Across countries and at the global level, the social fabric is fraying, and our standard explanations are missing the root of the problem. We keep pointing to leaders, polarisation, or failing institutions, but those accounts stay on the surface. The deeper issue is one of social psychology.
I apply a social psychological lens—grounded in a rereading of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents and informed by complexity thinking—to argue that what is breaking down is our capacity to sustain demanding forms of commitment. A ‘social psychology of commitment,’ then, is about the patterned ways individuals and groups experience, tolerate, resist, or withdraw from civil society obligations under strain.
This current breakdown is driven, in large measure, by a deeply interdependent globalised world marked by globalisation’s unequal impacts and failed promises. The consequences for civil society are no longer quietly accumulating; they are spilling out across societies in ways that mark a historically significant crisis. We have seen before how difficult it is to rebuild civil society once it fractures. If we misread this breakdown as merely an ideological or institutional problem, we will fail to confront the underlying psychological crisis now shaping our politics and public life.
For this post I will do the following:
o I begin by briefly revisiting my 2019 book, The Defiance of Global Commitment, written well before the current moment but directly concerned with the dynamics now coming into view.
o I then draw selectively on that framework to apply its central diagnosis to what is unfolding in the United States, both domestically and in its global commitments.
Still, the post is not just about the United States. The States certainly holds headline news presently, but the fraying of our social psychology of civil commitment is happening across the globe. As such my focus on the States is just one case study – albeit a very dramatic one – with the hope that others will test this framework’s utility for other parts of the world. In short, the value of the framework I outline here lies in its portability: it does not explain events by reference to national traits or political cultures, but by tracing how commitment strain is organised and negotiated under specific structural conditions.
THE DEFIANCE OF GLOBAL COMMITMENT – SELECTED SUMMARY
The Defiance of Global Commitment is a sustained argument that the central crisis of the contemporary global order is not best understood as a failure of policy, governance, or institutional coordination, but as a failure rooted in the social psychology of commitment itself. The book advances the claim that globalization has outpaced the social psychological capacities through which humans historically manage obligation, restraint, and shared responsibility. As a result, the very commitments required to sustain global civil society—ethical, ecological, political, economic and social—are increasingly experienced not as collective necessities, but as intrusive demands that threaten individual and group-based pursuits of security, status, and wellbeing. The outcome is not withdrawal alone, but patterned resistance, backlash, and, in many cases, open defiance and its normalisation.
Working through a critical rereading of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, the book reframes discontent as a structurally unavoidable social psychological feature of social life, rather than a moral defect or ideological error. Civilization, Freud argued, advances by restricting instinctual freedom, and this restriction generates resentment, aggression, and resistance.
The present study extends this insight into the global era, arguing that globalization intensifies this psychic tension in two key ways. First is the deep global interdependence it produces, binding economic, political, and social processes across distance and scale. Decisions made far from everyday life increasingly shape local conditions, demanding commitments to distant others, abstract systems, and long-term collective goods under conditions of inequality, uncertainty, and perceived loss of control. What changes is not the basic drama of commitment and resistance, but its scale, speed, and stakes.
Second are globalisation’s unequal impacts and failed promises. Globalisation operated as a promise of shared benefit that required sacrifice in advance, yet it distributed rewards unevenly while making the costs of adjustment immediate and tangible. For many—particularly those lower on the socioeconomic ladder—the promised gains never materialised. In this context, global obligations were experienced less as reciprocal commitments than as external demands tied to a fragile and uneven bargain. The resistance that followed was not a moral failure or misunderstanding, but a predictable response to a persistent gap between promise and lived experience.
Across its early chapters, the book develops a diagnostic vocabulary for understanding how individuals and groups respond to these pressures. It identifies recurring orientations—nostalgic retreat, global aggression, affluent resentment, and forms of defensive in-group and out-group consolidation—not as ideological positions to be debated, but as patterned social psychological responses to perceived threats to agency, identity, and recognition. These orientations cut across political divides, but they do not carry equal consequences. On the far right, fear of loss is readily transformed into exclusionary politics, moralised aggression, and the normalisation of violence, directed both at targeted groups and at the institutions of civil society themselves. Under these conditions, commitment to pluralism, restraint, and democratic process is reframed as weakness or betrayal, and aggression becomes a legitimate means of restoring order. A different-but-similar dynamic appears in liberal contexts, where symbolic struggles over identity politics, language, and moral standing offer a lower-cost substitute for confronting material inequality, structural disadvantage, and steep social gradients—often from positions of relative privilege. What unites these responses is not moral equivalence, but a shared function: reducing social psychological strain by narrowing responsibility, simplifying conflict, and deflecting the deeper demands of genuinely global commitment.
