As many observers have noted lately, the Western world presents a disturbing landscape. Virtually all advanced nations are afflicted with unpopular governments, restive electorates, intractable inflation, pervasive doubt.

There is no lack of fragmentary explanations. Blame is put on poor leadership, for example, and it is true that even apart from the special presidential disaster in the U.S., there is a severe shortage of inspiring political leaders {inspiring leaders of any kind, for that matter). But it is fanciful to suppose that changes in political leadership, without major changes of other kinds, would remedy the underlying troubles of Western nations.

The steep rise in oil prices comes in for blame too, and it has indeed been painful in more ways than one. But economic, political, and social stresses were troubling Western nations before the outbreak of war in the Middle East last autumn. To a large extent these stresses can be traced to persistent inflation, with the instability and injustice it brings. Inflation itself, however, is not an accidental misfortune but rather a symptom of deeper social disorders.

A major cause of inflation, and the inability of governments to cope with it, has been the prevalence of unfulfillable expecta-tions. As Flora Lewis of the New York Times observed, "governments have led their people to expect continuous increases in purchasing power based on steady industrial expansion." And now politicians find themselves caught in a trap of careless promises.

A sense of things gone wrong

But again, all this leaves much unexplained. Why has the goal of "continuous increases in purchasing power" become so central, so dominant in the lives of nations and the policies of governments? Why have past increases in purchasing power added up to such disappointing results in terms of the enhance-ment of life? Why so much unhappiness, unrest, and violence in the midst of so much material abundance? Why the low morale in Western societies, the lack of social cohesion, the sense that things have gone wrong? Why do governments, growing ever larger and more intrusive, seem ever less capable of meeting the demands upon them?

All of these phenomena are related in one way or another to a single underlying condition-the loss of what might be called the invisible means of support, the inner resources that in earlier generations lent purpose to people's lives, connected them to the social order, restrained their conduct, and helped sustain them in adversity.

Unfortunately for both governors and governed, the great postwar rise in standards of consumption has been accompanied by deep erosion of-among other things-religious faith, traditional values, standards of craftsmanship, the ideal of service, and the sense of membership in a social order. The processes of erosion have created in every up­to­date Western nation a large class of what historian John Lukacs calls "the new poor: men and women and children whose poverty is not material but social. psychic, spiritual."

The universal wolf

The new poverty makes it difficult to govern a modern nation, let alone lead it anywhere. The hollowed­out new poor tend to demand much from government, and very little from themselves. We have seen in the last couple of decades a great inflation in demands, claims, and rights, to be met or enforced by government. And simultaneously we have seen a great deflation of duties, responsibilities, and what Edmund Burke referred to as "moral chains." A few years after the French Revolution, he wrote: "Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites.

This is certainly not to suggest that the economic and social problems governments busy themselves with are imaginary. Quite the contrary: there is enough real injustice, enough material poverty, enough defects in social arrangements to occupy all the public efforts societies can muster. But to judge from the record, it seems most unlikely that these efforts will do much to remedy the new poverty.

Is there any remedy for it? Probably none that government can devise or administer. Individual political leaders or government officials can always help a little by setting personal examples of probity, or becoming effective advocates of moral principles. But no enactment, program, or bureau can do any good.

The burden, then, has to fall on individuals. The first step for those who want to whether as parents, teachers, preachers, business executives, members of organizations, or individual human beings-is to dare to be backward­looking. Perhaps the best hope for a recovery of morale and purpose and order in Western societies lies in a revival of personal moral values and responsibilities.

Reprinted from an editorial in Fortune April 1974.