Waves of Crisis: Drifting Across a Shattered World

The transcendental principle of progress is pantheism, in the sense that it refuses to allow anyone to feel at ease in their proper place, according to George Santayana (Santayana, 1923). Rather, it impels each person to seek true freedom and happiness in uncertainty and uprootedness, by embarking on a forced journey toward an inhospitable destiny, akin to the wandering of emigrants. In this worldview, the cosmos emerged from a nebula and shall return to another. In the meantime, happiness does not consist in remaining, even fleetingly, as a fixed, radiant, and pure star; instead, it lies in flowing and dissolving in harmony with each individual's supreme destiny.

As Zygmunt Bauman likewise contends, the idea of progress is thereby entwined with the notion of universal evolution and arises from the belief in continuous change as a form of liberation: a compulsion towards perennial mutation, perpetual flux, and ontological diversity (Bauman, 2000). To stagnate is to incur a kind of existential annihilation. The paradox, however, is that this flow, as an uninterrupted stream of action, becomes a paralysing force when left unchecked. Ortega y Gasset points out that at birth, the human being finds himself immersed in the dominant web of beliefs of his epoch, absorbing its very essence (Ortega y Gasset, 1930). Yet the yearning for knowledge drives one to examine these beliefs and transform them into ideas, in a dialectical process that reveals itself as the fundamental reality of human existence.

According to Ortega, at any given historical moment, three distinct generations converge, each embodying a different vital cycle: the emergent generation, the generation in full maturity, and the declining generation (Ortega y Gasset, 1930). While the beliefs and ideas of these generations coexist in the same present, they are divergent, which implies that individuals living in the same era may be contemporaneous but not coeval, as they belong to different generational strata. This generational coexistence constitutes the driving force behind the advance—or retreat—of history. Thus, in certain historical periods, societies undergo a weakening or abandonment of earlier values, institutions, and ways of life.

These are moments of crisis in which traditional social, political, and cultural structures dissolve into a stream of change, subjecting the individual to a state of confusion and disorientation in which the only certainty lies in the absence of conviction. The depth of such crises can be fully grasped through recourse to Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, which allows us to understand how social structures influence individual behaviour without wholly determining it (Bourdieu, 1977). Habitus is the ensemble of internalised dispositions that reflect external social structures and shape the way we perceive and act in the world. It predisposes individuals to behave in particular ways according to the structures that envelop them.

Habitus is simultaneously product, producer, and reproducer of social structures, generating practices that align with the social conditions that produced it—thus reproducing those same structures with greater or lesser intensity, depending on the degree to which beliefs have been dissolved in the flux of change (Bourdieu, 1977). As Ortega suggested, faced with systemic uncertainty, we respond either by returning to a mythical past in search of foundational meaning, or, as Santayana and Bauman warn, by regressing into barbarism—surrendering ourselves to frenetic action as a means of evading the insecurity of the present (Santayana, 1923; Bauman, 2000). Yet both reactions lead to social atrophy. For in our obsession with the failures of the present—rather than striving to create a better future—we end up transforming the present into the negative image of a past that belongs to a positive future we are incapable of imagining.

A clear symptom of social dissolution within the flow of change is the cultural fragmentation born of objectivations such as intersectionality, which itself arises from abstractions like individual perspectives and intersubjective discourses. In its most basic formulation, intersectionality proposes a compartmentalised struggle against exploitation, led (as protagonists, from the Greek prôtos, first, and agōnistḗs, combatant) by those who directly suffer a specific form of oppression: women must lead the fight against heteropatriarchy, ethnic minorities the fight against racism, and so forth (Crenshaw, 1989).

In the idiom of political discourse, this is akin to dividing a text into fragments of meaning and encoding each one as a separate letter—as in a word game. Far from reinforcing social bonding, intersubjectivism constructs a hierarchy of privilege that is inherently conformist. It establishes a rivalry of all against all, an agonism of worker against worker, of oppressed against oppressed—bestowing essential and immutable value on identity, from which false consciousnesses arise, and ultimately resulting in the cancellation of any principle of unified action in the public realm. This is because intersectionality and intersubjective discourses harbour a fundamental contradiction: namely, the inherent difficulty of constructing an “equivalential chain”—that is, of disarticulating existing institutions while enacting general and uniform laws capable of reconciling the particular and the heterogeneous (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985).

