From the late nineteenth into the early twentieth century, Western intellectual and political currents witnessed the rise of ideologies that purported to be scientific yet became deeply irrational and destructive. One of the most insidious of these was the doctrine of Social Darwinism, the extension of the concept of natural selection into human society: that competition among individuals, races or nations is not merely inevitable but desirable, and that the “fittest” will, should or must prevail. As Historians and sociologists observe, Social Darwinism “is an irrational loose set of twisted ideas, in which Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection was used to justify certain political, social or economic views, such as imperialism, racism and eugenics. HISTORY Underlying this appropriation of Darwinian metaphors was the belief that human races or classes are subject to analogous evolutionary struggles, and that the weak or “inferior” must be left behind or removed. In this way, the pseudo-scientific veneer of biology offered cover for moral and political claims about hierarchy, exclusion and violence. A recent scholarly essay locates the roots of eugenic thinking in this same terrain, arguing that “social Darwinism provided a conceptual framework for eugenics, albeit with nuanced differences shaped by nationalism, imperialism, and advances in genetics.” revistapolis.ro+2Cambridge University Press & Assessment+2 It is impossible to disentangle that intellectual foundation from the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century. As one comparative study puts it, Social Darwinist ideas “are cited as underpinning Nazi policies on war, eugenics and race, and providing a rationale for the emphasis on struggle and conflict found in Italian and French Fascism.” Cambridge University Press & Assessment+1 The ideological construction of the “enemy,” the “impure,” the “other,” in both Nazi and Soviet forms of totalitarianism, bore unmistakable traces of this ethos: the state, the leader, the movement became the vehicle of purification, a transcendent and violent logic of selection. In parallel, the theory and practice of Eugenics, the selective breeding or elimination of “unfit” persons, flourished as a so-called scientific programme, especially in the United States and Europe, long before the horrors of the Holocaust exposed it in its full gruesome logic. The Saint Louis Story writes that “the pseudoscience of eugenics became the platform for White scholars to defend their twisted ideas, perpetuating segregation and dehumanisation.” Thus, the ideological underpinnings of totalitarianism were not merely political, but embedded in a worldview of biology, race, struggle and hierarchy. This linking of political ideology to a metaphysics of biology served to immunise it against rational critique: once the enemy is biologically inferior, once the internal logic of struggle is naturalised, the very idea of rational debate evaporates. It is not a matter of choice among policies but of existential war. In this sense, one may truly call these movements “the attack of the irrational upon rationality.” The paradigm shifts from deliberation, weighing of evidence, consent and pluralism, to myth, mobilisation, violence and dogma. But political pathology gains its full traction when we consider the psychology of crowds, masses and the mythic leader. The seminal work of Gustave Le Bon on crowd psychology and subsequent adaptations in fascist propaganda showed how rational individuals, when subsumed into a crowd, can behave quite differently; the ego dissolves, inhibitions vanish, and the individual becomes part of a great and emotional collective. Le Bon’s ideas were adopted into early fascist theory: as one account states, “Adolf Hitler is known to have read The Crowd and drew on the propaganda techniques proposed by Le Bon.” Wikipedia. In his early 20th-century analysis, Le Bon suggested that crowds are impulsive, irritable, and changeable; reason gives way to suggestion and imagery. In the setting of a totalitarian regime, the crowd is not merely spontaneous but orchestrated. The work “Political myths and totalitarianism: an anthropological analysis” argues that the mythic narratives transformed into political programmes were the basis of the reinterpretation of the world, and the “new society” was built on these myth-inspired ideological postulates, undermining the social realm of civil society and individual autonomy. The myth of the leader, the myth of the movement, the myth of the enemy, become central. As one chapter on totalitarian leadership notes, in the theories of Hannah Arendt, “the totalitarian Leader… is entirely imbricated with the masses … he who says masses, says leader too.” Cambridge University Press & Assessment. In effect, what emerges is a form of political identification not anchored in reasoned assent or critical evaluation, but in emotional surrender. The individual abdicates civil liberty, the right to think, to question, to dissent and merges into the collective will of the Leader or the movement. The “leader” is not merely a functionary but a symbolic embodiment of the collective unconscious, of the mythic image of renewal, of purity, of struggle. As the study “Totalitarian Mythology” observes, the leader has “mystical power and authority”, and his will becomes “supreme law.” Taylor & Francis. Thus, under these conditions, politics becomes something utterly unlike deliberative governance. It becomes ritual, spectacle, mobilisation, myth‐making. The crowd does not engage in rational debate; it is stirred by fear, hope, grand narrative, image, and symbol. Civil society, with its institutions of mediation, reasoned argument, and pluralistic voices, is dismantled. Instead, we get mass organisation, parades, slogans, uniforms, paramilitary mobilisation, the cult of the Leader, the construction of enemies, and the promise of redemption. Furthermore, authoritarian mobilisation often coerces compliance or acquiescence through fear and surveillance, but also through what might be called a volunteer surrender, a surrender made possible by the myth of