After the Bell: Is it Doomsday? Or is it Wednesday?

People are making end-of-the-world jokes like there’s no tomorrow (ba-dum-dum). They see it in the distrust of political institutions, in grand and growing cleavages in society, in the crass quality of politicians, and this weekend, in a nutcase trying to assassinate a (nutcase) candidate for the highest office in the US.

Some of the evidence is well-founded: the proportion of US citizens who have either “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of trust in the US Congress is down to 8% of the population. It’s funny until you realise it’s not funny.

But it’s not just the US. If “did not vote” was a candidate in the recent UK elections, it would have won 606 of the 650 seats.  The Wall Street Journal summed up the recent impasse that followed the French election with the headline: “Actually, French voters have no idea what they want”. We can snigger but, to some extent, in SA you could make the same argument about our recent election.

For something so horrible, the idea has a weird attractiveness. The sheer number of books written about the “End of Civilisation” or the “Decline of Society”, or something similar is overwhelming.

Steuart Pennington, writer of the blog South Africa — The Good News points out that the Middle Eastern colonial soldier, scholar and author Sir John Glubb spent much of his retirement researching 13 major civilisations, starting with the Assyrian Empire in 859 BCE,  for his book The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival.

He found that each civilisation lasts about 10 generations and they move through the same six ages:

1. The age of pioneers;


2. The age of conquest;


3. The age of commerce;


4. The age of affluence;


5. The age of intellect; and


6. The age of decadence.

Since the Western world has been the dominant civilisation for the past 250 to 300 years, by this logic, the “West” might be well in the “decadence” phase.

The decadence phase is characterised by … pretty negative behaviour, including narcissism, consumerism, materialism, nihilism, fanaticism and high levels of frivolity. A celebrity culture worships athletes, actors and singers. The masses are distracted by entertainment and sporting events; they abandon moral restraint, shirk duties and insist on entitlements. The leaders believe they are impervious and will govern forever.

OMG, this sounds exactly like us! And not just the West, but the whole world.

Or does it? Is the world actually “declining”? The Financial Times on Wednesday carried a funny take on the US election by the Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev, who reflects on the years when his country was part of the Soviet bloc and the succession of ageing leaders who oversaw, or perhaps didn’t, the end of the Soviet regime.

In 1982, Leonid Brezhnev died at the age of 75. He was replaced by the chief of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, who lasted 15 months. Andropov was succeeded by the 73-year-old Konstantin Chernenko, who lasted less than a year. What Chernenko sought to do is unknown because he died only a year after his ascension.

When Mikhail Gorbachev, the youngest member of the politburo, came to power in 1985, the task of renewing the regime had become mission impossible, says Krastev: “The Soviet Union might be said to have died from the exhaustion of queueing to bid farewell to its leaders.” But here is the thing: the US president at the time was 73; a lot younger than the two current candidates, but not exactly a spring chicken.

My advice would be this: if you want to know what is happening in the world, the place not to find out is in politics. Politics is and always has been haphazard, erratic, fluctuating, confusing, volatile and capricious. There are a thousand other measures to examine, but one important one would be wealth, because it’s so pivotal for general wellbeing.

As it happens, the news here is very good. Once a year, the Swiss bank UBS brings out its Global Wealth Report. The latest edition came out last week. This is what the introduction says: “Wealth is steadily growing throughout the world — albeit at different speeds — with very few exceptions. The proportion of people in the world in the lowest wealth bracket has shrunk since 2008, while the proportion of people in every other wealth bracket has grown. Average compounded real growth in wealth has increased 7% per year across the survey between 2000 and 2010. That is now down to 4.5% between 2010 and 2023.”

In the 15 years of the Global Wealth Report’s existence, total global wealth has been reported to have fallen in dollar terms from the year before only three times: during the financial crisis of 2008, in 2015 and once again in 2022. The rate of growth of wealth is declining, but what has been achieved in our lifetimes is astounding. Just to take one example, the percentage of adults in the UBS sample in the lowest wealth band — whose net worth is less than $10,000 — has declined from 72% of the sample to 48%. The most common band is no longer the lowest wealth band, it’s the second-lowest.

So, here is a theory: maybe our politics is so fraught now not because Doomsday approaches, it’s just that people feel they don’t need to care that much. It’s not that it doesn’t matter: it just matters less. Instead of using the political system as a definition of what we are, maybe we should see it (and its buffoons, clowns, fraudsters and assassins) as what we are not.

There is a danger here of course. By not caring, we could enter what the FT’s Janan Ganesh calls the “doom loop of modern politics”. He asks: Is the US Congress the least trusted institution in surveys because it is so bad, or is it bad because it’s so distrusted? Obsessives will always volunteer, the apathetic will never do so. The people who have to be enticed into politics are the waverers who have a life of prosperous anonymity open to them.

Well, you know, maybe. It could be Doomsday. But then again, it could just be Wednesday. DM

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