How We Got Here—and What Needs To Come Next
During the 15 years I spent in Eastern Europe, I saw more than my share of upheaval. When I arrived in Poland in 1997, there were monuments to dysfunction everywhere you looked. In Warsaw, Stalin’s horrid Palace of Culture dominated the skyline. In Krakow, the abandoned frame of the Szkieletor building stood frozen since the 1970s.
I was there during the 1998 Ruble crisis that shook the former Soviet Union and, two years later, the dotcom crash rippled throughout the world bringing down former corporate juggernauts such as Enron and Worldcom. During the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, I saw first-hand how a society could turn itself inside out and come out the other side a better, more hopeful place.
Yet I’ve never seen anything like this. I think what’s different now is that America is seen as a primary source of disruption, instead of a source of stability. We’ve made terrible mistakes before, such as the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, but we never lost the world’s trust like we have today. This time, the problem is us and we need to understand how we got here.
They’re Screwing Us
The most obvious explanation for the current state is that someone is screwing us. And there’s no shortage of suspects: the billionaire class, the Kochs, the crypto-bros, the deep state, big tech, big pharma, Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, George Soros—the list goes on. It’s a story as old as the Illuminati: a shadowy, all-powerful cabal pulling the strings behind the scenes to enrich themselves and exert control over the masses
Yet truly nefarious people are actually extraordinarily rare. In fact, in all of my travels, I’ve never actually met one. I’ve met plenty of people who’ve done all manner of bad things, but each thought of themselves as inherently good, even if they had to go to great lengths to rationalize their actions. Most people try pretty hard to do what they think is right.
What is certainly true is that our institutions—public and private— have failed us and, according to Gallup, we no longer trust that they have our best interests at heart. The people who work in them—and their leaders especially—have grown too distant from the constituencies they are supposed to serve.
Sarah Wynn-Williams gives an intriguing account in her recent book about Meta, Careless People. People with immense wealth and power can afford to be careless. They’re insulated in ways the rest of us aren’t. They attract hangers-on who flatter them and validate them. When things go wrong they can, to paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, “retreat back into their money and let other people clean up the mess they made.”
What we need to look for in our leaders is the opposite. They don’t need to be geniuses or superheroes, nor do they need to have all the answers. But they do need to care. They need to have curiosity and, as was said about Franklin Delano Roosevelt , a first-class temperament. We don’t need to love our leaders, but we need them to love us.
Poorly Designed Systems
While populists on the left and the right tend to look for distinct villains, technocrats focus on the systems we build. Elon Musk, quite famously, has a five-step process to design systems. On the left, a very different theory is emerging in books like Why Nothing Works by Marc Dunkelman and Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.
Perhaps not surprisingly, these theories are diametrically opposed to each other. Musk argues that systems should be constantly disrupted and stress-tested to expose weaknesses, then rebuilt with only what is essential. The “Abundance Agenda,” for lack of a better name, insists that government initiatives have become too vulnerable to disruption, making it nearly impossible for public policy to achieve anything meaningful.
Each approach has some credence to it. Musk has built fantastically successful enterprises and, like any bureaucracy, government can benefit from some disruption now and then. The evidence for the “Abundance Agenda” is striking: from high-speed rail to electric car chargers to renewable energy, it’s become far too difficult to build things in America.
Yet I’m always wary of taking an engineering approach to human affairs. Sure, Musk’s can iterate his way through exploding rockets, but take the same approach to AIDS prevention in Africa or democracy promotion and the consequences can be disastrous in ways that aren’t immediately obvious or measurable. And while the Abundance Agenda points to real areas for improvement, it’s more a reframing of our challenges than a full solution.
The simple truth is that you can’t separate systems from their stakeholders—and those stakeholders are people with their own biases, values, and ambitions. Unless you can address those, tweaking systems won’t do much good.
The Societal Cycle
Another possibility is that we are just caught up in a societal cycle. The mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot suggested that systems are governed by Noah effects and Joseph effects—periods of discontinuity followed by continuity. Pressures build up gradually beneath the surface and then erupt all at once, disrupting the previous order and then paving the way for a new one.
There’s certainly evidence that history converges and cascades around certain points. 1776 gave birth to America, capitalism and James Watt’s steam engine. 1848 and 1968 were both years that saw massive waves of uprisings ripple across the globe. The Berlin Wall fell and the World Wide Web emerged in a single month in 1989.
In Abundance, Klein and Thompson note that the New Deal era took shape in the 1930s, eventually giving way to the Neoliberal order that began in the late 1970s and started to unravel in the 2010s. By that logic, we’re about due for something different. I’ve been writing for over a decade that, with four major shifts underway, our current moment bears striking resemblance to the 1920s and we can expect a major realignment.
Yet again, human agency matters. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was in no way inevitable nor was Donald Trump. Looking back, we can trace the forces that led to events like the American Revolution, but the principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution were wholly human creations.
People have the power to choose and those choices have consequences. Now is a time for choosing and we need to choose wisely.
No Heroes Are Coming. We’re All We Have
In his first inaugural address, Ronald Reagan declared, “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem,” and vowed to unleash the private sector. His deregulation led to the Savings and Loan crisis. Then came the dotcom bubble and crash, two long and destructive wars, the Great Financial Crisis, and the Covid pandemic.
Each time there was a villain to execrate: Big Business, Wall Street, Neocons, The Military-Industrial complex, Big Banks, Big Pharma and, of course, nameless government bureaucrats (sometimes also known as public servants). At this point, there’s no one left to blame but us. We can kick the bums out, disrupt our systems and invent new theories of the case, but at some point, we will also have to point the finger at ourselves.
In Eastern Europe, I saw how broken societies crumble. Yet I also saw how they can rebuild. When I first arrived in Poland in 1997, it seemed like nothing worked. Today, it is an advanced economy. Warsaw—having suffered the double misfortune of being destroyed by Hitler and rebuilt by Stalin—is now a modern metropolis, with clean streets, bustling shops and low crime. They were able to achieve all this because they chose a better way.
Once we accept that we are the problem, it becomes clear that we can also be the solution. There are no heroes coming to save us. We need to accept that the America we knew is gone and the current order—or disorder—cannot stand. Rebuilding isn’t just about systems, it’s about understanding our bonds to each other and renewing shared values so that we can regain a shared sense of purpose and common endeavor.”
The end of one order always marks the beginning of another. It is now a time to rebuild. As Bill Clinton said in his first inaugural, “There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.” We got here by making bad choices. We need to start making better ones. The only way out is through—and it starts with ourselves.
Greg Satell is Co-Founder of ChangeOS, a transformation & change advisory, an international keynote speaker, host of the Changemaker Mindset podcast, bestselling author of Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change and Mapping Innovation, as well as over 50 articles in Harvard Business Review. You can learn more about Greg on his website, GregSatell.com, follow him on Twitter @DigitalTonto, his YouTube Channel and connect on LinkedIn.
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