In 1921, the Swiss psychotherapist Carl Jung divided humanity into now familiar categories: introverts and extroverts. To simplify a nuanced theory, extroverts believe that the world beyond them is the sum of reality, whereas introverts insert subjective meaning between themselves and external objects. Introverts tend to feel secure in one tightly circumscribed position while extroverts want to be everywhere. The world is a fine balance between these equally valuable propensities, but at times, Jung believed, one of them gained the upper hand.
A century ago, Jung observed that we had entered an overly extroverted age. Material achievements, successes and productivity had become valued over inner reflection and self-awareness, throwing society out of balance. When one such orientation becomes dominant in an individual, Jung said, the unconscious tries to compensate by liberating the opposite propensity in us, often with catastrophic results. In one of his examples, an extrovert printer became so obsessed by expanding his business that he unwittingly unleashed the fantasies of his inner world. His childhood love of art meant that he began to put odd drawings into his book designs. His business collapsed. So it is in the world at large, Jung said.
Today, our political awareness remains undergirded by the primacy of matter over ideas: energy, rare earths, data centres, drones and the almost comical oxymoron of “artificial intelligence” take precedence in our thinking over ideas such as governance and leadership. These are premised on the notion of embodied mind, which says that our thinking is shaped by our bodily experiences. Yet the embodied mind is in retreat.
This dependence on the world around us, rather than the world within, has created a condition of learned helplessness in which we are isolated from each other and allow opaque mechanisms like predictive markets, large language models and “influencers” with banal and venal motives to determine ends for us. As with the overly extroverted printer, our renouncement of meaningful agency has fuelled anxiety and that Jungian revenge where the mind overcompensates for the suppression of introversion with destabilising fantasies.
This may, in part, explain the popularity of myths and conspiracy theories in which obscure cabals with arcane rituals but very prominent members supposedly enjoy outsized power. An American holidaymaker in Crete told me that Taylor Swift’s success was down to her membership of the “Illuminati”. More widespread but still astonishing is the belief in the possibility of an “artificial general intelligence” so complete that large language models develop a human-like will of their own. Even bright management consultants are worried that their firms, perhaps even their minds, will soon be redundant.
Social, economic and political developments since 1945 have both engendered and compounded our overly materialistic view of the world. Abundant energy and goods gushed into the postwar market in the rich world while the developing world concentrated on producing the commodities coveted by their hungry former overlords. When combined with better transport, international labour markets and the modern information revolution, this activity produced undreamed of connectivity. People and goods flowed across borders and global foreign direct investment boomed.
Supply chains are now linked across distant ports and cities. A single product accrues parts from a dozen countries. Instantaneous news coverage binds the world in a new form of interdependence: protests take place in one part of the world over an outrage committed thousands of miles away the day before, such as those in cities around the world concerning the war in Gaza. The advent of cheap labour in countries that had once supplied raw materials and, above all, the opening of the Chinese and Indian economies in the 1990s, has brought about deindustrialisation and lower consumer prices in much of the rich world.
Yet this connectivity, which has favoured consumers over producers, has also upset deep-seated notions of occupational dignity and trashed dreams of economic self-sufficiency. According to the United Nations, international migrants comprise 3.7 per cent of the global population, having increased only modestly from 2.9 per cent in 1990. Yet, because of the more than a million refugees who arrived in Europe from the Middle East in 2015, and today’s “small boats”, the capacity for movement looms large in our minds. All this has led to a powerful backlash. Tariffs and borders have been tightened and anxiety about co-existence between peoples and cultures is spreading, as the rise of anti-immigrant parties such as Reform UK and the Alternative for Germany shows. Political commentary is awash with discussions of nativism and the recrudescence of protectionist, often ugly nationalisms, an example of learned helplessness in which native citizens are passive victims of cultural and demographic change.
They reinforce that sense of helplessness, feeding its vanity with sickly sweet advice
The retreat of embodied mind, though not universal, has given birth to a new phenomenon that transcends nationalism. People whom we might think of as entrepreneurs of disconnection now leverage our learned helplessness, which isolates us from one another, to gain an advantage. They first reinforce that sense of helplessness, feeding its vanity with volleys of sickly sweet advice, bias confirmation and heady, purifying utopias. In place of the lost connections between us, they craft new bonds, which are transnational and which enhance their own power. What begins as manipulation ends up as mastery when these entrepreneurs use social media to shape our views, elicit our emotions and mould our politics.
It will suffice to consider three key examples. First, the retreat of embodied mind is fraying one of the most fundamental human connections: that between life partners. All over the world, a burgeoning “manosphere” of aggrieved and often single men has begun denouncing educated (and thus often choosier) women, learning misogyny at the feet of self-appointed online gurus who flatter their prejudice, telling them to double down on crude measures of manliness like physical strength and “dominance”. Attention has focused on the outrages of the most desperate variants of this phenomenon, the aberration of an Andrew Tate and the “involuntary celibates” or “incels” whose obnoxious and, at worst, terroristic behaviour, makes their abstinence more voluntary than that of monks. But it is the views of women, according to some recent studies, which point to the root of the problem: many men who want to date them lack the emotional intelligence and sensitivity to attract them.
