Illustration by Abro In various developed countries, the manner in which politics and society have unravelled in the last decade, suggests that certain factors that contributed to the unravelling had either been missed or were systematically hidden from the rest of the world. By ‘rest of the world’ here I mean developing countries. In the last few years, my research, in areas such as religious extremism, historical distortions in school textbooks, the culture of conspiracy theories and reactionary attitudes towards science, has produced findings that are a lot more universal than one suspected. This century’s second decade (2010-2020) saw some startling political and social tendencies in Europe and the US, which mirrored those in developing countries. Before the mentioned decade, these tendencies had been repeatedly commented upon in the West, as if they were entirely specific to poorer regions. Even though many Western historians, while discussing the presence of religious extremism, superstition or political upheavals in developing countries, agreed that these existed in developed countries as well, they insisted that these were only largely present in their own countries during their teething years.