‘Imagine all the people…’ is about to be archived. The iconic song of John Lennon and an era of high hopes, of youth movements, of contestation to wars – Vietnam and all those that followed, up to the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine – has now lost its meaning.

Now the cradle of Asian pop, South Korea, is also involved, which in a rush of the new style, autarky, opens a front of tension in an area that has been hot since the 1950s. Everywhere, wars and local conflicts are spreading virally, and if democracies, Asian as well as Western ones, falter, we are on the verge of a pandemic.

By multiplying the points of friction, sooner or later the spark of something irretrievable is ignited more by statistics than by strategy. We came out of the Cold War, with John Le Carrè’s spies and moles, to end up in an infected lane of sovereignisms, religious, ethnic and tribal conflicts, in which the dominant figure is always the same: the out-of-control ambition of men who make themselves autarchs, the form most similar to the Roman-Barbarian kingdoms that emerged from the collapse of the Western Empire.

What light propagates from the land of enlightenment?

In this chaotic, Low Empire period, the real problem of the Old Continent is its cultural agnosis. It seems devoid of thought, of philosophical and ideological momentum. It is all bureaucratic and ritualistic drapery, there is no Rousseau, Newman, Bergson or Havel. There is no focus on an overall vision, hence historical and political, because the excessive individualist fragmentation goes deep without a horizontal view, without connection.

The escape from the reality of the ‘peace&love’ world, contextualised in seventy years of Western peace, seems to us more and more like a space-time bubble, about to implode, taking us back to the millennial history of human civilisations. It is as if we had taken a tablet of LSD, as in Milos Forman’s film Hair, and woke up in a military training camp, accidentally leaving for a front line.

Is Europe aware?

But are Europe, its institutions, and above all its citizens, aware of this?