Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis

by Jared Diamond

Successful coping with either external or internal pressures requires selective change. That’s as true of nations as of individuals. The key word here is “selective.” It’s neither possible nor desirable for individuals or nations to change completely, and to discard everything of their former identities. The challenge, for nations as for individuals in crisis, is to figure out which parts of their identities are already functioning well and don’t need changing, and which parts are no longer working and do need changing. Individuals

This book is: a comparative, narrative, exploratory study of crisis and selective change operating over many decades in seven modern nations, of all of which I have much personal experience, and viewed from the perspective of selective change in personal crises. Those nations are Finland, Japan, Chile, Indonesia, Germany, Australia, and the United States.

“Narrative style” means that arguments are developed by prose reasoning, without equations, tables of numbers, graphs, or statistical tests of significance, and with only a small number of cases studied.

The client thereby embarks on a process of selective change, which is possible, rather than remaining paralyzed by the seeming necessity of total change, which would be impossible.

2. Acceptance of personal responsibility. But it’s not enough just to acknowledge “I have a problem.” People often then go on to say, “Yes, but—my problem is someone else’s fault. Other people or outside forces are what’s making my life miserable.” Such self-pity, and the tendency to assume the role of victim, are among the commonest excuses that people offer to avoid addressing personal problems. Hence a second hurdle, after a person has acknowledged “I have a problem,” is for the person to assume responsibility for solving it. “Yes, there are those outside forces and those other people, but they aren’t me. I can’t change other people. I’m the only person whose actions I can fully control. If I want those other forces and other people to change, it’s my responsibility to do something about it, by changing my own behavior and responses. Those other people aren’t going to change spontaneously if I don’t do something myself.”

So important. Understated here.

5. Other people as models. Related to that value of other people as sources of help is their value as models of alternative coping methods. Again, as most of us who have weathered a crisis have discovered, it’s a big advantage if you know someone who has weathered a similar crisis, and who constitutes a model of successful coping skills that you can try to imitate. Ideally, those models are friends or other people with whom you can talk, and from whom you can learn directly how they solved a problem similar to yours. But the model can also be someone whom you don’t know personally, and about whose life and coping methods you have merely read or heard. For example, while few readers of this book could have known Nelson Mandela, Eleanor Roosevelt, or Winston Churchill personally, their biographies or autobiographies have still yielded ideas and inspiration to other people who used them as models for resolving a personal crisis.

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. All of that background goes into the ego strength that helps one work through a crisis.

Most of all for my fellow Americans, Chile raises a frightening question to keep in mind as you read this chapter. The U.S. shares with Chile a strong democratic tradition. The yielding of that tradition to a dictatorship seemed utterly inconceivable to Chileans in 1967, just as it seems inconceivable to many Americans today. But it did happen in Chile, and the warning signs there were visible in retrospect. Could it also happen to the U.S.?

Finally, many of my American readers, concerned about growing political polarization in the U.S. today, will find this account of recent Chilean history frightening. Despite Chile’s strong democratic traditions, Chile’s political polarization and breakdown of compromise culminated in violence and a dictatorship that few Chileans had foreseen. Could that happen in the U.S.?

There are some optimists who claim that we can support a world with 9.5 billion people. But I haven’t met any optimist mad enough to claim that we can support a world with the equivalent of 80 billion people. Yet we promise developing countries that, if they will only adopt good policies, like honest government and free market economies, they too can become like the First World today. That promise is utterly impossible, a cruel hoax. We are already having difficulty supporting a First World lifestyle even now, when only 1 billion people out of the world’s 7.5 billion people enjoy it.

In short, it’s certain that, within the lifetimes of most of us, per-capita consumption rates in the First World will be lower than they are now. The only question is whether we shall reach that outcome by planned methods of our choice, or by unpleasant methods not of our choice. It’s also certain that, within our lifetimes, per-capita consumption rates in many populous developing countries will no longer be a factor of 32 below First World consumption rates, but will be more nearly equal to First World consumption rates than is the case at present.

Nevertheless, there is already progress along three different routes towards solving world problems. One long-tested route consists of bilateral and multilateral agreements between nations. We know that there have been negotiations and agreements between political entities for at least as long as there has been writing to document them (over 5,000 years). Modern bands and tribes without writing also make agreements, so our history of political negotiation surely goes back through modern humans’ tens of thousands of years of existence before the origins of state governments. In particular, all four of the world problems discussed in this chapter have been subjects of recent bilateral and multilateral negotiations.

China and the U.S. already reached an agreement in principle on CO2 emissions. That bilateral agreement was then joined by India, Japan, and the European Union in the Paris agreement that came into force in 2016.

Hence regional agreements constitute a second already-tested route towards solving transnational problems. The third route consists of world agreements,

In order to apply that approach to my study of national crises, we would need operationalized measures of the outcomes and of the postulated factors that I discussed, including “acknowledgment,” “acceptance of responsibility,” “national identity,” “freedom from constraints,” “patience at dealing with failure,” “flexibility,” “honest self-appraisal,” “change or lack of change,” and “success or failure at resolving a national crisis.”