The Rise And Fall Of Liberal Democracy’s Shared Fiction

Depending on who you ask, the origins of today’s crisis of liberal democracy vary widely. Some people point to the Covid-19 pandemic; others to 2016, with the first Trump presidency and Brexit; still others to the Great Recession, whose impact peaked in the United States in 2009 and in Europe in 2012. Regardless of when the crisis began, it was laid bare on Feb. 14, 2025.

That was when, at the Munich Security Conference, Vice President JD Vance told the assembled European leaders that the gravest threat to their continent came from within: governments that no longer trusted their own people, courts that overturned elections, the steady retreat of free speech. The United States, he said, could not be expected to defend a civilization that no longer recognized itself. Hours later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio echoed his message: The postwar order was over; what came next would be transactional and multipolar. The European reaction was sharp. Friedrich Merz, days from being elected as the German chancellor, said Europe could no longer count on Washington. Editorial pages across the continent reached for the word betrayal.

At a deeper level, today’s crisis, like others of a similar nature before it, was driven bythe breakdown of “shared fictions”: philosopher Yuval Noah Harari’s term for commonly held beliefs in things like the power of money, religions and nations. In his foundational book, “Sapiens,” he argues that large-scale human cooperation requires collective conviction in such fictions. Understandinghow shared fictions form and collapse provides a helpful framework for navigating our current moment.

Societies organize themselves around a specific kind of fictions, which I call transcendent beliefs: faith in something that outlasts individual death, and thus gives orientation to the living. We are the only animal that knows it will die, and we are the only animal that has built permanent collective fictions around that knowledge. We are also the only animal that has developed a complex language that permits those fictions. Throughout history, our belief systems have remained relatively stable until something disrupted them, and for a long time, such disruptions were climate-based.

Consider the end of the last Ice Age, which coincided with the emergence of ancestor worship in parts of the Near East. The dead were not considered to be fully gone but rather remained present within the community, anchoring cooperation among increasingly sedentary groups. This transcendent belief system helped stabilize early settlements and, after the cold snap known as the Younger Dryas ended, supported the development of agriculture and more permanent, larger-scale social organization.

Thousands of years later, the 8.2-ka event led to the rise of polytheistic “small gods,” which integrated multiple clans into early urban centers while managing both internal solidarity and inter-clan relations. The subsequent 4.2-ka event marked a further transition toward moralizing “Big Gods,” whose universal authority supported larger territorial states and early empires. These frameworks gradually evolved into universal monotheisms, which provided legitimizing structures for civilizations of millions.

Again and again, climatic shocks were punctuation marks of cultural evolution that destabilized existing social orders and yielded new transcendent belief systems enabling large-scale cooperation. But in the 16th century, the source of disruptions changed. It became communication-based. Because our collective fictions are built on language, new communications technologies imply the need for new fictions. Each new medium has forced a redrawing of the transcendent framework, which has become centered on the life of individuals: citizenry, nation, class.

We are in the middle of one such redrawing now, and whether they realized it or not, the people in Munich Hall on Feb. 14, 2025, witnessed the crumbling of a transcendent belief in real time.

A New Engine Of Change

In 1517, the printing press changed everything. German priest and theologian Martin Luther wrote his “95 Theses” by hand that year to protest the Roman Catholic Church’s sale of indulgences. Soon after, the theses were translated from Latin to German, reproduced using the movable-type printing press and widely distributed. Within a generation, hundreds of thousands of pamphlets had spread Luther’s arguments across northern Europe faster than the Church could respond, launching the Protestant Reformation. For the first time, the transcendent framework did not change because of a climate event, but because of a transformation in communications technology.

“We are the only animal that knows it will die, and we are the only animal that has built permanent collective fictions around that knowledge.”

Not only did the disruptive force change, there was also a transcendental shift toward individuality instead of collectivity. Among other ideas, Luther’s proposal that the relationship with God could be personal and direct — that the Bible could be read by anyone, not needing the intermediation of a priest or the Church — allowed the individualist strains to flourish, especially in Northern Europe. The religious tensions that were stirred indirectly by the use of the printing press to disseminate Luther’s ideas laid the foundations for the Thirty Years’ War. Individuals no longer had to believe in the same god, or in the same way, but still had to live together. Roughly a third of the population of Central Europe died in the war.

The second communication-driven shift came with the 18th-century rise of newspapers and coffee houses. People with no clerical training could now follow public arguments in real time and discuss them. When the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 destroyed a major European capital on All Saints’ Day, the explanations on offer — divine punishment versus natural disaster — became a public test of which transcendent frame would hold. The Enlightenment was the answer that emerged, providing a new way to make sense of the world without relying on religious dogma. It produced two political experiments: the American Revolution, still rooted in the prior system, and the French Revolution, in which a new transcendent entity was crowned at the center — the citizen, bearer of inalienable rights, member of a sovereign people.

The citizen-centered framework stabilized around 1815 and held for a century. The next communication disruption was mass media, especially radio and film. These technologies were fundamental for propaganda during the First World War, but were even more important in nurturing the fears and rage that led to the Second: from the 1915 film “The Birth of a Nation” fueling racism in the U.S., to the radio discourses of Mussolini and Hitler, and the lionizing of Hitler by Leni Riefenstahl movies in the 1930s and of the Soviets by Sergei Eisenstein in the 1920s. Mass media made it possible for one voice to reach millions, which in turn made possible totalitarianism’s specific signature: the manufactured national emotion.

After the Second World War, television produced a more stable equilibrium. A person on a screen could now reach millions with a handful of simple ideas — employment, wages, taxes, the security state — and political parties organized themselves around those ideas, packaged them as platforms and sold them at elections. This was the system of postwar liberal democracy: the citizen as consumer of national policy choices.

That system began to dissolve in 2006 with the launch of the modern social media platforms, accelerated in 2007 with the smartphone and ruptured between 2008 and 2011 with the Great Recession. Television had concentrated influence to the voices of a select few; social media re-fragmented it among hundreds of millions. The simple national ideas around which postwar democracy organized itself could no longer hold attention against a feed of…