The Last of the Angry White Men And the Future of Tomorrow
There is a fascinating thing happening in our world today, in that we are in the middle of the transformation between the disconnected and the connected. And it has a serious impact on the short term future of our political focus.
If we look at all the latest elections (across the western world), both those already completed and those still underway, there is a common trend across all of them.
This trend is that there is a tremendous growth in xenophobic nationalism, combined with an increase in non-democratic ideals, all for the sake of protecting the past. But, at the same time, we also see the exact opposite of this, in that there is another tremendous growth in people favoring internationalism and globalism … by people who are xenophiles (which is the opposite of a xenophobe).
And when we look at the specifics of these elections, we see that they are defined by an exceptionally strong generational divide.
At one end, we have the younger generations, who have been brought up in a world that is connected by default. These young people don’t exist within a border, but have friends and connections across the world. As such, this younger generation prefers internationalism, and very clearly define their future as being part of that international community.
At the other end are the old nationalist. The people who were brought up back when a country was a country, and who see people on the other side of the border as being different than themselves.
One great example of this is the Brexit election in the UK, where we saw this result:
Only 25% of the younger generation wanted to leave the EU, while for the older generation it was a staggering 71%.
But we see this everywhere. When you look at Trump, it’s the same pattern. And it’s the same with the rise of nationalistic parties in pretty much every country of Europe.
Right now, we are at the very breaking point of this transformation. We are at the point where the size of the old generation, who are desperately trying to cling on to the past, is about the same as the size of the younger generation. The split is about 50/50.
The result of this (in the short term) is a polarization, in which the generational divide, combined with the effect of this transformation, causes each group to move further and further apart, opening up rather extremist and intolerant views for those who are on the wrong side of it.
And this trend too is very clear to see. If you look at all the elections that has happened within the past five years, you will notice that we are not discussing traditional politics anymore.
Think about the past battles between the Republicans and the Democrats. They have always been against each other, but in the past, the focus was mainly on issues of government.
For instance, Ronald Reagan’s definition of being a Republican was mostly about limiting the influence of government, lowering taxes, and a stronger focus on the individual freedom that encouraged people to fight for what they called ‘American Exceptionalism’. The Democrats, however, saw government as having more of a supporting role (which requires more government).
But this is no longer the argument that we see in the US. Instead, the discussion is now about intolerance versus tolerance. On one side, we have the Republican party where Trump is forcing through a message that people should vote for him because he will get rid of all the people that he doesn’t like (even if that means creating more government control), while on the other side, we have Hillary with a message that we are ‘Better together’.
It was the same in the UK. On one side, we had the ‘Leave’ campaign, who focused their campaign on intolerance, while the ‘Remain’ campaign focused on the message that we are ‘Better when we are united’.
And every country is going through this. Even Canada went through this, although here, the transformation seems to be a few steps further ahead than in the rest of the world.
Remember, the reason why Justin Trudeau was elected, was because he was the voice of the younger and more tolerant generation.
The older generation wanted the Conservative party to win, who had campaigned on an increasingly intolerant and immigrant hostile platform. While the younger generation wanted Justin Trudeau to win, who ran a campaign on tolerance.
But in Canada, the population had already transformed. Leading up to the election, the old conservative party was already losing. In 2011, almost 60% of the older generations wanted to vote for them, while in 2014, it was down to about 35%.
In other words, and from a trend perspective, Canada has moved one step further than the rest of the western world.
And let me illustrate why.
Take a look at this graph again from the Brexit election in the UK.
In this graph, the split between those who are intolerant towards the new connected world is about 50% of the total. And, as we know, this caused an election result of 51.8% to the ‘Leave’ side.
But what if we look one generation forward? What if we projected this change to the year 2036? Well, at that point it would look something like this:
What I have done here are two things. First, I have shifted this whole graph forward 20 years, while still accounting for the future population projections. Secondly, I have looked at the rate of change caused by the connected world (which is roughly 15% on average).
Look at how massively different this is. Now, instead of the result being 50/50, the result is now: 70/30 to the ‘Remain’ side.
Keep in mind that this is a very simplistic projection. So many other things could happen in the next 20 years that could change this in either direction. Maybe the European Union won’t even be the same in 20 years.
But from a trend perspective, the future seems very clear.
This rise in right-wing, racists, nationalistic xenophobia that we see in politics today is just a short term problem. It’s happening because we have reached this breaking point between the old and the new.
And while it may be a big thing during this and maybe the next one or two election seasons, when we look at voting trends, the new connected generation will start to dominate more and more, and the problem will simply go away.
BTW, it’s also same in the Middle East. Here, the younger generations are also the most progressive thinkers. For instance, the younger generations are very much against ISIS.
But it’s not only that, young people in the Middle East also think religion is playing too big a role in the region. And about 70% thinks that ‘the divide’ is a significant cause of unrest.
Just think about that for a moment. Isn’t this amazing? The Arab youth is far more tolerant than what most think. In fact, the Arab youth is just like the Western youth.
So, every single problem that we have and discuss today is simply a generational problem related to resistance to change. And because it’s generational, these problems will solve themselves over time.
It’s hard to be intolerant when you are connected
The reason why we see this trend so clearly is because of how we are now all connected. It’s very hard to be intolerant towards people and cultures that you follow and like on Instagram or Snapchat.
This is the reality of the youngest generation. Remember, nobody is born a bigot. You either become a bigot because the old generation tells you to, or because of lack of integration. But both are solved by being more connected to the world.
There was a wonderful (and scary) story in the New Yorker back in November 2015, about a young woman who had been brought up in one of those extreme xenophobic churches that exists in the US.
