Perhaps civilizations do not begin to die when they are destroyed. Perhaps they begin to die much earlier, when they slowly stop believing in the future.
It is a quiet kind of death. It makes no noise and rarely makes the headlines. Buildings do not necessarily collapse. Sirens do not necessarily sound. People simply begin to plan less, risk less, desire less. A couple decides not to have children because they do not know what kind of world those children would inherit. A young person puts off buying a home because they do not know how long their job will last. Someone abandons a project because holding on to what they already have seems safer. Meanwhile, they reach for their phone in the morning and, before their feet even touch the floor, they have already been exposed to wars, economic crises, emergencies, scandals, disasters. At night, they go to bed with the feeling that tomorrow might be worse. Each of these things, taken individually, is simply part of life. But when millions of people begin living in the same state of mind, perhaps those individual experiences stop being merely personal and become something collective.
The Energies We Cannot See
Many years ago, I was interested in esotericism and the collective unconscious. At the time, I was trying to understand whether, beyond the reality we can see and measure, there might be a deeper dimension capable of influencing individuals and entire societies. Today I look at those ideas with greater caution. I do not know whether the "subtle energies" I might once have spoken about actually exist, and I have no desire to turn a metaphor into scientific fact. Yet I still think there was something worth exploring in that old language. When we talk about fear, anger, resentment, hope, or trust, we are talking about realities that cannot be weighed or placed in a laboratory dish and yet produce very real consequences. Fear can keep someone from changing their life. Distrust can persuade an entrepreneur not to invest. Insecurity can lead a couple to give up on having a child. Resentment can turn a neighbor into an enemy. Perhaps calling all of this "energy" is simply a symbolic way of speaking. But it is a language that captures something we can all recognize: individual emotions, when they become widespread and persistent enough, can turn into a collective atmosphere.
When Fear Becomes a Culture
This is what makes me think about the time we are living through. We are surrounded by tools that allow us to know almost instantly what is happening anywhere in the world, yet this enormous amount of information does not necessarily make us more at peace. Quite the opposite. We risk living in a state of permanent alert. A tragedy thousands of miles away enters our kitchen minutes after it happens. A financial crisis becomes a notification on our phone. A distant war becomes an image we watch while eating dinner. One catastrophic prediction is replaced the next day by another, even more alarming one. Of course the media have a responsibility to report what is happening, and it would be absurd to suggest that the solution is simply to stop reading the news. The problem is something else. When our minds are exposed continuously to danger, we can eventually develop a picture of the world in which danger itself appears to be its defining characteristic. At that point, fear is no longer merely a response to what is happening. It becomes part of the environment in which we live.
Before the War
War may be the most extreme expression of this transformation. We tend to think that war begins when soldiers arrive, when tanks roll in, when missiles are launched and bombs begin to fall. But war can enter our lives long before it physically reaches our streets. It can enter through language, through fear, through economic uncertainty, through the feeling that the world has suddenly become less safe. It can enter our conversations and our decisions. It can change the way we look at other peoples and even the way we imagine our children's future. In that sense, a war can begin in our imagination before it begins on the battlefield. And when the possibility of conflict becomes a constant presence in the collective mind, something has already changed: peace stops being perceived as the natural condition of life and begins to feel like nothing more than a temporary pause.
The Destruction That Comes Before Destruction
Perhaps, then, there is a form of destruction that comes before material destruction. It is the destruction of trust, of symbols, of expectations, of our ability to imagine a tomorrow different from today. A destroyed building is immediately visible. A society that slowly loses its capacity to hope can continue to look perfectly functional for many years. People keep working, consuming, paying their bills, going on vacation, using their phones. And yet, beneath the surface, something profound may already have changed: people are no longer building for the future; they are simply trying to protect themselves from it. Perhaps this is why declining birth rates seem to me to represent something more significant than a purely economic or demographic problem. Having a child is, after all, one of the greatest bets on the future a human being can make. It means accepting uncertainty and saying anyway: it is worth bringing someone into the world who will come after me. When a society gradually loses that confidence, perhaps it is revealing something much deeper about its state of mind.
