Causes of world ‘going mad’

“Has the world gone mad?” No doubt, you, like me, have heard this expression a lot more often in the past couple of weeks. This is because of President Donald Trump’s baseless connection between autism and paracetamol; his imposition on five days’ notice of tariffs against drug companies that do not build plants in America; and Optus’s failure on the emergency network causing death; among other things.

It is worthwhile looking at how and why the world has “gone mad”. To do that, let’s look at the big changes this century to get some related clues: the internet; economic disruption; planetary resource limitations; and asymmetric warfare. Trump is a symptom of these causes, not the cause itself.

In the 1990s the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berniers-Lee, thought the internet would just give access to existing bodies of information in a quicker and more searchable form than in the past and be a collaborative force for good. It did that, but it also did a lot other horrible things, which he now admits.

First, it removed the need for publishers before people could get their messages across. Pre-internet, journalists were pleaded with, nagged, and bombarded with goodies by people who wanted to get their message across. Without media, or mediums, to publish the message over the public airwaves or through printed and well-distributed newspaper and magazine networks, no-one would get their message out.

The media were the gate-keepers, deciding what would be published in the limited space available. They filtered out, to a large extent, the factually incorrect, the tasteless, the defamatory, the offensive, and the trivial, leaving information of consequence to be published.

With the internet, publishing space became almost unlimited. There are now no paper space or air-wave constraints. Messages are now being read depending on attention-grabbing rather than a pursuit of factual information of consequence.

Unlike traditional media which usually wanted to appeal to everyone, or everyone with a genuine special interest, such as gardening, health, fishing etc, internet publishers appeal to viewpoints: political, religious, racial; economic; and conspiratorial.

The internet has done worse. It has created echo chambers where existing views get reinforced. It has caused the near elimination of good information, truth seeking, and evidence-based clear thinking. Regular browsing and absorbing of the whole world through a daily newspaper, broadcast, book, or encyclopedia is shrinking.

The internet has also helped monetise misinformation, undermining legitimate markets and competition. It enables corporations to ignore consumers and their rights and put profit before community obligations as Optus has done. It enables the sowing of confusion upon which power-grabs can be based, as Trump is doing.

Meanwhile, the economy changed with the onslaught of the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, closely followed by COVID, and supply-chain inflation.

Suddenly many people felt shut out, and poorer. With like-affected people they used the internet to reinforce their alienation, and their desire – ever more aggressively – to seek retribution.

The optimism that followed the end of the cold war was replaced with inward-looking nations turning their backs on the benefits of co-operative free trade in a rules-based order. Nations like Russia, North Korea, China, Israel, Iran, and the US have been using their armed forces and asymmetric, aggressive warfare to expand territories, exert pressure, terrorise populations, and attempt regime change.

The promises of neo-liberalism – rational, efficiency leading to better living standards – have failed as shareholders and upper-management creamed off the wealth at great public cost without any regard or payment for the rapacious misuse of finite planetary resources. They became irrational slaves to the hopelessly inaccurate measure of GDP rather than measures of general well-being. No wonder we had a Global Financial Crisis.

Small wonder we have an upsurge in youth mental-health problems. It is not just social media. All they see is a chaotic future with few opportunities.

What we are seeing here is a change equivalent to the end of the Roman Republic, the collapse of the Roman Empire; the Black Death and the end of feudalism; the Renaissance-Reformation-Enlightenment; the rise of nation states; the Industrial Revolution; and the rise and fall of fascism and communism. All times when “the world went mad”.

This change is about the fall of neo-liberal economics. What will replace it? The rule of autocrats and oligarchs in a zero-sum fight over a finite pie of power and greed, and growing inequality at the expense of minorities and the less well-off, and a denial of science and planetary limitations. Or will it be replaced by a co-operative search for greater co-operation and creativity that results in greater abundance (a bigger pie) and improved living standards for all in a rules-based – not force- and fear-based – order.

This is the contest.

The difference between the two futures can be illustrated nostalgia. Many alienated white Anglo-Saxon Protestant males have a nostalgia for an age when they held the power. Left progressives have a nostalgia for an earlier age of better and freer government health, education and aged services. This is unlike the WASPs’ nostalgia for a world in which many lived in fear: defenceless, jobless women bullied in the home (and now being spooked into having safe pain-killers taken away); racial and sexual discrimination in the workplace, housing, retail, the law, and public facilities; homophobia and bashings and killings; and sexual abuse of children – all done with impunity.

That misplaced WASP nostalgia (exhibited in the dangerous hero-worshipping of the assassinated extremist Charlie Kirk in the US) is making the race card easier for some to wave again, even in Australia.

Coalition frontbencher Andrew Hastie said at the weekend: “We’re starting to feel like strangers in our own home” due to what he called “unsustainable” immigration.

“In the last two years, we’ve added nearly a million extra people to our population,” he said.

Now he knows what Indigenous Australians have been feeling since 1788. But cutting immigration won’t stop “us” feeling like strangers in our own land because we have a non-discriminatory immigration policy. Immigration can be raised or cut and make no difference to its racial mix. Hastie is dog-whistling. He is using the race card as well as the obvious concern over the economic and environmental pressures that high immigration brings to get support for himself and his leadership aspirations.

The best way for the Government to deal with this repugnant racist tripe being linked to immigration is to have a population policy which sets out the economic and environmental advantages and disadvantages of various levels of immigration and what the nation can reasonably bear. The optimum should be legislated in an annual number – rather than the present uncontrolled system under which anyone who fits the fairly lax criteria can come in.

If the Government could go back to the normal levels before Howard ramped up immigration to provide cheap labour and reduce union power, the Coalition’s campaign would have the rug pulled for under it.

Similarly, other government policy can undermine power swings to autocracy and oligarchy. That is the contest.

Crispin Hull

This article first appeared in The Canberra Times and other Australian media on 30 September 2025.