This is necessary to prevent radical subjectivity from ossifying social inequity. The two concepts that best epitomise this contradiction are isothymia—the demand to be treated as equal—and megalothymia—the desire to be recognised as unequal. In truth, this dilemma serves as a practical case study of Bourdieu’s theory of fields, which posits that society is organised into structured spaces where agents compete for different forms of capital—economic, cultural, social, or symbolic (Bourdieu, 1984). These fields contain dominant and subordinate positions, and the accumulation of capital determines one’s class position. Far from being victims of the system, those who accrue cultural and social capital via intersectionality and intersubjectivity are, in fact, architects of a system that, following Althusser, understands class dynamics as a theoretical phenomenon emerging from the very structure of society (Althusser, 1971).

This stands in contrast to E. P. Thompson, who emphasised praxis, spurred by class consciousness, as the true motor of historical transformation (Thompson, 1963). In this regard, it is worth recalling Thompson’s impassioned argument that the Luddite movement of the nineteenth century was not composed merely of passive victims of technological progress and economic forces, but of conscious agents responding to the upheavals of the industrial revolution (Thompson, 1963). They resisted the introduction of machinery not out of reactionary motives, but because they understood that these new systems were the reification of emergent socio-productive structures that abolished human dignity by turning them into extensions of machines—rather than machines serving human ends. The Luddite revolt marked a turning point in the confluence of the ruling classes and the state apparatus, whose alliance was cemented by deploying the monopoly of state coercion in service of capital holders, thereby safeguarding their prerogatives and excessive profits.

This historical juncture delineated an unprecedented relationship between state power and economic elites, embodying an emergent paradigm in which the interests of capitalists—owners of technology—came to determine state decisions and actions. It is precisely here that one of the great confusions of contemporary discourse concerning the Western economic system becomes apparent: the very term capitalism, so prevalent in political debate and the popular imagination, is itself ideologically charged. It was not coined by the classical liberals or by the industrial entrepreneurs of the nineteenth century, but rather by their critics. The term capitalist was notably popularised by Karl Marx in his seminal works (Marx, 1867). Prior to Marx’s conceptual intervention, those engaged in economic enterprise did not refer to their system as “capitalism”, although they were fully cognisant of its operative economic principles.

Their mode of economic activity was not defined fundamentally by the accumulation of capital. Rather, capital, stricto sensu, acted as an instrumental means to facilitate production — as was the case with many early industrialists who were not motivated just by profit, but by a commitment to innovation and social advancement as well. In this light, the strength of such economic model does not derive from “capitalism” per se, but from its dynamic and productive character. A more accurate term for such a system might be “productive enterprise,” which encompasses not merely capital, but also labour, material resources, managerial skill, technical knowledge, and a wide array of other factors essential to economic vitality.

Capital, in this broader framework, is but one element among many. Marx’s critique, however, succeeded in elevating capital to a position of conceptual centrality by presenting it as the defining feature of the economic order he sought to oppose (Marx, 1867). This conceptual reframing provoked a defensive rendentirely on speculative financial returns and one grounded in labour, entrepreneurship, and the creation of real social value. Two centuries on, now fully immersed in the apotheosis of total digitalisation, the anthropological dimensions of technological determinism remain, as then, the central issue. For the true threat posed by Generative Artificial Intelligence does not lie in its potential to acquire consciousness or surpass human intelligence. The real danger lies in our entrapment within a transparent digital cage: a technologised social structure, ostensibly neutral, in which value is reduced solely to efficiency and productivity (Zuboff, 2019). Within this invisible cage, all dimensions of human life are commodified, collapsed into a single dimension ethically and socially subordinated to the maximisation of economic profit. Human beings are increasingly conceived as human capital, and our labour as a commodity—reduced to yet another productive factor, forced to compete in cost-efficiency with machines.

As a result, wages increasingly reflect less the intrinsic value of labour as material reward for human effort, and more a token gesture that leaves surplus value uncompensated. The wage becomes objectified labour, which, while nominally compensating human effort, idolises the value of work as money—thereby turning salary into an artificial symbol that ofuscates the real source of social value and the ethical burden of human labour.

Moreover, the value of objectified labour is increasingly symbolic in itself: it functions not only as a medium of exchange, but also as a sign devoid of intrinsic value pointing to the value of other things. This value is constructed and upheld by socioeconomic structures, such that money becomes a simulacrum—an artificial representation of value progressively detached from the tangible reality of human labour and material production (Baudrillard, 1994). Yet, swept along by the frenzy of liquid utopias, we remain unaware of our docile conformity to the so-called Dark Enlightenment, the term coined by Nick Land to denote the constellation of ideas that repudiate popular sovereignty, evince scepticism towards political equity, and advocate alternative forms of pseudo-political technocratic rule (Land, 2013).