Depending on who you ask, the origins of today’s crisis of liberal democracy vary widely. Some people point to the Covid-19 pandemic; others to 2016, with the first Trump presidency and Brexit; still others to the Great Recession, whose impact peaked in the United States in 2009 and in Europe in 2012. Regardless of when the crisis began, it was laid bare on Feb. 14, 2025.

That was when, at the Munich Security Conference, Vice President JD Vance told the assembled European leaders that the gravest threat to their continent came from within: governments that no longer trusted their own people, courts that overturned elections, the steady retreat of free speech. The United States, he said, could not be expected to defend a civilization that no longer recognized itself. Hours later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio echoed his message: The postwar order was over; what came next would be transactional and multipolar. The European reaction was sharp. Friedrich Merz, days from being elected as the German chancellor, said Europe could no longer count on Washington. Editorial pages across the continent reached for the word betrayal. 

At a deeper level, today’s crisis, like others of a similar nature before it, was driven bythe breakdown of “shared fictions”: philosopher Yuval Noah Harari’s term for commonly held beliefs in things like the power of money, religions and nations. In his foundational book, “Sapiens,” he argues that large-scale human cooperation requires collective conviction in such fictions. Understandinghow shared fictions form and collapse provides a helpful framework for navigating our current moment.

Societies organize themselves around a specific kind of fictions, which I call transcendent beliefs: faith in something that outlasts individual death, and thus gives orientation to the living. We are the only animal that knows it will die, and we are the only animal that has built permanent collective fictions around that knowledge. We are also the only animal that has developed a complex language that permits those fictions. Throughout history, our belief systems have remained relatively stable until something disrupted them, and for a long time, such disruptions were climate-based. 

Consider the end of the last Ice Age, which coincided with the emergence of ancestor worship in parts of the Near East. The dead were not considered to be fully gone but rather remained present within the community, anchoring cooperation among increasingly sedentary groups. This transcendent belief system helped stabilize early settlements and, after the cold snap known as the Younger Dryas ended, supported the development of agriculture and more permanent, larger-scale social organization.

Thousands of years later, the 8.2-ka event led to the rise of polytheistic “small gods,” which integrated multiple clans into early urban centers while managing both internal solidarity and inter-clan relations. The subsequent 4.2-ka event marked a further transition toward moralizing “Big Gods,” whose universal authority supported larger territorial states and early empires. These frameworks gradually evolved into universal monotheisms, which provided legitimizing structures for civilizations of millions. 

Again and again, climatic shocks were punctuation marks of cultural evolution that destabilized existing social orders and yielded new transcendent belief systems enabling large-scale cooperation. But in the 16th century, the source of disruptions changed. It became communication-based. Because our collective fictions are built on language, new communications technologies imply the need for new fictions. Each new medium has forced a redrawing of the transcendent framework, which has become centered on the life of individuals: citizenry, nation, class.

We are in the middle of one such redrawing now, and whether they realized it or not, the people in Munich Hall on Feb. 14, 2025, witnessed the crumbling of a transcendent belief in real time.

A New Engine Of Change

In 1517, the printing press changed everything. German priest and theologian Martin Luther wrote his “95 Theses” by hand that year to protest the Roman Catholic Church’s sale of indulgences. Soon after, the theses were translated from Latin to German, reproduced using the movable-type printing press and widely distributed. Within a generation, hundreds of thousands of pamphlets had spread Luther’s arguments across northern Europe faster than the Church could respond, launching the Protestant Reformation. For the first time, the transcendent framework did not change because of a climate event, but because of a transformation in communications technology. 

“We are the only animal that knows it will die, and we are the only animal that has built permanent collective fictions around that knowledge.”

Not only did the disruptive force change, there was also a transcendental shift toward individuality instead of collectivity. Among other ideas, Luther’s proposal that the relationship with God could be personal and direct — that the Bible could be read by anyone, not needing the intermediation of a priest or the Church — allowed the individualist strains to flourish, especially in Northern Europe. The religious tensions that were stirred indirectly by the use of the printing press to disseminate Luther’s ideas laid the foundations for the Thirty Years’ War. Individuals no longer had to believe in the same god, or in the same way, but still had to live together. Roughly a third of the population of Central Europe died in the war.

