2. A diagnostic map of today’s society

There is no shortage of analysis of what is wrong with the world. Climate breakdown, rising inequality, democratic erosion, a mental health epidemic, housing unaffordability for an entire generation — the list is long and well-documented.

What is more challenging to see is how these challenges relate to each other, and what their root causes are.

By mapping the challenges and insights to the previously introduced Societal Emergence Model, what arises is what I refer to as a Diagnostic Map. It does not introduce any new concepts, or make the issues easier to solve. But it does lead to some interesting insights.

The core: a world view in three words

The diagnostic map begins with a world view that can be summarised in three words, articulated with remarkable precision by Dutch economist Herman Wijffels in his farewell address as professor of Sustainability and Societal Change at Utrecht University, on 3 October 2016:

These are not political opinions. They are the operating assumptions that have been built into the foundations of modern Western societies over the past few centuries — through Enlightenment philosophy, through the scientific revolution, through industrialisation, through the architecture of international relations, and through the design of our economic systems. They feel so natural that they are rarely recognised as assumptions at all. They feel like reality.

The system: four institutional expressions

Because we see the world as made up of competing, separate parts with no higher shared purpose, our institutions reflect that logic. Each of the four pillars of our current system follows directly from the world view above — not by coincidence, but by causal necessity.

The growth imperative. Because atomistic, competing parts have no shared language other than size, growth becomes the only universal metric. Not wellbeing, not sustainability, not justice — but growth. And once growth is embedded in pension funds, debt structures, and political cycles, it ceases to be a political choice. It becomes a structural necessity: an economy that does not grow is an economy in crisis, almost by definition. Stillness equals failure.

The financialised economy. Because the human being and their possessions are placed at the centre, and the world is seen as a resource to be used, capital becomes the primary steering mechanism. Money stops being a means and becomes the end. The economy evolves into a system in which debt, interest and capital markets shape all decisions — not the question “what is good?” but “what returns?”. Long-term thinking is structurally disadvantaged; quarterly results are structurally rewarded.

Nation-state sovereignty. Because the world is seen as a collection of sovereign, competing units, this logic scales directly to the political level: states that guard their own interests, with no higher authority that can act bindingly above them. The result is a world in which global coordination is structurally difficult. Climate agreements are voluntary. Tax havens cannot be closed because some state will always opt out. Multinational corporations play states against each other in a race to the bottom on regulation, wages and taxes.

The individualist welfare state. Because the isolated individual is the basic unit of the system — not the family, not the community, not the commons — care and solidarity are organised around that isolated individual. The welfare state catches people when they fall, but it does so by treating them as separate cases rather than as members of communities that could provide resilience in the first place. It solves individually what was broken collectively.

The workings: where the system meets society

Between the system and daily experience lies a layer that is often overlooked in public debate: the structural patterns that the system continuously generates. These are not policy failures or political mistakes — they are the predictable outputs of a system working exactly as designed. I call them the workings of the system: how it concretely manifests in the fabric of society.

Disconnection from nature — economic logic systematically severs the feedback loops between human activity and ecological systems. Nature becomes invisible in the price of things, and therefore in the decisions we make.

Commons destruction — shared resources — clean air, groundwater, biodiversity, social trust — are treated as free inputs with no cost and no owner. They are consumed faster than they regenerate, because the system has no mechanism to price or protect them.

Market failure — the market, left to its own logic, does not price externalities. The true cost of carbon, of loneliness, of soil depletion, of precarious labour — none of these appear on any balance sheet. Decisions that look rational in market terms are often deeply irrational in societal terms.

Concentration of power — wealth and influence compound over time without structural limits. Those at the top of economic and political hierarchies accumulate not just resources but the ability to shape the rules of the game in their favour. Power becomes self-reinforcing.

Short-termism — political cycles of four years and financial cycles of one quarter structurally disadvantage long-term thinking. Problems that unfold over decades — climate change, demographic shifts, infrastructure decay — are consistently underinvested in, because the incentives all point elsewhere.

Care deficit — the work of caring for children, elderly people, the sick, and the vulnerable is systematically undervalued by markets, because it does not produce measurable output in the conventional sense. This is not incidental — it is structural. Care is the invisible subsidy on which the entire economy runs.

Community infrastructure collapse — the physical and social fabric of collective life — local institutions, third places, neighbourhood networks, civic organisations — has been progressively defunded, commercialised or simply allowed to erode. The infrastructure of belonging has been quietly dismantled.

