ven the careful reader of the news these days could be forgiven for believing that the driving forces behind world events are economic.

The White House repeats jobs, jobs, jobs. The Democrats chime in with calls for increased maternity leave and better pay, while American corporations stubbornly refuse to bring back the more than $1 trillion they have stashed overseas to avoid taxes.

But this widespread assertion is dead wrong. What we are grappling with are primarily problems of global, historical resentment, leading to an unquenchable thirst for revenge, and to conspiracy on one level or another to achieve it. 

To test my thesis, think for a moment of what an ominous week it has been, as if Halloween were really bent upon frightening us all.

Let’s start with conspiracy, a word Americans have always felt was foreign to our makeup. And yet dark, conspiratorial thinking over dark, conspiratorial events has dominated the news.

This fall, for instance, the Trump administration acted to release long-held documents from the investigation into the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Wonderful, people thought -- but some of the most dangerous documents were held back, and we are now overtaken by a more advanced conspiratorial mood.

Now we come to Russia and to the amazing news that broke on possible Trump campaign contacts, and perhaps collusion, with Moscow. And again we find, strangely enough, that in vast Russia, Vladimir Putin is acting out historical Russian resentment and hatred of the West.

So “jobs” is not the prime motivator of the world today. This world, still wrenched by its post-colonial tremors, is filled with people busy getting even. And we now see the same qualities of “grievance politics” inside our own borders and inside ourselves, especially in the angry, left-behind, white working class that elected Donald J. Trump.

Being ruled by resentment may not be how we think the world should be -- or how it could be in the future -- but if we look at the world honestly, and if we look at ourselves honestly, we will have a far better chance of solving our own problems and thus righting the world, as well.

It’s not an easy world, but it IS a manageable one. We have to start by getting the words right.

Georgie Anne Geyer has been a foreign correspondent and commentator on international affairs for more than 40 years. She can be reached at gigi_geyer(at)juno.com.