Reasons Why People Fear the Future
Everyone knows: The world is in constant decline. Our fear of the future is therefore understandable. Or is everything just a big panic?
What do Donald Trump, the Brexit campaign and the President of Turkey have in common? Right! All of them won historically important elections. But more interesting and surprising: They won elections, even though they promised to realize old-fashioned political and social concepts. To most of us their perfect world does not match with our understanding of a fair and worth-living society. But paradoxically, voices of people longing for the good old times multiply nowadays. Has the world been better in the past?
Trying to answer this question, you first need to become aware of that we always deal with many truths, heavily dependent on life experiences and perceptions of individuals. But since collecting data and generating statistics did not just come up with modern data science, we can bring all these individual experiences together by utilizing the information of previous census data and scientific surveys. Fortunately, the University of Oxford provides a massive open database with demographic data regarding almost every aspect of life!
Randomly picking single facts, statistics, diagrams and reports from this platform makes you quickly realize: The world is in continuous progress towards the…better! You’ll hardly find any statistic proving the contrary. There are many scientists, journalists and writers who already examined this data, so I will not come up with a quod erat demonstrandum. That’s just a redundancy. Let’s better find out the reasons why people are longing for the good old times.
In contrast to the fact-based world view there’s surprisingly a statement people in the western hemisphere can largely agree on: The world is getting worse!
In contrast to the fact-based world view there’s surprisingly a statement people in the western hemisphere can largely agree on: The world is getting worse! According to a study from 2017, not even more than half a dozen percent of the people living in the US agree that the world is constantly becoming a better place. When considering related studies we’ll hardly find any survey telling us the contrary.
This phenomenon called declinism often appears together with future anxiety. But why do people in the most progressive and wealthy parts of the world tend to have a negative world view and fear the future?
It goes without saying that the media has a big impact on how we see the world.
War, terrorism, xenophobia, drugs, financial crisis, pandemics, refugees, displaced persons… Imagine aliens arriving on planet earth: After catching a glimpse of the news either they would immediately fly back believing it’s better to stay away from the human chaos or in case they wanted to conquer our planet, they could just hide and wait until humanity takes itself out of the game. They must believe the world is at the edge of total apocalypse.
Only bad news is good news is a fundamental concept for a lot of journals. The headline “Growth Rate will collapse by a quarter in 2020” just sells better than the positive version with the same content “Economic Growth continues. Growth Rate expected to 3% in 2020”. Or just imagine the headline “30 refugees rescued by Italian coast guard”. Is it likely to catch more readers than a headline “Crossing borders in the death boat! Refugees fighting hours for their lives”? Probably not…
Of course, the presentation of news and reports depends on the type of media: Tabloid readers will probably be more vulnerable to declinism or acquiring information only from social media is even more critical, because algorithms will generate filtered news and you can quickly find yourself in a filter bubble. But, can you brake down everything to a problem of consuming the appropriate media? This is a fairly straightforward explanation. Even though the bad news seems to be overrepresented, good news exists as well as bad news. There is even a movement called constructive journalism that aims to avoid negative bias in media.
But when good news exists as well as bad news, is it the case that we remember bad news better than good news? Or do we even prefer reading bad news over reading good news? Researchers of McGill University in Canada discovered a peculiar characteristic of the human brain when they set up the following experiment: Participants of a study were asked to come for an eye-tracking experiment. They were told to select some stories about politics on a news website to perform some basic calibration measurements before the beginning of the main experiment. But in fact, the researchers were interested in the people’s choice of news (the false pretense was just to eliminate confounders that could affect the people’s choice). The results of the study unveiled a latent preference of the test persons towards negative news content!
An explanation for this behavior can be found in the layout of the neural centers for rewarding and fear: As both centers are spatially closely located in our brains, we can experience pleasure when being scared. On the other hand, researchers observe a rising level of emotional ignorance towards bad news. For the reason of an excessive offer of news — especially pictures and videos, people learn to filter important things from what’s irrelevant.
Disregarding the media and entering a more psychological level: Aren’t people actually longing for lower complexity and deceleration when longing for past times? Some people feel outpaced by the growing rate of progress. Since humanity started to evolve technology, the rate of progress has ever been growing exponentially. Particular events and inventions just raised the base and power of this exponential progress. This Law of Accelerating Returns (R. Kurzweil) has brought us to a point today, where technology touches almost every aspect of our lives.
The entire human knowledge exists in binary code spread on untold thousand servers all over the world. Our everyday life today is not possible without the internet. Moreover, every day an innumerable amount of data is produced: 90 percent of the ever-generated data has been generated within the last two years. Innovation cycles become faster and faster and the technology of today will be outpaced tomorrow. We live in a VUCA world.
VUCA is an acronym that stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. The term is widely used to break down the challenges of modern corporate management. But basically, VUCA summarizes the unpredictability of the modern world. Certain events can gain momentum so fast that it’s becoming impossible to distinguish between cause and effect. The world is becoming a non-linear dynamic system in that people find it difficult to adapt themselves and to find their determination.
As a result, there are numerous counter movements, aiming to reconstitute parts of old political and social orders. Donald Trump’s MAGA-slogan during his 2016 presidential campaign referred to restore old structures and to give them back to those people who lost their belongings due to economic change associated with structural progress and globalization. Political actors like Trump, the Brexit supporters or several right-wing populism parties in Europe try to take advantage of the VUCA world and amplify VUCA to FUD: Fear, uncertainty and doubt — an essential part of their political campaigns.
Are we facing a new age of autocracy because people feel lost in complexity? We cannot predict it. The tendency that young people are more and more willing to actively shape the future gives confidence and hope. Vote analytics revealed the least political support for Donald Trump, for the Brexit vote and for new right-wing parties in Europe from younger people — those people who grew up in a VUCA world.
But the negative biased world view seems to be primarily a phenomenon of the highest developed countries in the world: Asking in China if children growing up today will be financially better or worse off than their parents, 88% believe their children will be better off! Most people in emerging and developing countries aren’t biased when thinking about the future. And what about you? Do you believe the world is getting worse? I’m inviting you to take the test!
