Reading Hobbes recently made me think differently about the political movements we are seeing around the world.

Hobbes argues that human beings do not know the future. We experience the past, remember what happened, observe which events followed others, and gradually accumulate what he calls signs. From those signs we form expectations about what may happen next.

This is prudence: not knowledge of the future, but, in Hobbes’s words, a “Presumption of the Future” derived from past experience.

I wonder whether something similar happens politically, not only within individuals but across societies.

For a long time, a government or political establishment may appear immovable. People can be dissatisfied with unemployment, inequality, corruption or declining opportunities and still believe that nothing can really change.

That belief matters.

A population that cannot imagine political change behaves differently from one that has seen change happen.

Then somewhere, something breaks the pattern.

Bangladesh provides a striking recent example. Student protests that began over public-sector job quotas in 2024 grew into a much wider uprising and eventually brought down Sheikh Hasina’s government.

Then came Nepal. Youth-led protests in 2025, initially triggered by restrictions on social-media platforms but fuelled by deeper anger over corruption, governance and lack of economic opportunity, contributed to the collapse of the government. The elections that followed produced an extraordinary result: the Rastriya Swatantra Party, founded only in 2022, won 182 of the 275 seats in parliament.

More recently, India’s Gen-Z-led “Cockroach” movement demonstrated something similar on a different scale. Protests over examination failures and opportunities for young people eventually forced the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan—an unusual concession from a government accustomed to political dominance.

These countries are very different. Their political systems, histories and economic conditions cannot simply be placed into one category.

But Hobbes offers an interesting way of thinking about what can travel between them.

Not revolution itself.

Expectation.

Once people observe that organised pressure can produce consequences, that experience becomes a political sign.

The sequence begins to enter collective memory:

Dissatisfaction → organisation → pressure → concession or political change.

And once that sequence has been observed, the next population facing similar frustrations no longer confronts the future with exactly the same imagination.

Something previously considered impossible has happened somewhere else.

This does not mean that the same result will follow. Hobbes would probably warn us against precisely that conclusion. Experience gives us signs, not certainty.

The same grievances can produce very different political outcomes depending upon institutions, leadership, organisation, economic conditions and the response of the state.

The United States illustrates this uncertainty.

Young Americans are clearly experiencing substantial economic and political dissatisfaction. Harvard’s 2026 Youth Poll found that only 13% believed the country was heading in the right direction, while trust in government had fallen to extremely low levels. Cost of living, housing and economic insecurity feature heavily in this dissatisfaction.

But dissatisfaction alone does not tell us what comes next.

This is where Hobbes is useful again.

A sign is not a prophecy.

Past experience allows us to form conjectures about the future, but it cannot guarantee them.

And perhaps this is also how we should think about countries such as Pakistan, where economic frustration, political distrust and a very young population create conditions in which events elsewhere may increasingly become part of the political imagination.

The mistake would be to predict that Pakistan, America, India or any other country must follow Nepal or Bangladesh.

History does not operate so mechanically.

What may travel across borders is something more subtle: the knowledge that established political arrangements can be challenged.

A young person watching events in another country does not experience those events directly. But through communication, images and now social media, they become part of that person’s political experience.

And once an alternative has been imagined, politics has already changed slightly.

This brings me back to Hobbes.

He describes human beings as creatures who carry the past into the future. We remember, recognise signs, form expectations and then act according to what we believe may happen next.

Political systems depend partly upon the same psychology.

Authority is maintained not only through institutions, laws or force, but also through expectations: the expectation that institutions will endure, that challenges will fail, or that alternatives are unrealistic.

When experience begins changing those expectations, behaviour can change with them.

Perhaps that is the political lesson worth watching today.

The most important moment may not be when people become dissatisfied with the existing order. It may be when experience gives them reason to believe that another outcome is possible.