Mankind goes through a period in which the problem of direction touches on ignorance, and this is paradoxical when considering the rational propensities of 21st century modernity. This can be described as a breakdown in the interpreting mechanism of the ineffable signals which structure the knowledge of the sensitive world’s functioning. The creator of the order of things, which insures the equilibrium of cohabitation, becomes increasingly confused under the pressure of neurotic contexts. The universality through societally engaged forces, with an emancipation effect through democracy, is in a symptomatic way being substituted by the crisis inducing hegemony of the structures of financial speculation.

The personalized situation lies in the state of the elites, whose leading function in configuring the winning evolution seems to have disappeared. From being a source of inspiration and innovation to the solutions to society’s problems, the elites now have visions which complicate the problems. Getting mired in materialism, adopting the accounting approach to macroeconomics and to the mechanics of voting in society are formulas through which today’s elites disfigure realities and shut down horizons. Among other things, instead of the hoped-for openness after the exit from communism and the redemption from the planned dystopia, a trial ground for another experimental extreme was set up: that of the equally violently alienating “divine market”.

In spiritual terms, the world goes through an acute crisis of the ideal. The sequestration of creativity in fictitious spaces and the grouping of expectations on the short time, together with the robotic obsession for yield, cloud the mind with the void of dyslexia. The description of the sense and of the trans-generational vehicles is overturned by the cognitive dissonances in the public debate. There is a preference for the emotional conclusions, with the ideas remaining as artefacts of rational thinking. This reasoning is being given up under the pretext of being to slow in a world where what counts is speed, not the finishing point. The fork in the road is late to appear, with the energies of the winning alternative being sapped by the carnival of the closing path. Shock has become the nourishment of existence.

The social nature goes into anomia due to the ideological reductionisms motivated by schemes of abandoning discernment in the face of the mechanics of the invisible hand. The typology of separating the individual into consumable/human capital - manipulable/voter sets the rule for the human perspective. Practically, mankind undergoes an experiment in which the costs destined for social cohesion are considered useless. From a structural standpoint the society is the sum of individuals, while functionally it becomes the expression of the instinct for closeness. The distribution of chances to accessing resources is dependent on the performance of the public space, while redistribution is linked to the yield- generating behaviour of the individual.

History’s lessons are passed in the bluffing game of the world which is assaulted by image. Time flows through the screen of existential emotions which are explained through languages encrypted and decrypted in an impressionist way. The world has little time for the argument in the face of a life filmed through the lens of audience. Reality stems from the fiction of the soap opera; it has the substance of banality presented in violent colours. The supreme institution in forging destinies turns out to be fashion.

The feeling that the position of man as the nervous centre of the things which configure the path of progress is undermined by the avalanche of irrational impositions. The economy of social life eliminates the valuing options on which the cultural memory is founded. Discernment is constructed in the field of referential minimalism, where the consciousness of an alternative is atrophied. The means have become more important than the ends, the mechanisms gaining equilibrium irrespective of the consequences on man. The market, and not man, became the measure of all things.

The sensation of a backward arrangement of reality is sustained by the excessive division at the level of public communication. The aggression on reality through projects meant to change the natural order by overturning the norms of cohabitation, on the basis of ideological justification, has in fact reached a critical level. Liberty has become the badge used to cover the mystification of the equality of chances. The economic biology of competition insures the spectrum of possibilities in theory, the contingency being inevitably monopolistic. The faces of reality belong to the illusion of the ethics of geopolitical strategies, with the truth being expressed by a single voice - the one of economic power.

Society is economically inhabited, democracy is electorally occupied, the rule of law is covered by the texture of power. The citizen loses identity, the relativism of values amplifies the differences, the orientation becomes ambiguous, while forwards means backward and the cardinal points - just like the planet’s magnetic poles - are reversed together with the parallels and the meridians.

This chaos seems to have a single cause: the lack of consensus on what we are. The moving universe is intelligible if we give it a sense. The consistency of society is given by its ideal of escaping the inferno of materialism.