My friend Sue Divin is an Irish novelist and peace worker who grew up with, and writes about, the legacy of the Irish “Troubles,” a 30-year period marked by car bombings, murders, and intergenerational grief and anguish. The “Troubles” formally ended with the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 – but their impacts are still being felt.
In her second novel, Truth Be Told, Divin’s 16-year-old Catholic protagonist Tara Connelly speaks to her Catholic and Protestant family members about what she has learned during the past few months about the fruit of arrogance, stubbornness, and self-doubt.
“I want to call out blindness. Blindness in our communities. Blindness in a system. Blindness in how we’ve got used to things being the way they are, so we never even ask how things should change. I don’t even know a name for it, but it’s broken. Broken for generations.”
In 2019 Ireland, the broken government had not even met in three years.
Brokenness in 2024 was all around us. The two major parties in the U.S., the Israelis and their Iran-backed attackers, the Russian people and the Ukrainian people. The European neo-colonialist elites and the African people who still see Europe as trying to control an entire continent’s development.
And let’s not forget the climate-focused environmental activists who fail to recognize that other environmental problems (including human poverty and disease) are far more urgent.
Let us also admit that war is the single greatest destroyer of the environment that humanity has ever deployed.
War kills enormous numbers of people, pollutes the air, waters, and land, and siphons billions from productive projects that could improve living conditions for humans, animals, and plants. Worst, even an attitude of war prevents collaborations among people with common interests.
The current “world order” thrives on exacerbating conflict and spends little energy on conflict resolution – whether on border policy, social issues, trade issues, or ideology. The U.S. has been enduring the most divisive political environment since, perhaps, the 1850s (and its aftermath).
But is all that about to change?
Rather than through organizing against “climate change,” perhaps melting the political ice requires admitting that the pendulum has swung too far? Can debate, which has shrunk to epithets, or worse, as many refuse to rationally seek solutions to real issues, ever be restored?
Much of the blame for the escalating threat of nuclear war lies with the rhetoric and actions by political elites to, as Al Gore put it, have made decarbonization “the central organizing principle of human civilization.”
The phrenetic rush to declare fealty to “Net Zero” carbon emissions (but really carbon dioxide, the gas of life) has sparked policy absurdities that have devastated economies (while making the rich that much wealthier) and brought corporations, even nations, to the brink of bankruptcy (and beyond).
The very idea of a “central organizing principle,” which requires a Hobbesian Leviathan to exercise unlimited power, is in direct conflict with what America’s founders called “unalienable rights” held by each individual. The purpose of the state, they declared, was to protect those rights rather than to run roughshod over them (as politicians today insist is absolutely necessary).
Today, we see the pompous electric vehicle mandates falling by the wayside as the favored machines have proven to be as flawed as the ones they were to replace, and as other technologies may reduce emissions without as many downsides. The biggest obstacle those technologies face is the tremendous subsidies that governments have imposed to promote their flawed machines.
The same goes for the campaign against farming, which many want to replace with laboratory-grown “food.” Common people know that the food they have relied upon for millennia is real and that they can grow or nurture it themselves. Today, there is even a growing counter movement against the additives that may be a contributor to human and animal diseases.
Ongoing attempts by elites to control, or rather inhibit, economic growth in Africa that most Africans see as vital to their futures may also be coming to an abrupt end. The neocolonialists (who hide behind the smokescreen of “climate change”) long ago forgot that old saying that true leadership is earned through service and not by subjugation.
Suppose world leaders can convince Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs to stop sending their citizens to kill each other. As with much of Europe in World War II, the war has brought environmental devastation along with generational decimation. But Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs increase their wealth while the common people suffer. In any future peace, will those most impacted make the decisions about their own well-being?
As for Gaza, beachfront property has been rendered worthless by decades of hostility. In little over a decade the kingpins who directed Hamas’ blitzkrieg in October 2023 became billionaires and let their citizens starve. The hated Israelis could be teaching their neighbors how to turn even barren land into lush farmland but for a lack of polity – yet hardly anyone dares suggest that these bitter enemies might profit from reconciliation.
The Internet has many downsides, but its greatest upside is that people everywhere in the world can have real-time access to how others live, how to build just about anything, and how people are creating wealth and building futures that they have at least a hand in controlling. The democratization of knowledge is its greatest gift, but it must be protected from the same spirit that burned the library at Alexandria.
The fact that elites continue to strive to censor information that threatens their hegemony is proof that “the truth will set them free,” and thus that Leviathan, long in the hands of the few, may be on the verge of democratization.
Leviathan has also fought the cryptocurrency revolution, another innovation whose advocates insist is the pathway toward democratization of wealth and prosperity – and thus input into how societies ought to work for their benefit.
If, as our own Declaration of Independence (from an English Leviathan) insists, “all [humans] are created equal” and are endowed with the rights of life, liberty, and the right to determine their own futures, then we should welcome these democratizing innovations brought by technology – and, as the Chinese once said, “let a thousand flowers bloom.”
But that can only happen when those gifted with leadership acknowledge the value of human freedom and learn better to listen to other voices and find common ground on which to build a truly better world. Mandates are a tool of tyrants. Standards are the product of experimentation, comparison, and agreement – and continual refinement.
In Divin’s book, Tara’s acknowledgment of brokenness led to a rebuilding of broken relationships and discoveries of relationships long lost and forgotten that added value to her life and the lives of those in her circle.
It is past time that our global society, and indeed our own nation, recognizes and acknowledges its brokenness that has divided families, cities, and even nations and find common ground. The alternative could be total collapse of our civilization.
So maybe, just maybe, the common people the world over who suffer from corruption, gamesmanship, and other foibles of the ruling classes can themselves begin to direct the public discourse toward things that actually matter to their own lives.
Duggan Flanakin is a senior policy analyst at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow who writes on a wide variety of public policy issues.
