Thousands of people in Tahrir Square chanted the slogan: “Bread! Dignity! Freedom!” It was 2011, and the height of the Arab spring. Standing on my own in the crowd, I recalled a middle-aged worker I’d met in Buenos Aires a decade earlier telling me why he and his colleagues had taken over a factory during Argentina’s economic collapse. He rattled off reasons such as hunger, poverty and inequality. But then his voice changed: “And the boss … ” he said. “Well, he never said good morning to us and, you know, that destroys your dignity.”

Defending one’s dignity sometimes tastes sweeter than the bread – yes, even when you’re hungry

Dignity is a slippery word, almost too elusive a concept to be put in a social contract or win inclusion as a demand from a new political movement. Yet it is the word that best reflects how surviving economic hardship isn’t the only thing that angers poor people. Being messed around, mocked and deprived of the last traces of humanity makes the physical consequences of everyday poverty harder to bear. It was a single mother of four living in one of the poorest neighbourhoods in Istanbul, on a hill overlooking the Bosphorus, who taught me this. She wasn’t furious when she told me her children went to bed hungry some nights, but she was when she recalled her boss sarcastically saying “but then you do have a sea view”. She quit her job after that, saying: “Oh yes, we dip bread in the sea for our dinner!” Her proud face taught me that defending one’s dignity sometimes tastes sweeter than the bread – yes, even when you’re hungry.

Tahrir Square in Cairo, Gezi Park in Istanbul and Puerta del Sol in Madrid: not so long ago these and other places were sites of protest and hope for radical democratic movements that wanted to remake politics and restore people’s dignity. They were either violently suppressed or absorbed into conventional global politics.

Now, once again, millions around the world are protesting. But the mood and the message have changed. This time they are demanding respect for their “truths” and their divisive political choices. The battle for dignity has been replaced by an aggressive assertion of pride – in the nation, or in a particular version of “the people”.

Between the words “dignity” and “pride” there is a world of difference, and that difference is at the heart of the global political and moral mess confronting us now. The need for dignity is inherent to being human, and connected to our love of humankind. Pride, on the other hand, is a facade, it’s about a craving for exclusionary recognition and an answer to the question of who is superior to whom. It is divisive. But when crowds are desperate enough, it is easy for political actors to reduce the need for human dignity to a vindictive clamour for pride. And this is what rightwing populism does.

It is dangerous and unfortunate that so much public anger is being organised and mobilised by rightwing populists and ruthless autocrats such as Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. They point at journalists, scientists and the political establishment and say: they’re the ones who have been messing with people’s dignity. These leaders usually emerge from the privileged classes but make people believe that they will bring the elite to their knees and allow them to take back their dignity. This is why at Trump rallies and Brexit demonstrations we see faces shaped by the struggle for survival lit up and filled with a new energy. These are souls rediscovering the ability to say no to a world that has been whipped into submission for decades by the capitalist motto, There Is No Alternative (Tina).

Despite the dominant economic assumption that humans function best when driven by the fear of losing out materially, and the desire to always acquire more, the human soul – the strangest matter on the planet – also needs meaning to hold on to. By now, even the diehard devotees of capitalism know (as we saw at Davos) that neoliberalism’s economic mechanisms are dysfunctional, its main narrative is collapsing, and that a collapsing story cannot produce inspirational heroes. At the same time people around the world feel the pain of their broken dignity and are angry about having been deceived. This is why they are so eager to be energised by remedies that are too simple to be true, to find visible targets for their anger and, most important, to latch on to false hopes. They are good to go; ready to follow new heroes promising them greatness.

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Following a hero who reminds them of their own basic human power delivers such a sweet and fundamental joy that they are prepared to compromise anything and everything to do it. It’s to do with a complex part of the human soul that the dominant economic system has overlooked for so long, and now this human need jeopardises the very system that shaped it: Brexit is threatening free trade, Trump’s protectionism is messing with the first commandment of neoliberal economics, laissez-faire.

Few leaders have openly confronted this rise of nationalism and nativism. Few are ready to talk actively about the possibility of a better world, to say there is an alternative, built not on vindictive pride but peaceful human dignity. That is why there is so much excitement about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the new star on the left of US politics and the youngest woman ever elected to the House of Representatives. She is a rare voice, and she knows that the fight is not only about material inequality.

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While watching a video of one of her speeches, I flicked through the recently published European New Deal, so far the only solid political document for an alternative economic model for the old continent. Put together by former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis’s Democracy in Europe movement, its manifesto lists its aspirations – democracy, transparency, pluralism – and much else that no sane person would oppose. But there is no mention of the human soul or human dignity. For an organisation that speaks of internationalising the opposition by standing shoulder to shoulder with US senator Bernie Sanders and reminding us that Tina is a manufactured illusion, I wonder – as a supporter of this movement – where the words are that would light up faces shaped by the struggle for survival.

As we have seen in Turkey, the US and parts of Europe, rightwing populists disrupt rational thinking and energise the masses by creating movements of their own. They benefit from the opposition defensively making nervous jokes about ruthless leaders, they dismantle institutions and, finally, they reshape their countries so they can coast on the waves of political madness. And this is a global matter that needs a global solution. Protecting human dignity from populism’s dangerous demand for pride while taking on the dominant global economic system will require a hell of a lot of solidarity.

• Ece Temelkuran is a Turkish journalist and author of How to Lose a Country