The second communication-driven shift came with the 18th-century rise of newspapers and coffee houses. People with no clerical training could now follow public arguments in real time and discuss them. When the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 destroyed a major European capital on All Saints’ Day, the explanations on offer — divine punishment versus natural disaster — became a public test of which transcendent frame would hold. The Enlightenment was the answer that emerged, providing a new way to make sense of the world without relying on religious dogma. It produced two political experiments: the American Revolution, still rooted in the prior system, and the French Revolution, in which a new transcendent entity was crowned at the center — the citizen, bearer of inalienable rights, member of a sovereign people. 

The citizen-centered framework stabilized around 1815 and held for a century. The next communication disruption was mass media, especially radio and film. These technologies were fundamental for propaganda during the First World War, but were even more important in nurturing the fears and rage that led to the Second: from the 1915 film “The Birth of a Nation” fueling racism in the U.S., to the radio discourses of Mussolini and Hitler, and the lionizing of Hitler by Leni Riefenstahl movies in the 1930s and of the Soviets by Sergei Eisenstein in the 1920s. Mass media made it possible for one voice to reach millions, which in turn made possible totalitarianism’s specific signature: the manufactured national emotion. 

After the Second World War, television produced a more stable equilibrium. A person on a screen could now reach millions with a handful of simple ideas — employment, wages, taxes, the security state — and political parties organized themselves around those ideas, packaged them as platforms and sold them at elections. This was the system of postwar liberal democracy: the citizen as consumer of national policy choices.

That system began to dissolve in 2006 with the launch of the modern social media platforms, accelerated in 2007 with the smartphone and ruptured between 2008 and 2011 with the Great Recession. Television had concentrated influence to the voices of a select few; social media re-fragmented it among hundreds of millions. The simple national ideas around which postwar democracy organized itself could no longer hold attention against a feed of identity, grievance, conspiracy and culture war. The shared room of broadcast television became the shouting market of the social network.

Munich & Beyond

In Munich last year, the transcendent belief that JD Vance broke with was the conviction in citizenship — specifically, the postwar version that the United States itself had built. That version held that a citizen is a citizen anywhere, that the rights of human beings are universal and precede states, that liberal democracy is the only legitimate political form and that the West is the community of nations that holds those convictions in common. This is the framework that has allowed more than 300 million Americans, half a billion Europeans and several billion more across the world to cooperate at an unprecedented scale as an international community of trading partners and allies. It is a transcendent frame in the truest sense: a fiction that lets us cooperate beyond our biological limits. 

This framework has been brittle from the start because, in a way, it asks us to accept that there is no soul, no other dimension, no ancestor who is watching, no god who will recognize us. It asks us to accept that what unites us millions of strangers within a nation is primarily a balance of market prices and votes. That is hard. It is the hardest transcendent frame humans have ever tried to inhabit, because it offers no comfort. Every previous framework was accompanied by the belief that we were part of something that could never fully die.

“Each of the previous communication-driven disruptions was eventually tamed by the same technology that caused it.”

Maybe because of this uncomfortable truth, the history of the citizenship framework includes two off-ramps, two apparent escape ways, that have appeared and reappeared in different forms across the last centuries. The first is restorationist: the conviction that we should retreat to a world ordered by religion and its earthly reflection. This was the position of the ancien régime against the French Revolution, of Spanish Carlism, of the various clerical-monarchical movements of the 19th century. It is the structure of much contemporary right-wing populism. The American MAGA movement, in its more developed forms, is restorationist: It imagines a return to a pre-globalist, more religious, more racially homogeneous nation. The European populists of the past decade, from Hungary’s Viktor Orbán to France’s Marine Le Pen, have drawn on related ideas. Structurally, all are attempts to bring back the god of the tribe.

The second off-ramp is utopian: the conviction that we can build a new transcendent order, but one designed by the enlightened minority who understand the proper direction of history. This was Jacobinism, then Marxism-Leninism, then the various 20th-century totalitarianisms of the left. The progressive identitarian project that emerged in Western universities and spread through the institutions over the last decade — sometimes called Woke by its critics, though it has many names and many internal variations — is a descendant of the same impulse: a sacred theory of history (oppression, intersection, liberation), an enlightened vanguard, a project of remaking institutions to align with the theory, and a moral charge against those who resist.

In the 20th century, proponents of restorationism and utopianism — fascism and communism — fought Liberalism and the citizenship framework, but also each other for control of states. In the 21st century, they are fighting for control of cultures inside states. The conflict is no longer over the means of production; it is over the production of meaning. The state of the contest, country by country, depends on which off-ramp currently has the upper hand in elite institutions and in the popular social media feed. Munich, in February 2025, was the moment the restorationist response stopped being an American domestic matter and became a threat to the architecture of the West itself.

