The Sickness of the World

We inhabit a fractured world. Tell me, can you feel it too? I feel it every morning when I emerge into society. I feel it as I endure the breakfast news and podcasts. I feel it throughout the day as I visit the digital platforms I inhabit, and even in the evenings as I plunge into my pleasures. Every day, of every year, it is always there.

I know you can feel it too: two can bicker about who farted, but not whether someone did. Its stench spreads through our colleges, which have been befouled by dogma. It reeks on our tongues which have become fluent in obsequiousness and dismissal. Social media, which was meant to connect us, is also soiled. It has become a platform for outrage and a battlefield for minds that came unarmed. From Facebook to Twitter, cruelty is dispensed casually and without restraint, misunderstandings are pitted against untruths, slogans supplant arguments, and amongst these a victor is selected. It is madness.

Even in our homes we can detect its stench, which drowns out the fragrances of love and compassion. We cannot talk to our loved ones openly anymore, fearing that discussions will simmer with suspicion or degrade into discord. Everyone has sealed their minds. We are ignorant and happy, cultivating our “safe-spaces”, little gardens where discord is disallowed, where everyone speaks but no one listens.

I remember a time not long ago, while this millenium was still young. I remember it with fondness. Back then, as a little boy, I felt whole, unbroken. I remember how conversations unfurled beautifully, with thoughts and ideas passed around freely. We disagreed too, but our disagreements were not walls, they were doorways, and we entered them with curiosity. Recently I have wondered, how did we get here, whence came this stench, this madness? Yet, as I study the world, I can trace the same contamination within myself. After all, we are all microcosms of the macrocosm, each of us containing the same maladies that plague our civilisation.

There are days when I, too, seal my mind from others. Sometimes, I also dismiss rather than engage. Even I am fractured, reeking of this sickness, and it frightens me. However, what fills me with terror is not the infection itself, but how comfortable the world is with it. We have normalised our intellectual dismemberment. We do not mourn what we have lost or what could have been. And sadly, for my younger readers, their generation has never known anything else: they are native inhabitants of this sick and fractured world. They have never felt the vertigo of standing at the edge of their knowledge and peering into the unknown. They are “clickers“, blinded by screens and prone to deception. For them, self-doubt is a myth, a legend.

This is despite — not because of — the information at our fingertips. Our digital platforms inform us while being the very instruments of our contamination. Each TikTok we see intensifies our ignorance. We consume feeds tailored to confirm what we already believe, created by algorithms that ensure we never encounter the discomfort of contrary thought. Through them, we are the architects and prisoners of our digital worlds.

About 100 years ago, Antonio Gramsci proposed his theory of cultural hegemony, alleging that the ruling class maintain their wealth and power not through violence but through ideology. Those who control the flow of ideas and culture, he observed, control our collective mind. Today, this rings true. The owners of social media platforms can select which ideas receive oxygen and which ones are extinguished, cultivating monocultures of thought where diversity once flourished. And because of this, the internet has become a pharmakon, both a poison and a cure. And so, we drown in information while thirsting for knowledge.

Despite the severity of your affliction, my friend, I am certain that you too can smell this decay and feel the fractures of this world. Not long ago, you must have spoken to someone about something, perhaps an election. And following their response, you felt a terrible chasm appear between both of you, a chasm that could not be bridged by discourse. No matter how much you explained yourself, every new word worsened things. You loved them no less in that moment, but you still felt the pain of mutual incomprehension. It was as if one of you had sullied a sacred subject and now reconciliation was impossible.

You may have wondered, what divides us here? What assumptions shape our separate worlds? Is there a language in which we might meet, however briefly? For a moment, you may even consider “agreeing to disagree”, but of what value is it to do so without the satisfaction that you have been understood?

Eventually, if your affliction is not too severe, your mind may discover the true source of this decay. Not in others, but in yourself. You realise that you have long lost the courage to hold your convictions lightly. You assume that you are what you believe. And so it is impossible to say, ” Maybe I am wrong,” because it would be an act of surrender, a capitulation of your identity, proof that you do not understand yourself. This, my dear friend, is the sickness of the world.

You may have noticed other symptoms in others, for this sickness manifests differently in all of us. In some, it presents as a compulsive contrarianism that values opposition over truth. These ones mistake cynicism for critical thinking. You can see it in their smug dismissal of expertise without rigour, or in their celebration of ignorance as authenticity. This type of cynicism appears clever but it offers nothing of substance.

Knowledge, especially technical knowledge, creates hierarchies that make us uncomfortable. The physician knows what the patient does not; the scientist understands what the layperson cannot. This hierarchy of understanding breeds resentment, and from resentment comes reaction: the stubborn insistence that surely the gut knows better than the mind. This opposition to elitism, though often justified, quickly becomes a weapon against reason itself.

This is not to say that experts cannot be wrong. They can and they regularly are. But the reaction against them has swung so far that people proudly embrace beliefs simply because they contradict established understanding. It is as if believing the opposite of what experts say has become a virtue in itself. No wonder Americans expressing distrust in medical expertise increased from 14% in 1976 to approximately 60% by 2024. Compulsive contrarianism has become a badge of authenticity in a world where authenticity is merely a performance.