belonging, of exclusion, of struggle. When civil liberties vanish, they do not always vanish by overt force alone: more often, the individual gives them up, convinced that the collective good, the higher cause, requires it. The crowd ‘makes’ the Leader as much as the Leader commands the crowd; the symbiosis between masses and leader is a key insight of Arendt’s analysis. Yet the rational foundations of governance are abandoned. Policy is no longer a matter of technical deliberation about means and ends, but a symbolic theatre of belonging, fear and mobilised energy. The state exists not to manage society but to remake it; the individual is not a citizen with rights and duties but a member of the movement; truth is not a matter of fact but of loyalty; dissent is not a critique but treason. Hence, we may say that the attack of the irrational on rationality finds its perfect expression in these totalitarian forms. In sum, the roots of what one might call the modern political pathology lie in this convergence of pseudo-scientific rationales (social Darwinism, eugenics), crowd psychology, mythic leadership and mass mobilisation. The rationale of struggle replaces the ethos of deliberation; the individual is swallowed by the mass; reason is supplanted by myth. The political becomes not a domain of free citizens and reasoned debate but a theatre of submission, belonging, mobilisation and emotional surrender.
Politicisation of Civil Life after World War II: From Mass Movements to Ideological Fragmentation
The defeat of the Axis powers in 1945 did not mark the end of political irrationality, but rather its transmutation into new and subtler forms. Totalitarian ideologies, Nazism, Fascism and Stalinism, were discredited by their crimes, yet the psychological and structural conditions that had allowed them to flourish persisted within the modern mass societies that emerged from the ruins of war. What began as a reaction to authoritarianism slowly evolved into a new configuration of political power: a world where the masses, newly empowered through suffrage, unions, and parties, became the permanent object and instrument of mobilisation. Politics, which had once been the domain of deliberation and governance, expanded to permeate nearly every dimension of civil existence. In the post-war years, Europe and much of the world experienced the rise of what historians such as Eric Hobsbawm called “the age of extremes”, a bipolar world divided between capitalist liberal democracy and communist socialism. Yet beneath this ideological polarity lay a common feature: the transformation of the citizen into a member of a mass political organism. In both East and West, participation in politics became not merely a right but a civic expectation, even a moral obligation. The worker joined a union, the youth a party movement, the intellectual a political club; civil associations were increasingly structured along ideological lines. This was the “massification” of political life, a process through which politics ceased to be a rational means for governing society and became the defining identity of the individual.
The rise of trade unions, welfare-state expansion, and broad labour movements marked the immediate post-war decades. These were, at least in intention, rational efforts to democratise the benefits of industrial modernity. But they also contributed to the embedding of political allegiance into the everyday fabric of social life. The factory, the university, the newspaper, and even the household became extensions of ideological conflict. The political party, once an organisational tool for representing interests, became a total social form: an identity, a community, an existential home. As sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset observed in Political Man (1960), the modern citizen became “politically socialised” from birth, not by reasoned choice but by environmental conditioning and collective belonging. The Cold War itself reinforced this massification of politics. The division of the world into rival ideological camps, democracy versus communism, necessitated the constant mobilisation of public opinion. The state of war, though “cold,” required societies to be permanently politicised, to define themselves against an enemy. In the East, this took the form of state-sponsored collectivism; in the West, it manifested as a new civic religion of anti-communism and consumer democracy. The Cold War’s psychological economy rested on fear and belonging, much as the totalitarian movements before it had done. Political life became a theatre of symbols and moral certainties rather than a forum for nuanced deliberation.
The paradox was profound. On one hand, the post-war era expanded civil liberties, created welfare states, and gave birth to unprecedented levels of education and prosperity. On the other hand, it entrenched ideological tribalism within democratic systems themselves. The very mechanisms designed to secure freedom, mass participation, media, and representation, became instruments of conformity. The political left and right, though ostensibly opposed, mirrored each other in their dependence on mythic narratives: the struggle for the working class, the defence of the free world, the dream of national renewal. Political rationality was displaced by slogans and emotional identification. The social sciences of the mid-twentieth century, from the Frankfurt School’s critique of mass culture to Hannah Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism, diagnosed this condition with remarkable foresight. Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), argued that the loss of genuine political space where individuals act and speak as equals leads inevitably to the substitution of ideology for thought. The masses, deprived of authentic participation, cling to collective fictions. Similarly, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), warned that the rationalisation of society under capitalism had paradoxically led to a new form of myth — the “culture industry” — which pacified the public through entertainment and consumerism while masquerading as enlightenment.
