conservative, democratic or authoritarian; they are as prone to enshrine LGBT rights as to reinstate torture and disseminate fake news. Nor does the longing for the good old days adequately respond to the massive crisis of legitimacy facing democratic institutions today.Political antidotes to the sinister pathologies unleashed by Putin, Erdogan, Modi, Brexit and Trump require a reckoning with the bad new days something a lot more forward-looking than models of solidarity inspired by Cuba or Churchill, nationalist pedagogies for the oppressed, or dauntless faith in globalisation eventually delivering the promised goods.Inside the Kremlins hall of mirrors Read moreThis work is necessary but it can only proceed with a more sophisticated analysis of how todays landscape of hyperrational power has coerced a new and increasingly potent irrationalism into existence. And such analyses would require, above all, a richer and more varied picture of human experience and needs than the prevailing image of Homo economicus. This intellectual effort which was first undertaken more than a century ago by the thinkers cited here would necessarily take us beyond liberalism and its faith in the curative power of economic growth.What Robert Musil called the liberal scraps of an unfounded faith in reason and progress have yet again failed modern human beings in their all-important task of understanding their experience. We once more confront the possibility, outlined in Musils great novel about the collapse of liberal values, The Man Without Qualities, that the characteristic desolation of the modern human being his immense loneliness in a desert of detail, his restlessness, malice, incomparable callousness, his greed for money, his coldness and violence is the result of the losses that logically precise thinking has inflicted on the soul.For nearly three decades, the religion of technology and GDP and the crude 19th-century calculus of self-interest have dominated politics and intellectual life. Today, the society of entrepreneurial individuals competing in the rational market reveals unplumbed depths of misery and despair; it spawns a nihilistic rebellion against order itself.With so many of our landmarks in ruins, we can barely see where we are headed, let alone chart a path. But even to get our basic bearings we need, above all, greater precision in matters of the soul. The stunning events of our age of anger, and our perplexity before them, make it imperative that we anchor thought in the sphere of emotions; these upheavals demand nothing less than a radically enlarged understanding of what it means for human beings to pursue the contradictory ideals of freedom, equality and prosperity.Otherwise, in our sterile infatuation with rational motivations and outcomes, we risk resembling those helpless navigators who, De Tocqueville wrote, stare obstinately at some ruins that can still be seen on the shore we have left, even as the current pulls us along and drags us backward toward the abyss. Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here.Since youre here ......we have a small favour to ask. More people are reading the Guardian than ever but far fewer are paying for it. And advertising