The Liberal Democracy Is an Artificial Environment Tim Urban

The liberal democracy is an artificial environment, carefully crafted to both contain human nature and convert it into an engine of progress.

When we grow up within an artificial habitat that values human inventions like reason and fairness and humanity, it can be easy to forget just how tenuous that environment is.

It’s easy to forget that we’re living in a rare anomaly within human history—an anomaly held up only by trust, cultural norms, and shared assumptions.

It’s easy to become overconfident in the stability and permanence of that environment and forget that the worst of human nature is always lurking just beneath the surface.

But the reality is that a liberal democracy is a human construct, held in place not only by laws but by the “support beam” of liberal norms—shared notions of what is and isn’t tolerable or harmful and by shared determination to uphold those standards.

When that support beam weakens, the environment can quickly collapse.

Credit: Tim Urban

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