Eighty Years After "Victory in Europe"
It's a lot like Fifty Years After "Victory in Europe" in terms of humanity's progress
Eighty years ago on 7 May 1945, Colonel General Alfred Jodl, representing the German Army, unconditionally surrendered to the Allied powers at Reims in northeastern France, ending the war in Europe.
The next day, 8 May 1945, German Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel signed a second act of military surrender in Berlin at the insistence of the Soviets.
Since then, humanity’s overall condition has vastly improved. But to Steven Pinker, author and psychology professor, humanity has regressed over the last few years because of Putin’s invasion in Ukraine and the wars in Ethiopia, Sudan, and Gaza.
We have wiped out about 30 years of progress. We're back to the level of where we were in the early 90s, still better than we were in the '50s, '60s, '70s and '80s, to say nothing of the two world wars.
Pinker is well known for his view that humanity is doing better than we might think. It’s better than we might think, he says, because most of the news we hear — “serious journalism” — is bad news. That’s because journalism is typically driven by events. So it takes years to build up good things, but a negative event to tear things down — a terrorist, a gunman, a killdozer — only takes moments.
Pinker’s concerns about humanity’s regression — voiced in a podcast recorded during the World Economic Forum 20-24 January 2025 — included democracy, too.
Democracy is another area in which the world has given up some of its progress. The peak was probably in the first years of the 21st century. Then we got quite a bit of a democratic recession. Again, not as bad as it was in the 20th century but we have lost.
Now, just over a hundred days later, even more of democracy’s progress is lost. As The New York Times editorial board put it on May Day (of all days, a homophone for the international distress call), President Trump has attacked “five pillars of American democracy,” namely, separation of powers, due process, equal justice under law, free speech and freedom of the press, and government for the people.
Such pillars sustain democracy’s progress. Made from institutions, laws, and policies, they take years to build, pass, and enact. With a record-breaking 142 Executive Orders in his first 100 days, it’s no wonder why President Trump, like Elon Musk with his chainsaw, is so often in the news. Those orders — sometimes staged as events — are often bad news for the institutions, laws, and policies that took years to build, pass, and enact.
Quick changes to long-standing institutions, laws, and policies have happened before, of course. For example, rampant financial deregulation in the 1980s helped Baby Boomers (known then as the “Me” generation) get ahead, but set the stage for the next generation — Gen X (born between 1965-1980) — to fall behind.
Indeed, it was no surprise to this member of Generation X — yours truly — to see The Economist publish today further evidence of humanity’s regression with this title “Why Gen X is the real loser generation.” A big part of the reason: circumstances beyond Generation X’s control.
During the 1980s, when many boomers were in their 30s, global stockmarkets quadrupled. Millennials, now in their 30s, have so far enjoyed strong market returns. But during the 2000s, when Gen Xers were hoping to make hay, markets fell slightly. That period was a lost decade for American stocks in particular, coming after the dotcom bubble and ending with the financial crisis.
As discussed before in SustainLab, definitions of sustainability vary considerably because economic, social systems, and ecological conditions differ. But the Silicon Valley model to “move fast and break things” employed by Musk and Trump and — dare I write on this 80th anniversary of “Victory in Europe" — the Axis Powers in World War II (Germany, Italy, Japan), does not work well in sustaining either human progress or democracy.
Is the era of ‘Move Fast and Break Things” over in your habitat? Venture capitalist Hemant Taneja declared it so in the Harvard Business Review back in 2019 — a long time ago in the tech sector. He urged fellow venture capitalists to replace the MFABT era’s “minimum viable products” with “‘minimum virtuous products’—new offerings that test for the effect on stakeholders and build in guards against potential harms” and proposed eight questions that venture capitalists should be asking “to assess the social impact of startups’ technologies.”
Lots of interesting links and thought provoking questions. Am I missing something? "This is our 2nd video post....."