The Happy Society and its Enemies

The previous cluster essay argued that the world is, by any fair judgement, widely discontent, and seemingly becoming more so. This cluster tries to understand the root causes of that discontent and the barriers to a system that genuinely drives the growth of global happiness.

The frameworks used to explain happiness are unfortunately less complete and convincing than their proponents sometimes claim. The World Happiness Report’s explanatory variables capture something real, but they were not derived from a theory of human flourishing; they were identified empirically, and the model they produce is better at describing the surface of happiness than its roots. We know that wealth, social support, freedom, and low corruption are associated with higher reported wellbeing. We know much less about why, in what combination, and whether the same factors operate the same way at different levels of human development.

This creates a methodological problem for any attempt to explain what is going wrong. If we cannot state with confidence what the full set of conditions for human flourishing are, we cannot simply inventory their absence and call that an explanation of unhappiness. A different approach is needed.

The approach taken here is a reversal of the usual direction of inquiry. Rather than asking what makes people happy and checking whether governments are providing it, this essay asks the opposite question: are there structural reasons to believe that governments are organised in a way that systematically fails to pursue sustainable wellbeing? And are there features of modern life — some of them functions of governance, some of them not — that predictably work against human flourishing regardless of how governments perform?

My view is that the answer to both questions is yes. This essay traces the main reasons why, as a bridge between the empirical symptoms catalogued in the previous cluster and the ideas for structural and policy responses developed in the clusters that follow.

Government’s Don’t Govern to Make their Citizens Happy

Governments are not organised around happiness. This is not a criticism of the people who run them; it is an observation about the systems within which those people operate. It is a big assertion, but I feel comfortable making it, since theory and practice both point toward an absence of happiness as the central organising principle of government.

What governments are organised around is a combination of survival, bureaucratic continuity, the management of competing interest group pressures, and to a greater or lesser extent depending on the political system, self-enrichment. These objectives are not the same as maximising the sustainable wellbeing of citizens, and where they diverge — as they routinely do — the institutional incentives act against the long-term best interests of citizens. Electoral cycles are short; wellbeing policy is long. Political coalitions are assembled from interests that are organised, vocal and often seek to protect the status quo; the interests of citizens who are diffuse, unorganised, and future-oriented have no equivalent lobbying force behind them. The interests of the rich and powerful can be easily leveraged into political and personal benefit; the interests of the poor and powerless not so much. The result is a systematic bias toward policies that generate visible, near-term benefits for politically salient constituencies, and against policies that invest in durable conditions for broad flourishing.

This misalignment between the interests of rulers and the ruled is not unique to democracy — it is, if anything, more severe in systems that lack even the imperfect accountability mechanisms that competitive elections provide. It is best understood as a systemic failure of governance systems, embedded in the institutional architecture rather than in individual failings.

The essays in this cluster trace some of the specific mechanisms through which this misalignment operates: the unchallenged assumptions that protect the status quo from scrutiny, the institutional sclerosis that prevents creative adaptation, the way sovereignty is routinely invoked to protect governing elites rather than the citizens they govern, the extractive institutional arrangements that have persisted in former colonies long after independence, and the welfare systems of rich democracies that were designed around the logic of minimum adequacy rather than the question of what would genuinely support human flourishing.

These are all, in their different ways, manifestations of the same root failure: the absence of a clear, explicit, and enforceable objective function for government that aligns what those who govern are rewarded for, with what the governed actually need.

A key question though is why has this seemingly become more of an issue now, when the post-war order has had these deficiencies for the past 70 to 80 years? I think there are four factors feeding the current mood.

The Emotional Labour of Complexity

The first is complexity — not the existence of complex problems, which is unavoidable, but the cognitive burden that modern life imposes on ordinary citizens simply in order to participate adequately in it.

The world is on a constant trajectory toward complexity. Global innovation across all fields continues to propel the world forward, but this comes at the cost of ever greater sophistication that demands increasingly deep and specialised knowledge.

The range of decisions that a citizen of a contemporary democracy is expected to make competently has expanded enormously over the past half century. Navigating healthcare systems, pension and superannuation choices, tax obligations, financial products, insurance contracts, digital privacy settings, and the cascade of administrative requirements that attach to employment, property, and family life requires a sustained investment of intellectual labour that earlier generations were not asked to make. This is before the citizen turns to the public sphere and is confronted with the expectation that they will form views on issues like climate policy, trade economics, immigration, monetary policy, and the governance of artificial intelligence — each of which is, in its full complexity, a specialist domain.

