Abstract

Humans use narratives to make sense of historical developments as well as to guide their future actions, and these narratives can in turn have great impact on their lives, societies and the world overall. Here I would like to put forward such a narrative to rationalize the increasingly forceful changes of our current decade. Arguing for the existence of three ongoing waves of emancipation of the individual in society, it is proposed that we are currently approaching the high-point of conflict of the second, economic emancipation process. After the outgoing first wave made (at least some) people fully aware of the importance of political equality and lead to the formation of (at least some) democratic states on the basis of national constitutions, we now have to fully accept the importance of economic fairness to enable us to continue our venture into the third wave of cultural fairness as diversity, which in my opinion puts the philosophy of economics under the pressure to tackle an increasingly important task, namely to develop ideas for better working constitutional principles for economic communities. A failure to do so would mean to not only fail to implement fair and sustainable markets, but as a result to fall back behind even political equality, with strongmen – banally driven by childhood wounds and riding on waves of public discontent – capturing democratic states with badly informed narratives about western civilization, for instance in the form of ‘Christian Nationalism’. Intentionally obscuring the facts that liberal democracies and free markets do in fact not underperform in comparison to the existing alternatives, and that extreme inequality is instead most often to a large part driven by the greed and ruthlessness of individuals who misuse their power to distort economic and political frameworks, these strongmen could then roll-back important civilizational advances while trying to satisfy their insatiable ego: What ‘great’ men want is still so boring.