We live in an age of uncertainty. In societies that preceded our own, human beings lived with a perhaps bleaker future, but the stability of their living conditions—however negative they might have been—allowed them to believe that the future would not hold too many surprises. They might experience hunger and suffer oppression, but they were not perplexed. Perplexity is a state characteristic of societies in which the horizon of possibility has expanded so much that our calculations about the future are especially uncertain. The 21st century began with the upheaval of the economic crisis, which produced waves of indignation but did not cause particular perplexity; it even helped to reaffirm our main orientations: who were the villains and who were the good guys, for example. The world was once again clearly categorized between losers and winners, between the people and the elite, betw...read more
