The Helping Impulse
What we destroyed when we tried to help
A young man in 1955 could look at a factory, a trade, a profession and see a ladder. Apprentice, journeyman, master. Entry-level, mid-career, senior. The rungs were visible. The requirements were known. You might not make it to the top, but you knew what “the top” meant and what it would take to get there.
A young person in 2025 confronts something else. The ladder has been replaced by a cloud. There are no rungs, only “opportunities.” No clear sequence, only “networking.” No defined mastery, only “personal branding.” The official story is that this is better: more freedom, more flexibility, less arbitrary gatekeeping.
The unofficial story is that the gates are still there. They’re just invisible now. And the people who can see them are the ones whose families taught them where to look.
We did this on purpose. We did it to help.
The economist Philip Pilkington argues that liberalism contains a fatal flaw, but not the one its critics usually name. The flaw isn’t that liberalism is too weak or too permissive or insufficiently rooted in tradition. The flaw is that liberalism, when it goes hard, destroys the very structures it requires to function.
Pilkington defines liberalism as the Enlightenment impulse to level and rationalize. Its target has always been hierarchy: the king over the commoner, the priest over the congregation, the guild master over the apprentice. Wherever liberalism sees hierarchy, it asks: is this justified? Can this be defended rationally? And when the answer is no (or not entirely), the hierarchy becomes a target for dismantling.
This impulse is not malicious. It genuinely tries to help. The liberal reformer sees barriers and wants to remove them. Sees gatekeepers and wants to open the gates. Sees people constrained by structures they didn’t choose and wants to set them free.
The problem is what gets destroyed in the process.
Hierarchies don’t only encode privilege. They also encode information: what’s valued here, what path leads up, what competence is rewarded, where you stand, what you need to do next. When you dismantle a hierarchy because it’s “arbitrary,” you don’t just remove privilege. You remove the map.
And the people who needed the map most are the ones left stranded.
Pilkington’s argument is that liberalism parasitically required pre-liberal structures to function. The stable liberal order of the twentieth century worked because it built on foundations it didn’t create: religion that provided meaning, families that transmitted values, guilds and associations that structured advancement, local communities that enforced norms. These were hierarchical, often irrational by Enlightenment standards, frequently unfair. They were also load-bearing.
As liberalism progressed and began to liquidate these structures (because they were hierarchical, because they couldn’t be rationally justified, because they constrained individual choice), it sawed off the branch it was sitting on.
This is different from saying liberalism was attacked from outside. The crisis is endogenous. The ideology generated its own dissolution.
Consider what the old structures actually provided:
Legibility: You could locate yourself within a system. The rules might be arbitrary, but they were knowable. The young person entering a trade understood what apprenticeship meant, what the stages were, what mastery looked like. The path might be narrow, but it was a path.
Scaffolding for aspiration: The ladder existed, which meant climbing was possible. You might resent the rungs above you, but you could see them. Aspiration had a shape. It wasn’t just “be successful” or “find your passion.” It was: learn this, then this, then you’ll be ready for that.
Meaning beyond the self: The structures embedded people in something larger: a trade with a history, a faith with a tradition, a community with obligations. This constrained, certainly. It also located. You weren’t just an individual choosing in a vacuum. You were part of something that preceded you and would outlast you.
When liberalism removes these structures because they’re irrational or unfair, it doesn’t create a flat plain of equal opportunity. It creates a desert. And in the desert, those who already possess informal navigational tools (cultural capital, family networks, elite education, the implicit knowledge of how things actually work) thrive. Those without such tools wander.
The reformer walks away believing they’ve helped. They’ve removed obstacles. They’ve leveled a playing field.
What they’ve actually done is make the game illegible to anyone who wasn’t already winning it.
This is what makes the helping impulse pernicious rather than merely mistaken. It’s self-sealing.
The reformer can’t see the damage because the damage is invisible to them. They have the credentials, the network, the cultural fluency. They navigate the new terrain easily. When they look around, they see openness and flexibility, the absence of arbitrary barriers.
