The Quiet Erosion of the Rule of Law and the Longer Decline of Capacity
The World Justice Project's 2026 Rule of Law Index records declines in 26 of the 40 European countries with comparable data since 2021. The four Nordic states that long topped the rankings, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Sweden, all lost ground, albeit modestly. The pattern is not confined to Europe. For the ninth consecutive year, declines outnumbered improvements across the 143 countries surveyed. The sharpest deterioration has appeared in constraints on government power and judicial limits on executive action.
These are institutional symptoms. They coincide with a longer argument about the human substrate of complex societies. In 1922, Lothrop Stoddard's The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-Man identified three recurring pressures that had previously undermined advanced societies: structural overloading (complexity outrunning the average capacity to manage it), biological regression (differential fertility that reduced the proportion of higher-ability people), and atavistic revolt (resentment of the demands of ordered life among those least equipped for them). Stoddard drew on the early psychometric data of his day and treated the "under-man" not primarily as a racial category but as anyone whose capacities fell short of the requirements of the civilisation in which he lived. He expected that when the human foundations weakened, institutions would eventually follow.
Contemporary psychometric evidence supplies a partial update. The long twentieth-century rise in IQ scores known as the Flynn effect stalled and, in several Western countries, reversed for later birth cohorts. Norwegian conscript data show gains through the mid-1970s cohorts followed by declines; Danish and Finnish series display similar downturns. U.S. online samples from 2006–2018 show drops on matrix reasoning and numerical series while spatial rotation continued to rise. Within-family analyses (most clearly the Norwegian work) indicate that the post-peak declines are environmentally driven rather than the product of changing parental genetic composition. Possible contributors include changes in education, nutrition, screen exposure, and selection effects, but the directional finding itself is repeated across multiple national datasets. Average measured cognitive ability in the most advanced societies is no longer rising and is falling in some of them.
The elite dimension is harder to measure directly yet visible in outcomes. Stoddard worried mainly about the expansion of the lower tail. Today the more striking observation is the simultaneous degradation of the upper strata that once staffed the institutions responsible for maintaining legal and administrative order. Elite universities have lowered objective standards in admissions and grading while elevating non-cognitive criteria. Public administration, judiciary, and corporate leadership increasingly select for conformity to ideological litmus tests rather than demonstrated competence in the underlying domain. The result is not merely a larger underclass of the sort Stoddard described but a thinner and less capable administrative and professional class. When the people who write regulations, appoint judges, and staff oversight bodies themselves operate at lower average cognitive and character thresholds, the formal constraints that constitute the rule of law loosen even if the statutes remain on the books.
What has so far prevented more rapid institutional collapse is the continuing productivity of a relatively small technical stratum: engineers, software developers, logistics specialists, and applied scientists, whose selection remains more tightly linked to measurable performance. These groups keep power grids, logistics networks, semiconductor fabrication, and medical supply chains functioning despite the broader deterioration in institutional quality and average cognitive metrics. Their output masks the cumulative effects of lower fertility among high-ability native populations, the importation of lower-average-ability groups, and the internal selection against competence in non-technical elites. Remove or heavily regulate that technical class, and the institutional decay already visible in the rule-of-law numbers would accelerate.
Stoddard's remedies : eugenic selection and a "neo-aristocracy" of the capable, were framed in the language and assumptions of 1922 and are not directly transferable. The data that matter today are simpler and less ideologically freighted: measured cognitive ability is stagnant or declining in the societies that once produced the highest rule-of-law scores; the institutions those societies built are recording measurable erosion in constraints on power; and the remaining high-competence technical minority is what still postpones more visible breakdown. Whether that minority can be sustained, or whether the selection mechanisms that produce it will themselves be subordinated to non-performance criteria, will determine how far the present trajectory runs, and how soon collapse occurs.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/rule-law-quietly-eroding-across-europe-even-nordics
