Confidence in Youth
The Emergence of a New Global Society
I was born into a world that seemed empty and quiet, a society yearning for stability and relief from further strife. There was exhaustion aplenty, but also a resolve to look to the future with optimism. The post-war moment I lived through wasn't just about rebuilding institutions, you see – it was about creating the conceptual underpinnings of what a society free from conflict should and could be.
In Britain, the Attlee government didn't simply establish the National Health Service; it reimagined the relationship between citizen and state. This wasn't technocratic reform but moral revolution, the notion that healthcare, housing, education, and employment weren't commodities to be purchased but rights to be guaranteed. The speed of this transformation was breathtaking – within five years, Britain had constructed the architecture of social democracy that would define the next three decades.
But this optimism was built on fundamentals that were already shifting. The Bretton Woods system that enabled post-war prosperity depended on American economic hegemony and cheap energy. The colonial empires that had funded European development were crumbling, forcing a reckoning with the true costs of that prosperity. The ecological consequences of industrial growth and increasing production remained unseen but were already accumulating. Most critically, the generation that had lived through depression and war wouldn't live forever, and their children would inherit prosperity without memory of its fragility.
The neoliberal counter-revolution that began in the 1970s wasn't an accident or an aberration – it was a deliberate project to restore class power that had been temporarily constrained by social democracy. The financial sector, chafing under new regulations, developed new instruments to circumvent democratic control. Corporate chiefs, facing pressure from unions and environmental regulations, began the long project of relocating production to jurisdictions with weaker protections and cheaper labour. The wealthy, confronted with progressive taxation, funded think tanks and political movements so as to delegitimise collective action.
What makes today's crisis dissimilar isn't just its scale but its temporal dimension. Previous generations faced challenges that could be solved within human timescales – wars could be won, economies could be rebuilt, and social movements could achieve reforms within decades. Climate change operates on geological time while requiring immediate action. Endemic poverty resulting from colonialism might take decades to resolve. Advances in Augmented Insight technology (AI) are accelerating beyond human comprehension while their impacts remain unpredictable. Nuclear weapons proliferate while international institutions decay.
The psychological burden on young people today is qualitatively different from anything my generation faced. They're inheriting a planet damaged perhaps beyond repair, economic systems created to extract rather than sustain, and political institutions captured by wealth, confined by borders, and impotent in the face of global challenges. Yet they're expected to maintain hope, pursue careers, start families, and build futures as if none of this were happening.
This explains the rise of "pre-traumatic stress" – anxiety about disasters that haven't yet occurred but that seem inevitable. Young people report feeling guilty about having children, buying homes, or making long-term plans. They're experiencing the psychological impacts of civilisational collapse while still being told to participate normally in a civilisation that's collapsing.
That they're also developing responses that would have seemed out of the question to my generation is remarkable. Mutual aid networks that operate outside traditional institutions. Economic experiments that prioritise sustainability over growth. Political movements that understand intersectionality in ways that transcend national boundaries. Technologies used for more than just efficiency or profit.
The climate movement represents something historically unprecedented – a global mobilisation around a challenge that requires immediate sacrifice for future benefit. This reverses the normal logic of political movements, which typically promise immediate improvements. Young climate activists are essentially asking their societies to accept present-day costs to prevent future catastrophe, a form of wisdom that Western societies have rarely demonstrated.
Their approach to mental health and trauma represents another fundamental shift. Where previous generations often internalised suffering as individual weakness, young people increasingly understand psychological distress as a rational response to irrational circumstances. This creates possibilities for collective healing and resistance that don't depend on pretending everything is fine.
The forces arrayed against them have indeed never been more powerful or coordinated. Fossil fuel companies knew about climate change decades ago and chose to fund denial rather than transition. Technology platforms designed to maximise engagement by cultivating outrage have knowingly amplified misinformation. Financial institutions have generated global networks of tax avoidance and regulatory capture that make democratic accountability nigh impossible. Meanwhile, authoritarian movements worldwide share strategies and resources in ways that democratic organisations are only now beginning to match.
Yet the speed of contemporary change also creates unprecedented vulnerabilities in these systems. Fossil fuel infrastructure becomes stranded assets as renewable energy costs plummet. Social media platforms lose legitimacy as their manipulative tactics become visible. Financial systems face instability as inequality prevents young people from entering the housing market, thus threatening social cohesion. Authoritarian governments struggle to maintain control as global communication exposes their contradictions.
It should be clear from this that the current system cannot survive. The real question is what emerges from its transformation. Young people grasp this in ways that older generations, vested in preserving what exists, often cannot. They're not trying to restore the post-war consensus but to build something entirely new – economics based on regeneration rather than extraction, politics configured around participation rather than representation, and community systems based on care rather than competition.
This requires acknowledging what's been lost while remaining open to what's now becoming possible. The security and prosperity that defined the post-war era were real enough, but they were also dependent on exploitation and extraction. These couldn't be sustained indefinitely. The collapse we are witnessing isn't just destruction – it's also the clearing away of the detritus of systems that were always temporary, making space for approaches that might actually be viable over geological time.
The youth, for which I fear, may actually be the first generation in human history forced to think and act on a planetary scale. In one sense that's a heavy burden, but it's also an unprecedented opportunity. They're inheriting the wreckage of industrial civilisation, but they're also receiving the accumulated expertise and wisdom of all previous generations. Whether they're able to use this knowledge to build something safer, healthier, cleaner and sustainable remains to be seen, but they're certainly trying in ways that would have seemed impossible when I was young.