The Nobel Prizes and the Search for a Glimmer of Light in Human Behavior

In recent years, the Nobel Prizes have become part of the political, social, and cultural transformations taking place around the world. They offer a subject for reflection that goes beyond scientific or literary achievements themselves, serving as a mirror of human behavior in a geopolitically troubled world and as a means of understanding the relationship between knowledge, power, politics, and society. Such a reading requires us to return to the human and behavioral dimension embodied by the laureates, as well as the geopolitical dimension of a global distinction that transcends borders without existing outside history. Peace, economics, literature, and science operate within a world marked by inequalities of power, influence, and resources. The choice of a particular laureate may confer symbolic legitimacy on a cause, draw attention to a conflict or crisis, or open a debate about the standards and rules by which the international community recognizes achievement, and the distance separating value from reality. A peace prize may be awarded while wars continue. The world may celebrate a scientific discovery even as inequalities in access to its benefits widen between social classes. Or it may honor a writer, whether obscure or well known, who defends human freedom in a world where freedom of expression is shrinking even in the most influential democracies! Here, it is important to distinguish between the reasons given by the Nobel Committee for its decisions and the political, social, and economic conclusions that may be drawn from them. Not every choice constitutes a deliberate geopolitical statement, even if it lends itself to a geopolitical interpretation.

Jørgen Watne Frydnes, presiding over the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize for the third time, is a 41-year-old man far removed from the conventional image of diplomats and political leaders. “We talk a great deal about the Nobel Committee, but I never imagined that one day I would bear this responsibility,” he says. During his humanitarian missions, Jørgen Watne Frydnes encountered political violence and the ravages of war at close range. He experienced their realities firsthand. While working with Médecins Sans Frontières, he organized a European convoy to Malawi in 2010, then traveled on missions involving measles vaccination campaigns and efforts to combat malnutrition. From Europe, he went on assignments to Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, and Sudan. His attention remains directed toward the outside world during the deliberations held at the Nobel Institute in Oslo between February and September.

The Committee’s five members examined 287 nominations, including 79 from organizations. The list remains confidential. They rely on experts from around the world who provide information about the geopolitical situations in the countries from which the nominees come. As for the controversy surrounding Donald Trump, whose candidacy received support from some Republicans in the US Congress as well as leaders of Cambodia, Pakistan, and Israel, Frydnes responds with a noncommittal “no comment.” Against this backdrop, we can understand the awarding of the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize to South African jurist Navi Pillay, in recognition of her efforts to promote peace and international law and her defense of human rights. Before that, the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize had been awarded to María Corina Machado for her efforts to advance democratic rights in Venezuela and achieve a peaceful transition. In 2024, Nihon Hidankyo was honored for its commitment to collective memory and nuclear ethics, as part of a global appeal to prevent the use of nuclear weapons, with all its geopolitical implications. In 2023, Iranian activist Narges Mohammadi had also been recognized for her struggle against the oppression of women in Iran and her defense of human rights and freedoms. These choices point back to Alfred Nobel’s will, a sacred text of sorts defining the prize to be awarded to “the person who has made the greatest or best contribution to bringing nations closer together, reducing or abolishing standing armies, and organizing or promoting peace congresses.”

The Nobel Prizes do more than celebrate achievements. At times, they reveal what the world has come to need to understand about itself, in societies that no longer suffer so much from a shortage of goods or information as from an inability to sustain meaning and a depletion of the capacity for attention. It is as though civilization, having made enormous advances in production, technology, and the accumulation of knowledge, were returning to its original question: what should we do with all these capabilities if we do not know how to live, why we live, or what is truly worth holding on to? Perhaps the Nobel Committee is aware of this mission through its choices and its search for the sources of human value. We believe that the Nobel Prizes are not looking for the human being who triumphs in the world, but for the one who remains capable of giving the world meaning and the pleasure of existing.

The 2025 Prize in Economic Sciences focused on innovation, economic growth, and creative destruction. The 2026 prize, awarded to Robert Hall and Michael Woodford, recognized their contributions to the microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilization, in an economy that does not operate on its own. Behind inflation, recession, saving, and spending are individuals who make decisions based on their expectations, their confidence, and their fear of the future. This does not mean that inflation and debt have become less important, but that understanding them also requires understanding the behavior that produces them and how expectations influence economic decisions. The economy is not a collection of numbers moving through a vacuum. It is a society acting under the pressure of expectations in unstable times. Economics therefore begins with people, as economic authorities face a recurring question: how can they stimulate economic activity during a recession without fueling inflation, and how can they curb rising prices without seriously damaging employment? The answer requires assessing how households and businesses respond to lower interest rates, increased government spending, or changes in taxation. According to the Academy, the two laureates helped develop models based on the behavior of households and businesses rather than relying exclusively on statistical relationships between indicators such as output, consumption, and inflation.

This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to French scientist Henri Kagan, aged 95, and Japanese scientist Kenso Soai, aged 76, for their discoveries in asymmetric organic synthesis and autocatalysis. In other words, the laureates are not relatively young scientists but researchers whose accumulated work over decades has had repercussions for drug development and our understanding of the chemistry of life. This means that the science we celebrate today is not merely the ability to produce new substances. It is also the ability to understand the minute structures that make life possible and to intervene in them responsibly. The Nobel Prize in Literature, meanwhile, was awarded to Canadian writer Anne Carson, whose work blends classical and modern literature, poetry and prose, as well as what has been described as a confrontation with boredom, or with the inability to remain interested in what gives pleasure its meaning. We are confronted with an immense abundance of images, news, products, and experiences, yet abundance does not guarantee fulfillment. Instead, it may become an endless succession of short-lived desires, changing before they can develop into experiences or memories, shifting like desert sand dunes. Literature, by contrast, asks us to slow down, to recover the ability to linger in post-consumer societies confronted with the shifting nature of truths before they can even be tested, perhaps as a way of diverting attention and easing the burden of questions of religion, geopolitics, and weighty ideologies.

This is not to suggest that the Nobel Prizes have decided to confront boredom or emotional coldness, but rather that their choices allow us to question contemporary humanity’s relationship with knowledge, time, meaning, and power. In some of the names selected, we can thus sense a transformation in the psychological and social structure of contemporary human beings, even before that transformation becomes an overt crisis of shared truth, belonging, and meaning, in a world where the prospect of a stable future is increasingly vulnerable to disintegration. We move from interpreting the economy through inflation, debt, and macroeconomic indicators to understanding the human being who makes decisions amid wars and is influenced by fear, expectations, incentives, and biases. At the same time, growth is being driven by both innovation and creative destruction, in the spirit of “let artificial intelligence do its work,” even as many argue that liability laws and new regulations remain inadequate, particularly in physics and artificial intelligence. The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for fundamental discoveries and inventions that enabled machine learning through artificial neural networks. The Nobel Prizes therefore offer an opportunity to examine three interconnected systems: the human psyche, the political system, and the system of global recognition.