Last week, I joined a group of 1,500 concerned global citizens in London to address the defining paradox of our time. Despite living in an era of unparalleled material abundance and unsurpassed social freedoms, millions of citizens and voters increasingly believe that it’s time to change course. Young men, and women in particular, want to abandon the form of democratically guided, market-based capitalism that has made the world wealthier, healthier, more educated, and freer than ever before because their personal futures seem impossibly bleak.
The Association for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) begs to differ.
Corrosive cultural discourse coupled with the real challenges of COVID, raging inflation, and incoherent climate hysteria have contributed to a collective sense of disillusionment. Despair has gone viral. Suicide rates in developed countries are up 37% since 1999. Mental health crises born of loneliness are spiraling, especially among female teenagers. There is scant appreciation for all the breathtaking socioeconomic progress that has been made since World War II, and no common narrative for how we got here or where we need to go. Young and old alike feel stuck in a “perma-crisis,” forever lurching from one societal misadventure to the next because there is no reassuring, top-down master plan.
Rather than trusting in human ingenuity and kindness, responsible citizenship, active civic engagement, and market innovation – i.e., all the hallmarks of human progress over the past half-century – prevailing doubts and cynicism are contributing to calls for collectivization of decision-making under some presumed enlightened elite, as if such experiments have never before been tried.
They have been tried, of course. Revealing versions remain on display in Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran. Top-down decision-making has always failed because of a false reading of history and human nature. Far from precipitating an environmentally driven existential crisis caused by excess consumption of fossil fuels, the democratically run West has the cleanest, most efficient, and socially productive energy mix in the world. Disaster is not nigh. Achieving multiple sustainable development goals like the eradication of abject poverty and illiteracy, improved maternal health, and reduced infant mortality are now, for the first time, all within reach. All we need do is continue to support wealth creation, engage in more mindful capital allocation through impact investing, and allow our NGO sectors to innovate and thrive.
The ARC Conference highlighted several specific challenges. The first concerned family, where we agreed that psychological integrity and social stability depend first and foremost on child-centered, intimate relationships. The second concerned free exchange and good governance, where our consensus holds that the genius of unbridled human innovation and free markets brings material abundance that underwrites all social progress. The third involved energy and resources. Here, ARC participants imagine a future of clean, abundant, affordable, reliable energy for all, knowing that these attributes have long been synonymous with human flourishing. ARC maintains that environmental stewardship and economic development not only can, but must, go hand-in-hand.
ARC participants learned that humanity is not teetering on the brink of inevitable, apocalyptic disaster. ARC sympathizers do not believe that striving individuals are motivated by lust and destructive intent; rather, they see the vast bulk of the globe’s inhabitants as broadly responsible and keen to better the lives of their children and communities. In particular, ARC enthusiasts believe that men and women of faith and decisiveness – all made in the image of God, equally possessed of human dignity – can arrange their affairs with sufficient attention and care so that opportunity and abundance are ultimately made available for all who desire it.
Material privation is not the path to liberation and justice; it is the road to misery and self-defeat. Those who present a vision of programmatic and inevitable catastrophe are not wise seers of our inevitable future; they are forlorn prisoners of faithless, ill-informed imagination. Humanity has never surrendered for long to terror and force. Invariably, hunger for a brighter future for oneself and one’s progeny reasserts itself. Messages of unity, compassion, economic betterment, and social progress are what move us to higher ground.
This is the better story that ARC has just begun to tell. Don’t be surprised if you hear more about it in the months to come.
