I have the feeling that Donald Trump's miserable display of insolence when he received Zelensky in Washington marks a turning point. Since then, the American president has begun to show signs of losing control of the scene. Judges are starting to rebel, citizens are showing the first signs of disagreement and disaffection, the reputations of some of the magnates who support him are slipping, Europe is beginning to take a stand. And the inconsistency of Trump's narrative is becoming substantial. It seems that he was the man who had Vladimir Putin under control, and from the very beginning, we have already seen that Putin is using the short bargaining chip: when he has him ahead, Trump's fanciful promises fall apart. He considered the negotiations to be on track, and in the first attempt at concrete results, he left with his tail between his legs. A vague one-month agreement without attacks on energy plants is all that Trump has achieved from his signature move: the phone call with Putin. And while Europe begins to show some willingness to rearmament and coherence, Russia's strategy of untangling the skein becomes evident. In the meantime, China, until now very discreet and convinced that Trump's noise has a limited reach and that the fish will fall to the hatchet, begins to show its face. Lest anyone fantasize about its discretion. The Chinese are here, betting on capitalizing on Western bewilderment.
Nothing new: as long as there is society, there will be power and, therefore, ideology, understood as the intermediary between man and harsh reality. Every society needs to equip itself with meaning and nurture a certain imaginary of its own. I say equip itself with meaning in a very conscious way. I start from the premise that being lacks meaning, but meaning is necessary for life. Meaning as a cherished illusion.
Man is a storytelling animal, and we must return to telling stories. The current crisis in politics partly explains the failure to allow stories to rot. Right now, we find ourselves in a spectacle of enraged males, which has served to overwhelm Europe with uncertainty. But in a complex society, stories can no longer be global or definitive. We must get used to the multiplicity of ends (individual and group) that publish social space and supplant any grand, single, and exclusive purpose. And this, paradoxically, in a world that is, in a sense, more connected, more interrelated.
Ultimately, the future of human coexistence depends on us truly managing to differentiate the realm of the conventional from the realm of the fundamental, so that the rules of the collective game can be agreed upon based on the maximum possible freedom without anyone drawing their fundamentalism to turn on others. It would be the second secular revolution. It is my modest utopia.
