On social media, antifeminist discourse is on the rise.

We are often even more surprised when much of it comes from those we would least expect: women.

Although this continues to surprise most women, it is not a new phenomenon.

We see similar reactions among marginalized groups who vote for their greatest enemies: Black people voting for Trump, or immigrants waving flags and wearing hats in support of a self-declared White supremacist.

The internalized racism is too powerful, and a concept for another article.

The anger some women express against feminism can be seen in the same light, or in the movement itself, which has flaws and has failed to reach everyone equally.

Psychologically speaking, when a group does not embrace someone, they may rebel against it. Feeling left out generates indignation, frustration, and, ultimately, revolt.

This is one of the reasons why Black Women have also discussed Black Feminism, having felt a sort of betrayal from the movement, which tended only to portray White Women and not embrace everyone and all their plights against injustice. In the case of Black Women, there is a double discrimination.

Online antifeminist discourse also reveals a deeply mistaken perception of what feminism truly is.

Amid much ignorance, many women falsely believe feminism is anti-feminine. They think that being “feminine” must conform to a concept of beauty that contradicts supposed feminist ideals.

Many assume that being a feminist means adopting a more masculine appearance: giving up dresses, keeping hair short, constantly wearing pants and shirts, and abandoning high heels, for example.

They seem to believe that feminists love this same version of masculinity that is also imposed on men — a version that dictates what it means to be a man. A version that is as harmful for them as the single concept of femininity is for women.

Yet, many women who attack feminism so vehemently are —often without realizing it— benefiting from the same struggles of earlier generations of feminists who fought so that they could freely embrace their preferred concept of femininity today.

Being a feminist does not mean renouncing the beauty standards that feel most comfortable to oneself; it is simply about having the freedom to choose.

Choosing to wear a miniskirt, a dress with a daring neckline, earrings you love, or high heels (as high as you wish) is only possible because previous generations of women fought for the freedom to make such choices.

Choosing how to wear your hair — long, medium, or short — is another freedom won through that movement. I’ve once met a family of Christian conservatives, whose daughters were not allowed to cut their hair, nor to wear skirts above the knee.

Still, many women cling to the idea that feminists reject all notions of what they consider female beauty. But what many feminists do — including myself — is simply challenge the beauty standards that have been imposed over time.

No woman should be judged for deliberately choosing a certain appearance.

What should be questioned is something more profound: whether the choice is truly free or conditioned by societal expectations regarding female beauty.

For example, why do so many women feel less beautiful the moment the first gray hairs appear?

And why are hair-coloring products almost always marketed with images of young women, often unnecessarily so, but rarely with men?

This reflects the idea that female beauty is intrinsically tied to youth — a small fraction of our lives — and that aging is undesirable and unattractive.

But if we are fortunate enough to live many decades, how will we deal with the image projected in our mirror? How will we deal with the fact that, according to these standards, we have become invisible?

And as time goes by, by the age of thirty-five, the notion of a biological fertility deadline haunts many women. Feeling older, many women often perceive themselves as unattractive, holding a negative view of their own bodies — a body they will inhabit for many more decades.

But, is our choice to constantly dye our hair to feel more comfortable truly free, or is it conditioned by the beliefs and projections imposed by the environment throughout our lives?

Personally, in my own case, after going through a phase of wanting to dye my hair every color imaginable, my own aging — and perhaps the early graying of my hair — led me to decide to accept that white hair need not be negative, or even anti-feminine.

Choosing to let my gray hair grow freely was influenced by practical considerations. Firstly, spending an entire afternoon at the hairdresser’s every month is not how I want to spend my time or money. Secondly, the acceptance came from a radical shift in my perception of beauty.

I owe much of this shift to the many women I admire, who have embraced alternative concepts of beauty and what it means to be a woman.

Now, when I look in the mirror and feel a strange resemblance to Susan Sontag, my ego inflates, almost making me feel invincible. If I can, even remotely, look like her, I will be forever happy. I do not feel unattractive; I feel complete, like the women I admire and hope to emulate.

Beauty products and the images they project dictate a narrow standard of what it means to be a beautiful woman.

These standards are deeply unjust, especially in light of the inevitable passage of time, and they also contribute to social inequality.

High-end beauty products, priced out of reach for many, reveal that these standards are not only tied to youth but also to socioeconomic privilege.

By this same logic, aging is not just “ugly,” but aging as a middle- or working-class woman is doubly so.

This concept of beauty is therefore not universal; it is attainable only if one has the financial means.

