On Decline
If you’re currently lost in a downward spiral of doomscrolling, you are not alone. The news out of Ukraine is almost too much to bear, especially coming on the heels of a national crisis, wrapped in a global pandemic.
But my guest on the podcast today says things have been bad like this for some time. That, in fact, our civilization is in a form of decline.
Andrew Potter is an associate professor at the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University. He’s the former editor-in-chief of the Ottawa Citizen, a former public affairs columnist for Maclean’s, and a former director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada. His latest book is On Decline: Stagnation, Nostalgia, and Why Every Year is the Worst One Ever.
Andrew Potter joins me for a conversation about the grim state of the world (that’s funnier and less depressing than you might expect).
On Decline
It's interesting for people like me, a professing Christian, to listen to conversations like this; queue the rolling of eyes; fingers down fake "gagging" throat. But it is, none the less.
While they may not profess it, these two people come across as disgruntled humanist. They embrace the thought that things are getting worse each year but they can't see the reason, they think there is an "... inability to resolve the collective action problems that we face ...". Thus the big problem, humans have the innate need to make the simple, complicated. This interview oozes such a need.
So the masses will continue to turn to their fellow human for solutions to the problems their fellow human created; that's what humanist do. Quite sad actually.
Interesting podcast, thank you! I appreciated his insight that the “left” and “right” have switched places on the political spectrum, with the left becoming more rules-based and authoritarian and the right becoming the counterculture rebels. That is a fascinating development that deserves to be explored further. However, his simplistic right/left political dichotomy in relation to the truckers’ protest was, in my opinion and experience, completely off-base. Rather than fuelled by the right, which he argued, a great many people on the left fully supported the truckers’ protest, including myself. As I’ve emphasized before on this platform, the truckers’ protest crossed all political lines, no matter how much people want to label it as right-wing motivated - simply because the issue that was and is being protested is an inherently and deeply “human” issue, which is an individual’s right to choose what they inject into their body without being discriminated against, and segregated and ostracized in society.