The Meaning Crisis

The crisis behind the crisis

I. What if the crisis is not only material?

What if the collapse we are living through is not only economic, institutional, ecological or democratic? What if it is also, and perhaps most dangerously, a collapse of meaning?

This is not to deny the material reality of the crisis. People cannot live on metaphysics. Rent, wages, debt, heat, food, transport, care and security are not abstractions. Nor is institutional decay imaginary. Public services can break. Ecologies can be exhausted. Democratic systems can hollow out. Economies can grow while lives become smaller. But beneath these visible failures sits a deeper wound: a society losing the capacity to tell people why their lives matter, where they belong, what they are contributing to, and what kind of future is worthy of their loyalty.

The modern economy asks people to function. It asks them to adapt, compete, retrain, optimise, consume, endure and remain resilient. It asks them to become flexible in the face of forces they do not control. It asks them to accept insecurity as dynamism, exhaustion as ambition, atomisation as freedom and permanent adjustment as maturity. Yet it increasingly fails to answer the oldest human questions. Why are we here? What are we building? Why should this command our effort, patience, sacrifice or love? What is society for?

This is the provocation: the crisis is not merely material. It is metaphysical. The deepest political wound is not only that people are poorer, more insecure, less represented or more exposed to catastrophe. It is that the pathways through which life once became intelligible have weakened or disappeared. The economy no longer reliably appears as a place of contribution. Democracy no longer reliably appears as a place of agency. Community no longer reliably appears as a place of belonging. The future no longer reliably appears as a promise.

A politics that cannot speak to this will misunderstand the age. It may improve administration while leaving the wound untouched. It may deliver programmes while leaving people passive. It may describe policy success while people continue to feel useless, unseen and unneeded. It may produce evidence, targets and dashboards while its opponents produce belonging, grievance, memory, destiny and enemy.

That is the danger. When society fails to construct meaning through democratic, economic and social life, meaning does not disappear. It is built elsewhere.

II. The exhaustion of utility

The long history behind this crisis is the rise of a civilisation organised increasingly around utility. This worldview has many names: efficiency, productivity, instrumental rationality, growth, optimisation, output, extraction, measurement, usefulness. Its power lies in the fact that it is not simply wrong. Utility matters. A bridge must stand. A hospital must function. A railway must run. Food must be produced. Energy must be generated. Public money must be used well. A society indifferent to practical organisation becomes cruel very quickly.

The problem begins when utility ceases to be a servant and becomes a metaphysics. When the question “does it work?” overwhelms the question “is it worthy?”, society becomes technically capable but spiritually impoverished. It learns how to organise means while losing the capacity to argue about ends. It learns how to increase output while forgetting to ask what kind of life that output is meant to serve. It learns how to measure activity while neglecting the forms of value that cannot easily be counted: dignity, rootedness, beauty, time, care, belonging, reverence, contribution, craft, democratic power.

The utility-driven worldview turns people into functions. They become workers, consumers, taxpayers, service users, voters, claimants, data points, productivity units and self-managing bundles of preferences. They are asked to perform roles within systems whose purposes they did not choose and may not believe in. The citizen becomes an input into growth. The worker becomes a cost or a metric. The patient becomes a throughput problem. The child becomes a future skills asset. The community becomes a delivery area. The human being becomes legible to the system precisely to the extent that they can be administered.

This produces wealth, power and technical sophistication. It also produces a strange emptiness. A society may become better at doing things while becoming less able to say why any of them matter. It may acquire more tools while losing the language of purpose. It may increase choice while diminishing agency. It may multiply pleasures while weakening belonging. It may extend life while making life feel less worth living.

Utility asks: does it work? Meaning asks: is it worthy?

A healthy society needs both questions. Our problem is that one has colonised the other.

III. Meaning as the missing political category

Meaning is often treated as soft, decorative or secondary: a matter of mood, messaging, narrative or values. In this view, politics is made of material interests and institutional arrangements, while meaning is what communicators attach afterwards to make policies emotionally palatable. That is a profound mistake.