The average citizen, and even many political actors, are being disempowered by the unachievable levels of knowledge required to have an informed view on the policy challenges that confront the modern world.

The psychologist Barry Schwartz identified the paradox of choice: that beyond a certain threshold, expanding the range of options available to people does not increase their sense of freedom or satisfaction — it increases their anxiety and reduces their decision quality. The modern world has generalised this paradox across most domains of life.

Furthermore, the cognitive tax of navigating complexity is not distributed equally; it falls hardest on those with the least education, the least time, and the fewest resources to hire others to manage it on their behalf. But it is experienced, to varying degrees, across the income distribution. And its cumulative effect — the sense that keeping up requires more than one can reasonably give, that the world has become too intricate to feel at home in — is a plausible contributor to the ambient disaffection that the previous cluster documented.

The Outrage Machine

The third factor is the information environment in which modern citizens live — one that has emerged from the intersection of human psychology and commercial incentive, and that no government has found an adequate response to.

Human attention is finite and, under conditions of information abundance, intensely competed for. The platforms that now mediate most public discourse are not neutral conduits for information; they are attention-maximising systems whose commercial logic drives them toward content that generates the highest engagement per unit of time. The consistent finding of the research literature, and the internal conclusion of platform engineers who have become its most credible critics, is that the content that maximises engagement is content that provokes strong negative emotion — outrage, fear, contempt, indignation. These are not incidental features of the attention economy. They are structural outputs of systems optimised to hold human attention as long as possible.

The consequence is an information environment that systematically amplifies conflict, distorts the perceived prevalence of extreme positions, and rewards the most inflammatory version of any argument over the most accurate one. This is not a political or big business conspiracy. It is simply the outcome of the incentive structures as they exist, but the effects are real and measurable. The psychological literature on chronic exposure to negative arousal is unambiguous: it is associated with reduced subjective wellbeing, increased anxiety, and a diminished capacity for the kind of reflective, nuanced engagement that democratic self-governance requires. Citizens are not merely receiving a distorted picture of the world; they are being neurologically conditioned, by the structure of the systems they use, toward emotional states that make happiness harder to sustain and collective problem-solving harder to achieve.

The Unanswered Question

The outrage machine isn’t merely a general amplifier of negative emotion — it specifically exploits the need for belonging. The algorithmic amplification of conflict, tribal identity, and in-group versus out-group dynamics works precisely because it plays on human emotions around loyalty, authority, and sanctity.

The factors described so far are, in different ways, structural problems: amenable in principle to better institutional design, clearer mission, or reformed incentives. The ability of the media to trigger intense emotional responses points to a discontent that is more resistant to this kind of treatment, because it operates in a fundamentally different register — not the register of policy and argument, but the register of identity, emotion, and belonging.

The political psychologist Jonathan Haidt has written extensively about an uncomfortable finding: that moral and political judgements are made primarily by the intuitive and emotional system, with the reasoning faculty functioning largely to generate post-hoc justifications for where instinct has already arrived. His metaphor is the rider and the elephant: the elephant goes where it is inclined to go, and the rider — reason — constructs a narrative for why that was the right direction. The practical implication is that rational argument, however well-evidenced, has very limited capacity to move people whose deeper orientations are already committed elsewhere. Evidence is evaluated not on its merits but on whether it confirms or challenges what the emotional system has already concluded.

Haidt goes further, identifying six distinct foundations on which moral and political intuitions are built: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, and liberty. What he finds, across extensive cross-cultural research, is that progressive political movements primarily activate the first two, while nationalist and conservative movements activate all six — including the three that most directly address identity, group membership, and the felt integrity of a community. This asymmetry helps explain something that policy debate consistently fails to account for: why the surge in populist right politics across the rich world has proved so resilient to rational rebuttal. When citizens are drawn to movements that give them a clear account of who they are and where they belong, and the mainstream responds with arguments about economic management, the mainstream is answering a different question than the one being asked.

