Are we going backwards?

What happens when reason stops mattering in politics? We are living through the answer in real time. For 45 years, neoliberalism has been the dominant force in Western democracies, and in that time, it has done something far more dangerous than redistribute wealth upwards. It has systematically dismantled the intellectual and ethical foundations that make democratic politics possible.

The Enlightenment gave us something extraordinary: the idea that reason, evidence, and the equal moral worth of every human being should guide how we organise society. Neoliberalism replaced that with markets. It reduced people from moral equals to economic actors, stripped public services in the name of efficiency, weakened democratic accountability, and narrowed the boundaries of political thought until Margaret Thatcher's "There Is No Alternative" became conventional wisdom rather than a political choice.

The consequences are now impossible to ignore. Careful reasoning is being replaced by crude slogans. Evidence is losing ground to belief. Nuanced debate has given way to hostility. And the backlash against neoliberalism's failures is not producing a return to Enlightenment values, it is producing the conditions for fascism: demands for loyalty over accountability, indifference to consequences, and the deliberate promotion of inequality for the benefit of an elite.

Thomas Hobbes warned us centuries ago about what happens when the social order breaks down. We are approaching that point. But as this video argues, the current path is not inevitable. Change is possible, but it requires us to recommit to evidence-based decision-making, rebuild democratic institutions, constrain markets, and put care, not profit, at the centre of politics. Can we do that still? That is the question.