A world of contradictions

This page outlines the reasoning that shows that the world is now in a declining phase, which will end with the collapse of the western-dominated world order.

This reasoning is based on the theoretical model and uses the model's technical terms.

In identifying the present era as one of decline, we are dealing with processes that operate on the timescale of decades and centuries. Click here for a summary of the changing fortunes of different regions over the last millennium or so.

If we look solely at recent years, the statistics of crime, say, or economic growth may paint an optimistic picture (though that is changing)--but these must be understood as just a fluctuation within a much bigger trend. Over the last two hundred years, the direction of history is clear. Global powers rise and fall in accordance with their ability to impose order, create wealth and maintain legitimacy in their own and others' eyes. The west is losing out on all three fronts.

Comparing the twentieth century with the nineteenth, the west showed a weaker hegemony, deficient entrepreneurship and creeping self-doubt concerning its traditional values and beliefs. In other words, it showed lower levels of integration, organisation and cohesion. Yet the perceptions deviate far from the reality and people believe that things are getting better and the west's continued ascendancy is assured. Such self-deceit is typical of decline. When the discrepancy is revealed, some kind of crash is inevitable.

	19th century	20th century	Self-deceit
Imposing order	European empires directly ruled subject nations. They imposed their own laws and taxes. A substantial peace prevailed throughout the world.	The United States exerted influence through covert operations and economic pressure. Much of Africa that was well-ordered in colonial times degenerated into turmoil.	"We have the United Nations--that will keep the peace." (Reality: The UN is ineffectual. Whatever authority it has is parasitic on American power.)
Creating wealth	Industrialists created world-spanning enterprises. In Britain they set up a great cotton industry (though the country grows no cotton), buying raw materials in America, and selling finished goods in Asia.	Manufacturing declined before modern technology reached many poor countries. The world lacked entrepreneurs capable of bringing off an industrial revolution in its increasingly forsaken regions.	"We are now globalised--great prosperity will follow." (Reality: In relative terms, world trade has contracted since 1900. Firms try to get rich quick by exploiting cheap labour abroad.)
Maintaining legitimacy	Leading nations believed in the superiority of their culture and religion, and promoted them, without hesitation, around the world. Lesser countries emulated western ways and values.	Leading nations lost faith in the rightness of their conduct. Other peoples, e.g. in East Asia and the Islamic world, were increasingly vocal in rejecting western morals and behaviour.	"We are tolerant and enlightened." (Reality: Moral freedoms have their downside, in the form of selfishness and alienation. Many people need boundaries and a sense of purpose.)

The declining trends of the present era can be divided firstly into the processes of disintegration, disorganisation and discohesion, and secondly into the processes that operate internally within each society and those that operate on the international level affecting the world order as a whole.

Internal disintegration	International disintegration
Internal disorganisation	International disorganisation
Internal discohesion	International discohesion

Internal disintegration

• Despite larger police forces and prison populations, crime has increased since 1900 and clear-up rates have tended to fall. What were once serious crimes, like using obscene language, are now considered trivial.
• In Britain, police officers are more likely to be attacked than in the past. There are some forty unofficial 'no-go' areas. In the US crime rates have eased recently but nearly 1% of the male population is in jail. 'Zero-tolerance' policing, which was proving effective, is being attacked by campaigners.
• In many African countries, government control has disappeared in the last 20 years. Russia is plagued by a severe crime wave.
• Societies have become too complex to govern. The bureaucracies have a life of their own. The executive seems to be in charge but is relatively powerless.
• In Europe, governments are overruled by the European Commission and the European Court of Justice and so are no longer masters of their own destiny.
• Terrorism is rising again. Technological developments are tipping the balance back towards the individual malcontent, making it easy to wreak havoc with Semtex or home-made nerve gas. Computer networks are very vulnerable to disruption.
• CCTV technology has worked in favour of the authority but its impact is limited. Demonstrators have begun wearing gas masks, reducing the usefulness of tear gas for crowd control.
• The free flow of information, with modern media and communications technologies, makes it easier to spread dissent and harder for the authorities to divide and rule.
• Democratic ideas have taken root and challenge government authority. Such pressures are threatening the Arab monarchies. In the west, public policy seems to be perennially failing as people demand, and politicians promise, the impossible.
• The police are increasingly likely to find themselves in court for exceeding their powers. Respect for teachers and other authority figures is diminishing. School indiscipline is an epidemic throughout the developed world.
• Transnational corporations transcend borders and find it easy to defy national governments, avoiding tax and regulation. The biggest firms can practically dictate policy to weaker nations.
• The world's money supply is now out of the hands of any government, which has been a boon to organised crime. Private financial interests have access to huge funds that overwhelm the resources of individual governments.
• International non-governmental organisations have proliferated and maintain a persistent critique of governments large and small.
• Existing countries are breaking up. About a third of the world's nations face some kind of separatist demand.
• Frustration with existing political institutions is helping the popularity of politicians who present themselves as outsiders while embracing authoritarian and nationalistic platforms.
• Private security firms are undergoing a boom, indicating the failure of the political authority to guarantee order.
• Gated communities (residential areas surrounded by 'city walls' with guarded gates) are increasingly common, even in some developed nations. These also reflect government failure to keep order.
• Western militaries are increasingly hampered by the culture of rights. As robust military attitudes are subordinated to all the concerns and sensitivities of the day, recruitment, retention and combat readiness are plummeting. The protective capacity of these armies is being eroded.

