We will try today to answer a very pressing question regarding the underlying causes of the pervasive sense of hopelessness at the global level which can be observed in different manifestations vertically and horizontally in almost every society on planet Earth with different manifestations and magnitudes, which reflect the common and deep feeling of lack of opportunities, powerlessness and lack of the means for a positive and meaningful change in the intricacies of the daily lives for the majority of human beings worldwide.
We will try to touch on several headlines, which current research points to as the major culprits in what we see of generalised sense of hopelessness and helplessness globally with a special concentration on the specific social, economic and political conditions that characterise the differences between the situations in the developed and developing parts of the world.
INCOME STAGNATION FOR THE WORKING CLASS
With the ascendance of the neoliberalism with Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom in the early 80s of the 20th century, and especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, there was a dramatic change in the way that governs the distribution of wealth globally. The result of this change was a stagnation or even a decrease in the level of income for the ordinary people from the working class after adjusting their incomes by the accumulated rates of inflation over years. This stagnation or even reduction in the working-class income had progressed even when the productivity rate had increased at the global level, which meant more generated wealth all around the globe, and technically an increase in the concentration of wealth in the hands of a small group of the ultrarich capitalists who administer the businesses and companies within which this extra wealth has been generated. Usually, you don’t read these facts in the mainstream media, and you need to do deeper in the marginalised alternative media outlets or highly specialised research journals to find these facts. For example, The global antipoverty charity Oxfam recent research report titled “takers not makers” published in January 2025 unmasked the fact that that 1% of the world millionaires and billionaires own 45% of all the wealth in the globe, and 44% of the inhabitants of planet Earth (3.6 billion people) live under the poverty line as set by the World Bank.
THE ASCENDANCE OF THE CONSUMERISM IDEOLOGY
According to the neoliberalism ideology consumption is the ultimate aim for every single individual of the human species, and the human freedom can be reduced to the freedom in buying what we want in the space of the free market, in which there is nothing that cannot be bought and sold and negotiated even if it was the human beings themselves figuratively or literally by objectifying the bodies of those human beings, and especially females. It is worth remembering that the pornography industry did produce $182 billion in 2024, and expected to reach $275 billion by the year 2032 globally.
THE FLOOD OF ANXIETY AND DEPRESSION
In fact, there is a multilayered suffering for the ordinary human beings as a result of the stagnation or reduction in their incomes, especially after being compounded with a flood of what can be bought and acquired from the free-market space; whether it was a car, a mobile phone, a certain lifestyle, glamorous holidays, fancy clothing or products offered by a specific trademark and many other items in the long list of the manufactured urges and needs within the market economy system. This kind of perpetual suffering is consistent with the famous or infamous announcement of the past Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Margaret Thatcher who said “there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families” who are free in consuming what they want to consume within the free-market economy space. This reality had resulted in a complex malady at the social level based on a continuous decline in incomes and purchasing powers for the largest sector in the society i.e. the working class, along with endless invented urges and needs to live by the rules of the neoliberalism freedom, that has been reduced to endless consumption and unsatiated appetite for amassing goods and products within the society that also has been reduced to a mere marketplace in which relationships should be transactional and nothing can be of value if it cannot be bought or sold. This social malaise has presented itself in the rapid increase of the incidence of anxiety and depressive disorders that affects not less than 10% of the global population according to the World Health Organisation, and reached in some meta-analysis studies- that takes the data from a huge number from many research papers to create a bigger research dataset that can be re-analysed to reach a clear statistical picture about the studied phenomenon- to almost 33% for anxiety disorders, and 32% for depressive disorders globally in the era after the global pandemic of the coronavirus. For a more practical example, we can look at the United Kingdom as an example of the rich nations in the global North in which the economic circumstances are definitely much better than the impoverished global South. According to the statistics of the year 2014: 17% of the adults over 16 years suffer from mental disorders which are mainly anxiety and depression, and according to the statistics of the year 2023: 20% of the children between the age of 8 and 16 years suffer from a mental disorder, which means that one of every five children in the United Kingdom is mentally insane, which is something serious that needs a very long pause to contemplate its tragic and horrific meaning.
