Mark Leonard

the connections that knit the world together are also driving it apart. In a world where war between nuclear powers is too dangerous even to contemplate, countries are waging conflicts by manipulating the very things that link them together.

We are having to get used to an unstable, crisis-prone world of perpetual competition and endless attacks between competing powers. Welcome to the age of unpeace.

In a connected world, people don’t have an option to keep themselves to themselves: everyone is in each other’s face.

As the great sociologist Anthony Giddens has pointed out, social media has made a reality of the global village, where people form personal friendships and intimate relationships, but where we also contend with bullies, gossip, innuendo, deception and violence.

The tragedy of our generation is that the forces that have united humankind are also dividing us and threatening to destroy us.

When I was a child we would compare our experience to our neighbours’ or our parents’ lives – but nowadays every aspect of our existence can be benchmarked against (sometimes fictionalized) depictions of the most privileged and successful people in the whole world. How can our lives ever match up to those standards? The result is permanent resentment.