What neither side will admit is that both off-ramps are anachronisms. Both reach for yesterday’s gods. Neither restorationism nor utopianism can answer the deeper problem, which is the absence of a stable transcendent framework for a world of 8.3 billion people networked through algorithms. That frame does not yet exist. We do not know what it will look like. It will not look like nation-state citizenship, and it will not look like medieval Christendom, and it will not look like the dictatorship of the proletariat.

It may take a long time to emerge. The Reformation required 131 years to settle into the Peace of Westphalia. The Enlightenment needed longer. The mass media transition produced two world wars and a Cold War before the postwar order stabilized. The social media transition is still very young.

What Comes Next

There is a pattern here that may give us a reason for hope: Each of the previous communication-driven disruptions was eventually tamed by the same technology that caused it. 

The printing press tore the medieval frame apart through the polemical pamphlet, and then, more slowly, built the new frame through the printed treatise and the encyclopedia. The press that broke Christendom is the press that produced the Enlightenment. The early newspaper of the 18th century fed the revolutionary mood that overthrew the ancien régime; the mature newspaper of the 19th century became the daily companion of the stable citizen-democracy of 1815 to 1914. The mass media of the interwar period — propaganda film, the demagogue’s radio voice — produced the manufactured emotion the totalitarianisms ran on; the mass media of the postwar period — broadcast television, regulated journalism, the evening news — produced the calmer national conversation the postwar order required. In each case, what initially fragmented the public sphere is what, in its maturer form, eventually rebuilt it.

If the pattern holds, the disruption caused by social media will not be resolved by abandoning social media. It will be resolved by social media’s next iteration, as shaped by artificial intelligence. We are still inside the chaotic phase, the phase that corresponds historically to the Wars of Religion or to the demagogue’s radio. The interaction of AI with social platforms could deepen the current chaos, but it is also the most plausible candidate to eventually tame the disorder. The new transcendent framework, whatever its content, will not arrive in spite of these technologies. It will arrive through them.

“What new narrative can we tell ourselves that will allow us to cooperate at the scale at which we now live?”

Over the last 500 years, three great transformations resulted from new communications technologies, each initially creating enormous chaos and even the expectation of doom. But the result has been an ever more democratic world: The printing press allowed for freedom of religion, of expression, of organization; newspapers brought the end of the old order and the expansion of Liberalism across Europe; mass media permitted the ascent of autocrats like Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin, but afterward, expanded democracy. 

Social media and AI offer the possibility of moving toward hyper-democracy. It is possible now to build a platform where every one of us can be connected to the issues that are relevant: by receiving information, by discussing it, by voting. This can shape policy by influencing Congressional action. The enormous potential of AI to coordinate inputs from billions of people, then translate them into options, goals and strategies to be voted upon — either by groups of interest or as a whole — cannot be overestimated.

As always, there is the risk of some group controlling the platform, which happened also with the books that could be published, the news that ended in print and, quite notoriously, the control of mass media. Nothing is perfect, but history shows that evolution works. 

In the meantime, we live in the gap. We have lost the previous framework and we have not yet built a new one. Our institutions still function, but with declining legitimacy, because they were designed for citizens organized by broadcast. Our populists rise, but cannot build, because their proposals are versions of older systems that cannot scale to encompass our full society. Our intellectuals diagnose the crisis, but cannot resolve it, because the resolution requires a transcendent move that is not yet available.

The sentiment behind Vance’s Munich speech did not begin in 2025. It began in 2006, or earlier. The question it asked is the same one that was posed at every previous transition: What new narrative can we tell ourselves that will allow us to cooperate at the scale at which we now live?

We do not know what the new framework will be. But the long arc of human cultural evolution suggests two things. First, that a new framework will form, because there has always been one, though frequently through a very painful process. Second, that it will be built from the same materials that are currently fragmenting us — the networks, the algorithms, the artificial intelligences that are reshaping how we come together, reason and decide what is real. 

The new transcendent fiction will likely be assembled by the next generation, people who are growing up inside the new technologies and who will accept as self-evident conditions that we find frustrating or even untenable. When that framework finally settles, the convulsions of our own time will become comprehensible in the way that the argument over the divine right of kings is now understood: as the long death of a system whose god had already disappeared, and the slow arrival of whatever god — or transcendent belief — technology and the machine are preparing to put in its place.