A Ranked Breakdown of the Seven MDI Categories and Which Has Worsened Most Over the Last Decade
Protesters in Hong Kong demand the release of imprisoned journalists, 2022. Photo: OHCHR / UN Human Rights
Every category in the Moral Disorder Index is getting worse. But they are not getting worse at the same rate. Line them up by severity, breadth, and acceleration over the last decade and a clear answer emerges. It is not the one most people would expect.
No, this is not a list of which categories score highest in the MDI right now. It is which categories have moved fastest in the wrong direction. A disorder that was catastrophic ten years ago and stayed catastrophic is not gaining ground the same way one that was merely elevated and has since spread.
#7 — Sovereignty
Global average score: 18.2. No country scores above 50.
Sovereignty sits last because it is the most geographically concentrated disorder in the dataset. The worst scores belong to active war zones: Afghanistan (46.4), Libya (44.7), Syria (41.4), South Sudan (40.9) — all per the UnseenFront MDI. Outside those contexts, most nations score below 25. The disorder exists, and in failing states it is catastrophic. But it has not spread broadly into stable countries the way other categories have.
That may be changing and is worth watching. But as of now, it is not the disorder gaining the most ground globally.
#6 — Body
Global average score: 30.7. High variance (SD: 16.2).
The Body category has the second-highest variance of any category in the MDI. That tells you something important: countries diverge sharply on this one. The highest scorers are not authoritarian regimes. They are liberal democracies. The Netherlands scores 75.5. Canada, 75.3. Australia, 72.1. New Zealand, 69.9. Germany, 68.8.
The pattern is consistent with permissive abortion law, high homicide rates, and bodily disorder. The countries leading those metrics are mostly Western. Colombia (68.2) and Mexico (35.6) bring in the violence dimension from another angle.
The disorder is real and accelerating in specific regions. But the Body category still has a global average of 30.7, and the majority of countries score below 40. It ranks sixth because its growth is geographically uneven.
#5 — Creation
Global average score: 27.9. The United States scores 55.5. France scores 60.6. Belgium scores 61.8.
Creation disorder covers substance dependency and the ideological inversion of the natural order. Gender ideology, transhumanism, and drug use all feed this category.
Belgium leads the world at 61.8. France is at 60.6. Canada is at 56.2. The United States is at 55.5. The United Kingdom is at 53.2. Every country in that list is a Western liberal democracy with low coercion scores — meaning what you are looking at is freely chosen disorder, not state-imposed behavior.
The UNODC’s 2024 World Drug Report put global drug users at 292 million, a 20% increase over one decade. New synthetic opioids are now appearing across high-income countries at near-zero distribution cost. The other dimension, harder to measure, is the pace at which legal and educational institutions in the West have formally adopted frameworks that directly contradict biological categories of sex and reproduction. That process moved faster in the last decade than in the previous five combined.
Creation ranks fifth because its current global average is the second-lowest in the index. But the trajectory in wealthy, low-coercion countries is the most accelerated pattern in this category, and the downstream effects compound across generations.
#4 — Sacred
Global average score: 37.5. North Korea scores 79.2. China scores 74.8. Vietnam scores 73.2.
Survivors outside a burned church in Jaranwala, Pakistan, 2023. Over 380 million Christians faced persecution globally in 2024. Photo: Dawn News / Open Doors International
The top three Sacred disorder scores belong to communist-atheist states using systematic state suppression of religious freedom. That is not surprising. What is more instructive is the middle of the distribution: Pakistan (55.5), Sudan (55.5), Yemen (55.5), Somalia (59.2), Belarus (57.5). Many of these are coerced environments where the MDI explicitly flags that apparent religious order is enforced, not chosen.
The acceleration over the last decade has two distinct tracks. The first is persecution: more than 380 million Christians persecuted in 2024, 15 million more than the year before. Attacks on churches and Christian institutions were up 371% year-over-year in some regions. The second is apostasy in the West: historic confessional bodies formally revising foundational doctrines within a single decade, at a pace that would have been unrecognizable to those institutions twenty years ago.
Sacred disorder is pervasive. But at a global average of 37.5 and with its worst cases concentrated in coercive environments, the category has not yet broken into free societies at the top severity level. That makes it rank fourth, not first.