This matters as an enemy of happiness for a reason that goes beyond electoral politics. The longing for identity, belonging, and cultural coherence that drives these movements is not false consciousness or ignorance — it is a legitimate human need, and one that the more mobile, more individualised, and more complex world that prosperity and globalisation have produced has left incompletely addressed. The movements that capture and articulate this longing — providing a clear enemy, a mythology of loss, and an unambiguous tribe — are not providing the conditions that the evidence associates with durable flourishing. They are providing emotional relief that substitutes for it. The result, when such movements succeed, tends to be governments energetically committed to the performance of cultural affirmation and systematically unequipped to deliver the sustainable wellbeing that the people who voted for them actually need. The enemy, in this case, is not the emotional need itself — that need is real and deserves a serious political response. The enemy is the structural resistance of mainstream political systems to acknowledge and address it, which leaves the space to be occupied by those who will exploit it instead.

The Dog that Caught the Car

The longing for identity and belonging is, at its root, a longing for a life that feels meaningful — and the question of how government addresses that is the question of self-actualisation. Belonging is where the failure shows up politically; self-actualisation is where it lives at the individual level. They’re different expressions of the same unaddressed frontier.

More and more people have ascended Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and the implications of that ascent are not merely benign. When physiological and safety needs are reliably met, human aspiration shifts toward belonging, esteem, and ultimately self-actualisation — toward a life of meaning, purpose, and authentic identity. Each generation in the prosperous world has arrived with a higher implicit baseline for what a good life looks like.

A consequence of this is that any regression — housing insecurity, employment uncertainty, threats to physical safety, the erosion of institutional trust — is experienced not merely as a practical setback but as a psychologically destabilising reversal. A generation that expected to continue its parents’ upward progress is instead navigating conditions that feel like a slide backward on the hierarchy. The distress this produces is real and measurable: it shows up in declining happiness scores among younger cohorts in wealthy countries, in collapsing birth rates, and in a diffuse but persistent sense that the promise of modernity is being withdrawn. At the same time, the billions in the developing world who have not yet secured their place on the lower rungs of the hierarchy watch the wealthy world’s governance failures undermine the international cooperation on which their own ascent depends.

More generally though, even where people are arriving at a point where they have all of the trappings of prosperity, Government is not actively creating an environment for them to flourish and achieve self-actualisation. The rich world has generally reached a point where scarcity is no longer a meaningful problem, but it hasn’t psychologically adapted to a post-materialist world. The focus of governments and voters on material outcomes reflects a genuine feature of human psychology, but one that distorts as much as it reveals. Two well-documented phenomena are relevant here.

The first is that people assess their material circumstances not in absolute terms but relative to those around them. Richard Easterlin’s landmark 1974 analysis — now known as the Easterlin paradox — found that while richer individuals within a country tend to report higher life satisfaction than poorer ones, countries do not become measurably happier as they grow wealthier over time. The most plausible explanation is that what people are tracking is not their absolute standard of living but their position within the distribution. A rise in income that leaves relative position unchanged produces little lasting improvement in reported wellbeing. This finding has been both replicated and contested at length, but its core insight — that social comparison mediates the relationship between wealth and happiness in ways that make aggregate growth a poor proxy for aggregate flourishing — has survived the scrutiny.

The second phenomenon is diminishing returns. Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton’s widely cited 2010 analysis found that day-to-day emotional wellbeing improved with income up to roughly $75,000 per year in the United States, but showed little further improvement beyond that threshold, even as people’s overall evaluation of their lives continued to rise. More recent research has complicated this picture, suggesting that for most people wellbeing continues to improve gradually with income beyond that level, while for those who are already unhappy it plateaus earlier. The picture is therefore less clean than the original finding suggested, but the underlying principle holds: the marginal contribution of additional wealth to experienced wellbeing declines sharply at incomes well below what wealthy societies now consider middle-class. Add to this the well-documented phenomenon of hedonic adaptation — the tendency of people to return to a stable emotional baseline as improved circumstances become normalised — and the case for treating GDP growth as the primary instrument of collective flourishing becomes difficult to sustain.

Together, these two effects suggest that in wealthy societies, the pursuit of greater material prosperity as a route to greater happiness is largely self-defeating: people habituate to what they have, reassess their position relative to others who have also improved, and find themselves on a treadmill rather than a ladder. The wellbeing gap that remains in rich societies — the anxiety, disconnection, and loss of meaning that this project has described — is more plausibly a function of non-material deficits than material ones. Martin Seligman’s PERMA framework, developed through the positive psychology movement he founded, identifies the elements of flourishing that the hedonic focus tends to obscure: positive emotion, engagement with meaningful activity, quality relationships, a sense of purpose, and genuine achievement. These are not luxuries for people who have solved the material question. They are, the evidence suggests, where the remaining wellbeing gap actually lives — and they are almost entirely absent from the objective function of contemporary governance.