Recognizing how oppressive this is — spending our working hours earning money only to spend it on products that meet these imposed ideals — is to acknowledge how much these standards constrain our freedom, and above all, our happiness.

On the question of class, I have come to the sad conclusion that social class — especially the upper classes — often trumps feminism.

Many women, privileged by their socioeconomic status, vocally denounce feminists online, as if being a feminist were somehow a threat to them.

No, it isn’t. However, they prefer to belong to their class and conform to the comfort of their lives rather than see that other women do not have the same privileges as they do.

Among the most viral phenomena of our time is the rise of so-called “tradwives” (from “traditional wives”) — a kind of revival of what used to define a traditional wife as a mother, homemaker, believer, obedient, and submissive to her husband’s orders.

I must admit I only became aware of this phenomenon somewhat late, and when I woke up to it, I saw that it’s increasingly entrenched everywhere.

Many of these “tradwives” have built careers — a direct contradiction to what they preach — promoting the sexist idea that women can only find fulfillment in the so-called traditional role of wives of heterosexual marriages.

On Instagram, a typical tradwife promotes the notion that a woman should marry young, have several children, stay at home, cook for the family, attend Sunday mass, take family vacations, raise obedient children, avoid iPads, and, of course, accept that the father is the head of the household — implicitly suggesting that women deliberately choose to be submissive to their husbands.

This phenomenon, proliferated by numerous social media accounts, is deeply contradictory, though.

The women creating this content generate their own employment, gaining financial independence, all while preaching to other women that they should not have it themselves.

Simultaneously, they appear to renounce the digital world, yet they constantly benefit from it.

Much has already been written about the hypocrisy of this narrative and the immense behind-the-scenes labor required to create these perfectly curated videos: immaculate vintage dresses, supposedly happy babies, smiling families walking barefoot through endless flowers and grass.

It’s all a business model, and not necessarily a real portrait of life. Also, it tells us that if you follow such a path or wear such outfits, you cannot be a feminist either. It’s either black or white.

I am a married woman in a heterosexual relationship. At times, I, too, enjoy wearing white cotton dresses, walking barefoot on the grass, hanging laundry in the sun, baking sourdough bread, and cooking something healthy and delicious for everyone’s happiness.

Yet I manage to do all of this while maintaining my career as both a teacher and a writer. I am a grown-up, independent adult, and, like almost anyone in the middle or working class, it would be impossible for only one partner to work and support the household. Most people find themselves in this situation, rather than the other way around.

When discussing this issue with some female friends, I am often surprised at how they fail to grasp the underlying problem behind these new online trends.

This is not merely a matter of choice; it is a matter of imposed norms. It is not an option, but it is a narrative enforced by misguided concepts of gender, beauty, and femininity.

Many of my female friends, victims of a society that continuously punishes women, wrongly see it as a kind of liberation from overwork. For those burdened by work outside the home while still managing household responsibilities, it is a way to escape and regain their time. It’s a way of just maintaining the domestic sphere while being freed from the other, and thus gaining quality of life.

Yet, this is not the answer.

The answer is understanding that two adults, both working, both sharing equal responsibility, are equally accountable for managing the home they share.

The overload that women endure is inhumane, yet it is also a consequence of a patriarchal society, not of feminism.

A patriarchal and capitalist society that, even after freeing women to enter the workforce, insists that domestic labor — a full-time job in itself — remains the woman’s responsibility.

Feminism, while having liberated women into the workforce, has not yet dismantled the misogyny that keeps them performing household labor. Feminism gave women rights, but it has not yet imposed duties on husbands.

Unsurprisingly, patriarchy, unwilling to step down from its comfortable pedestal, continually resists feminism so that it does not disrupt its ease of life.

If feminism is the fight for justice and equality of women’s rights, it appears as an imposition of duties on men.

And it is easier to demand rights than to enforce responsibilities.

It is no wonder many men have resisted feminism, and it is also unsurprising that women, exhausted by the dual workload, seek refuge in narratives that promise the calmer life they long for.

The noisy world we all live in, with burnout very real and life feeling extremely chaotic, is therefore ripe for easy solutions that promise calm, beautiful lives wrapped in vintage aesthetics, attempting to evoke nostalgia for a time that, in truth, never really existed.

Women want to renounce the world outside the home, to the stress they have been enduring, so they would have only one job instead of two. The solution? Adopting the supposed lifestyle of tradwives.

