still be destructive. An ideology may provide meaning and still be false. A movement may give people belonging and still turn them against others.

But if we refuse to understand why these structures become attractive, we will not understand why they persist.

We will simply continue condemning the symptoms while weakening the conditions underneath them.

I remain convinced that democracy is the best political structure humans have built so far. But I no longer think its survival can be taken for granted simply because its institutions still exist.

Democracy depends on a social world capable of sustaining democratic behaviour. It requires families, communities, trust, shared language, responsibility, restraint, a shared national culture and identity. Most importantly, it requires people to believe that they still share a future.

Perhaps this is the deepest lesson I take from Hobbes today.

Civilisation does not collapse only when violence begins. It starts weakening when the future ceases to organise the present.

When people no longer believe that work will build something, that institutions will protect the rules, that disagreement can remain disagreement, or that their children will inherit a society they can still recognise, they begin searching elsewhere for stability.

Some find it in ideology, nationalism, identity, religion, political movements, or enemies. The content changes, but the need underneath it may be the same.

The less we trust ourselves, our institutions, and our collective future, the more attractive the regression into tribalism becomes. It does not necessarily begin with revolutions, dramatic political movements, or black-swan events. It can begin much earlier—with perception: the growing feeling that the future can no longer be trusted at its most foundational level.

We cannot rebuild a fragmented society only by asking people to abandon their tribes. We first have to understand why the larger world stopped feeling trustworthy enough to live in.

Hobbes saw something uncomfortable beneath civilisation: before humans can afford meaning, morality, tolerance, and political cooperation, they need enough stability to trust tomorrow.

If that floor continues to weaken, the question will not simply be whether the left or the right wins the next election.

The more important question will be whether enough people still believe that there is a common society left to win.

And perhaps that is the most urgent question we should address at this point.