We are lost. It is increasingly clear to us that if something works, it is not precisely thanks to our rulers, but rather due to pure inertia and with luck. That a person of flesh and blood answers our calls seeking help or simply an explanation or information, has become an event that can be shared even with the indebted baker on the corner with a vinegar face.
No matter how much family we have, how many real or social friends we have, we feel increasingly alone, more abandoned to our fate. Working from home is a double-edged sword. And in most cases, running away from the city doesn't solve anything either, because after the first period of euphoria and supposed freedom, one starts feeling lonelier than one.
In the West, we live in a world of 'the winner takes it all', which ABBA sang in the happy seventies of the last century. There is no place for seconds. Either you are a winner or you are nobody. We are fake Americans without the right to vote. Our past weighs on us, which we try to rewrite or hide so that it is perceived more in line with today's insane demands.
But it's of no use to us, of course. They will also come for us. Or at least that's how it is perceived by more and more scared Westerners willing to give their vote to a bunch of populist politicians who lack any scruples or even a minimal democratic impulse, however questionable that may be.
Yesterday's heroes are today's reviled antiheroes. There is no statue of a great man that resists the opprobrium of the hosts of the so-called cultural warriors. Nothing is sacred anymore. Whoever said that history is written by the victors was totally wrong.
But if our past is unspeakable and the present is frankly unspeakable, what about our future? At the very least it will be apocalyptic or it will not be, according to the words of the so-called experts who we would do well not to pay too much attention to, because every now and then they make mistakes, like any neighbor's son.
We have learned nothing from the unmitigated disaster of Brexit, from the presidency of Donald Trump, from the Russian invasion of Ukraine or from the happy Catalan process. The only casualties recorded have occurred among the common people, that is, the majority, who increasingly play less role in our democracies doomed to agree with unbridled minorities. Given the current deplorable political panorama, is it worth going to the polls to cast our sacred democratic vote?
We find ourselves in a Copernican moment, of black swans, of progressive puritans who are about to mount autos-da-fé in public squares after burning books considered dangerous or simply degenerate in bonfires. Instead, we look at the so-called primitive peoples with admiration. We dress up as if we were them, with tattoos, piercings and paleolithic diets. We are lost.
Installed as we are in the era of the most absurd hoaxes, of the most far-fetched nonsense, in addition to an institutional begging that is as disproportionate as it is uncomplexed, we find ourselves without a past, present or future to put in our mouths. If globalization has been disastrous, what about the demographic crisis that afflicts the West? What was offered has long since run out.
Far from embracing the idea that 'the winner takes it all', perhaps we should pay attention to what the Irish Nobel Prize for Literature postulated, Samuel Beckett, which consisted of failing again and again, of failing better. Because, so far this century, which is ours, we are only failing worse.
