I suspect we live in a world of surging anxiety, with some of it fueled by legitimate, serious causes - inequality, climate change - and some of it created by the sheer inability of our species to handle incoming information from the entire planet.

This means we gravitate more toward threats, and tend to discount good news. People begin to distrust economic growth, and fear technology, and they form political movements around these sentiments.

The problem is that these are instant political losers. No one wants to be told that we need to regress. People want a vision of the future to labor toward - one that's better.

And a lot of this fear is fueled by bad or intentionally misleading data. https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1085739345154207744

So much of this is propelled by this burgeoning feeling of guilt, of participation in cataclysm, of being a bystander to civilizational failure - so much so that we become inured to the ideas that a better way is possible.

We are desirous of failure, and grow self-flagellating.

We will not build a better world if we listen to those who tell us it is impossible. Citizens will instead gravitate to the status quo powerful - the people hellbent on making the world stay as it is, even though we can, and must change.