It began with the attack on the Twin Towers and has led us to the most disruptive and abject US president in history. In the 21st century, the US has gone from being a victim of global terrorism to a guarantor of the world's executioners: from Netanyahu to Putin. It's not that they were once, as a great power, little sisters of charity. But they cloaked their interventionism in the rhetoric of freedom. Now Trump simply upholds the law of the mightiest: everything is or should be. tough. He is a gregarious and antipoetic leader, who makes banality and moral vulgarity his trademark. Many people, no matter where they are, can identify with him. evilism It works for him.
But in this quarter of a century, until reaching the lord Beyond the toupee and the outburst, a few other things have happened in the world. Some are the exact opposite: for example, the emergence of liberated and empowered women. It's the century of a new feminism, that of Me Too in self-defense; it's the century of women rising to the top of public life—as rulers, social leaders, businesswomen, intellectuals, scientists...—and also becoming mass sports idols. A new step forward toward gender equality. We are also witnessing the hybridization of genders, with fluid sexual identities and pleasures, a true revolution in intimacy.
This inward-looking approach by people is surely a response to the lack of certainty in public life. We have settled into an ideological and ethical confusion, which all the Trumps exploit. After two centuries of triangulating between liberalism, socialism, and nationalism, with resounding failures—not to mention massive criminal drifts—in all three areas, we cannot find a new route, a way out. The outcry prevails, and the crises accumulate and exacerbate.
First, the climate emergency crisis, increasingly experienced with greater evidence and anguish because it confronts us with planetary survival. Second, the involution of Western democracy, with the zombie mutation of totalitarianisms we thought we had overcome: now authoritarian frivolity is in fashion. The frivolity of evil. Third, the lethal global coronavirus pandemic, a health disaster that brought the world to a standstill. And fourth, educational disorientation: if education has been the key to progress and equal opportunity in the 20th century, an educational system under suspicion—again, Trump—and lacking in equity can set us back and further polarize us socially.
Given all this, the triumph of dystopian fictions in literature and film is not surprising. Nor are the ghosts of a regression within the framework of beliefs, which, both religiously and ideologically, are bringing about new exclusionary fanaticisms. More harshness. They are also the reaction to a deregulated economic globalization that is leaving the Western middle classes exposed and is shaking, in a combination of opportunity and exploitation, the impoverished masses of the global south, where hypocritical postcolonial paternalism has proven useless, while the rich north shows its true dark side with the closing of borders to immigration. And in the East, dictatorial China has emerged as a new global power, with extraordinary planned development, while around it, Russian imperialism and Indian nationalism, two nuclear powers, have reawakened.
All this is happening hand in hand with the new technological revolution in communications, which has opened our minds and changed our lives. With the internet and mobile phones, work, leisure, and personal relationships have taken on a new dimension, full of both possibilities and stress. Our experience of time has accelerated, swept away in a never-ending frenzy from which it is difficult to remain aloof. And artificial intelligence (AI) has just been added, another leap forward that we are only just beginning to experience. With it, the first quarter of the 21st century is coming to an end. Will we know how to use it to seek horizons of coexistence and to deal with the crises of material and meaning? Or will it help us fall down the seducer's slope? evilism?