Meaning is not a slogan placed on top of politics. It is one of the conditions that makes politics possible. It concerns whether people experience their lives as part of something intelligible, valuable and shared. It concerns whether work feels like contribution rather than extraction. Whether public life feels like participation rather than spectatorship. Whether community feels like belonging rather than proximity. Whether sacrifice feels connected to a future rather than demanded by a system that gives nothing back. Whether the economy is experienced as a common project or as a machine into which people are fed.

To speak of meaning is not to evade material politics. It is to deepen it. Wages matter not only because they purchase goods, but because they express recognition. Housing matters not only because it shelters bodies, but because it allows rootedness, memory, family and future. Work matters not only because it produces income, but because it tells people whether they are needed. Public space matters not only because it provides amenities, but because it makes visible whether a society honours common life. Democracy matters not only because it aggregates preferences, but because it gives people a way to act upon the world that acts upon them.

The collapse of meaning therefore cannot be repaired by motivational language. It cannot be solved by telling people a nicer story about systems that still leave them powerless. It cannot be conjured through branding, patriotism, optimism or managerial reassurance. Meaning becomes real when people can experience themselves as situated, recognised, capable and needed. It is lived before it is narrated. It is constructed through institutions, relationships, rituals, places and powers.

This is why meaning may now be the strategic centre of politics. Not because material life has stopped mattering, but because material life itself has become unintelligible without it. People do not only ask whether they can survive. They ask whether survival is connected to dignity. They do not only ask whether public services function. They ask whether anyone sees them as citizens rather than cases. They do not only ask whether the economy grows. They ask whether they have a place in it.

A politics that cannot answer these questions leaves the field open to those who can.

IV. The collapse of meaningful pathways

The central problem is not simply that people feel less meaning in some general cultural sense. It is that society and economics no longer provide enough functioning pathways through which people can exist meaningfully.

For much of modern social life, people encountered meaning through structures that were larger than the isolated self: work, class, place, family, faith, trade unions, civic institutions, public service, vocation, neighbourhood, political movements, shared memory and imagined futures. These pathways were never innocent. Many were hierarchical, exclusionary, patriarchal, racist, coercive or narrow. Some people found dignity in them; others found confinement. Nostalgia must not be allowed to cleanse them.

Yet the fact remains that they often gave people a grammar for their lives. They located the individual inside a broader story. They helped answer questions of identity, obligation, status, contribution and belonging. They told people where they had come from, who stood with them, what counted as honourable, what could be hoped for, and how one generation might hand something on to the next.

Many of those structures have now weakened. Work is more likely to be insecure, surveilled, fragmented or stripped of voice. Class identity has been politically disorganised without class power disappearing. Place has been reshaped by extraction, neglect, unaffordable housing, hollowed high streets and the loss of common institutions. Religion has declined as a shared social architecture, even where private belief remains. Trade unions and civic associations have been weakened. Public institutions have become less able to embody common purpose. Families are asked to absorb pressures that were once distributed across wider social structures. The future itself has become harder to imagine as progress.

The result is not merely insecurity. It is existential dislocation.

People are not only asking how to pay the bills. They are asking why the life available to them feels so thin. They are not only angry about bad services. They are angry that no one appears accountable for the forces shaping their lives. They are not only nostalgic for the past. They are mourning the loss of a future in which their efforts would make sense.

When work no longer confers dignity, home no longer confers rootedness, democracy no longer confers agency, community no longer confers belonging, and the future no longer confers promise, politics becomes vulnerable to darker forms of meaning.

V. Othering as substitute meaning

Human beings do not stop needing meaning when democratic society fails to provide it. They search for it with whatever materials remain. In conditions of insecurity, humiliation and powerlessness, identity becomes one of the last available materials from which meaning can be constructed.