The manosphere sometimes dovetails with nationalism but its attraction and identity amount to transnational solidarity, sweetened by an imagined community where women “return” to the kitchen and the bedroom and, above all, do not show any intellectual ambition. In China, a demographic time bomb may have been laid by the one-child policy that ended on 1st January 2016, during which abortions of female foetuses and infanticide were rife. By next year, there will be 22.5m excess men of marriable age, or 119 men for every 100 women. Meanwhile, in Latin America, manosphere influencers have been a vehicle for a kind of Trumpism, despite Trump’s nationalism and animus towards the region: Javier Milei of Argentina, Daniel Noboa of Ecuador and Abelardo de la Espriella of Colombia, known as “the Tiger”, have all recently won elections while praising the US president and drawing on manosphere social media or misogynist tropes. They ape his version of masculinity, including, in the case of El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele and de la Espriella, his love of tough mega-prisons, resembling the cage fights Trump staged at the White House.
Second, leaders of western AI, centred in Silicon Valley, have also embraced the manipulation of disconnection. They reinforce our learned helplessness by touting the danger that their own creations can hack into other systems and could pose a real threat to human life, as an organised crime boss might warn a neighbourhood about the prowess of the burglars he controls so that protection money is paid on time. But much of the talk about AI that surrounds these magnates amounts to an insipid political philosophy, full of contradictions. Elon Musk believes that AI-driven abundance will make traditional human work redundant, potentially granting AI magnates willing to give away their wealth immense philanthropic power; he also predicts that immigration has already made civil war in Britain “inevitable”.
This bleak dystopia offers its own compensation in the adjacent world of predictive markets. Just as Musk, Sam Altman and others disempower us, predictive markets offer a “futarchy” in which ordinary citizens participate by making bets on future events packaged as binary outcomes: yes or no. Yet large bettors can tilt each market, there is the potential for all sorts of insider trading, and bets about whether Volodymyr Zelensky had worn a suit or not in July 2025 were ultimately decided by an arbitrary ruling. Just like the overarching inputs that shape large language models, the decisions of predictive markets are made out of sight and by unaccountable magnates.
Third, between 1980 and 2016, the real income of the global top 0.001 per cent grew by 235 per cent, whereas the 0.01 percent grew by only 185 per cent. The “elephant curve” showing the trajectory of global inequality has taken a sharp upward turn. Even if the rich are today taxed more than they were according to the Economist, the fact that a growing share of tax revenue comes from a small band of businesses and those most able to move money around is a form of fiscal disenfranchisement. As the growing gap between the rich and poor appears to have made citizenship of certain polities less valuable, so the citizenship of an imagined restored community of ethnic solidarity takes its place. American business bosses like Musk are openly backing anti-immigration politics abroad in a bid to “rescue” western civilisation.
They propose a new citizenship...in which newcomers are excluded, deported or reduced in status
It is a feature of great political upheavals like the French Revolution that membership of the community is ideologically reframed. Frenchmen and women became citoyen and citoyenne, an identity that was universal and at odds with local community, region and the church, whose universality was of a different kind. Those who now fear “ethnic replacement” propose a new citizenship, less universal than the Enlightenment or Catholicism but still transnational, in which newcomers are excluded, deported or reduced in status. It is a form of solidarity between the anxious and paranoid which, as in the manosphere, crosses borders to forge new connections of grievance and longs for a long-lost idyll.
Alongside the intensification of anti-immigrant sentiment arises what we might call a “confessional axis”, whereby citizens unable to improve their immediate environment and seeking a higher purpose align with a “cause” that cuts across conventional political boundaries and is also transnational. Such causes are often close to but do not entirely overlap with religious identities. In some British constituencies—such as Harrow East, in 2019—voters sympathising with Hindu-nationalist politics have shown a tendency to back candidates on that basis, a development accelerated by Narendra Modi’s support of these ideas in his leadership of India, as well as clashes in Kashmir and the wars of the Middle East.
Such polarisation attracts fellow travellers from beyond practising religious circles, who adopt the political resonance of the antagonisms and magnify them. Politicians and commentators in many countries warn of the danger of “Islamisation”, though in most places intolerant, militant Islamism seeking to spread the harshest forms of Sharia law by force is supported by only a small minority of Muslims. In India, some even warn about “love jihad” in which Muslim men supposedly lure and entrap Hindu women in relationships—a way of delegitimising consensual relationships, and the point at which the conspiratorial, confessional axis meets the manosphere. Meanwhile, others, including Islamist militants, agitate against Jews as supposedly responsible for every ill. A report by extremism expert Daniel Allington last year showed that speakers in a few UK mosques promoted conspiracy theories about the 7th October attacks. It also argued that Iranian state media has a track record of supporting Holocaust denial. At its worst, this leads to the spread of antisemitic conspiracy theories and Islamophobia, and to the targeting of houses of worship and those who visit them.