THE SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE COMPARISON SICKNESS
The neoliberalism has been working incessantly over the last three decades to destroy the fabric of societies worldwide with its sledgehammer of ideology, economics and politics in order to dismantle societies and turn each individual to an isolated island as professed by Margaret Thatcher and her disciples. Over the last decade or so it became almost ubiquitous and universal for the isolated human beings in the neoliberal era that there is no more efficient channel to communicate with peers other than the social media, which are based on the principle of maximising users engagement and the time they spend on these platforms, and consequently result in exhausting the limited mental powers within the human brain, and especially draining to the last drop the powers of the prefrontal cortex that is responsible for the higher mental capabilities of analysis, logic thinking and rationality, while it is trying to filter the good, from the bad and ugly within the social media seas and oceans. Also, this had led modern humans to fall into the horrendous trap of comparison that is essentially based on comparing the reality of the life of the individual using the social media with the refined and filtered snapshots of the others’ lives, that have been chosen carefully and processed with the photo editing software and algorithms, especially in the case of the ultrarich celebrities. This kind of severe imbalance between the finite processing powers within the brain and the flood of comparisons that it has to fathom, assimilate and possibly internalise cannot lead to any outcome but disappointment and depression for not being able to achieve that kind of sparkling and glamorous lives, when the brain is completely unable to discern the falsehood and fakeness of what it sees in the social media after being disarmed from its super analytical powers that has been drained while scrolling down the bottomless feeds of the social media platforms that have been designed in a nasty way to take advantage of the innate interest of human beings to observe and learn from the behaviours of other fellow human beings, which is now used dreadfully and intentionally against them by the social media platforms to keep them engaged and spend longer times on these platforms with the inconsequential collateral damage in the perspective of the owners of these platforms that can be seen in what we mentioned of the exponential increase in the rates of depression, anxiety and other mental disorders among adults and children worldwide.
THE DESTRUCTION OF THE SOCIAL CARRIER OF THE COLLECTIVE WILL
Any ordinary observer can notice the dramatic deterioration or the absence of the social carrier of the collective will of those who can be grouped as the working class, in the form of trade unions and their activities for many reasons that are specific to each society evolutionary history. For example, in the rich nations of the global North, the neoliberalism assault especially in the Anglo-American sphere had managed to destroy the unions with a combination of the exclusive rights for the state to use violence along with outlandish legislations that stripped the workers from their sole defence mechanism i.e. striking to nudge their employer to increase their share of the wealth – the added value in economy terminology- they generate through their work, or at least improve the conditions of their work. Yes, it is customary now in the developed countries to follow specific laws that regulate how the workers can go to strike, and how they have to overcome the multitudes of hurdles built in within these legislations to render the only defence mechanism the workers have ineffective, while protecting all the rights of business owners to bring in temporary workers - sometimes called agency workers or Scabs- if their workers succeeded to find a leeway through these legislations’ spiderweb of complexities and managed eventually to go to the picket line. Legalising the tactic of bringing temporary workers renders any strike ineffective as there would be no pressure on the business to get the workers back to work when the Scabs can do their work indefinitely until the striking workers feel the pain of losing income for the days they were on strike, and realise that they have no other option other than accepting the unfair conditions of status quo. On the other hand, in the global South there are lingering structural deficiencies as a result of the historical extraction of wealth by the colonial powers along with their reckless destruction of the productive capacity of the societies in this geographical space. For instance, the historical drain of wealth during the era of direct colonialism rule, had resulted, for example, in the case of India in $64.82 trillion that were extracted from India by Britain between 1765-1900, after being adjusted for today's value as it has been documented in the Oxfam report we mentioned above. Another example is China, where the whole structure of the society was destroyed as a result of the Opium Wars led by Britain between 1839-1843 and 1856-1860 which produced devastating effects of forced narcotic addiction in every stratum of the society in China, as the British military power started the war in order to be free in selling the opium it produced in colonised India after forcing the local Indian farmers to produce opium instead of cotton and other staple crops. This had led the defeated Qing dynasty to lose effective sovereignty to the British, leaving China helpless prey for over 100 years of exploitation by the European powers, the United States, and Japan as it has been documented methodically in the American surgeon Journal issue of July 2023.
