It’s difficult to know whether our leaders are reflecting society or are setting a path for their own self-interest, but it certainly appears that the fragmentation of society has picked up apace.

Divisions appear in all aspects of our life, in business, families, healthcare and education.

In the post-war era when it was recognised that work was needed to heal society, governments, institutions and citizens quickly identified the need to pull together. It was an age of cohesion and consolidation.

I’m not saying the turbulent times over the last ten years can be equated to a world war, but it appears that the result of the economic trauma experienced by many is a move to decentralisation and fragmentation.

We seem intent on building barriers. It may be an instinct of protectionism that leads us to defend our own position.

However, wherever we build a barrier we are forced to choose which side of the barrier we wish to defend.

The occurrence of Brexit or Indyref2 – two major events in a short space of time – does cause one to wonder. In a year in which Donald Trump has reached the White House on a platform of protectionism and division, it may be that society in the western world is retrenching to a default position of self-interest.

US academic Seth Caplan wrote: “Two factors above all decide how a country’s political, economic and societal life evolves; a population’s capacity to co-operate (which depends, for the most part, on the level of social cohesion) and its ability to take advantage of a set of shared, productive institutions.”

These two factors shape how a government interacts with its citizens, how officials, politicians and business people behave. Self-interest may be smothering our leaders’ ability to recognise the cracks that are appearing.

Caplan also considered two types of social cohesion. Vertical looks at levels of inequity where substantial differences in income are both unfair and damaging to the wellbeing of societies. Horizontal looks at how strong the “social glue” is that ties people to one another.

When history reflects on Trump’s success on a platform of division and that the democratic will of the people in the UK is to divorce our European neighbours, it will be interesting to see if these events reflected or caused the further fragmentation of society.

We are experiencing a rise in the number of divorces and relationship breakups; the propensity for the younger generation to build a CV by moving jobs on a regular basis rather than building a longterm career with one employer; the rise of extremism, right and left, political and religious.

Perhaps our leaders need to take a look back at historical examples of where providing the social cohesion, or the “glue” that binds us, is the best way of achieving our aims working together.