This is where othering enters. It should not be understood only as ignorance, prejudice or manipulation, although it can contain all three. It performs a function. It gives pain a structure. It gives humiliation an author. It turns loneliness into belonging, confusion into certainty, decline into betrayal and powerlessness into revenge. It tells people that their suffering is not random. Someone did this. Someone stole the future. Someone corrupted the nation. Someone jumped the queue. Someone mocked the ordinary. Someone must be resisted, expelled, punished or defeated.

Othering is a substitute technology of meaning.

It is powerful because it answers real needs falsely. It gives people a “we” when other forms of belonging have decayed. It gives them a story when public life offers only complexity. It gives them agency when institutions feel remote. It gives them moral clarity when the economy feels abstract and ungovernable. It gives them a sacred object to defend and a profane object to attack. In doing so, it transforms diffuse social suffering into political energy.

This is why reactionary politics cannot be defeated by treating it as an outbreak of irrationality. It is not simply a failure of information. It is a form of meaning construction. Its answers may be cruel, false and dangerous, but they are answers to questions that liberal and progressive politics have too often refused to take seriously.

Where people cannot find meaning through contribution, they seek it through identification. Where identification is formed under conditions of fear, humiliation and collapse, it hardens into othering. The politics of enemy then becomes a way for people to know who they are.

The progressive task is not to mock the hunger for belonging. It is to build forms of belonging that do not require an enemy.

VI. What the right has understood

The right, especially in its reactionary form, has understood something that technocratic politics forgot: politics is not only the management of interests. It is the construction of meaning.

It understands that people want more than policy. They want memory, dignity, recognition, continuity, agency, sacred objects, shared symbols and a story that makes suffering legible. They want to feel that they are part of a people, not merely participants in a market or clients of a state. They want to believe that their losses matter, that their instincts are not madness, that their place in the world has not been dissolved without consequence. They want some answer to the question: who are we, and what happened to us?

Reactionary politics answers by converting powerlessness into identity, identity into grievance, grievance into enemy, and enemy into destiny. It says: you belong because they do not. You are suffering because they betrayed you. Your future was stolen by outsiders, elites, migrants, judges, bureaucrats, cosmopolitans, minorities, experts, traitors or enemies within. Restoration is possible if the contaminating force is defeated. The past can be returned. The border can redeem. The nation can be made whole.

This is meaning through domination, exclusion and return.

Its force lies not only in what it says, but in what other politics has failed to say. Where mainstream politics offers better administration, the right offers metaphysical drama. Where technocracy offers complexity, it offers clarity. Where liberalism offers tolerance, it offers belonging. Where managerial politics offers process, it offers sovereignty. Where progressive politics offers critique, it offers destiny.

None of this makes the reactionary answer true. It makes it politically potent. It has understood that people who feel powerless may prefer a false sovereignty to no sovereignty at all.

VII. Brexit as a meaning-event

Brexit can be understood in this light not only as a constitutional, regulatory or trade event, but as a meaning-event. Its emotional power did not lie solely in institutional questions about the European Union. It lay in its ability to give existential shape to a wound.

“Take back control” mattered because it named an experience. It told people that their powerlessness was real, that something had been taken, that the loss had an object, and that agency could be restored through a single collective act. It compressed economic dislocation, cultural humiliation, democratic frustration, national memory and personal anger into a phrase of remarkable symbolic force.

This is why so many technocratic responses failed to land. Forecasts, impact assessments and institutional warnings may have been serious, but they did not speak to the deeper hunger being mobilised. A spreadsheet cannot answer a myth unless there is another myth, another meaning, another account of agency capable of meeting people at the level where the wound actually lives.

You cannot defeat a myth with a spreadsheet.

The lesson is not that evidence does not matter. Evidence matters profoundly. Societies that abandon truth become vulnerable to fantasy and authoritarianism. But truth without meaning is politically weak. Competence without agency is thin. Procedure without belonging is bloodless. A politics that only corrects falsehoods will lose to a politics that makes people feel part of history.

