How trust-smashing TV shows like The Traitors help explain what's going wrong with the world

It was a child’s creed, of course. Moving fast can be dangerous; and breaking things – while it can signal new beginnings – is more often just destructive and cruel. Yet the attitude captured in Zuckerberg’s phrase – a kind of reckless destructiveness born of boredom and privilege – runs deep in our Western 21st-century culture, with its fascination for disaster and horror movies, and for trust-smashing television shows like The Traitors.

And now, we have a US President who himself moves fast, and constantly breaks things – deals, promises, long-established alliances, the fundamental principles of the US constitution – in a geopolitical horror-show that keeps the world’s news media enthralled with its non-stop threats, sudden reversals, and shocking outbursts of violence, both domestic and international.

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To say that the world’s leaders have been bamboozled by this display of unpredictability, aggression and geriatric petulance is to understate the case; and many nations have been inclined, in the words of Canadian premier Mark Carney, simply to “go along to get along”, hoping “that compliance will buy safety”.

That faint hope is hardly, though, a solid plan for future security; and it was perhaps because he dared to take a longer view, based on a clear recognition of our changing geopolitical world, that Mark Carney’s speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week has been so widely acclaimed.

In truth, it was quite a modest speech, in keeping with the character of the man, and certainly contained no great flights of rhetoric. Mark Carney, though, is the first Western leader to speak so bluntly, on the world stage, about what the second Donal Trump presidency is doing to the idea of a rules-based international order, and, more piercingly, about the great-power hypocrisies and double standards that have, over 80 years, made that idea increasingly vulnerable to the historic collapse we are now witnessing.

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From a devastated Gaza, reduced to rubble by a two-year Israeli assault that has killed more than 70,000 people, to millions in Ukraine freezing through a savage Russian midwinter attack on civilian energy infrastructure, we are now living in a horrifying age of impunity for those who not only breach international law, but openly mock it; and that spirit of lawless brutality is now spreading to the streets of the United States itself.

It was therefore something of a relief to hear Mark Carney acknowledge that we are now in the middle of a “rupture, not a transition” in the post-war order to which Western leaders once used at least to pay lip-service, and that many middle-ranking powers – including Canada – are now concluding that they must develop greater strategic autonomy, not only in defence, but in energy, food, and other critical areas.

So far, so disruptive; and it’s perhaps a sign of the nihilistic mood of our times that it was this section of Mark Carney’s speech – attacking the myths of a law-abiding world order, and even likening them to the empty socialist slogans of the old Soviet bloc – that attracted most coverage, not least from those who have always seen the idea of international community as a mere pipe-dream.

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That, however, was not his message; on the contrary, he dismissed the idea of a world of fortress nations, which he said would make our future poorer, more fragile and less sustainable. “Middle powers must act together,” he warned, “because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu. In a world of great-power rivalry, the countries in between have a choice: compete with each other for favour, or combine to create a third path with impact.”

And the world he imagined is one in which medium-sized powers like Canada both unite to defend basic democratic and human values, and work pragmatically together to promote co-operation of all kind, and to guarantee those values.

To create that third path, though, politicians and citizens must actually believe in it – believe, as our parents and grandparents once did, that human beings are capable of something better than dog-eat-dog competition, and that we achieve most when we work together, within a rules-based framework that we can generally trust.

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So somehow, in this time of chaos, we must learn to stop gazing in fascination at the antics of those who smash, break and divide, and instead, to become more interested in the builders, the ones who want to heal, and to reconstruct the very fabric of a good society, with its free, safe and self-respecting citizens. It seems likely, for example, that millions will rally to support the people of Gaza and Ukraine in that task of reconstruction, if they are ever able to move on from their current nightmare.

What Mark Carney suggests, though, is that we also need to start a reconstruction job on the idea of orderly and co-operative relations between nations, now that the United States is no longer, even in theory, a credible leader of that project. As political tasks go, it will not be flashy. Its television ratings will be low, the pace of construction will be modest, and very few things will be broken.

It will be a job for grown-ups, though, who actually care about the future of humankind, and of our planet. Mark Carney emerged, at Davos, as a potential leader among those grown-ups. And our task as citizens – when we vote, campaign, make consumer decisions, or just chat online or in the pub – is surely now to make life easier for leaders like him, and more difficult for the destroyers and disrupters, of whose actions and their cruel consequences we have surely, over a bloody half-decade, now seen more than enough.