In post-war democracies, the same phenomenon appeared in a different guise. Political life became both ubiquitous and empty: everyone was “engaged,” yet real power remained concentrated in bureaucracies and corporate lobbies. The citizen’s role was reduced to participation in a managed spectacle of voting, protesting, and consuming, while decisions of genuine consequence were made elsewhere. The politicisation of civil life thus did not produce more democracy but rather its simulation. As Guy Debord would later argue in The Society of the Spectacle (1967), the image replaced reality, and politics became performance. The trade unions themselves, once symbols of collective struggle and solidarity, gradually evolved into bureaucratic institutions entangled with the very systems they sought to reform. By the 1970s, many had become intermediaries of state and corporate power rather than instruments of worker autonomy. This degeneration reflected the broader problem of mass politics: when representation becomes institutionalised, it tends to reproduce the hierarchy it claims to challenge. The individual is again absorbed into a collective, not the totalitarian mass of the past, but the democratic mass of the present, where the illusion of choice conceals structural coercion. Thus, the post-war politicisation of society represents not the triumph of reason over irrationality but a new stage in the history of political illusion. The overt myths of race, destiny, and purity were replaced by the subtler myths of progress, participation, and equality. Yet the underlying psychological mechanisms, identification, belonging, projection, and fear, remained constant. As Jung might have said, the collective unconscious simply changed its costume. By the late twentieth century, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the global spread of neoliberalism, this process reached its paradoxical culmination. The grand ideologies of the past seemed to dissolve, and yet politics became more pervasive than ever. Every lifestyle choice, every cultural expression, every personal opinion was now political. The individual, liberated from external dogma, became his own propagandist, his own ideological product. What was once the public sphere had become a marketplace of competing identities. In this way, the post-war dream of depoliticisation through prosperity and rational governance gave birth instead to a culture of permanent politicisation, where ideology replaced religion, and emotion replaced reason. If the first half of the twentieth century had witnessed the brutal face of political irrationality in the form of totalitarian violence, the second half witnessed its seductive face, the soft power of media, conformity, and emotional manipulation. Politics no longer needed to coerce through fear alone; it could seduce through participation. Citizens believed themselves free precisely because they were engaged in a game whose rules they could not change. In this sense, the rational ideals of Enlightenment governance, deliberation, truth, and empirical inquiry were not abolished, but drowned beneath the noise of competing ideologies and the endless spectacle of “democracy in action.” The next phase of this historical evolution would see these mechanisms amplified beyond measure by new technologies of communication and perception. Globalisation, the mass media revolution, and the digitalisation of the public sphere would transform politics into a total environment, a matrix of images, fears, and desires that shape not only how societies think but what they can think. In this new configuration, manipulation replaces persuasion, perception replaces reality, and the crowd becomes the algorithmic public of the twenty-first century.
Globalism, Mass Media, and the Manipulation of Perception
The second half of the twentieth century ushered in a transformation more profound than any political revolution: the globalisation of communication. Where the totalitarian regimes of the early century had relied on direct coercion and physical control, the new systems of governance discovered that domination could be achieved more efficiently through perception. The decisive battlefield was no longer the territory of nations but the interior world of consciousness. The modern citizen’s thoughts, emotions, and desires became the terrain upon which power acted. In the immediate post-war years, the mass media were still presented as the guardians of democracy — the “fourth estate,” a counterweight to the executive, legislative, and judicial powers. Newspapers, radio, and later television were expected to inform, educate, and scrutinise. Yet as the twentieth century progressed, the media evolved into something far more ambiguous: at once the instrument of information and the machinery of persuasion. The economic model of the press, based increasingly on advertising revenue and entertainment value, transformed journalism into an industry whose primary product was attention. The object was no longer truth, but engagement.