Brexit revealed the scale of the meaning gap. It showed that sovereignty, however symbolically constructed, had become the language through which many people expressed a much wider condition of dispossession.

The progressive error would be to conclude that sovereignty itself is the problem.

VIII. The progressive failure

Liberal and progressive politics has often been more comfortable opposing bad meanings than constructing better ones. It knows what it is against: austerity, inequality, racism, authoritarianism, climate breakdown, exploitation, corruption, cruelty, privatisation and institutional decay. These oppositions are necessary. But opposition is not enough to build a world.

Too often, the progressive offer has been procedural, corrective or managerial. It promises better policy, fairer distribution, cleaner government, greener investment, improved services, stronger rights, more inclusion and more competent administration. Much of this is essential. But it does not, by itself, answer the existential question: what are people being invited into?

A politics can be morally right and imaginatively weak. It can diagnose injustice while failing to create belonging. It can defend rights while neglecting common life. It can expose domination while saying too little about contribution. It can speak of inclusion without constructing a shared horizon. It can offer delivery without dignity, redistribution without agency, reform without destiny.

This is the strategic gap. Meaning is not a decorative supplement to progressive politics. It is the missing function.

The question is not how to attach the language of meaning to every policy area. That would reduce meaning to communications. The question is how politics can create the social, economic and democratic conditions through which people experience themselves as powerful, needed, situated, recognised and bound to a future worth inheriting.

Progressive politics does not need a softer version of reactionary belonging. It does not need nationalism with kinder adjectives. It does not need to borrow the emotional architecture of exclusion and replace only its targets. It needs a different basis for meaning altogether.

Not meaning through enemy, but meaning through contribution. Not belonging through exclusion, but belonging through shared creation. Not agency through revenge, but agency through democratic power. Not re-enchantment through regression, but re-enchantment through repair.

IX. Sovereignty as the pathway

The progressive answer to false sovereignty cannot be less sovereignty. It must be deeper sovereignty, wider sovereignty, lived sovereignty, democratic sovereignty.

The right has narrowed sovereignty into border, nation, identity and exclusion. It has converted a real experience of powerlessness into symbolic national restoration. But the hunger beneath that politics is not imaginary. People do feel governed by forces they cannot shape: markets, landlords, employers, platforms, distant institutions, collapsing services, opaque bureaucracies, global supply chains, climate shocks, financial systems and political decisions made elsewhere. A politics that dismisses this hunger will surrender it to those who weaponise it.

The task is to radicalise sovereignty.

Sovereignty should not mean only the formal power of Parliament, the symbolic integrity of the nation, or the control of borders. It should mean the lived capacity of people to shape the conditions of their own existence. It should mean power over work, housing, energy, transport, care, land, technology, public services, local economies and the future of one’s community. It should mean that people can look at the world around them and say: we shaped this; we built this; we decided this; this belongs to us.

Meaning returns when people experience agency over the forces that shape their lives. It cannot be hoarded at the centre and announced as national renewal. It cannot be performed only at the border. It must be distributed into everyday life.

This is the explosion of sovereignty: not sovereignty as domination, but sovereignty as participation; not sovereignty as nostalgia, but sovereignty as democratic construction; not sovereignty possessed by the state on behalf of passive people, but sovereignty built through institutions that allow people to act meaningfully on the world.

The state still matters. In fact, it matters enormously. But its role changes. It is not merely the deliverer of services to managed populations. It becomes the builder of democratic capacity. It creates the rights, resources, institutions and spaces through which people can become co-authors of common life.

X. From managed populations to sovereign participants

The technocratic state can improve people’s lives while leaving them politically diminished. It can administer needs, allocate funds, set targets, monitor outcomes and deliver programmes. It can consult stakeholders, process service users, engage communities and evaluate impact. Some of this is necessary. But a society can be efficiently managed and still be existentially empty.

