The Idea of Progress Is Not a Natural Law
January 3, 2026 · Frisian News
We treat progress as inevitable, but history shows societies move sideways and backwards just as often. The belief in endless improvement blinds us to real costs and trade-offs.
Walk through any European city and you will find ruins next to glass towers, old corners left untouched while developers flatten neighborhoods. This physical landscape tells a truth we have forgotten: societies do not climb steadily upward. They lurch forward, slip back, veer sideways. Yet our politics, media, and schools all whisper the same gospel: progress marches on, always, inevitable as gravity.
This faith in progress shapes how we judge the past and plan the future. We measure prosperity by GDP growth, see technological change as automatically good, and treat skeptics as backward. When something new arrives, we assume it improves on what came before. A new job replaces an old one, so employment is fine. A new medicine treats symptoms better, so health advances. We rarely ask what we lost, what broke, or who paid the price. The costs stay invisible while the gains get celebrated.
Historians know better. Rome built aqueducts and roads, then lost the knowledge to maintain them. Medieval towns had cleaner air and water than industrial ones. Medieval people worked fewer hours than modern workers. The printing press brought literacy but also endless propaganda. The internet connects us and floods us with lies. Agriculture fed more people and trapped them in different kinds of poverty. Antibiotics saved millions and created resistant bacteria. Every genuine improvement carries hidden damage. We simply choose not to see it.
The trouble runs deeper than accounting errors. Progress as an idea serves power. If improvement flows automatically from time itself, then whoever controls the future controls the narrative. States and corporations sell us change and call it progress. Questions about who benefits and who suffers get brushed aside as complaints from the losing side of history. The ideology makes dissent seem foolish. It tells workers their old jobs were worse, so accept the new ones. It tells communities their traditions were backwards, so accept the new order. Resistance becomes futile because the future belongs to progress anyway.
We need to stop pretending the future will be better by law of nature. Some choices we make will improve life, and some will damage it. Some trade-offs help most people while crushing minorities. Some changes we cannot undo. Honest politics means admitting this plainly: we choose what happens next, and we will live with the consequences. Progress is not a fact waiting to occur. It is a bet we place, and we should know the odds before we place it.
Published January 3, 2026 · Frisian News