The Rise And Fall Of Liberal Democracy’s Shared Fiction

At the Munich Security Conference on February fourteenth, twenty twenty-five, Vice President JD Vance delivered a message that reverberated across the Atlantic: the United States could no longer guarantee its defense of liberal democracy. Per Noema Magazine, that moment captured something philosophers have long understood — the collapse of what Yuval Noah Harari calls shared fictions: collective beliefs that enable large-scale cooperation. Throughout history, climate disruptions reshaped these transcendent frameworks, from ancestor worship born after the Ice Age to Big Gods enabling ancient empires. But since the sixteen hundreds, communication technologies have become the punctuation marks of cultural upheaval. Martin Luther's printing press gave rise to Protestantism and individualism; newspapers and coffee houses enabled the Enlightenment and the figure of the sovereign citizen; mass media created a concentrated power that postwar liberal democracy depended on. Then social media arrived. Starting in two thousand six, hundreds of millions of voices could suddenly speak and be heard, fragmenting the consensus that had held liberal democracy together for seventy years. The shared fiction, it seems, could not survive the loss of its monopoly on attention.

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