What they don’t see: the young person from outside the network who follows the official rules (get the degree, apply to jobs, work hard) and discovers the official rules are fiction. The real rules are unwritten, and you had to already know them to know they existed.
The reformer concludes the system is working. The person stranded in it concludes the system is rigged. Both are correct from where they stand.
You can trace this across every domain.
Education: The old system was elitist, exclusionary, narrow. True. So we expanded access, diversified requirements, questioned standards. Now credential inflation means the degree that once signaled competence signals nothing. The students who needed clear standards most are adrift in a system that won’t tell them what excellence looks like, because defining excellence is hierarchical.
Work: The old career ladder was rigid, patriarchal, limiting. True. So we celebrated flexibility, gig economy, portfolio careers. Now the path from entry to security has dissolved. Those who can navigate ambiguity (those with family money, connections, cultural fluency) thrive. Everyone else churns through precarity while being told they’re free.
Family and community: The old structures were constraining, heteronormative, oppressive in various ways. True. So we celebrated choice, autonomy, the dissolution of unchosen obligation. Now people are freer than ever and lonelier than ever. The structures that once provided meaning, even when they constrained, have been replaced by nothing. People shop for meaning the way they shop for products, and find it equally disposable.
Religion: The old frameworks were dogmatic, exclusionary, irrational. True. So we celebrated secularism, personal spirituality, the marketplace of beliefs. Now the frameworks that once located people in something larger have given way to self-help and content consumption. The transcendent has been replaced by the therapeutic.
In each case: a genuine problem with the old structure. A genuine impulse to help. A reform that removes the structure. An outcome that harms those who most needed the structure’s legibility.
Fromm understood what happens next. Freedom, he argued, isn’t just a gift. It’s a burden. The weight of choosing who to be, what to value, how to live creates anxiety that many cannot bear. But Fromm also recognized that functional freedom requires scaffolding: relationships, communities, values, structures that give the choosing self somewhere to stand.
Hard liberalism attacks the scaffolding as arbitrary. It sees only the constraint, not the support. It imagines the ideal as the autonomous individual choosing freely in an open field.
But the open field is a desert. Without scaffolding, the choosing self has nothing to push against, nothing to climb, no way to know if it’s getting anywhere. The result isn’t freedom. It’s paralysis, or drift, or the flight to any structure that will provide what liberalism removed.
This is where the Fourth Turning framework meets Pilkington’s diagnosis. Strauss and Howe treat the crisis as exogenous: history moves in cycles, and periodically the old order gets disrupted by forces that reset institutions. Pilkington says the disruption is endogenous: liberalism generates its own crisis by destroying the structures it required.
Both are probably true. The cyclical pattern holds. But this particular turning may be different because the crisis is a crisis of illegibility itself. The fracture isn’t between regions or nations or clearly defined factions. It’s between those who can navigate the unmarked terrain and those who can’t. Between those for whom the system works invisibly and those for whom it doesn’t work at all.
The demand that emerges from illegibility is predictable: structure. Any structure. The strongman offers hierarchy without the tacit knowledge that made old hierarchies functional. He offers legibility without wisdom. A map that leads nowhere, but at least it’s a map.
What would reconstruction require?
I don’t know. But I suspect it begins with understanding what we destroyed and why we destroyed it.
The helping impulse was sincere. That’s what makes this hard. You’re not fighting villains. You’re fighting your own best intentions. The reformers who dismantled the old structures weren’t trying to create a desert. They were trying to remove walls. They couldn’t see that the walls were also holding up a roof.
Rebuilding legibility without recreating the worst of what was dismantled: this is the task. Can you create structures that provide maps without encoding arbitrary privilege? Scaffolding that supports without constraining? Hierarchy that serves function without becoming exploitation?
Maybe. But it requires first admitting that the project of pure liberation has failed. Not because liberation is bad, but because liberation without structure isn’t liberation. Humans still need maps of the territory.
The young person in 2025, staring at the cloud where the ladder used to be, knows this already. They feel it even if they can’t name it. The system was supposed to set them free. Instead it set them adrift.
We did this to help. That’s the part that’s hard to face.
Sources and Inspiration
The Collapse of Global Liberalism - Philip Pilkington