Brexit seems to have finally woken the political and economic elites on both sides of the Atlantic to a reality they’ve been trying desperately, for years, to ignore: the middle class is suffering, and terribly.

In both the UK and the U.S., median incomes have been stagnant for decades. Meanwhile, people are experiencing a kind of vulnerability and insecurity without precedent in the modern history of rich nations. In the UK, living standards have fallen for all but the wealthiest. In the U.S., the majority of public school kids are now in poverty, the middle class is for the first time a demographic minority, and life expectancy is flat overall and actually fell for whites.

There’s no good name for this phenomenon of a middle class imploding while economies nominally “grow.” It’s not really a “recession,” which is just a few quarters of poor growth. Nor is it a “depression,” which is sustained negative growth. This new phenomenon of the middle imploding into the new poor, while the ultra rich get ultra richer has no name. And its lack of a name reflects the truth that the people who come up with names for such things are barely really aware of it at all.

But its namelessness doesn’t make it less real to the people suffering from it. They’ve grown enraged by a system that has abandoned them—one that won’t even acknowledge that abandonment. And that is why, across the globe, they are turning to demagogues.

Beneath the economic ruin lies a generation of failed leaders. The most emblematic of them is now of course David Cameron. He will go down in history as the man who broke up the EU, probably the UK, and plunged the country into chaos.

It is easy to point the finger at failed political leadership. But this is about failed corporate leadership as well.

The truth is that today’s business leaders have failed in the simplest, starkest, hardest terms. The middle class, which is the bellwether of prosperity, its truest measure, and the great creation of modernity (no, it wasn’t the iPhone) is vanishing under their watch. Even the so-called “rising global middle classes” in developing countries aren’t replacing them, really. (They don’t enjoy the same rights, protections, security, and quality of life as the dwindling middle classes in many wealthier nations. They have been named “middle classes” by pundits—but that is like calling both a supertanker and a canoe a boat.)

Brexit is easily the worst thing to happen to British business since WWII, and the worst thing to happen to global business since the great financial crisis. It is emblematic of a troubled new age: one in which system-shattering breakdowns are the new normal. And the truth is that rather than hoping futilely to avoid them (which you can’t), you’re better off helping prevent them (which you can).

To prevent such catastrophes from happening, business needs to play a more active, engaged role in creating the kind of thriving, vibrant economies that inoculate societies from self-implosion—because those implosions take businesses down with them, too. Brexits don’t happen in thriving economies; they only happen when the pie is shrinking. People who have good jobs — jobs that allow them to do something useful, that pay livable wages, that come with good benefits — who can educate their children, get the health care they need, and live lives that are decent and whole generally don’t blow up their own economies in a misguided bid for attention, justice, and vengeance.

It’s not enough just to let people’s lives roll downhill a little more slowly than the next business, and call it a job well done. You can’t CSR your way out of this while paying your senior executives more and more and paying your workers (relatively) less and less. The backlash from people who’ve been left behind by a broken model of prosperity is too sharp, too fierce, and too destructive. Just as it will be when climate change really accelerates, when the next financial crisis rolls around, when unemployed, education-debt-burdened young people reach their breaking point, and so on. The world-shaking costs of these great global risks are no longer nuisances that business can simply sweep under the nearest rug.

Brexit tells us something urgent. There will come a point when abandoned people are willing to see the whole playing field burn down, so that it can be level again. And they might burn you down with it.