This shift marked the beginning of what political theorist Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman described in Manufacturing Consent (1988): a system where the mass media function less as watchdogs and more as filters of information, shaping narratives to align with political and corporate interests. The freedom of the press was not abolished but redefined — a freedom to select, to frame, to omit. In this environment, the citizen was not censored by the state but overwhelmed by stimuli, persuaded not through fear of punishment but through the subtle architecture of information itself. Hannah Arendt had warned that the greatest danger to freedom is not overt repression but the disintegration of reality itself: when citizens can no longer distinguish truth from propaganda, freedom loses its meaning. The globalisation of communication in the late twentieth century expanded this condition to a planetary scale. Satellite television and, later, the Internet dissolved national boundaries, creating what Marshall McLuhan famously called the “global village.” Yet this village was not a community of shared reason; it was a cacophony of images, voices, and competing narratives. The rise of CNN in the 1980s, followed by the explosion of 24-hour news networks, transformed the world into an ongoing spectacle. Wars, disasters, elections, and scandals were transmitted in real time, collapsing the distinction between information and entertainment. Politics became performative; the politician became a media figure whose survival depended on visibility. In the words of French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, “The Gulf War did not take place” — meaning that its media representation replaced the event itself (La Guerre du Gulf n’a pas eu lieu, 1991). Reality was not merely reported but produced. This commodification of perception coincided with the rise of global capitalism. The great corporations that had once controlled industrial production now discovered a more valuable resource: the human mind. Advertising, marketing, and public relations — once auxiliary to politics — became its central nervous system. The manipulation of symbols, emotions, and desires replaced the production of goods as the primary mode of social control. In this sense, the world entered a new stage of political economy: what Guy Debord had called the society of the spectacle, where “everything that was directly lived has moved away into representation.” The citizen, like the consumer, no longer participated in the world but in its images.
Fear and control are the most potent instruments of this system. Just as totalitarian regimes had mobilised fear of the enemy to consolidate power, the global media complex discovered that fear was the most profitable emotion. The Cold War had institutionalised the politics of fear: the threat of nuclear annihilation, the spectre of communism, the anxiety of espionage. After 1989, with the Soviet enemy gone, a new series of “unknown enemies” emerged to sustain the same mechanism — terrorism, pandemics, climate catastrophe, cyber-warfare. Each of these real or imagined threats justified surveillance, conformity, and submission. The permanent state of alert became the psychological equivalent of total war. The British sociologist Frank Furedi described this transformation in Politics of Fear (2005): modern societies, he argued, no longer believe in a collective future but organise themselves around the management of anxiety. In this environment, the line between politics and entertainment dissolved completely. The talk show, the televised debate, and the rolling news cycle replaced the forum and the parliament as the spaces of public discourse. Politics became a product to be marketed, leaders became brands, and opinion became the commodity of a vast industrial machine. The logic of entertainment colonised the logic of deliberation. What mattered was not the coherence of arguments but the affective resonance of images, gestures, and soundbites. The political stage became indistinguishable from the entertainment industry — an observation already made by Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), where he warned that television was transforming public discourse into a form of amusement that renders serious thinking impossible. This transformation had profound psychological consequences. Citizens, bombarded by information and emotionally manipulated by spectacle, developed what psychologists call “learned helplessness.” They felt politically engaged yet powerless, informed yet disoriented, connected yet alienated. The public sphere no longer fostered reasoned dialogue but emotional contagion. Social media, emerging at the dawn of the twenty-first century, only intensified this dynamic. Algorithms rewarded outrage, fear, and tribal affirmation; complexity was punished with invisibility. The digital age fulfilled Le Bon’s prophecy of the irrational crowd, but in virtual form — a dispersed, algorithmically assembled multitude governed by affect rather than thought.
Globalisation, far from dissolving ideology, gave it new and fluid forms, where political cults gather a global footprint, also in leveraging the use of mass media. The world of interconnected economies and instantaneous communication did not produce cosmopolitan reason but a new fragmentation: a planetary market of narratives where truth became a matter of preference. Every political system, every government, every corporation could construct its own reality and disseminate it globally. The result was not enlightenment but noise, not community but chaos. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman described this condition as “liquid modernity” — a world in which structures melt faster than they can be understood, and individuals drift without stable identities or institutions. Thus, the global mass media, born under the banner of freedom, culminated in a system of soft domination. It replaced censorship with saturation, coercion with seduction, the dictator with the influencer. The manipulation of perception, once the prerogative of the totalitarian state, became the invisible infrastructure of daily life. Politics, once a means of governing society, became a performance of perpetual crisis designed to capture attention. In this spectacle, truth survives only as a niche commodity, consumed by those who still remember what it meant. This is the world in which we now live: a global civilisation connected by technology yet fragmented by illusion, governed not by reason but by the invisible economy of perception. The old totalitarianism sought to control what people said and did; the new totalitarianism — subtler and more effective — controls what people see, feel, and believe. It is a regime not of iron and fire but of images and emotion.
The Liquefaction of Modern Society and the Return of Reaction
In the twentieth century, after the devastation of totalitarian regimes and World Wars, it was thought to have inaugurated the era of reason, prosperity, and liberal democracy. Yet what emerged instead was a progressive dissolution of the very categories through which modernity had understood itself. Zygmunt Bauman, in Liquid Modernity (2000), described the late-modern condition as one where institutions, values, and identities lose their solidity. The “solid” structures of industrial society — class, nation, family, and ideology — were gradually replaced by flexible, mobile, and consumable identities. The self became, as Bauman wrote, “a project to be continuously constructed and reconstructed,” suspended between freedom and anxiety.
