In July 2025, we observe a society that has completed its metamorphosis into something unrecognizable. Reality has surpassed the darkest literary dystopias with surgical precision that leaves us breathless. We’re not facing a temporary crisis but an anthropological transformation: the emergence of a collective that has systematically abdicated responsibility, embracing the illusory comfort of cheap solutions. The atomization of Italian society has made it coincide with the market, creating precarious existence and isolated individuals, while this social fragmentation constitutes the prerequisite that favors the establishment of totalitarian forms of government.
This isn’t theoretical speculation. Reality exceeds every dystopian prediction with clinical brutality that borders on the grotesque. The film Idiocracy, cited as a parallel to the present, now appears even moderate in its representation of intellectual decline. Political leadership reflects this degeneration with electoral promises that defy all logic: “solving the Ukraine conflict in 24 hours” becomes a mantra accepted by populations immersed in cognitive torpor.
The evolutionary refusal
Biology teaches us that growth comes from overcoming difficulties. Terrestrial cataclysms have forged evolution, eliminating inadequate life forms to allow the development of superior organisms. Modern society performs the inverse operation: it systematically flees confrontation with every challenge, preferring superficial quiet that conceals profound atrophy of adaptive faculties.
The long-term cause that will continue to accompany us is atomization: ties of community dissipate and the individual becomes the basic unit of society, with decreasing levels of trust, time spent with neighbors, and social participation marking increasingly atomized societies in Euro-America. Young generations find themselves trapped in a calvary of job precarity, devoid of any prospect of family or project construction. Responsibility becomes an alien concept, while power knows perfectly how to plan long-term and adapt to changing circumstances.
The dissolution of bonds
The family, humanity’s natural society, finds itself under systematic assault. Reproductive techniques divorced from natural processes aim to transform the reproductive act from social reality into market transaction. The disintegration of family bonds, romantic partnerships, traditional connections, and cultural heritage creates individuals drifting completely untethered, exposed to propaganda currents and passing fashion. A new subject has formed: what researchers identify as “the tyrannical individual, an ultra-connected being, trapped in its subjectivity, convinced of being the center of the world.” Thought itself becomes liquid—today’s absurdity transforms into tomorrow’s absolute normalcy. Peace as a value can be instantly replaced by the desire for war with Russia.
Political experience demonstrates that the correct attitude should be: “what can I do? how can I be useful? how can I lend a hand?” Instead, a society of aspiring generals without soldiers proliferates, incapable of serving a higher good. The proliferation of words has as its main characteristic that of increasingly neglecting concrete participation in public life.
The pandemic as general rehearsal
The pandemic management between 2020 and 2022 wasn’t health response but camouflaged militarization. Emergency laws, constitutional freedom limitations, and street militarization provided the perfect acceleration for society’s securitization processes—processes that, as governments learned, could be deployed far beyond health crises. The bellicose language saturating pandemic communication fundamentally altered danger perception, engineering panic and fear as tools of control. Curfews, lockdowns, green passes, and checkpoints weren’t health measures but population regimentation instruments, preparing societies for deeper forms of compliance.
Since the coronavirus outbreak began, conditions of democracy and human rights have deteriorated in 80 countries. Governments discovered they could use pandemic crisis to expand attacks on civil liberties, roll back constitutional rights, and repress dissent while creating what Edward Snowden accurately termed “an architecture of oppression.” Death’s detabuization through daily bulletins prepared western populations for future war statistics, reducing mortality to acceptable numbers. Even mundane actions like waste sorting became mass obedience exercises, conditioning citizens for meaningless tasks that consolidate command structures.
The proxy war
Russia is at war with the west—this has become undeniable. Ukraine serves as NATO’s proxy battleground, a theater where the west psychologically prepares its populations for direct involvement while outsourcing the carnage to Ukrainian forces, avoiding the social discontent that would erupt from sending western soldiers to die. As one analyst observed, violence in Ukraine has escalated to “a proxy war that is to a high degree the responsibility of the west.”
The hypocrisy has reached unprecedented levels: the west condemns Russian aggression while tolerating analogous actions by its allies. Israel practices population extermination in the middle east using innovative technologies, applying state terrorism with methods that surpass even historical precedents, yet this receives western support or silence. The current military situation tells its own story—Russian advances across Ukrainian territory have accelerated dramatically, with conquered territories in recent months being five times greater than those taken in all of 2023.
Boris Johnson recently revealed what war hawks had denied throughout the conflict: “We’re waging a proxy war but not giving our proxies the ability to do the job.” This admission strips away the pretense of Ukrainian agency that mainstream narratives maintained for years.
The imminence of direct conflict
Official NATO troop deployment to Ukraine no longer represents a question of “if” but “when”—the trajectory is set, the machinery is in motion. The growing economic crisis provides exactly the pockets of desperation needed to recruit cannon fodder from peripheries and lower social strata, creating a pipeline of nihilistic individuals accustomed to violence, without projects or empathy, easily suggestible by facade nationalism.
Social division crystallizes with brutal clarity: middle-upper classes guarantee the system with their votes while dispatching those they consider human waste to the frontlines, and peripheries consumed as war material in an endless cycle of exploitation. When Trump’s plan emerged, promising that the allied front would guarantee Moscow that Ukraine won’t enter NATO for at least twenty years while creating a demilitarized zone, the real architects of this conflict revealed their hand—this was never about Ukrainian sovereignty but about controlling the chessboard.
The infrastructures of war
Infrastructural preparation is already underway. High-speed rail (Corridor 5 Lisbon-Kiev) and 5G represent dual military infrastructures, crucial for future war made of drones and artificial intelligence, where human beings will have a fundamentally secondary role or as slaughter meat. Europe becomes NATO’s bridgehead, ready for infinite attrition war against Russia, fed by a troop conveyor belt that includes migrants promised citizenship in exchange for military service.
Scandinavian militarization and vassalage are important for challenging Russia’s access to the Baltic Sea and Arctic. NATO expansion caused the Ukraine war, and the proposed solution is further alliance expansion. A distorted logic that prevails because the narrative of an “unprovoked” invasion has become immune to facts.
The final precipice
Official NATO soldier entry into Ukraine will open hell’s gates, unexplored territory without margin for diplomacy or dissent. Russia, to avoid getting bogged down in infinite attrition war, might make swift decisions, sending a very strong signal with catastrophic consequences. The state of exception has now been permanent, and without new social and political resistance, the risk that the post-pandemic will be marked by an Orwellian-style and model society is truly real.
Those who dissent will be literally eliminated from public debate, because in a declared war state, internal saboteurs are considered state enemies. The deresponsibilized, atomized and frightened society has already demonstrated its readiness to accept any freedom limitation, provided it’s presented as necessary for security.
We are like Cassandra, harbingers of doom who see in current trends an ineluctable path. The desire to be proven wrong and to result “stupid” clashes with the cold logic of facts. The message remains an urgent warning about freedom and democracy loss, dissent annihilation and the imminent sacrifice of new generations in a conflict that appears already planned and for which society has been methodically trained.
The metamorphosis continues its inexorable course. Each fragment that detaches tells of a civilization that chose immediate comfort over responsibility, obedience over critical thinking, militarization over peace. The march toward the precipice proceeds with clockwork precision, marked by the dull sound of steps from a society that has forgotten how to walk alone.
Bibliography
https://freedomhouse.org/issues/democracy-during-pandemic
https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/focaal/2024/98/fcl980110.xml
Is it the endgame for the Ukraine proxy war?
https://www.cigionline.org/articles/generative-ai-risks-further-atomizing-democratic-societies