Why Has World Become So Intolerant?

We often ask why ordinary people have become so impatient with one another. Why does a disagreement over politics, religion, traffic, football or even a Facebook post so quickly become a personal battle? Why do people seem increasingly unable to tolerate difference? We usually search for the answer at the bottom of society: poverty, unemployment, inequality, addiction, family breakdown, social media, declining values or psychological distress. All of these explanations have merit. But perhaps we are looking at the problem from the wrong end.
Before asking why people have lost their temper, perhaps we should ask what kind of world they are watching every day. Political conduct is learned through observation rather than formal education. Citizens observe how governments address adversaries, integrate violent rhetoric into their speech and suppress disagreements. When authority continuously proves that hostility yields better results, the public naturally adopts the same behaviour. 
This is why the growing harshness of public life cannot be separated from the stringency of international politics. Contemporary geopolitics is often heavily defined by aggressive rhetoric. Terms concerning warfare, territorial ambitions, nuclear warnings, economic penalties and endless hostility have regularised within mainstream political debates. Europe is debating greater strategic autonomy and defence preparedness while NATO members are increasing their military ambitions. Recent Reuters reporting has described growing European concern about Russia, uncertainty over US commitments and the resulting pressure for greater defence capacity. 
Preparing for danger is not the same as desiring war. Governments have legitimate security responsibilities. Neglecting the military can jeopardise public safety. But there is a psychological consequence to living permanently inside a vocabulary of threat. When governments prepare populations for catastrophe, citizens do not leave their fears at the border. It infiltrates homes, schools, and workplaces, poisoning everyday dialogue between families, coworkers, and neighbours. A stranger becomes a potential threat. A disagreement becomes an attack. Compromise begins to look like weakness.
Hannah Arendt, writing about totalitarianism and the political conditions that make mass movements possible, was deeply concerned with the destruction of a shared world in which people could encounter one another as different human beings. Once that common world fragments, politics becomes less about persuasion and more about domination. The opponent is no longer someone with whom we disagree. The opponent becomes someone who must be defeated. That transformation is visible far beyond formal politics.
While modern technology has dramatically increased our capacity to broadcast information globally, it has simultaneously eroded our willingness to listen to one another. The gap between rapid communication and poor listening links individual digital frustration to broader global instability.
W. B. Yeats understood something similar almost a century ago. Writing in the aftermath of the First World War, he imagined a world in which the centre of moral and political order was losing its ability to hold. In The Second Coming, the falcon can no longer hear the falconer, an image of a relationship between authority and control breaking down. Yeats then arrives at the terrifying observation that “the best lack all conviction” while “the worst” possess passionate intensity. 
The poem remains unsettling because its deepest subject is not war. It is the collapse of restraint. And restraint is a fragile human achievement. Civilisation does not survive because human beings are naturally peaceful. It survives because institutions, customs, ethics and habits teach us to control impulses that would otherwise make collective life impossible. Freud understood civilisation as an uneasy bargain between individual desire and social order. Hobbes, from a very different philosophical position, imagined political authority as a means of preventing human conflict from descending into something worse.
Both perspectives point towards an uncomfortable truth: order is never automatic. Order is sustained only when leaders, educators, parents, journalists, and everyday citizens actively model responsible behaviour and choose constructive disagreement over mutual destruction. That is why the behaviour of political leaders matters even when it does not immediately affect our wallets or borders. 
Albert Camus wrote that the real challenge of an absurd world was not to surrender to it but to resist becoming absurd oneself. That may be one of the great moral tasks of our time. We cannot control every war, president or missile. But we can decide whether the violence of the world will determine the way we speak to the person sitting beside us. The greatest danger may not be that the world explodes. It may be that we gradually become accustomed to living as though an explosion is normal.
Perhaps the first step towards restoring stability is therefore surprisingly modest. Those who possess the greatest power must rediscover the value of restraint. Leaders do not have to be weak to be measured. Nations do not have to surrender their security to pursue diplomacy. Citizens do not have to agree with one another to remain humane.
The centre does not hold by itself. Someone has to hold it. And perhaps, in an increasingly impatient world, that someone must begin with the people who possess the greatest power to make everyone else afraid.
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The writer is an academic, 
journalist and political analyst. 
He can be reached at 
[email protected]