Internal disorganisation

• Despite statistics suggesting great economic growth, people in many countries live worse than they did a few decades ago. According to the UN there were 70 countries in which average incomes in 1995 were less than in 1980.
• Absolute living standards may have grown overall, but the gap between rich and poor has expanded massively.
• In the rich countries, there is evidence of penny-pinching in such areas as school meals or the pay and conditions of public officials. This is dressed up as thrift and economic good sense.
• Private and public debt has grown, so that there is a growing gap between fantasy (debt) and reality (productive activity).
• The financial markets are getting larger, more complicated and less stable. Pension funds are huge pools of footloose capital that slosh about the system exaggerating economic movements.
• In Europe, pensions represent a growing burden that will become acute in the coming decades and that has been said to be capable of bankrupting the continent.
• The government bureaucracy has grown far faster than population. It is not entrepreneurial. Some government expenditure is beneficial, providing order and regulating economic activity, but the developed countries seem to be moving into an increasingly parasitic regime.
• Government regulation in such areas as health and safety is an increasing difficulty for businesses. The industrial revolution could never have got started under modern restrictions.
• Throughout the world, unemployment is higher than it has ever been, indicating a failure of entrepreneurship. Large numbers of people are on sick pay for stress-related illness.
• Although people generally imagine that technology is changing with increasing rapidity, the great days of innovation are long over. Modern gadgets are mostly superficial and do not compare with things like radio, aircraft and the motor car.
• Space exploration is failing to live up to its promise. Some technologies, like genetic engineering and nuclear power, are failing to make headway in the face of active opposition. They are condemned as unsafe despite being far safer than more familiar things that people accept every day.
• Environmentalist concerns have become mainstream and promote a mentality of stasis and equilibrium, in opposition to economic growth.
• The quality of education is increasingly under threat. Teachers are becoming hard to recruit and the sanctions they used to maintain order in the classroom have been all but completely removed. Even at university level, among the staff as well as the students, there is evidence for deteriorating standards. Literacy is declining and science courses, which pass on some of this civilisation's most characteristic knowledge, are proving hard to fill.