However, among the many flaws of this trend, the entire phenomenon is also based on a specific image, originating from a particular society: the American housewife and the aesthetics of 1950s America. A revival that ignores deeply what that era truly was for women, both in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Yet, this supposedly new image of a so-called traditional wife is nothing more than the same old ideas dictating how a woman should be and how she should live her life.

The concept of tradwives is also a question of class, and a profoundly hypocritical one, since all these women follow the maxim “do as I say, not as I do.”

None of them is genuinely dependent on their husbands; they are, in fact, creating their own businesses, freely doing so thanks to the feminists they claim to despise.

The tradwives movement glamorizes invisible domestic labor, placing it on a pedestal as the ultimate purpose of women, erasing any trace of individual will, and putting even more pressure on what “true femininity” should be.

Yet all this nostalgia obliterates a time in history when women’s independence was not even an option.

A time when this style of life was the only one available to them, whether they enjoyed it or not.

A time of tremendous violence against women’s bodies.

( In my country, during the fascist dictatorship that lasted from 1933 until 1974, criminal law allowed, in specific cases such as flagrant adultery, a husband to kill his wife without it being considered a serious crime. Domestic violence was not criminalized as such. Women were second-class citizens, as if they were eternal children, but without the protection of being so.)

Being a feminist does not mean rejecting femininity or imposing a single model of life; it simply means securing the freedom to choose.

Choosing to wear a dress or trousers, to dye your hair or not, to have children or not, to dedicate yourself to the home or to pursue a career…

All of these are valid as long as they are your own decision and not a social, cultural, or economic imposition.

The power of feminism lies precisely here: ensuring that every woman can define for herself what it means to be a woman, without others dictating the path.

Want to stay at home to care for your family? Great — your choice is valid, and as a feminist, I respect it.

Want to be single? Want to marry a woman? Want to marry but choose not to have children? Married to a man, want children, but cannot have them? Follow your own path according to your own choices, not what others think is better for your own life.

Whatever path you take is valid as long as it is your choice. True power lies there.

When I see women who do not understand what feminism truly means, while criticizing it, I am genuinely disturbed.

Some women think feminism does not fit with a “top-tier” concept of femininity. Others, because of their economic class, can comfortably choose not to work and want everyone else to believe this should be the way all women live.

Yet, whether it’s one or the other, what troubles me is that many of these women never follow what they preach; they only impose it on others.

Consider the now-famous Erika Kirk: someone who has benefited enormously from women’s empowerment yet espouses an antifeminist discourse, while being a businesswoman (CEO of TPUSA, Proclaim Streetwear), a podcaster, and a real estate agent.

She is educated, with degrees in political science and international relations, and is currently pursuing a PhD in biblical studies.

She was also Miss Arizona USA in 2012 and an athlete in basketball and volleyball.

All her achievements should be celebrated in the light of feminism.

Yet, many people have the misconception that feminism is a movement against men while promoting female superiority.

They also believe feminists hate Erika for having chosen marriage and children.

None of these ideas is accurate at all. Feminism celebrates her choices and acknowledges that she has made the most of her life.

The criticism from feminists lies not in the fact that she chose family over a job, but in the hypocrisy of maintaining a discourse that is totally inconsistent with her personal achievements—a discourse that believes in traditional gender roles, when she does not seem to have them.

Her case reflects a larger problem: empowering a woman individually does not guarantee that she will use her position to empower other women.

On this only premise, what the woke movement has failed to understand is that if we empower women only based on gender, without considering class and misogyny, we risk assuming feminism has already been achieved for or embraced by all women.

We see this, for instance, in Marine Le Pen’s trajectory in France, in Georgia Meloni’s far-right government in Italy, or in Portugal, with Rita Matias, a deputy from the far-right group Chega, who openly despises feminists while in politics.

Yet, the hypocrisy of all this is evident. Without feminism, none of these opportunities would have been available to these same women.

Criticizing feminism, having the power to say so granted by feminism, while not wanting other women to embrace it, is one of the greatest hypocrisies of our time. The concept of tradwives fits into this perfectly.

That is why it is so essential to maintain a critical mindset and understand that criticizing ideas is not the same as judging people, but it is about recognizing that harmful ideologies imposed on everyone represent a setback for all, including the very women who love to despise those who gave them the freedom to make these choices.

Feminism is not about prescribing a single path for women, but about ensuring that all paths remain open and accessible. It is not about dictating how women should live, but about ensuring they have the freedom to make their own choices.

Until class no longer trumps gender, this fight is far from over.

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The formula for manipulation has always been the same throughout time. The problem today is the speed at which it happens, and how it happens.

But let me provide you with some concrete examples.

