Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis

by Jared Diamond

I should figure out what I really want in my life, and not be seduced by the vanity of recognition.

Basic to crisis therapy as it has evolved is that it’s short-term, consisting of only about half-a-dozen sessions spaced out at weekly intervals, spanning the approximate time course of a crisis’s acute stage.

Hence a therapist’s immediate goal in the first session—or else the first step if one is dealing with an acknowledged crisis by oneself or with the help of friends—is to overcome that paralysis by means of what is termed “building a fence.” That means identifying the specific things that really have gone wrong during the crisis, so that one can say, “Here, inside the fence, are the particular problems in my life, but everything else outside the fence is normal and OK.”

what is there of yourself that is already functioning well, and that doesn’t need changing, and that you could hold on to? What can and should you discard and replace with new ways?

Related to that value of other people as sources of help is their value as models of alternative coping methods.

“ego strength.” That includes self-confidence, but it’s much broader. Ego strength means having a sense of yourself, having a sense of purpose, and accepting yourself for who you are, as a proud independent person not dependent on other people for approval or for your survival. Ego strength includes being able to tolerate strong emotions, to keep focused under stress, to express yourself freely, to perceive reality accurately, and to make sound decisions.

Ego strength begins to develop in childhood, especially from having parents who accept you for who you are, don’t expect you to fulfill their dreams, and don’t expect you to be older or younger than you actually are. It develops from parents who help you learn to tolerate frustration, by not giving you everything that you want, but also by not depriving you of everything that you want.

For an individual in crisis, fundamental to making good choices is an honest, albeit painful, self-appraisal to assess your strengths and weaknesses, the parts of you that are working, and the parts of you that are not working. Only then can you selectively change in ways that retain your strengths while replacing your weaknesses with new ways of coping.

The importance of previous experience is a main reason why crises tend to be so much more traumatic for adolescents and young adults than for older people. While the break-up of a close relationship can be devastating at any age, the break-up of one’s first close relationship is especially devastating. At the time of later break-ups, no matter how painful, one recalls having gone through and gotten over similar pain before.

People who cannot tolerate uncertainty or failure, and who give up the search early, are less likely to arrive at a compatible new way of coping.

Rigidity or inflexibility can be the result of a previous history of abuse or trauma, or of an upbringing that offered a child no permission to experiment or to deviate from the family norms.

a result of expeditions that I began at age 26 to study rainforest birds on the tropical island of New Guinea.

In a crisis you have to figure out where to draw the line in adopting selective change: which core values would you refuse to change because you consider them non-negotiable?

On the other hand, clinging to core values even when they reveal themselves as misguided under changed circumstances may prevent one from solving a crisis.

The result was that the Soviets no longer had any motivation to take over Finland, because Finland was so much more valuable to the Soviet Union independent and allied with the West than it would have been if conquered or reduced to a communist satellite.

In order to make productive use of its entire population, Finland’s school system aims to educate everybody well, unlike the U.S. school system, which now educates some people well but more people poorly. Finland has egalitarian, high-quality public schools with few private schools. Astonishingly to rich Americans, even those few Finnish private schools receive the same level of funding from the government as do public schools, and are not permitted to increase their funding by charging tuition, collecting fees, or raising endowments! While American schoolteachers chronically suffer from inadequate salaries and enjoy only moderate social status, Finnish schoolteachers go through a very competitive selection process, are drawn from bright high school and university students, enjoy high status (even more than university teachers!), are well paid, all have advanced degrees, and have lots of autonomy in how they teach. As a result, Finnish students score at or near the top of world national rankings in literacy, math, and problem-solving abilities. Finland gets the best out of its women as well as out of its men: it was the second country in the world (after New Zealand) to extend the vote to women, and its president happened to be a woman at the time of one of my visits. Finland even gets the best out of its police: again astonishingly to Americans, Finnish police have to have a university degree, are trusted by 96% of Finns, and almost never use their guns. Last year, Finnis...

Finland has the world’s highest percentage of engineers in its population. It is a world leader in technology. Its exports account for nearly half of its GDP (gross domestic product), and its main exports are now high-tech—heavy machinery and manufactured goods—instead of timber and other conventional forest products as was the case before World War Two.

The result of that excellent educational system and those high investments in research and development is that, within half-a-century, Finland went from being a poor country to being one of the richest in the world.

Finns know that life is uncertain, and so military service is still compulsory for Finnish men and voluntary for Finnish women. Training lasts up to a year and is rigorous, because Finland expects that its soldiers must really be able to fight. After that year of training, Finns are called up for reserve duty every few years until age 30–35 or older. The reserve army constitutes 15% of Finland’s population—as if the U.S. maintained a reserve army of 50 million.

National education, along with the government’s official abolition of hereditary occupations, undermined Japan’s traditional class divisions, because now higher education rather than birth became the stepping-stone to high government office. Partly as a result, among the world’s 14 large rich democracies today, Japan is the one with the most equal division of wealth, and the one with proportionately the fewest billionaires in its population; the U.S. lies far at the opposite extreme in both respects.

Fundamental to any functioning democracy are widespread literacy, recognition of the right to oppose government policies, tolerance of different points of view, acceptance of being outvoted, and government protection of those without political power.

In national politics as in personal life, no progress can be made towards solving a problem as long as one denies one’s own responsibility.

As a result, Americans have more ephemeral social ties, and high turnover of friends instead of lots of lifelong friends living nearby.