Internal discohesion

• Art is more concerned with confronting orthodox values than with promoting them. It is characterised by cheapness and hastiness. It is the art of gimmickry, or creativity without skill.
• Taste and fashion have become fragmented. People are compartmentalised by a proliferation of lifestyle choices.
• The notion of assimilating people to a single culture has been given up even as an ideal. Minority groups are encouraged to preserve their separate values and identities. Racists and multiculturalists share the same wrong-headed view that (for example) a black person, no matter what, can never be truly English.
• The 1980s saw individualism promoted as a political creed, and selfishness and social irresponsibility were almost held up as virtues. This may have been toned down lately, but selfishness persists in less ideological forms. Putting oneself first is seen to be desirable and something to be proud of.
• The amount of effort people invest in helping each other has been declining (although this sociological finding is disputed). People are less likely to socialise with their neighbours.
• Citizenship has been reinterpreted as being about rights rather than duties. People are no longer bound together in a framework of mutual and morally constraining duties, but set against each other in a framework of competitive and morally liberating rights. They are encouraged to feel aggrieved and seek redress.
• Selfishness is evident in the growth of personal injury litigation. Far from accepting suffering for the good of the community, people do not even expect to suffer for what they have largely brought upon themselves.
• Welfare entitlements are being cut back. Museums are less likely to be free. Philanthropy is in decline.
• The individualist philosophy dictates that the star players, in business, football or the arts, receive a larger share of the rewards.
• Every kind of social pathology--suicide, alcoholism, murder, mental disorder--has been on the rise over the last twenty years. These reflect the alienation, purposelessness and generally low respect for other human beings that go with individualism.
• Laws and taxes are increasingly invaded around the world, showing a sense of irresponsibility towards fellow citizens. Corruption among public servants is on the increase. In every walk of life, dishonest and venal behaviour is increasingly familiar. There has also been a rise in general crime.
• Technologies like recorded music and the home video have replaced more communal activities. The internet brings people together from all corners of the world but reduces the need for them to interact with their own household.
• There has been a weakening of the bonds between adults and youngsters. The family, the starting point for all social ties, is being discarded and downgraded. Illegitimate births have been increasing almost everywhere. The breakdown of the family is related to a whole host of other social defects, such as child poverty, child abuse, and juvenile crime.
• Male-female relations have become increasingly strained and difficult. Mixed workplaces are a minefield of potentially inappropriate behaviour. As women intrude on their former roles, men have been left looking somewhat superfluous.
• Meritocracy has helped to rupture social bonds between less privileged and more privileged. Competitive individualism has encouraged the notion that the poor are to blame for their failure.
• Separatist sentiments threaten what once seemed to be homogeneous populations. Most of these movements are barely a hundred years old. They are self-consciously regressive and not lingering hangovers from the past.
• Racial conflict is rising throughout the world. In many European countries, right wing parties are thriving again.
• The influence of the church is diminishing. Television is now a stronger presence in most people's lives and it projects a largely neutral perspective on most moral issues. People still need spiritual sustenance but they are finding it in a myriad of cults rather than in a communal church. Individualism has spread to religion.
• The church is also abandoning its own doctrine, to eliminate moral/repressive aspects. Adapting and becoming 'relevant' has not helped church attendances--quite the reverse. Islam is winning converts among young people, mostly women, who praise it for not shifting the goal posts.
• Western civilisation is being delegitimised as hopelessly oppressive and corrupt, being blamed for racism, sexism and imperialism. Past heroes, who made the west what it is, are demonised. Traditional institutions are less likely to be seen as a source of pride and more as bastions of shameful elitism.

International disintegration

• The European empires have broken up and the number of nations states has quadrupled.
• Western countries are losing the resolve to slaughter foreigners in the effort to impose their authority. The 'CNN factor' makes it necessary to limit even enemy casualties.
• The United States is increasingly less keen to bear the costs of global hegemony.
• The coherence of the western bloc is in question, with NATO being weakened by Europe-only defence initiatives.
• Contrary to common perception, the interventions in Kosovo and against Iraq's occupation of Kuwait reveal the limitations on western power. These operations against small, weak states both required a significant fraction of NATO assets and did not end with the west achieving its original demands.
• While the west has recently used aerial bombing to achieve (apparent) successes, it has had a hard time dealing with small, out-of-control militias, in Africa and elsewhere, that do not abide by known rules of warfare.
• Subordinate regions, especially East Asia, are increasingly ready to challenge western authority. Japanese people are dissatisfied with their status. China is growing rapidly in capabilities and self-assertion.
• The world is not standing still. Non-western countries are continually learning from western operations, developing their arsenals and tactics so as not to be the Serbias or Iraqs of the future.
• There is a less easy peace throughout the world. Many countries in Africa and elsewhere are tearing themselves apart while the western powers make little or no effort to intervene.
• Private soldiering services are a growth industry in an increasingly unstable world.
• The United Nations is no substitute for a peacemaking hegemony based on geopolitical power. It has no independent authority and no military forces other than those that are loaned to it. Its members can apply opprobrium rather than force. The UN could not discipline the US and other prominent members.
• The UN is essentially a way of leveraging American power--instead of dominating the world directly, the US dominates the UN agenda, which is an easier task. NATO, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund operate in a similar way.
• Western technologies have spread to every corner of the planet, eroding the west's advantage. Information technologies, which are commercially and militarily important, are inherently cheap and ubiquitous. They are also peculiarly vulnerable to small-scale, terroristic groups.
• International organised crime is increasing, reflecting the weakness of international control. The drugs organisations are world players and pose a growing challenge to western hegemony. Piracy is returning to the high seas.
• Western armies have been shrinking while those of other regions have been expanding.
• Nuclear weapons are beginning to proliferate. The US and China are working on more usable forms of nuclear wepaons. The enthusiasm for missile defence shows that nuclear war is perceived as a returning threat.
• There are numerous potential war triggers emerging, ready to spark conflict if the west's peacekeeping capacity declines. The World War Two losers are beginning to question the settlement that arose from it, and are reopening the issues over which it was fought.
• European integration is creating growing tensions both in member countries and in aspirant member countries that feel their candidacy is being treated with insufficient seriousness.