I have felt it in myself as well, this temptation to trust intuition over evidence, to avoid uncomfortable truths. I have caught myself a few times in this false skepticism, questioning not for inquiry but from a desire to set myself apart. I must confess, my affliction is quite severe. In others, it manifests as tribal thinking. These ones claim that because you believe something today, therefore, you must belong to some “ism” sect that also holds that view. And they, in their disagreement, must belong to the opposing one. After all, why should we form our own opinions when others can do it for us?

This sickness has allowed bad ideas to spread rapidly through our society and burn centuries of progress to the ground. Because they align with what we already believe, they take hold without the friction of examination. This sickness has also made our minds dull and our thinking simple. And so we are swept about by “influencers” of no scholarly distinction, we adopt opinions we have not examined, and we share information whose accuracy we did not bother to verify.

In my diagnosis, this sickness is not of our times, but of all times. It is not a linear decline, oh no, it is a cyclical one. Its fever rises and falls across centuries. Societies respect reason in one age, then sink into the stupor of ignorance in the next. The Islamic Golden Age comes to mind, that reign of great mathematical, medical, scientific and philosophical advancement in the stewardship of the Abbasid Caliphate (AD 750 to 1258). It gave us the libraries, hospitals and universities of Baghdad, The House of Wisdom, The Book of Ingenious Devices, algebra, and so much more. However, in the end, it surrendered to fundamentalism. The Enlightenment (AD 1600s–1800s), that luminous period of reason, was also not exempt. They too built universities and libraries, only to later question whether truth itself was merely a construct of power. It is as if each leap in understanding contains within it the seeds of its own undoing—as if the collective human mind can only bear so much enlightenment before it recoils back into darkness.

Our current era has not been spared. It bears all these hallmarks of intellectual recession. We are gradually forgetting the foundational knowledge that our predecessors uncovered at great cost. The more we match into the future, the less we remember. Our attention is frail. Our capacity to process information is shrinking. The cognitive load we can carry comfortably is far lighter today than it was a century ago. Information consumption no longer enlightens, it overwhelms us. And in this age of information overload, the tendency to gravitate towards dubious simplicities is stronger. Consequently, we are repeating the mistakes of the past.

Our civilisation is vulnerable, like a body whose immune system has lost the memory of previous infections. Religious fundamentalism, despotism, pseudoscience, vaccine hesitancy, genocide, racism, and other pitiful things are on the rise in many pockets of the world. Dogmatism flourishes across the entire political spectrum—left and right, secular and religious, traditional and progressive. Each faction is convinced of its righteousness, each is immune to the possibility of its own error.

The vaccine against this rising tide of unreason is simple: societies must maintain a critical mass of informed citizenry who can anchor us against this regression. This means advocating for educational reform that emphasise critical thinking skills. It means ensuring that this education is free for all, at all levels. Finland’s education model offers another promising approach, with its emphasis on teaching students to identify misinformation and evaluate sources. Their national curriculum now includes digital literacy starting in elementary school, resulting in Finnish students scoring 30% higher on information evaluation tests compared to their international peers.

Children must be taught to value intellectual humility over certitude. Our schools must be redesigned to produce an informed public that can engage its intellectuals rather than censure and dismiss them. Everyone must understand that what they believe is provisional rather than absolute, that the pursuit of truth is a collective endeavour. And as they blossom into adults, awareness will come naturally to them. They will practise the difficult art of critical thinking in their daily lives until it is difficult no longer. They will actively seek out perspectives that challenge their beliefs and these will sharpen their thinking.

Intellectuals, those who stand at the intersection of specialised knowledge and public discourse, must also ensure that their enlightenment is accessible and embedded into the society they inhabit. They must democratise knowledge without diluting its rigour, and do so without succumbing to the very arrogance and elitism that fuels anti-intellectual backlash. By casting themselves into public life, they can occupy the spaces that are currently filled by charlatans. They can serve their true purpose: preserving and transmitting knowledge across generations. For they are the memory cells of our collective mind which keep our civilisation alive.

The sickness of the world is not terminal but its treatment is hard. Whether we can achieve it in my lifetime time I cannot say, but I know that the cycles of history are not inevitable; they are shaped by the choices we make, the ideas we champion, and the values we uphold. For now, I can only observe the symptoms of humanity’s sickness. I am, after all, both doctor and patient in this, diagnosing the disease while suffering from it.

Perhaps the task of our time is not to lament what has been lost but to cultivate with fierce intention what can be. And as I write these words, I can feel the fever of this sickness lifting, if only briefly, allowing me a moment of clarity. Tomorrow, it may return. But for now, I know what it feels like to think clearly, to know both the powers and limitations of ones mind.

Perhaps the most radical act in our time may be the simple, almost forgotten art of taking one another seriously. Perhaps this way, we might remember how to disagree with care, with nuance, and with the humility that comes from recognising the vastness of what we do not know. Perhaps this way, we might remember to approach difference in opinion with compassion rather than contempt. And whenever we have nothing meaningful to say, we will have the courage to offer silence in recompense: not the silence of disengagement, but of shared contemplation. The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas wrote that ethics begins with the face of the Other—with the recognition that here before me stands a being as complex, as vulnerable, as worthy of dignity as myself. Perhaps the healing of the world should begin here, in the simple, radical act of presence. Of saying: I see you. I bear witness to your humanity.

V.