In fact, almost all the societies in the global South apart from Japan which was not subjected to direct or indirect colonialism, have been left so fragile after the direct colonisers left who kept in their place as a part of the tormenting process of decolonisation local elites entrusted to look after the interests of the departing colonisers, who were more than happy to keep arming these elites with the tools for violence, suppression and oppression required to keep these elites in power on the condition of receiving the harvested wealth by these elites from the societies they dominate into the circulatory vessels of the financial system in the global North, and mainly in its tax havens, without any consideration for the principles that are only valid for the rich and powerful in the global North such as democracy, transparency, integrity, human rights, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and rule of law as it has been documented extensively in the Panama Papers huge investigative work published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in 2016, and many other similar leaks that illustrate the same grim picture of neocolonialism in the global South through the local elites that work as tentacles and loyal servants for the old colonialists who turn a blind eye to the horrendous practices of these servants as long as they stick to the rulebook of their job description, which require them to keep the societies they dominate as cheap sources of raw material and labour ready to be exploited by the global North companies as well as an open market to sell the global North products in it without any barrier to protect any nascent local industry.
There is endless list of other examples that shows the horrific destructive effects of colonialism on the societies in the global South that demonstrate vividly the fragility of these societies that left the working class in the global South with no option other than accepting any work under any terms or conditions without any protection in order to merely survive, as the primal urge for survival trumps any other need in life, which is the ultimate rule of the game of exploiting the working class in the global South, that shows its ugly face in the huge number of the workers died while burning in unsafe garment factories in Bangladesh and India and the horrible stories of the suicide nets erected around the buildings at Foxconn factories in China to prevent the employees in these factories from killing themselves by jumping off the buildings.
THE GLOBAL STRUCTURAL CHANGE IN THE MODES OF PRODUCTION
There has been a dramatic structural change in the modes of production at the global level and especially in the developed industrial world, as there has been an exponential shrinkage of the traditional working class that was known before the era of neoliberalism, whose members used to work under the same roof in a traditional productive industrial setting, which was the source of building strong connections among the workers at the mental, cognitive, psychological and emotional levels. The current dominant mode of production adopts a highly specialised production model in which the human being is transformed into a sort of an automaton that works in parallel with the automated production lines and robots in a highly efficient system where there is no space for communication among the workers in the traditional way. This has been compounded with the seismic shift in the modes of producing wealth at the global level which drifted since the emergence of the neoliberal era towards financial investments, speculation and the services economy at the expense of the traditional industrial production in the factories. On the top of that there was the ascendance of the modes of work that are based on work from home or distance or even different countries or continents, which made building connections among who can be classified as members of the working class very difficult to establish for objective reasons related to the physical distance and lack of time and space for building these connections as a result of the invented work conditions for labour in the neoliberal era.
