The Age of Instability, or, Why Everything’s So Unstable Now

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When I look at the world these days, I see a number of lessons emerge. Let me briefly go through a few.

America’s emerging as a bright spot in an unstable world.

It’s got to be one of the fastest turnarounds in political history, bar none. In a handful of weeks, Kamala’s on the road to the Presidency. So much so that we’re almost at the point where we can say if the election were held today, she’d probably win it.

There are many reasons for this turnaround, and we’ve been discussing them. America’s outgrowing Trump, and his schtick, his paradigm, feels increasingly worn, threadbare, and obsolete. Meanwhile, Kamala came out fighting, and Americans love a fighter.

All of this bodes well for America. Especially in a world going dark.

It’s not that by themselves Kamala and Tim can fix all of America’s problems. America faces a number of problems that are by now generational in scope, and so generational in scale, too, meaning that it’ll take quite some time to fix them. How do you restore the fortunes of generations in downward mobility? Where will tomorrow’s jobs come from? What is a career, anymore? 

All of these hint at the really big question of this age.

Where will stability come from?

One answer is to throw up our hands in despair, and embrace the nearest demagogue. They promise to burn it all down, and not much else. That’s not much of an answer, and it’s why Americans are outgrowing Trumpism.

But this is a genuinely dazzling shift in attitudes. Seemingly overnight, Americans are coming to their senses, and rejecting demagoguery. Part of that is that Kamala and Tim feel right, trustworthy, people of integrity, not members of a moribund elite class so much as new kinds of leaders, emerging to solve a new set of challenges. And yet Americans themselves are changing their attitudes, at lightning speed, too.

And that’s dazzling for a reason. Because much of the rest of the world isn’t.

The World is Destabilizing, Faster and Faster

While Americans are coming back to their senses, consider what just happened, for example, in Germany. The far right party triumphed for the first time since 1945. Needless to say, “Germany,” and “since 1945,” aren’t words most of us like to hear in the same sentence.

Europe is losing its way. Social democracy hangs on by a thread. In France, while the construction of a New Popular Front, composed of the left and center, at lightning speed, to repel the far right, did its job—still, the task of forming a government hasn’t succeeded. Meanwhile in various corners of Europe, the social democratic project, the linchpin of modernity, is stuck, paralyzed, perhaps, it seems, in rigor mortis.

Meanwhile in Canada, there’s been a sudden, vicious turn towards its Conservatives. It’s understandable: a weak labour market coupled with an influx of new immigrants produces the usual scapegoating. In Canada’s case, systems appear to be becoming overwhelmed, and tensions in society are rising. Of course, that’s another indicator of the health of democracy globally, because Canada is a bellwether.

I could go on, and discuss Asia—but there’s little need to.

The point is to emphasize the question: where will stability come from now?

Stability and Eudaimonia, or a Good Life is a Stable One

What seems to be happening to many of our societies is that they’ve crossed a kind of threshold of instability. And as that threshold’s crossed, people react in fear, rage, and despair.

Here, it’s important to discuss, a little bit, the kinds of instability I mean. 

A decent life in the modern sense, a good life, is first and foremost a stable one. It’s composed of financial stability, which is summed up in the idea of the American Dream. But there are many deeper kinds of stability we need, too.

We need stability in terms of upwards trajectories. It’s not that every generation has to make a quantum leap, but by and large, we should see generation by generation doing better. Even if only incrementally. Today, we don’t, and that’s a global phenomenon, seen in America, Europe, and Asia, which is startling to behold, because it implies our macro-systems aren’t working.

We need some semblance of social stability, too, and that’s about a set of ties and bonds that anchor people in relationships. In America, and increasingly in Europe, social ties and bonds are rupturing—the process is most advanced in America, where we now speak of “loneliness epidemics,” and friendship itself is on a steep decline.

We need cultural stability also. Think of today’s “culture wars,” in which lunatics are perpetually on the attack. Cultural stability means many things—it can mean, for example, in the European sense, public life, community life, in which Europe is so rich. In the American sense, it means hewing true to foundational values, like life, liberty, and happiness—but when those become just lip service paid by institutions, people become cynical and embittered and distrustful.