This liquefaction, far from being a simple liberation, marked a profound transformation in the human relation to meaning. Anthony Giddens had already observed, in Modernity and Self-Identity (1991), that the reflexive self of modernity must constantly reinvent its narrative coherence in a world where traditional certainties have collapsed. The individual, once defined by stable belonging, now floats amid global flows of information, commodities, and affect. Freedom becomes a burden: the burden of self-definition in the absence of enduring structures. The political consequences of this condition are enormous. The collapse of class-based ideologies and the secularisation of public life emptied politics of its metaphysical centre. What remained was politics as spectacle, a symbolic theatre of representation and affect. Guy Debord, in The Society of the Spectacle (1967), foresaw this shift with prophetic clarity: the real was increasingly replaced by its mediated image. The mass media, instead of transmitting information, produced reality itself, turning public life into an endless circulation of signs, images, and moral poses. Politics became entertainment; the politician, an actor; and the citizen, a spectator. Marshall McLuhan’s insight that “the medium is the message” finds its ultimate expression in the digital era, where platforms no longer simply communicate politics but constitute it. Emotional contagion, virality, and tribal identity replace deliberation and rational discourse. This media transformation dissolves the very possibility of the public sphere as conceived by Jürgen Habermas in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962): a space of rational-critical debate among citizens. The new public sphere is algorithmic — governed not by reason but by engagement metrics. In this context, the rise of globalism in the late twentieth century appears as both economic and existential. The neoliberal order, with its deregulated markets and transnational flows of capital, promised universal prosperity but delivered increasing inequality and a profound sense of uprootedness. The human being, stripped of the symbolic anchors of tradition and community, is now both hyper-connected and radically isolated. Social bonds become transactional; relationships become brands; and the pursuit of meaning gives way to the pursuit of visibility. Yet, as Nietzsche warned, when the gods die, they return as demons. The very forces that claimed to dissolve ideology have generated new, more volatile ones. The so-called “liquid society” does not end ideology; it multiplies it in fragmentary and narcissistic forms. In the absence of collective narratives, individuals construct identities as moral performances. What once were ideological commitments have become moralised expressions of belonging: nationalism, environmentalism, technocratism, or progressive identity politics, all compete not as reasoned doctrines but as affective tribes. The reactionary resurgence of traditionalism — the return to religion, family, and nation — is not simply a nostalgic retreat; it is the psychological counterweight to liquefaction. As Bauman noted, when everything solid melts, people seek new certainties, even if they must be imaginary. The conservative impulse, therefore, becomes not merely political but existential: a defence of order against chaos, of rootedness against flux. At the same time, its modern adversaries, progressive movements seeking fluidity and inclusion, often mirror the same anxiety, trying to impose new moral orthodoxies to replace the lost symbolic centre. Thus, both traditionalism and hyper-progressivism emerge as twin products of the same disoriented epoch, oscillating between rigidity and fluidity. The commodification of fear completes the transformation. As states and corporations discover the political utility of anxiety, fear becomes an instrument of governance. The “war on terror,” pandemics, financial crises, and ecological catastrophes are endlessly mediated as existential threats, keeping the population in a state of moral alertness and dependence. Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower, the management of life and death through institutions, acquires a new, global form. The citizen becomes both consumer and data-point, controlled not by overt coercion but by behavioural prediction. From this convergence of media, fear, and identity emerges what we may call the post-political condition: a state where politics no longer mediates between competing social interests but merely administers perception. Truth itself becomes relative, not because reality has disappeared, but because its mediation has become total. In this sense, the populist and “multipolar” reactions of the early twenty-first century, from American nationalism to Eurasian multipolarism, are symptoms of a deeper civilizational fatigue. When the liberal order ceases to inspire faith, people turn to myths of nation, civilisation, or destiny. The world fragments into competing realities, each convinced of its authenticity. In such an epoch, politics ceases to be the rational management of collective life; it becomes the stage upon which societies project their unresolved psychological conflicts. Ideologies no longer function as programs of action but as symbols of belonging and fear. The irrational, once confined to the margins, returns as the organising principle of public life. As Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), the Enlightenment’s triumph over myth culminates in the return of myth through the domination of instrumental reason itself. We thus arrive at a paradox: the more the modern world claims to emancipate itself from the irrational, the more it is governed by it. The liquefaction of modernity, from solid institutions to fluid identities, has dissolved not only oppression but coherence. What remains is a fragmented civilisation, simultaneously hyper-connected and atomised, seeking meaning in the very illusions it once believed it had outgrown.
