I recently watched Aaron Bastani’s conversation with Pankaj Mishra on Downstream. They covered a great deal of ground, from the changing balance of global power to the decline of Western media and the persistence of colonial habits of thought. What stayed with me, though, was a quieter question underneath much of the conversation: what happens to the collective good when the old assumptions holding it together are no longer accepted?

Mishra spoke of a world increasingly unwilling to accept inherited colonial hierarchies, or the West’s description of itself, at face value. That refusal matters beyond geopolitics. For a long time, Western societies could describe liberal democracy, progress, rights and modernity as though these were largely settled ideas, with disagreement occurring somewhere around the edges. The centre itself appeared secure.

It no longer does.

This creates an awkward problem for social cohesion; a phrase many governments now use with increasing frequency. The conventional idea assumes there is an established social centre, and the task is to bring different groups into a reasonably harmonious relationship with it. But if the centre itself is being questioned, social cohesion cannot simply mean teaching people to fit more comfortably around it.

There is, of course, an opposite danger. It is possible to expose every inherited hierarchy, interrogate every national story and demonstrate the exclusions hidden inside claims of universality. Some of that work is overdue. But dismantling a common story is easier than constructing a common life. A society cannot indefinitely consist of groups explaining why they have good reason to distrust one another.

This is where the collective good becomes interesting again.

It need not mean recovering an older consensus or agreeing upon an approved list of national values. A cohesive society does not require everybody to tell the same story about themselves, their history or their place in the world. It does, however, require enough agreement that there remain things worth doing together.

I found myself thinking here of Mariana Mazzucato, whose work on the mission economy and the common good approaches the question from a different direction. Mazzucato has long argued against the idea of government as a rather anxious caretaker, waiting for markets to act and stepping in afterwards to repair the damage. Public institutions, in her view, can help set direction around problems that matter to society rather than simply stepping in when markets fail. Value, too, is often created collectively, with government playing a part in its creation rather than merely allocating it afterwards.

There is something useful in that for thinking about cohesion. The collective good need not be inherited intact from the past. It can be made, argued over and renewed through the things a society chooses to do together.

This also makes social cohesion more demanding than tolerance. People can tolerate one another very successfully while having almost nothing to do with each other. They can occupy the same cities, use the same roads and observe the same laws while retreating into separate economic, cultural and informational worlds. Peaceful coexistence is valuable, but it is a fairly modest definition of a society.

Cohesion requires some confidence that collective institutions are worth maintaining and that cooperation with people unlike ourselves remains preferable to withdrawal from them. It does not require the disappearance of disagreement. In fact, a cohesive society should be able to carry quite serious disagreement without every dispute becoming evidence that the society itself is coming apart.

This may also explain why so much contemporary discussion of social cohesion feels slightly weightless. Governments tend to treat it as a social-policy outcome. It appears beside community development, inclusion, wellbeing and resilience, with programmes designed to improve trust and belonging.

Meanwhile, much larger parts of governments can be pulling in the opposite direction.

Economic arrangements can produce insecurity while social policy asks people to feel secure in their communities. Institutions can become more remote while governments worry about declining trust. Public services can be weakened while citizens are encouraged to become more resilient. People can be told that everyone has a stake in society while experiencing housing, work or opportunity as an increasingly private struggle.

These contradictions matter because social cohesion has a material and institutional life. Trust is not created by asking people to trust. Belonging cannot be indefinitely separated from whether people feel they have a meaningful stake in the society around them. The collective good becomes difficult to believe in if its benefits repeatedly appear private while its costs are shared.

Nor is redistribution alone the answer. Wealthy societies can be lonely and fragmented too. What matters is whether institutions, economic arrangements and public purposes give people sufficient reason to believe that collective life is real rather than ceremonial.

Perhaps this is the harder implication of Mishra’s observation about the declining authority of Western self-description. The old centre cannot simply announce its legitimacy anymore. It has to earn it.

That need not be a catastrophe. It may even be healthier. A collective good that has to be made and remade is potentially more durable than one resting on inherited deference. But it asks more of governments than producing a social cohesion strategy.

It requires some consistency between what governments say they want socially and what they produce economically and institutionally.

A cohesive society is not one in which everyone accepts the same story about itself. It is one in which enough people believe that, despite their different stories, there remains something worth building together.

Until governments confront the policies that undermine that belief, the contradiction will remain a serious roadblock. Social cohesion will continue to be discussed as a desirable social outcome while some of the most powerful machinery of the state quietly manufactures the conditions for its opposite.