Broad human cooperation isn’t our natural state—it’s a luxury of abundance and security. Our moral circle is elastic, expanding when we feel safe and contracting when we feel threatened.
Our sense of belonging expands during peaceful times—local to national to global—and contracts under disruption back to family, neighborhood, tribe. The churn (economic collapse, resource scarcity, war, pandemic) strips away abstract loyalties. Citizenship and humanity give way to family and immediate community.
The 1990s brought peak globalization and “global citizen” identity. Then 2008’s financial crisis, 2016’s populist movements, and 2020’s pandemic pushed us back to nationalism and local concerns. Climate change now creates both cooperation attempts and resource competition.
Civilization—broad cooperation, universal human rights, international law—is more fragile than we assume. It depends on people feeling secure enough to care about distant others.
This cycle isn’t a failure of human nature. It’s inevitable. Understanding the pattern might help us build cooperative structures that survive the churn.