THE SCHOOL OF LIFE: The Fragility of Good Government

We are not living in an age of unusual folly. We’re simply rediscovering how rare good government has ever been – and how much there was to appreciate.

It is an enormous and very rare privilege to have lived in the days of good government. Across nations and centuries, few people have ever done so. By a rare bit of luck, certain groups in a few corners of the globe tasted decades of this remarkable, anomalous blessing. They might even, foolishly (especially if they travelled little, seldom read history books or had a very high estimation of their own populations) have started to assume it was a natural or god-given norm. Yet the default state of almost all nations is quite other, it is authoritarianism, bullying, demagoguery, corruption, monopoly, racial segregation and state sponsored aggression and murder.

We will not now, it seems, be living in dramatically unusual times; it was the years before that will be remembered as unusual: a daring bet against the facts of our nature. We aren’t sliding into a new age of darkness, we are reverting to a mean. Civilization was always, simply, an unlikely concept...

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