The Age of Fragmentation: Populism, Multipolarity, and the Collapse of Shared Reality
The twenty-first century opened with the illusion of unipolar stability — a single, globalised order driven by liberal democracy and market capitalism. For a brief moment after the Cold War, it seemed as if history itself, as Francis Fukuyama famously declared in The End of History and the Last Man (1992), had reached its conclusion: the liberal model would be universal, progress irreversible, and ideology obsolete. Yet this illusion dissolved almost as quickly as it appeared. The same forces that promised universal integration — technological acceleration, global communication, and financial interdependence — instead produced disorientation, inequality, and epistemic collapse. The promise of a unified world became the reality of a fragmented one. The fragmentation is not only geopolitical but ontological — a breakdown of shared meaning and reality. In the digital sphere, truth has become decentralised and personalised, shaped by algorithms that feed individuals precisely what confirms their worldview. The “public” no longer exists as a coherent space of debate, but as innumerable digital tribes, each enclosed within its own symbolic universe. Jean Baudrillard foresaw this in Simulacra and Simulation (1981), where the distinction between the real and its representation disappears, replaced by self-referential images. Today’s “post-truth” era is not a descent into ignorance, but the logical outcome of a society that has substituted mediation for reality itself. Populism, in this context, is less a political ideology than a psychological symptom. It thrives on the longing for authenticity in a world of simulation. The populist leader — whether of the left or the right — presents himself as the embodiment of “the real” against the artificial elites and media institutions that have lost credibility. Yet this authenticity is theatrical, performed through the very media logic it condemns. The leader becomes both actor and spectacle, speaking the language of resentment and belonging. Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), warned that the masses, disoriented by loss of structure and meaning, would seek refuge in the simplicity of slogans and myths. The populist age confirms her prophecy: it is the politics of emotion, of friend versus enemy, of grievance transfigured into identity. As the Western liberal order falters, the world increasingly reconfigures itself around what is called “multipolarity.” On the surface, this appears as the return of geopolitical pluralism: a rebalancing of global power between the United States, China, Russia, India, and other rising states. Yet beneath this geopolitical narrative lies a metaphysical crisis — the collapse of a shared civilizational horizon. Multipolarity, in its deeper sense, signifies not merely multiple centres of power, but multiple and incompatible visions of reality itself. It is, as some political theorists suggest, not an order at all, but a disorder elevated to principle. In this new landscape, truth becomes strategic rather than universal. Each state, ideology, and media ecosystem constructs its own narrative of legitimacy. The consequence is epistemic relativism on a planetary scale. The West, once united by the Enlightenment ideal of reason, now mirrors the same relativism it once denounced, unable to distinguish between belief and knowledge, authenticity and propaganda. The concept of “fake news” becomes itself a weapon in the war over perception. The battlefield is not physical territory but the human mind — perception, belief, and emotion. This condition has been described by philosophers such as Byung-Chul Han as the “psychopolitical” phase of capitalism, in which power no longer operates through coercion but through self-exploitation and informational saturation. The subject is no longer oppressed by censorship but paralysed by excess. The endless circulation of narratives creates what Han calls “neuronal fatigue” — a condition where the distinction between critical thought and emotional impulse disappears. In this exhaustion, the political subject becomes receptive to myth once again. Thus, the return of mythic geopolitics: nations reimagined as sacred civilisations, political leaders as messianic figures, wars as moral crusades. The language of global discourse shifts from rational cooperation to moral confrontation — “values,” “civilisations,” “traditions,” “identities.” This is the mythological regression of modernity. The Enlightenment’s promise of universal reason gives way to tribal cosmologies, each claiming divine or historical destiny. The twentieth century’s totalitarian myths have returned, but dispersed, plural, and digital. The new ideologies are not totalitarian states, but totalizing networks — algorithmic faiths competing for emotional allegiance. At the same time, the commodification of outrage ensures that fragmentation is profitable. Every moral crisis, every cultural panic, every geopolitical confrontation feeds the attention economy. The individual, once a citizen, becomes a consumer and a data product; politics becomes a content stream. As Neil Postman warned in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), the danger of modern media was not Orwellian oppression but Huxleyan distraction — a population drowning in irrelevance, incapable of distinguishing truth from entertainment. The result is a form of post-political nihilism. When every narrative is performative, and every belief is strategic, faith in collective purpose disappears. The social contract — the idea that citizens share a common destiny — disintegrates into what the French sociologist Gilles Lipovetsky called “the era of emptiness.” In this vacuum, the irrational does not merely return; it becomes the governing principle. The populist slogan, the conspiracy theory, and the digital myth each fulfil the same psychological need: to replace unbearable uncertainty with symbolic meaning, however false. It is here that the deeper danger of multipolarity reveals itself. A world without shared truth cannot sustain peace, because diplomacy presupposes at least a minimal agreement on reality. When every civilisation constructs its own metaphysical order — its own idea of truth, good, and destiny — conflict becomes not a contest of interests but of worlds. The “clash of civilisations,” which Samuel Huntington theorised as cultural, becomes epistemological: a war over reality itself. Yet even in this fragmentation, the possibility of renewal remains. The very exhaustion of ideological warfare might eventually force humanity to rediscover the value of truth as a shared human endeavour rather than a weapon. Whether such a rediscovery is possible depends on whether societies can recover a sense of logos — reason understood not as domination but as dialogue. As long as politics remains an instrument of fear and identity, civilisation will oscillate between chaos and authoritarianism. But if reason can once again be understood as the common language of humanity — not as Western hegemony, but as mutual intelligibility — then perhaps the cycle of irrationality can be broken. For now, however, the post-political age continues to drift. The liquefied society, unable to restore its solid forms yet fearful of its own freedom, turns politics into ritual and emotion into ideology. The myth of progress dissolves into competing myths of destiny, each claiming to restore order in a disordered world. In the end, the crisis of politics is not political at all: it is metaphysical — a crisis of meaning, of truth, and of the human soul in an age that has forgotten both.
