The Worse-Is-Better Theory of History

There is a curious belief that appears again and again across the political spectrum: the conviction that the world is not merely troubled, but collapsing—and that this collapse is somehow necessary, even desirable. Things must get worse, the thinking goes, before they can get better. When the system finally breaks, then our ideas will prevail.

I’ve come to think of this mindset as the worse-is-better theory of history.

It is not confined to any single ideology. You find it on the right, the left, and the center. You find it among religious traditionalists and secular radicals, environmentalists and techno-skeptics, populists and revolutionaries. The details differ, but the structure is always the same: a story of inevitable decline paired with the promise of eventual vindication.

Collapse as a Precondition for Victory

Recently, conservative columnist David French described conversations with young MAGA voters who were furious with him for refusing to admit that America is in a “death spiral.” French noted that disagreement or agreement over policy no longer seemed to matter. What mattered was that he would not acknowledge collapse as a given starting point. To deny the death spiral was, in their eyes, a kind of moral betrayal. They told him, “The country was in crisis, and I needed to open my eyes, steel my spine and take the necessary, sometimes authoritarian, steps to pull it from the brink.”

Donald Trump exploited this instinct successfully to win his elections. His first inaugural address warned of “American carnage”—a nation supposedly ravaged by crime, immigration, and economic ruin. His rhetoric appealed to his follower not because it was accurate, but because it validated a feeling: that the present moment is uniquely degraded, and that only drastic rupture can “make America great again.”

On the left, similar beliefs have persisted for centuries. Classical Marxism held that capitalism contained internal “contradictions” which would produce ever-deepening crises of overproduction, culminating in systemic collapse and revolutionary transformation. Suffering was not an unfortunate byproduct of history; it was history’s engine.

I was a Marxist in college. I remember one of my fellow-Marxist friends once refusing to tip a waitress because he wanted to “sharpen contradictions.” It was an absurd moment, but also a revealing one. When collapse is treated as morally productive, ordinary human decency becomes negotiable.

The environmental movement has had its own versions of this story. In the late 1960s and 1970s, Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb predicted mass starvation and societal breakdown by the end of the twentieth century. Those predictions did not come to pass. Global food production rose faster than population growth, and famine declined dramatically.

Yet the expectation of catastrophe never disappeared—it simply changed form. Today, as population growth slows and even reverses in affluent societies, we are warned of a “fertility crisis” and demographic collapse. At the same time, we are told that climate change will lead to near-term civilizational breakdown and human extinction. These fears may contradict one another, but they share a common emotional posture: history is running out of road.

No one ever went broke telling people that the world is going to hell.

The Awkward Problem of the Data

The difficulty with the Worse-Is-Better Theory of History is not that it is pessimistic. Pessimism can be healthy. The problem is that it persists in defiance of overwhelming evidence.

Two hundred years ago, global life expectancy was roughly 35 years. Today it is more than 73 years. Extreme poverty, once the human norm, has collapsed from over 80 percent of the global population to under 10 percent, even after accounting for recent setbacks, according to data collected by the World Bank and other sources.

Literacy, education, access to clean water, knowledge, human rights and numerous other metrics of human well-being have expanded on a scale that would have seemed miraculous to earlier generations. Violence—despite horrific twentieth-century episodes—has declined over the long run when measured per capita, as noted in Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature.

The dominant nutritional problem of the nineteenth century was hunger and famine. Today, the dominant concern in much of the world is obesity. This is not a trivial issue—obesity contributes to heart disease, diabetes, and reduced quality of life—but it is also a problem of abundance, not scarcity. Many of today’s major health challenges are diseases of aging and affluence, precisely because people are living long enough to develop them.

Even cancer, often described as a modern scourge, is in large part a disease of longevity. As Siddhartha Mukherjee writes in The Emperor of All Maladies:A Biography of Cancer: “Cancer is a disease of aging. The longer we live, the more likely we are to get cancer. … As medicine succeeded in controlling tuberculosis, pneumonia, cholera, and childhood infections, chronic diseases—including cancer—emerged as leading causes of death.” In short, cancer has become more visible—not because live has gotten worse, but because medicine has grown more effective .

None of this means the world is perfect. It plainly is not. But it does mean that claims of unprecedented collapse demand extraordinary evidence—and rarely supply it.

Why We Keep Expecting the Worst

If the evidence for progress is so strong, why does the worse-is-better theory keep returning?

Part of the answer is psychological. Human beings are subject to negativity bias: we attend more closely to threats than to improvements. Decline feels urgent; progress feels boring. A famine makes headlines; the quiet absence of famine does not.

There is also a moral temptation. Believing that collapse is inevitable absolves us of responsibility for reform. If history itself is the agent of change, then cruelty can be reframed as realism, and exaggeration as courage.

There is a political incentive as well. Apocalyptic narratives mobilize supporters, silence internal dissent, and justify extreme measures. When everything is an emergency, anything becomes permissible.

Finally, there is a commercial logic. Media ecosystems, whether they be the traditional news media or current social media, build audiences by appealing to negativity bias. They reward alarm, outrage, and catastrophe. Measured assessments of long-term trends do not spread as fast as predictions of doom.

The Moral Cost of Wanting Things to Get Worse

The most troubling aspect of the worse-is-better theory of history is not that it is wrong, but that it is morally corrosive.

• It teaches people to root for failure.
• It treats human suffering as a strategic asset.
• It substitutes grand historical fantasies for practical problem-solving.

History does not advance through collapse alone. It advances through institutions, compromises, technologies, and incremental reforms—usually driven by people who believe improvement is possible and worth the effort. The abolition of slavery, the reduction of child mortality, the spread of education, and the decline of famine were not gifts of catastrophe. They were achievements of persistence.

Progress is slow, uneven, and reversible. That makes it less satisfying than apocalyptic stories. But it is also real.

We don’t need to believe the world is falling apart in order to care about it. We don’t need to exaggerate its failures to justify working on its flaws. Most importantly, we should understand that history improves not when things become unbearable, but when people refuse to accept unnecessary suffering as inevitable.

The world has been worse than this. It has also been better in specific places and times. The task is not to wait for collapse, but to keep making collapse unnecessary.