No growth, a loss of trust, a culture of blame, an unequal burden of austerity: it’s hardly the most tempting of cocktails. This is a dystopian world of economic and financial failure. It threatens political instability on the grandest of scales. We may no longer be engaged in twentieth-century debates about the relative benefits of the free market versus central planning. Marxist- Leninist dogma has, thankfully, disappeared from view. But we are in danger of letting a culture of blame and mistrust develop. We cannot understand why we have to make sacrifices so we search, instead, for sacrificial lambs. It’s a convenient approach, absolving ourselves from blame even as we construct a narrative to blame others. Yet if we all follow the same approach, it won’t be long before the politics of hate makes a comeback.