THE ABSENCE OF THE ALTERNATIVE MODEL TO RUTHLESS CAPITALISM
By the end of the Second World War, there were a paradoxical picture comprised of immeasurable losses in blood and money suffered by the warring nations, especially in Europe, admixed with the eminence of the Soviet Union after its huge human sacrifices as an alternative system to the ruthless capitalism in the West, even though the Soviet Union was a form of a repressive state capitalism with a veneer of socialism rhetoric. This paradoxical picture forced capitalism in the West to retreat back a little and invent the principles of the welfare state in order to placate the boiling masses as a result of what they suffered during the destructive course of the Second World War, and most importantly to prevent a collective drift in the public mood towards the rhetoric of the Soviet Union about socialism and the like. However, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the victorious ascendance of the neoliberal politics in the West, it became clear that there is no more ideological deterrence in the world against the epic flood of neoliberal practices in the West that gradually started to strip the Western societies of any benefits brought by the welfare system, and eventually managed to convert most of the Western societies into a sort of economic jungle where the survival is reserved for the strongest while no meaningful protection for the weak and the vulnerable sectors of the society. The picture became gloomier in the poor developing nations that still reeling from the huge burden of the colonialism era and had no choice after the collapse of the Soviet Union other than following the rules of the Masters of mankind as described by Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations, who set the rules for how the capitalist system works globally in the light of their vile maxim: “all for ourselves and nothing for other people.” This made the poor poorer, and the weak weaker, and the vulnerable more vulnerable in the global South. This has been exacerbated by the rise of the Chinese system of governance, which turned the huge masses in China into a cheap workforce in the service of cross-border international companies, where the rules are formulated to protect the interests of the foreign investors, and prevent the workers from unionising or taking any other collective action other than following orders from the repressive security state and its corrupt elite who revel under the veneer of communism rhetoric and it is mutated terminology of “socialist market economy” that mixes the worst of the two worlds: ruthless capitalism of the neoliberal free market economy, and the oppression of the security state under the veneer of communist rhetoric.
THE REPLACEMENT OF POLITICS WITH IDENTITY CONFLICTS AND CULTURE WARS
In addition to disarming the working class from the levers to actualise its collective will through the organised process of dismantling the trade unions and disabling the process of unionising, there was another insidious accumulative work by the “masters of mankind” to depoliticise the whole political spectrum by turning politics from the act to find middle ground and compromises to solve the faced societal problems into a battleground of controversial subjects which are vaguely related to the main issues that affect the quality of life of the ordinary human beings who participate or observe these clashes of ideas which termed recently as identity politics or culture wars. Regardless the essentiality of the subjects of these heated debates of identity politics and culture wars such as the right to marriage or a separate bathroom for the LGBTQ community members, abortion rights, or the rights to own a gun, and many other similar subjects; resolving them partially or completely most probably will not lead to any meaningful improvement in the quality of life for the majority of individuals who are involved in these zero-sum clashes, as winning or even losing any of these battles is unlikely to result in any meaningful change that can lead to a higher life evaluation among these individuals in terms of health care, education, sense of well-being, and any other parameter of the happier life six factors measured by the annual world happiness report which are personal income, social cohesion and mutual support, quality of healthcare and healthy life expectancy, freedoms and liberties, generosity and social regard for the weak and the vulnerable, and the level of corruption with the governmental systems and networks. All of these meaningful pillars of a better quality of life that every normal human being aspire to are destined to decline as a result of the ascendance of the current mode of distraction politics practised by the rich and powerful to maintain their dominance on the working class masses after being kept busy with their perpetual disagreements on marginal issues leaving the rich and powerful to strengthen their grip on every aspect of life in the society that are the real factors in generating true happiness and better quality of life for the ordinary people.
WHAT CAN WE DO?
As always, the spontaneous question of “what can we do” arises when we are faced with these kinds of gloomy description of the degeneration of our lives which can normally breeds a pervasive sense of helplessness and hopelessness, which is understandable. Nonetheless, it is abnormal for any human being to retreat in defeat without trying to fight back in line with the hardwired networks in our brains by the unrivalled powers of natural selection that control our basic innate will for survival and protecting our genes within our bodies, and most importantly within our children who will take care of our genes and keep them viable and passable to the next generations. Yes indeed, within this context, it is normal for the everlasting question of “what can we do” to emerge naturally. And to this existential natural and basic question there is always one simple answer centred around: education, organising and activism. Education is about knowing what is going around you and how the systems of dominance, wealth and power work. Organising is about the basic principle of clapping can only happen with two hands, and more hands can generate louder clapping. Activism is about patience, perseverance, dedication and putting time and sustained effort to fight back for a better life and future for yourself, your children and grandchildren.