The analytic core of the book is its distinction between therapeutic and non-therapeutic power, and between healthy resistance and unhealthy defiance. Power, the book insists, always provokes resistance; the critical issue is what kind of resistance emerges, under what conditions, and in response to which forms of power. Therapeutic power aims to cultivate insight, responsibility, and collective capacity, even when it enforces limits. Non-therapeutic power operates through coercion, humiliation, deception, or moralisation, often while claiming ethical legitimacy. When global commitments are advanced primarily through non-therapeutic means—especially under conditions of inequality and loss of voice—resistance predictably shifts from defensive and corrective forms toward denial, scapegoating, and aggression.
By treating these reactions to global commitments as intelligible rather than inexplicable, the book provides a framework for understanding why global civil society remains both necessary and perpetually unstable, and why efforts to sustain it repeatedly collide with the limits of human psychology under conditions of unequal globalization.
So let’s see if this framework can hold up to what is happening in the States, again as only one case study.
APPLYING THIS FRAMEWORK TO WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THE STATES
Civil society is perpetually unstable because it presses against the limits of human social psychological capacity in a globalised world of deep interdependence and unequal impacts. Participation in global civil society requires restraint, tolerance of ambiguity, and commitment to distant others under conditions where benefits and burdens are unevenly distributed. Some individuals, groups, and institutions can manage this strain, at least intermittently. Others cannot.
What distinguishes our present globalised and highly interdependent moment is not that this limit has suddenly appeared. It is that those who experience global commitment as intolerable are increasingly able to shape political agendas, institutional trajectories, and public narratives.
This capacity does not reside in leaders and elites alone – who often benefit massively from globalisation. In most of the global West, political authority operates through negotiated ordering: what leaders can do, sustain, or get away with is constrained by what those they govern will tolerate, endorse, ignore, or quietly accept.
Everyday social psychological thresholds therefore matter.
Civil society weakens not only when leaders undermine institutions, but when large numbers of people withdraw their willingness to sustain demanding commitments in daily life—through indifference, compliance, selective outrage, or active support for narrowing obligation.
Seen this way, current conflicts around civil society are not well captured by simple stories of democracy versus authoritarianism. What we are witnessing instead is a struggle over how much commitment can reasonably be demanded, and who gets to decide when that demand has gone too far. This struggle plays out unevenly, often within the same societies and institutions, producing patterns that appear contradictory only if we assume civil society is a single, shared object rather than a social psychologically uneven demand.
In the United States, the Trump administration’s 2025–2026 challenges to NATO and the United Nations, alongside proposals treating Greenland’s sovereignty as negotiable, have been widely contested. But they have also found significant pockets of tolerance—and occasional enthusiasm—because they resonate with an already present scepticism toward multilateral obligation and alliance commitments. For those citizens in support, the United States’ responsibilities within global civil society have come to be experienced as onerous obligations imposed in the name of others’ interests: a system of restraint perceived as serving a distant transnational elite rather than the national in-group. Under these conditions, pushing back against multilateral institutions does not register as destabilising global order so much as resisting repression.
What matters analytically is not the accuracy of this picture, but its social psychological plausibility. Europe is not a unified liberal bloc, nor are its states interchangeable. The United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union, Denmark’s initial hesitations over military support for Ukraine, and persistent domestic conflicts over immigration, welfare, and sovereignty all point to internal fractures that sit uneasily with any image of a coherent ‘transnational elite.’ Yet these complexities do little to disrupt the underlying resentment narrative. From a social-psychological perspective, such narratives function not to describe reality, but to simplify it—to compress heterogeneous actors and institutions into a single external force against which resistance feels justified.