And we need personal stability, human stability. It’s hard to just be in this world. Do you feel that? Just…existing. Checking the headlines, taking a walk, going to work, paying the bills. This stuff has become increasingly stressful, what used to just be everyday rituals. This sense of human or personal instability is deeply upsetting, and leads to skyrocketing rates of stress, distress, and depression.

So. Human beings need stability. I emphasize the need. It’s in our nature. Sure, some of us are adrenaline fueled risk-seekers. But for most of us, a good life is one that begins with stability. And increasingly, a good life feels out of reach to so many because…

Our Institutions are Producing Instability

What our institutions are producing is instability.

Let’s take a simple example. The Department of Justice is suing a company that makes an algorithm which it says…drives up the rent. This company gathers data from landlords, and then sells it back to them, perpetually recommending that the rent go up, up, up.

That’s institutional instability. Macroeconomists look for “price stability” as a bellwether feature of a healthy economy, and what this company does, the DOJ says, is produce the opposite of price stability.

That’s a tiny example of a larger problem, which is that our institutions produce instability. 

So why is that? It’s because increasingly, they’re incapable of managing the risks of this age.

Coffee’s spiking in price, because of climate change. Other staples will follow. And yet our financial markets and insurance systems offer little way to manage this risk well yet. Hence, another example of price instability.

But the examples go further. Why are our politics so unstable now? Because our political systems aren’t robust and strong enough to manage the rising risks of extremism. What checks and balances we once thought were good enough failed serially over the last few years, culminating, in America, with Jan 6th, and in Europe, with the ongoing rise of the far right.

Why is life so unstable now? Our labour markets don’t create enough good jobs to go around anymore. Westerners will complain too many have been offshored, and that’s true enough, but the dirty secret is that even in poor countries, those new jobs haven’t been enough to create healthy, vibrant middle classes, and so even in India and China, there are crises of unemployment.

At the same time, our economies feel rigged because they just don’t work in any vaguely sensible way. Too little of them goes to the average person, and gains are hoarded at the top. The result is systemic instability, as people go into deeper and deeper debt just to afford a decent life. That’s a result we’ve seen in America, where debt levels climb perpetually, and in South Korea, which faces tremendous challenges with personal debt. And all of that produces deep instability, because of course, it causes shudders through larger economies, as demand waxes and wanes unpredictably.

And all of that, of course, produces sociocultural instability, born of rage and pessimism.

We race further and further away from points of balance and equilibrium, and as a result, life and the world feel out of control.

Paradigm Failure, and What Kamala and Tim’s New Paradigm is Really About: Stability

Our institutions now produce instability, and that’s one chief way in which the old paradigms are failing.

We need to rethink our institutions to produce stability again. And probably, that should come before “growth.” It doesn’t do much good to optimize for growth, after all, if the richest 0.01% are going to have all of it, leaving nothing but…instability…for the rest.

So for me, stability is a new design principle for our institutions. For societies, organizations, companies, what have you. 

And it’s interesting in a way that Kamala and Tim are hitting upon that idea. What is their paradigm really about? We discussed recently how paradigms are bigger than policies, and matter more. I think that their paradigm is about stability.

Helping people afford families. Homes. Kickstarting careers. The “care economy,” as she puts it. The “care” has an end, a purpose, a point: stability.

There’s a lesson there that I think applies broadly. If we can’t redesign our institutions for stability, then what purpose do they serve? In an age of shock, institutions must buffer people from shocks, protect them, so they can nurture, guide, and care for them. This is sort of the essence of care, if you think about it. 

If, on the other hand, institutions just transmit shocks, or worse, amplify them, so they fall on people’s shoulders, all the harder—what’s the point of them? And as we hit that place, people turn away from institutions, and place their trust, instead, in darker promises that demagogues and crackpots make.

We’re in a race against time, in other words. Institutions. Reinvention. Stability. Instability. America’s emerging as a bright spot in the world because, remarkably, its pioneering all the above. Can Kamala and Tim make America stable again? Time will tell. But the world should watch intently, and those of us who are weary of the slippery slope the world is on should be proud of the idea of caring for one another, because in the end, that, caring for one another, and translating it into paradigms and institutions—it’s the only way civilizations ever conquer the old demon of instability.

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