The Psychopathology of Political Language and the Spectacle of Mass Communication
In contemporary politics, the widespread use of false rhetoric and demagogic language reveals not only the corruption of communication but also the pathological condition of the political mind itself. When political discourse loses its referential integrity—when words cease to signify reality and instead become instruments of manipulation—the result is a linguistic schizophrenia within the public sphere. The double meanings, euphemisms, and coded inversions that dominate modern political language are not simply strategic; they constitute symptoms of a deeper illness. As Hannah Arendt observed in The Origins of Totalitarianism, the deliberate perversion of language is among the first signs of totalitarian logic, where speech ceases to describe the world and begins to create a fictive one. In psychological terms, this marks the transition from rational persuasion to pathological projection: a shift from discourse as shared understanding to discourse as domination. The demagogue, through his performative lies, becomes both patient and propagator of a social psychosis, while the citizens, immersed in his distorted semantics, are drawn into collective delusion. The loss of meaning in public speech is thus not merely a linguistic decay but a diagnostic sign of political schizophrenia—an incapacity of the system to distinguish truth from fabrication, and reality from its ideological fabrication and convictions. This linguistic pathology does not remain confined to the political class; it spreads epidemically through the channels of mass media and digital communication, transforming collective consciousness itself. The demagogue’s false speech finds its echo in the emotional resonance of the crowd, which no longer processes meaning through critical reflection but through affective contagion. Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle warned that in the age of mass representation, the image replaces the idea, and the spectacle substitutes for reason. What emerges is a political field where language functions not to communicate truth but to generate stimulus and response—an algorithmic cycle of outrage, fear, and desire. The citizen ceases to be an autonomous participant in democracy and becomes a reactive node within a vast emotional network. This is the point where political psychopathy merges with collective psychology: the pathology of the leader becomes the collective disorder of the governed. Through repetition, framing, and emotional amplification, propaganda and media transform society into a mirror hall of projections, where the boundaries between sincerity and deceit, sanity and delusion, collapse. The result is a civilisation governed not by discourse but by affect—by the primitive reflexes of pleasure, anxiety, and belonging—thereby fulfilling the condition of mass psychopathology that defines late modern politics.
The Reconstruction of Meaning through Reason and Logos
If the history of modernity is that of the emancipation of reason from myth, then the story of postmodernity is that of reason’s exhaustion. The world that once believed in progress, rationality, and universal knowledge has dissolved into a multiplicity of partial truths, subjective identities, and technological noise. The preceding centuries of ideological struggle — from totalitarianisms to neoliberalism, from collectivist utopias to hyper-individualist chaos — reveal a single, recurring tragedy: that humanity, in attempting to master existence through reason alone, lost the very meaning that made reason possible. Yet the crisis of modern civilisation is not the end of reason, but the end of its reduction to calculation. The Enlightenment’s promise of emancipation became distorted into a technocratic rationality, an instrumental reason that measures everything but understands nothing. Max Weber called this the “iron cage” of rationalisation: a world that functions efficiently but without purpose. In such a cage, the soul suffocates, and the political becomes merely administrative. As Adorno and Horkheimer warned in Dialectic of Enlightenment, the Enlightenment’s self-destruction occurs when reason ceases to question its own ends and becomes merely a tool of domination. The reconstruction of meaning, therefore, cannot consist in a return to the past. The traditionalist dream of restoring hierarchy, faith, and nation ignores that the very forces which dissolved those forms of science, communication, and consciousness cannot be reversed. Nor can meaning be rebuilt by surrendering to the fluid relativism of liquid modernity, which replaces truth with subjective authenticity. The path forward lies between these ruins: in rediscovering reason not as domination, but as dialogue; not as control, but as openness to being.