#3 — Authority
Global average score: 45.0. The highest-scoring category globally.
Authority is the number one disorder by global average. Syria scores 83.1. South Sudan, 82.4. North Korea, 80.7. Cuba, 79.8. Turkmenistan, 77.7. Thirty-six percent of all countries score above 50 on this category. That is the highest such proportion of any category in the index.
Transparency International’s 2024 Corruption Perceptions Index found 47 countries posting their worst scores in over a decade. Two-thirds of humanity lives under governments that score below 50 on a 0-to-100 corruption scale.
So why does Authority rank third and not first? Because Authority has been this bad for a long time. It is the highest-scoring category in the index, but it is not the fastest-moving one. The ground beneath it has not shifted dramatically in a decade. It is a high floor, not an accelerating collapse. Two categories have moved faster in the wrong direction more recently, in contexts where the disorder was supposed to be different.
#2 — Family
Global average score: 38.1. Western democracies average 53.5 on this category alone.
Among countries with minimal or low coercion (societies where behavior is freely chosen, not state-enforced) the average Family score is 53.5. That is the highest category average for that group by a significant margin.
Look at the top scorers: Norway (75.2), Belgium (74.8), Denmark (74.6), Canada (74.1), Uruguay (74.0), Australia (73.6). These are not failed states. They are wealthy, stable, highly functional nations by most conventional measures. The disorder is not imposed on them. It is chosen.
Family disorder has the highest standard deviation of any category (17.6), meaning the gap between the most ordered and least ordered countries is larger here than anywhere else. That variance tells you the category is contested and actively moving. Some countries still maintain strong family formation patterns. Many are moving away from them fast.
The United States scores 65.4 on Family — its worst category in the index! It scores 55.4 on Body and 55.5 on Creation. Out-of-wedlock birth rates, family dissolution, and the redefinition of marriage and parenthood have all moved in one direction for decades in the West, and the societies producing those trends are doing so voluntarily.
Family ranks second because it is the category where free, prosperous nations are failing most severely, and because every generation that grows up under disordered family conditions is statistically less likely to form stable ones.
#1 — Truth
Global average score: 44.6. 31.8% of countries score above 50. North Korea: 82.3. Cuba: 80.5. China: 77.4.
A protester holds a sign reading ‘Journalism Is Not a Crime.’ Global press freedom reached its lowest point in 25 years in 2026. Photo: Nieman Reports
Truth is second only to Authority in global average, but it ranks first in this analysis for a reason that the index scores alone do not capture: it is the only category whose deterioration directly impairs the ability to detect and resist all other categories of disorder.
The RSF World Press Freedom Index 2026 found that global press freedom has reached its lowest point in 25 years. For the first time in the index’s history, more than half of all countries assessed fall into the ‘difficult’ or ‘very serious’ categories. The legal indicator recorded the sharpest decline globally, with conditions worsening in over 60% of countries. UNESCO’s Global Freedom of Expression Index has dropped 10% since 2012.
Those are the measurable numbers. The structural shift is harder to quantify but not hard to describe. The infrastructure for mass deception has industrialized. Synthetic media, algorithmic censorship, and coordinated narrative management are now deployable at near-zero cost across every information platform simultaneously. The feedback mechanisms by which societies have historically caught and corrected false public narratives are weakened at precisely the moment the capacity to generate false narratives has expanded by orders of magnitude.
The MDI flags Truth as the primary disorder for Cuba, North Korea, China, Eritrea, Somalia, and Vietnam. What those governments have historically done through brute state force is now available as a capability to any actor with sufficient resources and institutional access. The distinction between authoritarian information control and democratic information control is narrowing. That is new. That is the shift of the decade.
Truth ranks first because every other category depends on it. A population that cannot accurately assess its own condition cannot organize to correct the Family disorder it is choosing, the Creation disorder it is normalizing, or the Authority disorder it keeps tolerating.
Disorder in Truth is the disorder that makes all the others permanent.
Data: UnseenFront MDI · · RSF World Press Freedom Index 2026 · UNODC World Drug Report 2024 · Transparency International CPI 2024 · Open Doors World Watch List 2025 · UNESCO Freedom of Expression Report 2025