International disorganisation

• In relative terms, i.e. taking into account population size and overall national product, most countries are less economically interdependent today than they were in the nineteenth century. A proliferation of regional common markets has made trade more compartmentalised, less global.
• The west's prosperity is increasingly based on credit and the entrepreneurship of others. Some countries are losing faith in western credit-worthiness.
• Crises in Russia and East Asia have revealed deep strains in the system of international finance. The world may have bounced back from recent threats of economic meltdown but George Soros argues that this has only left the underlying situation deeply unsound.
• Businesses are treating the liberalisation of trade (removal of tariffs and of restrictions on capital movement) as an opportunity to get rich quick. Instead of creating jobs in great new industries, they export old jobs to where labour is cheap. The trends that critics denounce as 'globalisation' are really attributable to this lack of international entrepreneurship.
• The economic co-operation zones inhibit trade as much as promote it. Like Imperial China, the European Union imposes safety restrictions and standardisation in a way that stamps out diversity, initiative and originality. Its Common Agricultural Policy quite deliberately pays farmers to destroy crops and leave land idle.
• There is an underlying tide of protectionism throughout the world, despite the existence of the World Trade Organisation. Tariff barriers have fallen dramatically but trade is restricted by quotas, technical standards, and health and safety regulations. Trade sanctions are an increasingly popular instrument.
• The wealth gap between the richest and poorest nations is large and growing larger. The third world's relative poverty is a recent phenomenon and is by no means inevitable.
• Despite decades of concern with development, at the United Nations, World Bank and other organisations, little progress has been made and poverty, famine and civil strife persist. Western aid has been of questionable value and motivation, being used as an instrument of foreign policy and with the real beneficiaries being western contractors.
• The poor countries now owe enormous sums to the rich. They have little to show for the massive influx of funds, which were largely stolen by dictators or spent on white elephant projects. All the major debtors are in default. Debt forgiveness helps the western financial institutions by giving them a face-saving way out of the situation created by their own ill-judged lending decisions, at the expense of western taxpayers. It does not help the third world populations for whom debt is not forgiven completely but simply made less ludicrously disproportionate.

International discohesion

• The long-standing tendency for the size of social units to increase has stalled. Despite their membership of the European Union, France, Britain and Germany show no signs of merging into a common form with a common language and common tastes. Countries may be queuing up to join the EU, but not to lose their national identities--some aspirants (e.g. Slovakia) have only just broken away from larger units.
• Associations that have bound nations together across cultural boundaries are becoming less convincing, and nations are reverting to type. America's ties with Japan, South Korea and Pakistan are all weakening.
• Relations between nations at the United Nations have become increasingly conflictual as membership has grown.
• The spectacle of Muslims allying with the west to turn back Iraq's occupation of Kuwait suggested international cohesion. However, Muslim populations were actually equivocal about western involvement despite the victim being Muslim as well as the aggressor.
• Ethnic conflict has been rising steadily around the world. Old enmities are flaring up--Greek/Turkish; Malay/Chinese; Islamic/Christian; Arab/Israeli.
• East Asians are growing resentful at the patronising treatment doled out by the west, while China and Japan are increasingly serious rivals.
• Contrary to popular assumption, the spread of democracy and the free market does not make countries inherently pro-western. When the west seemed all-powerful, countries did indeed adopt its values as they adopted its techniques. Yet they have no desire to be permanently subordinate and they have been gaining renewed confidence in promoting their own cultural values.
• The west's ability to apply moral pressure in the international system is undermined by its transparent hypocrisy. Its ethical record is deplorable, not only in the era of colonialism but also more recently when it has tolerated oppressive regimes so long as they pursue policies broadly favourable to western interests and destabilised popular ones for not doing so.
• A mutual enmity between the Islamic and Christian worlds is increasingly felt on both sides. Westerners regard Muslims as brutal, violent and repressive. Muslims, with arguably greater justification, have much the same view of the west. Islam is not inherently extremist. Its modern fundamentalism is a form of cultural resistance.
• There is a divergence of interest between relatively rich and poor nations. As Francis Fukuyama observes, people in rich countries seem to care more about baby seals than mass starvation in Africa. Aid is shrinking as a proportion of national product. As the disadvantaged countries become better off in absolute terms, their ability to defy the west is growing and the clash of interests has potentially serious consequences.

Return to home page