When a Culture Forgets Why

Something is missing

The air of our time hums not with quiet electricity, but with friction. Online, voices clash with growing ferocity, each attack louder, sharper, more rehearsed than the last. Streets echo the same agitation: protests rise and fade, headlines flare and vanish, leaving only fatigue. There is motion without direction, anger without anchor. We feel it everywhere yet cannot quite name it. The reason has been forgotten.

This absence has a name. To put it simply: what is missing in our society is philosophy.

Technocracy without vision

Across Europe, we live under procedures that are meant to guide us, protect us, and prevent our worst impulses. Yet over time the map eclipsed the landscape. Rules became ends in themselves. We learned to navigate laws and regulations but forgot the principles that once animated them.

The strengthening power of technocratic structures, especially in supranational governance, brought stability, but also taught us to distrust deviation. Law hardened into destiny. Judgement atrophied.

Populism as counter-impulse

The vacuum did not stay empty. Populism rose to supply identity and immediacy. But it trades in agitation rather than understanding. Its sentences are short and sharp; its energy is real but oftentimes unmoored. It feeds polarization without offering a horizon.

Technocracy and populism, though opposed, are siblings: one hides behind procedures, the other behind emotion. Both refuse philosophy. Both refuse the slow, difficult work of asking: what is good? What is just? What binds us?

The forgotten middle

The “great middle” has withered and we are left now with a ping-pong game of extremes, each louder than the other, neither building the shared ground we desperately need.

To return to philosophy is to reclaim that ground. It is not nostalgia, but necessity. Philosophy is disciplined attention to first things: to beauty, to truth, to the ways we might live together without devouring one another.

The middle is not bland compromise. It is strength: a woven field where opposing threads create a fabric more durable than either strand alone.