Why the world ignores Cassandra

Reality is our problem and also our answer. For, as always, the answer to the problem lies not in running away from it — there is simply nowhere to run to — but in turning to face it.

— Peter Kingsley, Reality (2024)

Gil-Manuel Hernàndez i Martí

Cassandra's wound

It is true - and it should be stated clearly from the outset - that the way in which capitalism is structured as a mode of global civilisation, and not only as a system of production, profoundly conditions our ability to perceive and understand the civilisational collapse underway. This difficulty is especially accentuated when we live in the centre of the system, a centre that, in order to sustain itself as such, has had to recurrently provoke partial or local collapses in the savage, backward or underdeveloped peripheries - the former colonies - today once again plundered and abandoned to their fate.

Late capitalism has become an integral machinery of symbolic, affective, and existential control: the Megachine of which Fabian Scheidler (2024) speaks, which penetrates, transforms, and regulates all dimensions of life. As we well know, it does not limit itself to exploiting labour or resources: it produces subjectivities, shapes ways of feeling, filters collective emotions and designs the frameworks of the sayable and the imaginable. It has become an ontological structure that imposes what can be perceived, what can be said, and, above all, what can be believed.


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