Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
pstarr wrote:Tanada, thanks for resurrecting the model. It's neat, have any links? Kind of like Kübler-Ross on a Grander Scale.
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
And in 2015, just before the great unraveling, the world still seemed to be in the grip of what was then labeled “globalization.” The volume of world trade was at an all-time high. Facebook had created a network of 1.5 billion active users. People on every continent were dancing to Drake, watching the World Cup final, and eating sushi. At the other end of the socio-economic spectrum, more people were on the move as migrants and refugees than at any time since the end of World War II.
Borders seemed to be crumbling everywhere.
Before 2015, almost everyone believed that time’s arrow pointed in the direction of greater integration. Some hoped (and others feared) that the world was converging on ever-larger conglomerations of nations. The internationalists campaigned for a United Nations that had some actual political power. The free traders imagined a frictionless global market where identical superstores would sell the same products at all their global locations. The technotopians imagined a world united by Twitter and Instagram.
In 2015, people were so busy crossing borders -- real and conceptual -- that they barely registered the backlash against globalization. Officially, more and more countries had committed themselves to diversity, multiculturalism, and the cosmopolitan ideals of liberty, solidarity, and equality. But everything began to change in 2015, a phenomenon I first chronicled in my landmark study Splinterlands (Dispatch Books, 2025). The movements that came to the fore in 2015 championed a historic turn inward: the erection of walls, the enforcement of homogeneity, and the trumpeting of exclusively national virtues.
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