Disconnection is thus a series of converging trends anchored in our disregard of embodied mind and emotional intelligence, deepened by those willing to manipulate it. It forges transnational links even as it severs more fundamental ones. For the superpowers which increasingly shape our age, this is a useful tool: they compete not merely by amassing or monopolising resources such as rare earths and superconductors, but by managing disconnection. The ways in which religions become beacons of political allegiance or aversion; how notions of masculinity mobilise political constituencies or affect demographic trajectories; the opacity in the governance of powerful technologies; the cultural retreat from connectivity, all this is a composite challenge.
That management of disconnection is by no means straightforward. In late 2023, a US Republican activist at an international relations seminar told me that supporters of his party were fed up of supporting Ukraine. What they wanted was to confront those oppressing Christians in Nigeria. Since then, Trump has indeed deployed troops in Nigeria with that explicit rationale, and has downgraded aid to Ukraine, seeking to tie American support for Kyiv to transactional conditions. His violent obsession with Iran, against the advice of many professionals, is in part explained by the sense among some Republicans that an Islamic confessional state with a sense of mission is a more natural adversary than Orthodox Russia. Lacking his own coherent ideas, Trump absorbs the impulses of his various political constituencies and has thus imbibed these iterations of the confessional axis. China itself continues its repression of the Uyghur people and other minorities in Xinjiang with the justification of responding to the growing presence of Islamist militancy in the Middle East and Central Asia. Its drive to homogenise the behaviour and mental consumption of its population as well the façade of places of worship is a bid to protect itself from cultural as much as political threats.
The reaffirmation of an “original” community against newcomers, even very old newcomers, is shared by populists on the right and left. While rightly denouncing the violence of the conquest, some Latin Americans would like to forget that their Christianity, architecture, legal systems and common language came from Spain. In March 2019, Mexican president López Obrador asked Spain and the Vatican to apologise for the 16th-century conquest. As our tolerance for nuance and synthesis decreases, the idea of autonomous, separate cultural entities takes shape.
As the west and its former dependencies turn inward, China sees an opportunity to dismantle not just the postwar order, but “western” ideas of universality in general. In a joint declaration in February 2022, China and Russia said that the “universal nature of human rights should be seen through the prism of the real situation in every particular country”. Since 2023 China’s “Global Civilization Initiative” has sought to build relationships between countries as fixed cultural entities with traditional values coming together through the patronage of Beijing rather than as partaking in universal attributes. This is a means to dismantle alliances and the credibility of international court rulings, such as that which favoured the Philippines in a maritime dispute with China in 2016.
Just as the superpowers share an ambition to use the longing for homogenisation and confessional sensibilities to consolidate their rule at home and define their adversaries abroad, the political dimensions of the AI race dovetail with big geopolitical shifts. In June, Trump barred non-US nationals from handling the most advanced AI models of American companies—a move which was lifted weeks later but which is being mirrored more subtly in the Chinese government’s wish to control its own products as well as undercut US products abroad. It seems likely this trend will continue and that the superpowers will develop distinct AI power-blocs.
This is the consequence of a key diplomatic development. As former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd argued in On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism is shaping China and the World (OUP, 2024), China in effect asked the US for a non-aggression pact in which each superpower would leave the other alone in its own backyard. Though the US rejected the obliquely proposed deal, it is indeed exercising its military muscle in “its” hemisphere and has withdrawn troops from East Asia to have on standby against Iran.
This mirrored posture is grounded in the profound historical ambivalence of these two powers towards global activism. While Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln regarded the US as a political and social model of universal validity whose fate would decide that of humanity, they also warned against excessive involvement in world affairs. Mao Zedong, father of Communist China, regarded himself as chief of the global proletarian revolution yet said the Chinese Revolution was not for export. The retreat to territorial spheres of influence with fortresses of technology is as much grounded in their self-conception as an outward sense of mission. While closing themselves off they each believe their own fate is that of humanity. The manosphere offers a different ambivalence at geopolitical level: it undergirds the posture of “strongmen” like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Trump but it creates the potential for disorder and demographic decline.
The disconnection transmitted from society to the world order is hampering our ability to contain conflict and to confront climate change, our two most salient problems. The world needs a moral authority that can offer impartial arbitration backed by military force and a coherence that can harness all dimensions of the climate effort. Yet such authority requires not that we be in helpless awe of it but that we meet it with our own agency. A clue about where this agency may be cultivated is given by a university degree set up recently in China: “embodied intelligence.”