Who Is Feeding the Fear?
At this point, an uncomfortable question inevitably arises: how much of this fear is spontaneous, and how much of it is being amplified? It is obvious that political, economic, and media interests can make use of fear. A frightened person looks for protection. A frightened society is more willing to accept control, simplification, and drastic solutions. Whoever gets to define the threats we are supposed to fear can wield enormous influence. But I do not think we need to imagine some gigantic control room where someone is deliberately planning every fear on the planet. The mechanism can be much simpler—and precisely because of that, much more unsettling. Bad news attracts attention. Attention creates economic and political value. And whatever creates attention tends to be repeated. We can therefore find ourselves immersed in an environment where no one has necessarily decided to poison the air, yet many people have an incentive to keep the alarm switched on. At that point, fear no longer needs to be commanded.
It feeds itself.
The Downward Phase
Perhaps this is where the old idea of cycles becomes useful again. I do not know whether history truly follows precise cycles, nor do I believe there is some mysterious wheel determining when an era must rise or fall. But when we look at human beings, it is difficult not to recognize that societies also pass through psychological seasons. There are periods when trust, expansion, creativity, and the desire to build prevail. There are others when fear, cynicism, resentment, and the need for protection take over. There are eras when people look primarily ahead, and others when they are constantly looking over their shoulders. If we really are entering a downward phase, then the challenge is not simply to recognize it. The challenge is to understand what we can do while we are going down. Because a downward phase fueled by fear does not necessarily end simply because the calendar moves forward.
It requires countercyclical forces.
Countercyclical Forces
A countercyclical force does not necessarily have to be a great revolution. It may be something much simpler and much more ordinary. It is the person who, despite knowing how difficult the times are, refuses to become cynical. It is the couple that continues to make plans. It is the parent who teaches a child not only how to protect themselves from the world, but also how to build a better one. It is the teacher who gives a young person the ability to imagine a future that has not yet been handed to them. It is someone who builds instead of merely commenting, who creates instead of endlessly consuming what others have created, who seeks human connection instead of retreating into isolation. These are small, almost invisible acts, but perhaps that is precisely why they represent the most authentic form of resistance. If fear is contagious, trust can be contagious too. If pessimism can become a culture, so can hope.
Do Not Surrender Your Mind to Fear
Of course, we cannot stop a war simply by thinking positively. We cannot lower the cost of living through willpower, and we cannot solve a geopolitical crisis by lighting a candle. Reality has to be faced as it is, even when it is uncomfortable. But there is a fundamental difference between looking at reality and allowing reality to completely occupy our inner world. I can know that the world is going through a difficult period without making that difficulty my identity. I can know fear without becoming fear. I can see the darkness without convincing myself that darkness is all there is. Perhaps this is where the old idea of energy meets something very concrete. Every day, at least to some extent, we choose what we will feed within ourselves. We can feed resentment or understanding, resignation or possibility, hatred or connection. We will not change the world simply by changing our thoughts, but the world of tomorrow will inevitably be influenced by what we allow to grow inside us today.
And So?
Perhaps the real question is not even whether we have entered the downward phase of a cycle. The more important question is what we will do while we are going down. Will we allow ourselves to be dragged downward along with everything around us, or will we try, each within our own small sphere of influence, to become a counterforce?
We do not know whether war will come, whether the economic crisis will worsen, or whether the world we know will change beyond recognition. But we can decide whether fear will also be given control over the way we imagine the future.
A society does not necessarily begin to rise when all its problems have been solved. Sometimes it begins to rise much earlier—at the exact moment when someone, despite everything, starts building again.
Perhaps that is the deepest meaning of a countercyclical force:
not denying the darkness, but refusing to become darkness.
Because perhaps the future is not simply something waiting for us.
Perhaps it is also something that, through what we think, what we desire, and what we build today, we are already creating.
