Headline : Is the world getting out of control?

Read more from the original article on here at www.ips-journal.eu.

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No. of Paragraph 32

In a recent interview for the New Statesman, a former head of Israel’s internal-security service, Ami Ayalon, disarmingly confessed: ‘We have to assume we shall have a war with Hezbollah not because we want it or they want it but because we are losing control.’ And this feeling of helplessness is not confined to Lebanon or the Israel-Palestine conflict.

We did not want to have a war with Russia, but we lost any grip over the predatory behaviour of its president, Vladimir Putin. We know that uncontrolled markets may crash again, causing enormous social damage, but we lack the instruments that could bring global markets into line. We comprehend the horrendous implications of climate change, but we repeatedly break environmental pledges under pressure from firms, farmers and fans of diesel cars. We lament the rapid if not wild development of artificial intelligence, but we elect to wait and see what happens. We expect another health alert caused by new viruses or antibiotic-resistant pathogens, but the erosion of public health services proceeds unabated.

The feeling of helplessness requires social-psychological rather than political therapy. Doomsayers do not believe in a better future, no matter what. Yet even famous pessimists such as Thomas Hobbes believed that the government could and should make a difference: only in a ‘state of nature’ without a Leviathan, was life ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’, a war of ‘all against all’. Sadly, today only a few believe governments can secure the future.

I used to be considered a naïve optimist in the 1980s, when arguing that workers’ strikes in Poland or human chains lighting candles in the Baltic states could bring down the Soviet Union and tear down the Berlin wall. I still believe rich and educated Europe can overcome the ‘polycrisis’ of today. We were able to prevent Russia taking over the entirety of Ukraine, the 2009-10 European debt crisis was contained, new medicines are constantly being invented and the recent EU AI Act offers citizens some protection from new, intrusive technologies.

Read more from the original article on here at www.ips-journal.eu.

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