In living memory
When I was a young kid in Nigeria, like every other millennial in the world pre social media and screens everywhere, I used to take my bicycle and disappear for hours at a time. One of the places I’d go was a neighborhood that most westerners would equate to something like a favela in Brazil. Why would a kid with a comfortable life go there? Because that’s where some of the most interesting people live, people with nothing to lose and everything to say. I’d just hang out, play football (soccer for the Americans), cards, or sit with random folks drinking tea and eating food my parents would have had a heart attack over. Cholera and typhoid were very common, so I get it now.
The conversations among adults would almost always delve into politics, history, the state of the country. Nigeria has never been a stable place, and it’s hard to be when you draw borders around hundreds of distinct cultures and languages, different religions, and millennia old customs, then tell everyone inside the lines to become one united country. You can thank the British for that, specialists in drawing borders that bundled incompatible peoples into one state, but that’s a conversation for another time.
Of the hundreds of conversations I overheard, very few have stayed with me. One did. It was during a period of civil unrest, after the paramilitary police raided the area and killed several people. The aftermath of it turned the talk to coups and civil wars, and in the circle was an older man I later learned had fought in the Nigerian Civil War in the late 1960s, a conflict some estimates place at up to three million deaths. The war was fought over an ethnic group’s attempt to secede from the federation, remember how the British drew those lines? What stuck with me was something he said: there would be no civil war anytime soon, because the living memory of that war had not died out yet. War is horrible, he said, and many of us who fought in it or lived through it are still alive, and so we will do anything not to go down that path again.
When I read a while ago that the last WW2 veterans were dying, I recalled that conversation and thought to myself: does that mean we could drift toward conflict again? And here we are, with constant talk of WW3. But I realized this applies not just to conflict, but to governance in general. There has been a huge wave of right wing resurgence across Europe driven by the cost of living, collapsed trust in mainstream parties, and a cultural backlash that hardened into identity politics, one where migration became the central accelerant. It let them frame insecurity, housing strain, and welfare pressure as a border problem, because as your rent goes up, your wages stagnate, and your government can’t manage a spreadsheet, they tell you the real culprit is a man in a dinghy crossing the Mediterranean or the rio grande to work a job you didn’t want in the first place. I’m not saying immigration policy hasn’t been utterly mismanaged, it has, badly, but it is not the cause of decades of governmental failure.
Curiously, one place that had remained mostly immune to the right wing wave sweeping Europe is Spain, despite being among the countries most exposed to migration and the pressures I’ve described. One reason, I believe, is that Spain still carried living memory of what that path can lead to. Francisco Franco, an authoritarian dictator who ruled from 1939 to 1975, reshaped Spain through repression, censorship, and centralized nationalist rule. The same goes for neighboring Portugal under António de Oliveira Salazar. Franco and Salazar left a recent scar, so hard right politics stayed taboo longer in Spain and Portugal than elsewhere. That historical memory acted like a brake, until economic and political discontent slowly started overpowering it, driven by younger voters with no living memory of those regimes.
Living memory functions like a social immune system in ways that map almost perfectly onto biological immunity. It recognizes a pathogen it has encountered before, mounts a rapid response, and the whole system moves with an urgency that no amount of abstract knowledge can replicate. Think about the first time you got seriously ill after COVID, not COVID itself, but that first real flu or chest infection after years of masking and isolation had kept everything at bay. Your immune system had lost the rhythm of that particular fight, and you were sicker for longer than you expected, not because you were weaker, but because the system had no recent memory of that exact threat. Doctors call it immune debt.
Societies work the same way. Someone who lived through the early stages of authoritarian rule doesn’t need to analyze it. They recognize it in the body before the mind has words for it. The man I was listening to as a boy could tell us what he saw, but he could not give us what it did to him.
So what does a society running on social immune debt actually look like from the inside? It looks and feels like now. A generalized unease that nobody can quite locate, an anxiety that keeps getting misdiagnosed and handed to the wrong doctors. Institutions that feel hollow without anyone being able to articulate exactly when or why they became so. A political class that grew up in the long stable aftermath and so has no felt sense of how fast things can go sideways once they start moving. One that keeps reaching for normal tools in an abnormal moment and expressing genuine surprise when they don’t work, as if yelling “close the border” was supposed to fix housing supply, wages, and a decade of administrative incompetence in three business days.
Rachel Yehuda, a Mount Sinai researcher, studies PTSD and inter generational trauma, including epigenetic changes tied to stress regulation. In Holocaust survivor families, her work links parental exposure to measurable differences in stress biology and DNA markers in survivors and their adult children, suggesting catastrophe can leave traces beyond culture. Still, biology doesn’t hand us a lasting safeguard. Collective memory has a half life and as witnesses disappear, the reflex to hit the brakes weakens. Politics gets rewritten by people for whom the warning label is a Netflix documentary, not instinct. You can see versions of this globally but especially across the West.
The man I was listening to was one of the people who carried the imprint, whatever mix of biology and lived experience you want to call it. He understood something that none of the formal architecture of the post war order ever accounted for, that the memory of catastrophe is a commons. A shared resource that belongs to everyone who lives inside a society, that nobody owns and nobody maintains, that does its work quietly and invisibly in the background. And now those immune cells are quite literally dying out, and what replaces them nobody knows. Another catastrophe that burns new immunity into a new generation at a cost nobody sane would choose, or nothing at all.