Politics in Times of Perplexity

If required to synthesise the nature of the world we now live in, one might say we are in an age of uncertainty. Although human beings in societies that preceded ours lived with a more or less gloomy future, the stability of their basic conditions of existence, however negative they might have been, allowed them to assume that what lay ahead wouldn’t hold too many surprises for them. They might have been hungry or oppressed but they weren’t perplexed. Perplexity is the situation typifying societies in which the horizons of what is possible are so open that calculations about the future will be particularly uncertain.