The Builders and the Claimants: How a Minority Could Undo the World We Built

Every comfort of modern life, from the clean water that runs when you turn on the tap to electricity, medicine, and the vehicle that takes you to work, was built. None of it was handed to us, and nobody owes it to us. It was raised, over generations, by people who devoted their effort, their science, and their cooperation to creating a world that did not exist before. What sustained that construction was not chance but a set of values: respect for effort, merit, scientific evidence, private property, the rule of law, innovation, and voluntary cooperation. Today that order of values is being displaced by another, at a moment in history that is accelerating the shift as never before.

Values matter so much because they are the ultimate basis of every decision. When the order in which a society ranks things changes, so do the laws it passes, what it rewards, what it punishes, and what it chooses to sustain or abandon. A society that puts contribution at its center makes decisions that favor building. One that puts claiming at its center makes decisions that erode it, even if no one ever proposed that explicitly.

The proof that the values of construction work lies in the value they generate. The countries that produce the most, such as the United States, which accounts for roughly a quarter of world GDP, along with South Korea, Singapore, and, increasingly, China, share a culture centered on working, innovating, and improving what already exists. That value is not an abstract figure. It is what pays for hospitals, laboratories, infrastructure, and technology, and much of what these countries produce becomes medicine, knowledge, and tools used by the whole world, including countries that generate less. Put another way, the well-being we enjoy today is the direct result of that value continuing to be created. Life expectancy, the reduction of poverty, the expansion of rights, and the strength of the rule of law are at their highest levels in history, and not by accident: the sustained creation of value made them possible. If that creation declines, well-being declines with it.

That value, moreover, is not created alone. Curing a single disease takes researchers, hospitals, engineers, institutions, and supply chains that span the planet, a scale of voluntary, decentralized cooperation without precedent. That is why it is false to say modern society is growing more individualistic: billions of people, each with their own goals, have understood that they can reach them only by freely collaborating with countless others. Voluntary cooperation and the creation of value are the same thing seen from two angles, and so any logic that ignores this web of contributions ignores the very source of well-being.

Against this, a different logic has been gaining ground, one that treats rights as something the world owes you rather than something built by taking part in it. None of this challenges anyone's right to dignity, whatever their condition or circumstances; those rights are legitimate and not up for debate. What worries me is claiming the fruits of the system without helping to sustain it, like the child who demands from his parents everything he believes he is entitled to without ever asking what he has contributed to the household that shelters him. And if well-being depends on value continuing to be created through cooperation, a culture that claims without contributing undermines the very thing it depends on.

These ideas are not new. What is new is the speed at which they now spread. Social media does not amplify a message because it is well reasoned or backed by evidence, but because it stirs strong emotions, and because you can pay to boost it. A lie can now reach millions of people within hours, something that in any earlier century would have taken years. That is the first reason the inversion of values is advancing faster than ever: the evidence and lived experience that once corrected the course can no longer arrive in time.

The second reason is availability, and it connects directly to everything above. Those who devote their lives to building, researching, producing, and maintaining the systems we depend on barely have room left for politics and social media. Those who channel their energy into claiming tend to have far more. The result is a strange imbalance: public space is occupied, disproportionately, by those who do the least to sustain the system, while those who sustain it are too busy to notice that the values that make it work are being rewritten. Young people, who have not yet taken part in the building, are the most exposed, because they receive the message from those with more bandwidth to spread it rather than from those who are at work.

History has already shown where this mechanism can lead. In Germany in the 1930s, a determined minority, the one that gave rise to the Nazi movement, took advantage of the propaganda tools of its day and the figure of a leader to invert the values of millions of people, first in Germany and then in other countries. It was not a majority that drove the change but a small, organized group that seized the available channels of persuasion, and the result was the Second World War and the deaths of millions of human beings. Something similar is happening today in its structure: a minority with bandwidth, reach, and access to politics and social media is reshaping a society's values, only with far faster and cheaper tools.

That is why the debate over merit is the point where everything converges. It is legitimate to ask whether merit is measured honestly or whether systems distribute opportunity fairly; that criticism is valid and necessary. But discarding the very concept of merit severs the link between effort and result, and with it goes the reason to contribute. If contributing stops mattering, no one builds, and if no one builds, there is nothing left to distribute.

So we arrive at the underlying question: what happens in a world where everyone claims and no one builds? A society cannot sustain itself on claims alone, because a claim has nowhere to draw from except what someone else has built. The free time and comfort that allow a minority to practice the politics of grievance are products of the very system it undermines. It is like cutting the root of the tree whose fruit is still being eaten.

There is, besides, an ethical question. No one arrives in the world with a right to have the rest of humanity owe them something simply for existing. We are born into an enormous intergenerational project, a team effort of billions of people, and each person who joins inherits not only its benefits but also the responsibility to help sustain it. Rights do not exist by mere declaration: they are built, generation after generation, by those willing to do the hard, unglamorous work of building.

History leaves no room for doubt on this point. Merit, evidence, property, the rule of law, innovation, and voluntary cooperation are the conditions that have proven to lift human well-being to its highest point. If political discourse keeps drifting away from that foundation, pushed by a minority with more bandwidth and more access to the media that amplify emotion, the danger is not hypothetical: it is the slow erosion of the engine that built everything we now take for granted. The task is not to silence disagreement but to insist that every demand made of the future be matched by a genuine contribution to building it.

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