This story is remarkable, because it starts out showing just how intolerant someone can be when they are brought up in this extreme way. But as she grew older and started connecting with more and more people via channels like Twitter, she started realizing that these ‘other people’ weren’t anything like what her parents and grandparents had told her they were.
It’s a really great story that you should take the time to read.
And this is happening everywhere. If you are a young man born in the UK, your Snapchat and Instagram feeds are filled with people from not just the UK, but from all over Europe and the world.
So when an EU hostile party like UKIP comes along and says that the UK should leave the EU, this young man doesn’t understand that argument. Why would you want to leave your friends? Why would you try to prevent your friends to visiting and sharing your world. Why shouldn’t you be allowed to go to them and be inspired by what they do.
Closing the borders to your friends? Seriously?
It’s the same in the US. If you are a young woman in the US, you might be following people on Twitch who lives in Egypt. You might have played games with them, started friendships, shared experiences, and so much more.
So when people like Trump comes along and says that all Muslims should be prevented entry into the US, he is basically saying that you can no longer be friends with someone just because they were born in a country that Trump doesn’t like and hasn’t connected with himself.
The connected world eliminates this intolerance, because those ‘other people’ are no longer other people. They are just people like you and me.
At this point, you might say, “Wait-a-minute, but the internet isn’t like this. The internet is bad. Look at Gamergate and their harassment, the amount of bad news we see every day, and the filter bubble of social media?”
Okay, let’s look at that.
Gamergate
It’s true that Gamergate is a problem, and that it’s dominated by mostly extremist white men who apparently enjoy attacking women. But the Gamergate community is estimated to only be about 10,000 people strong, with only a tiny fraction of those being active offenders. This means they only represent 0.00014% of the population.
They are insignificant in relation to the bigger trends.
But as I wrote on Twitter, the real problem is how easy it is for them to dominate the conversation.
Every time we see a woman leaving Twitter due to harassment, it’s not really because thousands of people have started harassing her. It’s because of a very small group of people who have started tweeting hate-speech to her with such a high frequency that they are dominating her stream.
And when she blocks some of them, they just come back 2 minutes later with another account.
This is very much a problem, and something Twitter should absolutely do something about. But the problem here isn’t with the connected world.
In fact, the main problem with Gamergate seems to be that the people in it aren’t that well connected to begin with. As a study found back in 2015 (when Gamergate peaked), “Men who harass women online are quite literally losers, new study finds”
The [researchers] watched how men treated women during 163 plays of the video game Halo 3.
As they watched the games play out and tracked the comments that players made to each other, the researchers observed that — no matter their skill level, or how the game went — men tended to be pretty cordial to each other. Male players who were good at the game also tended to pay compliments to other male and female players.
Some male players, however — the ones who were less-skilled at the game, and performing worse relative their peers — made frequent, nasty comments to the female gamers. In other words, sexist dudes are literally losers.
We will always have this problem. And with the ease of the internet, it will be a continuing struggle to contain it. But it’s not really a trend.
People think the world is getting worse
It’s kind of the same thing when we look at people’s perceptions of all the bad things in the world. It sounds like the world is falling apart, but the actual amount of bad things that is happening is very low on a personal level.
I think Ray Kurzweil, the futurist working for Google, said it best:
People think the world’s getting worse, and we see that on the left and the right, and we see that in other countries. People think the world is getting worse. … That’s the perception. What’s actually happening is our information about what’s wrong in the world is getting better. A century ago, there would be a battle that wiped out the next village, you’d never even hear about it. Now there’s an incident halfway around the globe and we not only hear about it, we experience it.
He is exactly right about this. Here, for instance, is a comparison between the actual changes in crime levels with people’s perception of them.
As you can see, 70% think that crime has gone up, while it is actually far lower than 20 years ago.
The problem here is our perception of reality, but not reality itself (which is something we need to do much more about).
The filter bubble that doesn’t really exist
So what about the filter bubble that people keep talking about (especially within the media circles). Well, in isolated cases this is a problem. There is an inherent problem with social algorithms that tends to highlight only a certain type of article for each person. And there is another problem with the sheer abundance of content we have access to, making it much harder for people to choose the right things.
But think about the graphs I showed you in this article, illustrating how the younger generations are far more tolerantly focused than the older generations, and then think about how the younger generations are also far more connected than the older generations.
You see what I mean?
If younger people are more tolerant and more connected, how can we then claim they are living in a filter bubble? What is actually happening is that it’s the old world that is living in a filter bubble, not the new world.
Look at the trends.
And again, even if we did have a filter bubble, the solution wouldn’t be to ‘Leave’ and disconnect ourselves from other people. The solution is to help people connect even more.
You don’t solve the filter bubble by building walls.
Again, read the article in the New Yorker that I linked to above. Here this woman was very much living in a filter bubble. But it started to crack as soon as she became more connected.
The reality is that the next generation will be connected by default. They will not just be digital natives, they will also be connected natives. And with that most of the problem with angry white men that we see today will disappear or become irrelevant.
We will always have problems in the fringes. There will always be extremists that we have lost along the way, and who will try to make our lives as miserable as theirs. There are also specific problems and trends that we need to do something about. Things like income equality, the rising cost of education and health care (even if that is covered by taxes in some countries), the housing problems and many other things.
But overall, the future is looking to be absolutely amazing, and especially when we focus on the problems with intolerance. We just need to get past this rough patch of bigotry that we see today.
Our world is constantly getting better over time, even if there are several short-term ups and downs along the way.