In this context, challenges to NATO, scepticism toward the United Nations, and gestures that treated territorial norms as flexible operated as outward-facing expressions of a deeper social psychological withdrawal from global commitment. They signal a refusal of restraint framed as self-defence: a reclaiming of agency against obligations that now felt excessive, moralising, and asymmetrically distributed. That these moves risk undermining institutions from which the United States also benefits did not weaken their appeal. On the contrary, it reinforces their symbolic power as acts of release from a global order increasingly experienced as psychologically oppressive. As Freud long noted, such contradictions are not incidental: under conditions of perceived constraint, individuals and groups will often accept—even embrace—self-damage if it promises release from an order experienced as asymmetrically benefiting others.
This logic also applies domestically. One prominent example in 2025–2026 lies in domestic practices associated with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which relies heavily on in-group/out-group distinctions to normalise harsh enforcement, detention, and sanctioned force. Policies that inflict harm on refugees, minorities, or marginalised groups are rarely defended as cruelty. They are justified as realism, protection, or necessity. Once participation in civil society is experienced as an unreasonable psychological burden, limiting compassion and narrowing responsibility can feel not like moral failure but like common sense. Support for such measures is sustained not only through coercion, but through widespread accommodation.
Domestically, what is at stake is not immigration alone. For those drawn toward nostalgic retreat, nationalism, or similar defensive orientations, civil society itself comes to be experienced as an intolerable social psychological burden—an overextended demand for restraint, pluralism, and global obligation. In response, civil society is rewritten not as a shared space of negotiation and restraint, but as a legitimate source of coercive power: a means of enforcing order against those who insist on maintaining commitments that now feel unbearable. In this context, the rights of immigrants, refugees, and citizens engaging in nonviolent protest are no longer recognised as upholding civil society but are recast as obstacles to order. Sanctioned force is thus redirected inward, not as an aberration, but as a social psychologically intelligible attempt to resolve the strain of global and civic commitment by narrowing who and what civil society is for.
This helps explain why undermining civil society can focus on empowering a defiant social psychology. Commitment can be narrowed without being disavowed. Obligations can be reinterpreted rather than rejected. Restraint can be recast as naivety, care as overreach, and solidarity as self-harm. These shifts matter not because they are rhetorically clever, but because they align with what many people can psychologically carry. Leaders articulate these framings, but their durability depends on whether they resonate with everyday experiences of strain, loss, and resentment.
Crucially, these dynamics do not produce uniform retreat. Survey evidence across the United States and Europe consistently shows divided publics: support for humanitarian values and democratic norms often coexists with endorsement of restrictive or coercive domestic policies, particularly around migration, protest, and security. The point is not moral inconsistency, but psychological management. Commitment strain is negotiated across domains, narrowed where tolerance is exceeded, and maintained where demands remain bearable. However, many people experience the erosion of restraint itself as intolerable. As defiance bleeds out across society, in this case the States, resistance reappears in the form of protest, institutional defence, and demands for civility and humanity to be restored. These responses emerge from the same negotiated order. They signal that withdrawal has gone too far, that the social costs of undermining now exceed the psychological relief it provides.
COMING FULL CIRCLE TO WHY THIS ARGUMENT MATTERS GLOBALLY
What this perspective ultimately clarifies is why the present moment in the States (and more globally, across a lot of the world) feels both volatile and unresolved. Civil society is not collapsing in a single direction, nor stabilising through consensus. It is being stretched, resisted, defended, and narrowed all at once as individuals and institutions confront the psychological limits of global commitment. Even under more equitable forms of globalization, the demands of global interdependence and global civil society would remain psychologically taxing; the issue is not whether strain exists, but whether it becomes corrosive or manageable. Those who find these limits intolerable now have greater capacity to drive agendas that reduce obligation and legitimise withdrawal—because enough people, in everyday life, are prepared to live with the consequences.
The task, then, is not to imagine a world without resistance to civil society, but to recognise that its instability is structural, negotiated, and ongoing—and that how societies manage these limits will determine whether commitment is contained, distorted, or progressively undone.
CONCLUSION
In summary, this analysis shows how social-psychological limits on commitment can be traced across countries and regions—not by attributing outcomes to national character, ideology, or leadership, but by examining how obligations are experienced, negotiated, resisted, and narrowed under specific structural conditions. Offered as a starting point, the United States case examined here warrants careful comparative extension to other national and regional contexts where global commitments are being renegotiated under different institutional, cultural, and historical conditions.