Accountability gap — there are few structural consequences for those at the top of power and wealth hierarchies whose decisions produce widespread harm. Accountability mechanisms exist on paper but rarely operate in practice at the level where the most consequential decisions are made.

The experience: what people actually live

The outermost ring of the diagnostic map is where most political conversation happens — and where the least structural change takes place. These are the things people name when asked what is wrong with the world. They are real, urgent and painful. But they are outputs, not causes.

Reading around the map, the experienced reality of the industrial society includes:

Ecosystem collapse — species extinction, the destruction of coral reefs and forests, the unravelling of the biological systems on which all human life depends.

Resource depletion — the exhaustion of water, soil, and fossil fuels that took millions of years to accumulate and are being consumed in decades.

Geopolitical instability — war, mass migration, failed states, and the breakdown of the international order that was painstakingly constructed after 1945.

Democratic erosion — the rise of authoritarianism, the spread of disinformation, the hollowing out of institutions that were once trusted to arbitrate between competing interests.

Inequality — widening gaps in wealth, health, and educational opportunity that are now so large in many societies that social mobility has effectively stalled.

Social isolation — loneliness and disconnection at epidemic scale, in societies that are more connected digitally than ever before and more isolated socially than at any point in living memory.

Intergenerational rupture — perhaps the most underappreciated fracture: young people who are locked out of the housing, security and futures their parents could access, not through their own failure but through the structural logic of a system that consistently optimises for the present at the expense of the future. The social contract between generations is broken.

Mental health crisis — burnout, nihilism, addiction and loss of purpose at a scale that cannot be explained by individual psychology alone. It is the human experience of living in a system that is misaligned with what people fundamentally need.

Trust collapse — institutions that are no longer seen as legitimate, competent or acting in the public interest. A diffuse but profound sense that the systems meant to serve people are serving something else.

Cleaning up polluted rivers, building more affordable housing, strengthening mental health services, reducing child poverty — millions of people work on making change, and this work is urgent, necessary and valuable. The outer ring of this map — the domain of the symptoms — is a hugely important place to act.

But the map does reveal something important about the limits of outside-in work. Every intervention at the level of experience has to fight against the current of the system producing that experience. You build affordable housing; the financialised economy drives prices up again. You treat burnout; the growth imperative generates new burnout. You strengthen democratic institutions; the concentration of power hollows them out from within. This is not a reason to stop — it is a reason to also work inward, on the layers that are generating the pressure in the first place.

At the level of the system, it means institutional and policy reform: redesigning the rules of the economy so that true costs are priced, so that capital serves long-term common good, so that global coordination becomes structurally possible rather than structurally blocked. This is fundamentally political work — and it is worth saying explicitly that the European Union is one of the few places on earth where that kind of transnational institutional reform is actually possible. The EU’s ability to set binding standards across 27 nations — on carbon, on corporate taxation, on digital markets, on nature restoration — makes it a uniquely powerful lever for working at the system level. Strengthening and deepening that project, rather than retreating into national sovereignty, is one of the most consequential things Europeans can do.

At the level of the workings, the work is about shifting the conditions that the system generates: building community infrastructure back up, recognising and redistributing care, creating accountability mechanisms that actually function, designing cities and institutions around belonging rather than efficiency. This is the domain of urban planners, social entrepreneurs, institutional designers, and the many people working in what is sometimes called the social economy — quietly rebuilding the fabric that the industrial system has eroded.

And at the level of the world view — the innermost ring, and the hardest to reach — the work is cultural. It is the domain of storytelling: the narratives we tell about who we are, what we are for, and how we relate to each other and to the natural world. It is the domain of education, which shapes the assumptions of the next generation before they have hardened into the obvious. It is the domain of philosophy, spirituality and meaning-making — spaces where the deepest questions about human nature and our place in the world are actually held. And it is the domain of activism in its most fundamental sense: the refusal to accept that the current set of assumptions is the only possible one, and the insistence on making visible what the dominant culture prefers to leave unseen.

This diagnostic map may feel a bit like a counsel of despair. But it shouldn’t: a map that shows you where you are is the first condition for being able to navigate somewhere else.

That is the subject of the next article in this series, in which I introduce a Vision Map — the same four-layer model, but then describing the to-be situation.