Americans are unlikely to give up cell phones, or to stop moving. Hence if this explanation linking that decline in American political compromise to the factors underlying our low social capital is correct, political compromise will remain at greater risk in the U.S. than in other affluent countries.

On the other hand, factors making a bad outcome more likely in the U.S. than in Chile include far more private gun ownership in the U.S., far more individual violence today and in the past, and more history of violence directed against groups (against African Americans, Native Americans, and some immigrant groups).

I instead foresee one political party in power in the U.S. government or in state governments increasingly manipulating voter registration, stacking the courts with sympathetic judges, using those courts to challenge election outcomes, and then invoking “law enforcement” and using the police, the National Guard, the army reserve, or the army itself to suppress political opposition.

Readers wanting to learn more will enjoy Howard Friedman’s book The Measure of a Nation, which includes dozens of graphs comparing the U.S. to other major democracies with respect to many of the variables discussed below.

The basic flaw in our American system of voter registration is that, in Florida and many other states, our registered voter lists and election procedures are controlled by partisan procedures at state and local levels, not by non-partisan procedures at the national level. Partisan electoral officials often seek to make voting difficult for citizens likely to prefer the opposite political party.

poorer people, and African-Americans in general, are more likely not to have a driver’s license because they haven’t paid a traffic fine. The state of Alabama closed its Department of Motor Vehicle (DMV) offices (the offices that issue driver’s licenses) in counties with large African-American populations.

But poorer people (including our largest minorities) can’t afford to miss work and to wait in long lines to register or to vote.

Those advantages included: the opportunity for citizens to debate, evaluate, and choose any proposal; citizens knowing that they are being heard, and that they have peaceful outlets for expression; reduction of the risk of civil violence; incentives for compromise; and incentives to the government to invest in all citizens (ultimately, because they vote), rather than just in an elite fraction of citizens. Insofar as Americans choose not to vote, are ill-informed when they vote, or can’t vote at all, those are the advantages that we are losing.

American politicians must devote most of their time (one retired senator friend of mine estimated, 80% of his time) to fund-raising and campaigning rather than to the task of governing; well-qualified citizens are discouraged from running for government office; and campaign information is reduced first to 30-second sound bites, then to short Twitter tweets.

No country approaches the U.S. in the expense and uninterrupted operation of our political campaigning. In contrast, in the United Kingdom election campaigning is restricted by law to a few weeks before an election, and the amount of money that can be spent for campaign purposes is also restricted by law.

However, as for which major democracy has the greatest inequality, all quantities compared and all measures yield the same conclusion: the major democracy with the greatest inequality is the U.S. That’s been true for a long time, and that inequality of ours is still increasing.

The average income of an American CEO, which was already 40 times the income of the average worker in the same company in 1980, is now several hundred times that of the company’s average worker.

Those issues give disproportionate political power to rich people, by making it easier for them than for poor people to register, vote, and influence politicians.

economic inequality has been increasing, and socio-economic mobility has been decreasing, in the U.S. over the course of recent decades.

The likely explanation is that wealthier American parents tend to be better educated, to invest more money in their children’s education, and to provide more useful career connections to their children than do poorer parents. For example, children of wealthy American parents are 10 times more likely to complete college than are children of poor parents. As Richard Reeves and Isabel Sawhill wrote, “Pick your parents carefully!”

Many affluent Americans would be more concerned about inequality if they realized that it affects them personally, as well as being an abstract moral issue.

will see more riots in LA and other major American cities. With increasing inequality, persisting racial discrimination, and decreasing socio-economic mobility, poorer Americans will perceive correctly that the vast majority of their children have low chances of achieving a good income or even just of modestly improving their economic status. Within the foreseeable future, the U.S. will experience urban riots in which plastic strips of police tape won’t suffice to deter rioters from venting their frustration on affluent Americans. At that point, many affluent Americans will receive their own personal answer to the question, “Does it cause any harm to rich Americans that they live surrounded by poor Americans?” One answer is: yes, it causes personal insecurity.

the economic consequences of declining American investment in our human capital and other public purposes. Those consequences will be felt by all Americans, including affluent ones.

the decline of American government investment in public purposes, such as education, infrastructure, and non-military research and development; and our large government expenditures for economically unprofitable purposes.

Ever since the rise of the first governments 5,400 years ago, they have served two main functions: to maintain internal peace by monopolizing force, settling disputes, and forbidding citizens to resort to violence in order to settle disputes themselves; and to redistribute individual wealth for the purpose of investing in larger aims—in the worst cases, enriching the elite; in the best cases, promoting the good of society as a whole.

the U.S. is losing its former competitive advantage that rested on an educated workforce, and on science and technology.

the decreasing amount of money that we devote to education, the declining results that we get for the money that we do spend on education, and large variation among Americans in the quality of education that they receive.

Despite our growing population, state funding of higher education has grown at only 1/25th of the rate of state funding for prisons, to the point where a dozen U.S. states now spend more on their prison systems than they do on their systems of higher education.

In math and science comprehension and test scores, American students now rank low among major democracies. That’s dangerous for us, because the American economy is so dependent on science and technology, and because math and science education plus years of schooling are the best predictors of national economic growth.

in South Korea, Finland, Germany, and other democracies, the teaching profession attracts the very best students, because teachers there are highly paid and enjoy high social status, which leads to low job turnover of teachers.

American teachers have the lowest relative salaries (i.e., relative to average national salaries for all jobs) among major democracies.

All schoolteachers in South Korea, Singapore, and Finland come from the top third of their school classes, but nearly half of American teachers come from the bottom third of their classes.