A Rupture

The fifth reason the world seems to be going backwards was articulated poignantly by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in an unusually direct speech at Davos in January 2026. Drawing on a celebrated 1978 essay by Czech writer and subsequent President Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless, he observed that the authority of the world order derived from everyone performing as though it were binding — but that too many performers have now stopped.

He described this moment as a rupture, and pointed unambiguously at the Trump administration as the actor that had pushed the system over the edge. This may be true, but it does need to be honestly recognised as having occurred in a context where China and Russia had both been actively and overtly working to subvert the established order, even as they took advantage of it where it was in their interests to do so.

Once it becomes obvious that the pretence has ended, it becomes self-defeating for any player to continue pretending it hasn’t, and the system necessarily unravels. This is the reality of the world we are now confronting. A fragile system has broken, leaving a void. What matters here is its cumulative effect: a world in which the normative infrastructure for collective action is arguably more dysfunctional than it has been at any point since 1945, precisely at a time when the demands on it are unprecedented.

The world order as it existed was far from perfect, but it provided something real nonetheless: a framework of norms, institutions, and shared performance within which cooperation was possible, and states could operate with some degree of predictability. That framework has essentially unravelled, and there is no clear and coherent alternative.

It’s Always the System

There is a question that sits underneath the whole of this project, and it is time to ask it directly: if the problems are as serious as the previous essays have argued — the rupturing of the international order, the unaddressed trajectory of climate change, the structural forces concentrating wealth and eroding democratic legitimacy, governments failing to meet the aspirations of their citizens — then why is nothing fundamental changing?

The conventional answer is political. The wrong people are in power, or the right people lack courage, or public attention is too fragmented to sustain the pressure needed for reform. These explanations are not wrong. But they are incomplete. They locate the problem in the individuals inhabiting the system rather than in the system itself.

The common thread through the factors discussed in this essay — the structural misalignment in governance, the burden of complexity, ever rising expectations, the negative arousal of the information environment, and the visible rupture in the performance of international cooperation — is that none of them is self-correcting.

W. Edwards Deming was an American statistician and management theorist whose work transformed Japanese manufacturing after the Second World War, and whose ideas eventually shaped the global quality management movement. At the centre of his thinking was a deceptively simple insight: that when an organisation consistently produces poor outcomes, the cause is almost never the failings of individual workers, it is the system they are working within. He put it with bluntness: every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. Persistent failure is not an accident. It is what the system was built — or allowed to evolve — to produce. The implication is equally blunt: if you want different outcomes, you cannot achieve them by trying harder within the existing system. You have to change the system.

The attention economy is optimised for engagement, not for the conditions of human flourishing; it will continue to produce outrage as long as outrage maximises the relevant metric. Bureaucratic complexity accumulates because the incentives within systems favour adding requirements rather than removing them; simplification is nobody’s job. Governance misalignment persists because the people with the greatest power to reform institutional arrangements are those who have arrived at power through those arrangements and have the least incentive to alter them.

The implication is that the response needs to be systemic. Better individual choices within the existing information environment help at the margin; they do not address the structural incentive. More capable citizens navigating complexity better is valuable; it does not reduce the complexity. Better politicians within the existing governance architecture produce better outcomes within the existing constraints; they do not change the constraints.

When protesters sloganeer about smashing the system, they are, on this analysis, not wrong, or even necessarily extreme. The problem we have had is that there is a shortage of fresh and innovative ideas. Once you smash the system, you need to replace it with something. But what is that something?

The challenge I have set myself through this project is to generate ideas as to what a different architecture could look like — both at the level of governance institutions, and at the level of the framework that a government genuinely oriented toward maximising the wellbeing of its citizens would work within. In the following two clusters I will float a range of such ideas. These suggestions fall short of smashing anything, which is probably a good thing. There is also no guarantee that they represent a sufficient set of solutions to make genuine progress on building a happier world. If nothing else though, they can hopefully start a thought process about what an evolved system could look like, one that is genuinely built around an objective of maximising sustainable wellbeing.