Depeche Mode in their 1990 hit single Enjoy the Silence insisted that “…Words are meaningless and forgettable… They can only do harm…” Actually, words do matter. They reflect very well what is going on in our societies.
Leading dictionaries have recently published their 2024 Word of the Year lists (see the table below). They can be used as short and effective guides to understanding the current state of affairs around the world in general and in the developed world in particular.
Probably, for those who do not like number crunching and financial charts it would be easier to understand our way from democracy and integrity to austerity and squeezed middle to selfie and vape to surreal and post-truth to feminism and climate emergency to pandemic and doomscrolling to gaslighting and goblin mode to polarization and brain rot.
My personal bet is that in 2025 we are likely to face a post-surrealist world as well as attempts to launch a populist perestroika.
For those who did not witness the Soviet perestroika, this word could be associated with democratization, openness, and freedom. For those who saw what was actually happening on the ground, perestroika was associated with clumsy reshuffling, failed overhaul, and utter mayhem.
This might sound exaggerated. But just look at what has been recently happening in seven leading industrialized nations, also known as the “G7 Group”: Trump’s comfortable victory in the United States, snap parliamentary elections and political chaos in France, snap elections in the United Kingdom, snap elections in Japan, snap elections in Germany, potential snap elections in Canada.
In political terms the most stable G7 country right now is Italy which has had 69 governments since the end of World War II in 1945 and whose government is headed by a populist politician. And it says a lot about the current political landscape in the developed world.
However, this does not mean that we should exclusively blame “malign” populist politicians. New ideologies begin to gain strength when things start falling apart, while an old ideology is not capable of providing any convincing justification for this deterioration. If the economic situation and financial circumstances do not improve, these new ideologies, first, become attractive. Then they become popular. Finally, they gradually transform into the dominant ones.
It is clear that the current model of liberal consumerism launched in the 1970s and 1980s is obviously stagnating. Liberal consumerism was the attempt to mitigate the effects of declining rates of technological progress that reached its apogee in the 1950s and 1960s. However, relying on loose monetary policy, financialization, and more debt to support consumption as an engine of economic growth has only had a temporary positive effect, while creating serious long-term economic, financial, and social imbalances. The rate of GDP per capita growth in the developed world keeps declining, while income and wealth inequality has reached its highest level in the last 100 years. This is what lies behind modern political instability and the crisis of liberal consumerism.
However, all these events should not be overdramatized: times inevitably change and we inevitably change with them. History never ends. Life just carries on.
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