There’s an ominous development in contemporary life that we’ve almost completely failed to notice, let alone done anything to correct.  It has already corroded key foundational elements of our society, and if we don’t come to grips with it, it could bring about Western democratic civilization’s outright collapse.

Soon.

The root of the problem is that too many people today feel like nobodies.  Or as a psychologist friend added when I raised the subject to her, “Nobody thinks they’re being listened to.  Nobody thinks they're important enough to have a voice."

This may not sound anywhere near as threatening as, say, COVID-19, or environmental collapse, or nuclear war.  But it’s a condition that people react to intensely—at a deep and existential level.  If left to fester unacknowledged, it increases the likelihood of all three of these potential calamities, along with quite a few others.

How does it operate? Consider an example involving Russians, toilet paper, and fear.

A thoughtful Russian observed not too long ago that during the Cold War, there were shortages of basic things like toilet paper in his country, but people around the world were afraid of Russia, so his countrymen felt okay.  Then in the post-Soviet era, there was lots of toilet paper, but nobody was afraid of Russia anymore, and his countrymen were miserable.

It was a telling insight into a characteristic of not only Russians, but people all over the globe:  that a sense of mattering can be more important than things that are, from a purely rational standpoint, more fundamental necessities.

It’s a principle that, only a short time later, Vladimir Putin grasped and capitalized on in his rise to power on an aggressively nationalist agenda.

Because this trait is by no means limited to Russians, we should not be surprised to have seen numerous other heads of state come to power promising a similar alleviation of their people’s chafing at a sense of smallness and insignificance by throwing their weight around on the world stage. Though they express their agendas in a variety of different ways, in the final analysis, they’re all ultimately promising to “make their countries great again.”

Given the tendency for aggressive nationalism to be accompanied by militarism abroad and suppression of dissent and the reduction of freedoms on the home front, if we don’t want democracy to be supplanted by a neo-fascist system, we need to open our eyes to how powerful and disruptive a pervasive sense of not mattering can be, and come up with better ways of dealing with it.

To do this, we’ll need a better grasp of just what it is about the times we live in that creates such widespread feelings of insignificance among people in the first place.