The problem is not delivery itself. People need things delivered: hospitals, homes, care, transport, schools, energy systems, justice, safety. The problem is delivery as a theory of citizenship. When politics imagines people primarily as recipients of services, it reproduces passivity even when it improves conditions. The citizen becomes a service user. The community becomes a stakeholder. The person becomes a case. The place becomes an administrative unit.

This cannot repair the collapse of meaning because meaning requires agency. People need to receive, but they also need to shape. They need care, but also power. They need security, but also authorship. They need institutions that do not merely act upon them, but allow them to act.

A politics of meaning therefore moves from managed populations to sovereign participants.

This does not mean romanticising participation or pretending that every person wants to spend their evenings in meetings. Democratic agency must be designed with seriousness, not sentimentality. But the principle matters: people should encounter power not only as something done to them, nor even as something done for them, but as something they can exercise with others.

The state cannot impose meaning. No government can decree purpose into existence. But it can build the conditions under which meaning becomes possible: secure foundations, shared institutions, democratic rights, public spaces, collective ownership, local power, civic rituals, economic voice and credible futures.

The question for government is therefore not only “what can we deliver?” It is “what powers can we give people, and what forms of common life can those powers sustain?”

XI. The sites of democratic meaning

The reconstruction of meaning will not happen in the abstract. It must be built in the places where people live, work, travel, care, gather, remember and imagine. These are not merely policy areas. They are sites of sovereignty.

Place is one of the first sites. People experience politics through streets, estates, libraries, parks, schools, buses, rivers, high streets, public squares, leisure centres and the visible condition of the built environment. A neglected place tells people that they have been abandoned. A place shaped only by developers, distant departments or market forces tells them that they are spectators. Meaning begins when people can say: this place carries our memory, reflects our dignity and is open to our power. A politics of place would not treat localities as delivery zones, but as democratic worlds capable of authorship.

Work is another. Work remains one of the primary ways people learn whether they are needed. Yet too much work now combines necessity with indignity: low control, low security, weak voice, surveillance, fragmentation and little visible relation between labour and social value. Meaning returns when workers have power, craft, recognition, time, security and a say over the institutions to which they give their lives. A democratic economy cannot be only a matter of wages and productivity, though both matter. It must also ask whether people experience work as contribution or merely survival.

Infrastructure is another. Energy, water, transport, housing, broadband, care and public services are not neutral systems. They shape the horizon of possible life. When infrastructure is extractive, failing or unaccountable, people experience society as something that takes from them while denying responsibility. When infrastructure is public, reliable, beautiful, accountable and oriented to common value, it becomes part of the architecture of meaning. A bus route can be a democratic institution. A library can be a portal into citizenship. A warm home can be a foundation for dignity. A publicly accountable energy system can make the future feel shared rather than imposed.

Democracy itself must also be rebuilt as lived agency. Voting is indispensable, but voting alone is too thin to carry the full weight of democratic meaning. People need more frequent and more tangible encounters with power: participatory budgeting, citizens’ assemblies with consequence, serious devolution, community ownership, workplace democracy, tenant power, local economic planning and institutions that allow decisions to be made close to the lives they affect. Democracy must become something people do, not merely something they observe.

Culture and ritual matter because meaning is not only institutional. It is symbolic, embodied and repeated. A society that abandons ritual leaves the field open to nationalism, consumerism or resentment to provide it. Civic festivals, public art, local histories, ceremonies of contribution, community meals, shared acts of repair, remembrance and ecological restoration can make common life visible. They are not trivial adornments. They are how a society tells itself what it honours.

The future is perhaps the most important site of all. Meaning depends on futurity. If the future feels dead, people retreat into nostalgia. If the future is imagined only as threat, sacrifice becomes unbearable. A progressive politics must make the future available again as a shared project: not a fantasy of endless growth, nor a technocratic transition imposed from above, but a democratic inheritance that people can shape. Climate repair, care, housing, childhood, public beauty, technological governance and local resilience must be made visible as parts of a common future worth building.

