How We Lost the Plot: What Happens When a Society Loses Its Shared Story — and Its Sense of the Real

 

We are living through a transformation so deep it cannot be captured by economics alone—one that is reshaping not just our livelihoods, but our very sense of what is real.

For years, we have been told that the middle class is shrinking because of technology, globalization, or a temporary mismatch between skills and opportunity. But I’ve come to believe this explanation is too small for the scale of the transformation underway. Something deeper—structural, historical, and ontological—is happening beneath the surface.

The rupture began, I think, with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

For all its brutality and distortion, the Cold War locked elites and masses into a shared geopolitical project. The “people”—industrial workers, clerical labor, students, soldiers—were not merely economic units. They were strategic resources held in reserve. Welfare systems, pensions, public education, accessible healthcare—these were more than social goods; they were stabilizing investments in a mobilizable population.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, that incentive evaporated. The need for mass participation waned. Wars no longer required millions of bodies. Global markets fractured the old national economies. Capital gained the ability to pool talent, labor, and consumption anywhere, anytime.

And then, almost imperceptibly, the bottom 90 percent began to be reclassified.

The shift wasn’t announced. There was no proclamation that citizenship had thinned into a legal fiction. But the effect was unmistakable: the majority were transformed from rights-bearing citizens into something closer to functional subalterns—their value measured less by participation in a social contract than by their capacity for extraction. What the colonized experienced under imperial capitalism—precarity, disposability, a structural inability to speak their world into legitimacy—is now resurfacing inside the very nations that once exported it.

Globalization, financialization, and the reach of ICT technologies didn’t simply disrupt industries; they dissolved the underlying logic of the post-war settlement. The middle class was not just an income bracket. It was a historical artifact, sustained by an implicit agreement: your stability for our stability.

When that agreement lost its geopolitical utility, it began to fray. Today, millions find themselves in a condition that would be familiar to the forgotten and ignored peoples of colonial history: living in survival mode, unable to secure housing, healthcare, education, or even a coherent narrative about their place in the world. The core features of the colonial condition—disposability, marginalization, ontological erasure—have quietly migrated into the heart of advanced democracies.

This is where the ontological dimension becomes unavoidable.

When a population is structurally downgraded, the first thing that collapses is not material well-being, but epistemic standing. People lose the right to define what is real. Their experiences are pathologized; their struggles reframed as personal failure; their intuitions dismissed as irrational. They are spoken about but not with. They occupy the position Gayatri Spivak famously articulated: the subaltern cannot speak—not because they are silent, but because the dominant structure cannot hear them.

The newly precarious majority now inhabits that same position. They are feeling the early symptoms of ontological displacement: mistrust in institutions, attraction to unconventional imaginaries, and the search for alternative ways of making sense of a world that no longer reflects them back to themselves.

People are losing the ability to locate themselves within the story of their own society. They feel the decoherence before they can name it. And without a shared ontology, the old narratives collapse.

But this structural demotion couldn’t succeed on economic grounds alone. It required a second, equally powerful process: the ontological occupation of public reality.

This is where the modern nation-state reveals its updated function. In earlier eras, the state told a story of shared destiny and upward mobility. Today, its narrative machinery operates differently. Rather than generating cohesion, it maintains ontological containment. The purpose is no longer to unify the public around a common project but to limit the bandwidth through which alternative realities can be articulated, circulated, and taken seriously. The state does not need to own the media. It only needs to shape the frame within which media operates.

This is an organizational lock on the imagination.

Through narrative saturation, regulatory pressure, and alignment with capital, the media ensures that the public sphere remains narrow, individualized, and emotionally charged but politically impotent. The effect is subtle but decisive. People do not simply lose access to material stability; they lose the legitimacy of their own worldview. Their ability to describe the world in terms that make sense to them is delegitimized before it can become politically actionable.

The domestic precariat now occupies the position of the colonized subaltern. Their economic hardship is compounded by ontological displacement: a sense that the world is no longer coherently narratable from their point of view. They feel the incoherence before they can name it. And in that epistemic void, the old social contract dissolves.

Under these conditions, alternative ontologies—mutualism, decoloniality, ecological relationality, local sovereignty, new forms of consciousness—are perceived as threats, not because they are dangerous in themselves, but because they expose the narrowness of the dominant frame. They reveal that the ontological perimeter around “reality” is politically maintained. They show that the terrain of possibility is larger than the story we are being told.

Yet this ontological occupation is not as stable as it appears.

People sense the fracture. Precarity sharpens perception. Climate destabilization amplifies ontological dissonance. AI enables individuals to engage in accelerated autodidactic exploration, bypassing traditional gatekeepers. The cracks are widening. New world-making efforts are emerging from the margins—small coherence clusters in a landscape that is otherwise fragmenting.

Perhaps that is the deeper task now—not to restore the old social contract, which belonged to a geopolitical era that no longer exists, but to cultivate alternative ontologies capable of grounding life in a rapidly shifting world. To listen with the newly subalternized majority, just as anthropologists once listened with the colonized, and recognize that their struggle is not only material but ontological.

We are living through a reordering of the real. Naming it is the first step. Reimagining it is the work ahead.