This endeavour requires, first of all, a philosophical awakening of logos, the principle that, since Heraclitus, has denoted both reason and the order of the cosmos. Logos is not mere logic; it is the capacity to speak truthfully and to recognise the commonality of truth. In the ancient sense, to live according to logos was to live in harmony with the rational order of the universe and with one another, the space where difference can exist without chaos, and freedom without nihilism. This is not an abstract task; it demands institutions, education, and public spaces where the human being is treated not as a consumer or data point, but as a moral and rational subject. Jürgen Habermas, in The Theory of Communicative Action (1981), where legitimacy arises from rational discourse rather than manipulation. Such a concept, though utopian in an age of algorithms, remains the only way democracy can be reborn. The task of civic education must be not merely to transmit knowledge, but to cultivate judgment the capacity to distinguish truth from falsehood, fact from fiction, and the real from the simulacrum. Yet the reconstruction of meaning cannot rely on civic reason alone. Beneath the political and the epistemic lies the existential. The loss of meaning is not merely an institutional crisis; it is a metaphysical wound. Martin Heidegger, in The Question Concerning Technology (1954), warned that modernity’s obsession with control had reduced being itself to a “standing reserve”, an object to be exploited. In this enframed world, the human being forgets its own essence: not mastery, but openness to the mystery of existence. To heal this wound, humanity must once again learn to dwell, to inhabit the world not as its owner, but as its interlocutor.
Beyond Politics: Toward Societies Free from Political Pathology
The historical arc of modernity, from the totalitarian tyrannies of the twentieth century to the fluid chaos of liquid societies and multipolar world disorder, reveals a single, unavoidable truth: politics, as practised, has become the central illness of all civilisations. It is not merely the abuse of power or ideological extremism that is pathological, but the very mechanisms of political life: coercion, demagoguery, manipulation, and the commodification of fear that undermine reason, truth, and human flourishing. Across centuries, societies have been drawn into cycles where politics ceases to mediate life and instead dominates it, transforming communities into arenas of psychological and social disorder.
If civilisation is to survive and humanity to thrive, it is not enough to reconstruct meaning within the current political framework. The political framework itself must be transcended. A truly free and egalitarian society would be one where governance is no longer exercised as domination, where collective life is not mediated through ideology or spectacle, and where power is not concentrated in hierarchical structures. Such a society would replace coercion with cooperation, competition with dialogue, and manipulation with transparency. Decision-making would arise from shared understanding, ethical reflection, and voluntary participation, not from the threat of violence, propaganda, or financial control.
In this endeavour, the individual is restored as civis a moral and rational member of the people, not as a data point, a voter, or a consumer of spectacle. Societies are organised not through top-down authority, but through mutual aid, consensus, and ethical responsibility. The distribution of knowledge and resources becomes a practical, moral imperative rather than a tool for political leverage. Information flows freely, but always with the cultivation of critical thinking, attention, and ethical awareness. In effect, the society itself becomes the medium through which meaning emerges, rather than relying on politicians, parties, or ideologies to dictate it.
Technology, once a medium of manipulation, becomes an instrument of empowerment: a tool to coordinate collaboration, enhance understanding, and facilitate direct participation. Digital networks could function as forums for collective deliberation, not as pipelines for spectacle, outrage, or disinformation. The ethical and social infrastructure would prioritise education, critical reflection, and the cultivation of empathy, creating an environment in which coercion, fear, and the pathology of politics lose their potency.
In essence, a society without politics does not mean the absence of order or deliberation. It means the liberation of human interaction from the mass psychopathologies and the inability to act, that have defined political life for millennia: demagoguery, hierarchy, propaganda, and the commodification of fear. Decision-making becomes a shared moral practice rather than an arena of power; communication becomes a form of mutual intelligibility rather than manipulation; and truth, justice, and ethical responsibility replace ideology as the guiding principles of collective life.
History demonstrates that politics, as currently constituted, is inseparable from social illness, but history also suggests that humans are capable of designing alternative forms of coexistence. In endeavouring societies beyond politics, where rational cooperation, ethical responsibility, and shared understanding govern life, humanity can escape the cycle of totalitarianism, liquid modernity, and mass psychopathology. In doing so, civilisation may finally fulfil the promise that reason and freedom have long sought: a world where human beings live together not as subjects of political domination, but as co-creators of a shared, meaningful, peaceful and harmonious life.