This is what an explosion of sovereignty would mean in practice: multiplying the sites where people can experience authorship.

XII. Labour and the meaning gap

For Labour, or any progressive governing project that speaks in the language of national renewal, the danger is clear. Renewal can become a managerial aesthetic. Missions can become dashboards. Devolution can become administrative rearrangement. Public service reform can become throughput. Growth can become an output target detached from lived dignity. Community can become a consultation exercise. The future can become a slogan.

A government may then appear serious, competent and reforming while failing to touch the deeper wound. It may deliver improvements that people experience as distant, fragile or insufficiently theirs. It may rebuild the machinery of the state without rebuilding democratic agency. It may talk of national renewal while leaving sovereignty concentrated in the same places as before.

The strategic challenge is not simply to govern better, though governing better matters. It is to understand meaning as the absence at the heart of contemporary politics, and sovereignty as the route through which meaning can be reconstructed.

Labour’s historic strength, at its best, was never only redistribution. It was the creation of institutions through which working people could experience dignity, power and belonging: unions, councils, public services, libraries, housing, education, social insurance, collective provision and a moral language of contribution. Its task now is not to recreate the twentieth century. The old pathways cannot simply be restored. But the deeper principle remains: people need institutions that make them powerful and needed.

The test of renewal, then, is not whether government can say that it has delivered for people. It is whether people can plausibly say that they have gained power over the forces shaping their lives. It is whether they feel less like managed populations and more like sovereign participants. It is whether policy creates not only outputs, but authorship.

A progressive government that misses this may find itself doing real work while the politics of meaning is captured elsewhere.

XIII. A politics in which people do not need enemies

The question running beneath all of this is simple and immense: how do we choose to exist?

Do we choose to exist as isolated units adapting to systems that no one seems able to govern? As managed populations receiving services from distant institutions? As wounded identities searching for enemies to make pain intelligible? As nostalgic subjects hoping that sovereignty can be restored by exclusion? Or as democratic participants capable of building a common world?

The collapse of meaning is dangerous because it does not remain empty. It invites occupation. If democratic politics does not fill the void with agency, contribution and shared creation, reactionary politics will fill it with enemy, purity and return. If people cannot find belonging in common life, they may find it in exclusion. If they cannot find agency in democracy, they may seek it in revenge. If they cannot find dignity in contribution, they may seek it in superiority. If they cannot find futurity in repair, they may seek it in myth.

The answer is not to deny the hunger for meaning, belonging or sovereignty. It is to answer that hunger more truthfully.

Meaning cannot be delivered from above. It cannot be messaged into existence. It cannot be substituted with competence, however necessary competence is. It must be constructed through lived agency: through work that confers dignity, places that invite authorship, infrastructure that embodies common value, democracy that gives people power, culture that makes belonging visible, and futures that people can help to build.

The crisis is meaning. The wound is powerlessness. The false answer is othering. The strategic gap is progressive meaning-making. The route is an explosion of sovereignty. The goal is democratic agency as a lived condition of everyday life.

A politics equal to this moment would not ask people merely to trust that better managers are in charge. It would ask them to become co-authors of the world around them. It would not offer belonging through an enemy. It would offer belonging through participation. It would not promise restoration through exclusion. It would promise dignity through shared construction. It would not treat sovereignty as a symbol to be possessed by the nation while people remain powerless in their daily lives. It would distribute sovereignty into the institutions, places and relationships where life is actually lived.

The final provocation is this: people do not need enemies in order to know they matter. But they do need power, place, contribution, recognition and a future. A progressive politics that cannot provide these will keep losing the metaphysical argument, even when it wins the policy one. A progressive politics that can provide them might begin to rebuild not only the economy or the state, but the meaning of common life itself.