There’s a pervasive uncertainty, an overwhelming feeling that those in power lack any real vision for the future, that they’re just kind of flailing. They might try out good ideas, but they don’t seem to have a clear sense of why. And they know that we know that.
Somehow after the excitement of the triumph of liberal - democratic capitalism in the 80's and 90's we’ve ended up here, in this uncertain place. We can’t see the future and we constantly replay the past to ourselves. We have a sense that something is ending.
There were major shifts in power during the 1980s and ’90s – primarily away from politics and mostly toward finance, though also other areas. But also there was a significant internal shift in consciousness. We are very different creatures from the human beings of 1978. The new individualism that rose up ate away at the foundations of political democracy.
From a political point of view, we’re waiting for someone to show us how to escape our obsession with the past. One of the things this age kind of suddenly realizes, deep down, is that it’s time to stop looking back and replaying the past, and to build something genuinely new. The internet was for many years put forward as the answer to this. But it has failed.