I grew up in a traditionally Catholic family. I say “traditionally” with this exact choice of words because I always felt there was more tradition within my family than an actual religious choice.

It was tradition to attend Mass, wear nice clothes, arrive smelling good, sit in one of the pews, stand up when the priest entered, kneel during the proper rituals, greet others with kisses, and then receive Jesus almost at the end of the Eucharist.

It was a beautiful routine: going together every Sunday, leaving Mass, and spending a little time talking with the others. Mass was a moment for the community to gather, to get to know one another, and to learn about who lived in our land.

Most of the people sitting next to us during the ceremony seemed to share the same feelings as we did.

They liked going to the mass, even if the words read there meant nothing to them.

Many — tired from hard work in the fields or construction — fell asleep during the priest’s sermon, or whispered to the person next to them about some interesting gossip.

Me, as an obedient child who had learned to constantly hear a “shh” whenever the priest began to speak, it irritated me that the adults beside me didn’t also keep quiet.

But beyond that mere irritation, what upset me the most was that they did not pay attention to his speech, to the meaning of those words, to what he had to tell us.

Or it upset me that when the readings were done, they did not give proper attention to all the letters to the Philistines, those Sea Peoples who also didn’t want to hear anything.

Moreover, the readings, delivered by people trembling with nerves as they approached the pulpit, were delivered in a rushed manner. The Philistines were sometimes referred to as Philists, sometimes as Philistinos, and other times as Filisteleus or Fililistelos.

Anyway.

If that were a dialogue, someone would eventually ask:

• “Who were the Philistines? What did they do wrong? Why is there no letter written by them to us, but only the opposite? Why are we even reading this here?”

But Mass went on. Because it just did not matter.

Between readings and Gregorian chants, the priest’s interminable sermon added a little more to our passive, complacent minds.

What I most remember from those sermons was how other religions preached falsehoods, how they had strayed from the path of goodness, and how even among Christians, many had deviated from the truth.

Too often, it ended with the same idea, that there was only one true church, the one built by Saint Peter.

“You are Peter, and on you I will build my church,” the priest would say, repeating phrases spoken over the years on a Sunday morning.

And listening attentively — at least those who stayed awake — everyone would nod collectively. Or else it would not be “the truth,” whatever that really meant.

And everyone agreed on one thing: that the priest, being a learned man, knew more than all of them.

There was only one solution for our lives (and our deaths): to trust him, the transmitter of the word of salvation, the direct path to eternal life.

It seemed so easy to follow along without questioning anything, whether it was what he said or what he read in ‘the book’.

There was nothing more to see than that this God had guided His people out of the desert and, swallowing the others in the Red Sea, annihilated all those who wanted to oppress them.

Just as in many enchanting stories, where we are told who is good and who isn’t, it was incredibly easy to create a guiding line that defines good and evil, embodied by one side and the people it represents.

It was as simple as this:

The people who followed this God were good, yet they were oppressed and enslaved.

Evil, on the other hand, originated entirely from the Pharaohs of Egypt—the ones who oppressed, or all the others who didn’t belong.

Above all, there was the legitimacy of one of them, Moses, who had refused a life of opulence to return to his origins and guide his people to eternal salvation, later descending from Mount Sinai to bring down the commandments. Finally, the correct path was there to follow and to tell them how good they had been all that time.

Catholics adored the commandments, even as they were the first to break them.

In my tiny, quaint, pietistic, Catholic village, the huge feast to Saint John contrasted with the guiding line of righteousness read during Mass.

“You shall not make for yourself idols, nor any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth” (Holy Bible; Exodus 20:2).

Yet the float carried by the men of Saint John the Baptist in June, with his sheep in front of them, adorned with flowers, was the biggest celebration in my Catholic village, and the one we all were eager to celebrate. It was also the celebration of Summer. Barely anyone remembered anything other than that.

Of all these commandments, which, by their very nature, were the greatest imperatives for obedience, followed the one:

“You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God; when they hate me, I punish the children for the sins of the parents to the third and fourth generation; but when they love me and keep my commandments, I show them love for a thousand generations” (Holy Bible; Exodus 20:5).

These are the exact words inscribed in the ‘Book of Truth.’

Of course, the truth was always distorted, summarized, and only spoken of in Mass to make us worship God and no others. The part about the jealousy and punishing the innocent (children and grandchildren) was, you know, omitted.

Still, the people were ignorant, but they were not wicked. They had a sense of justice, and therefore, of injustice. So, for things to continue as they had always been, there were phrases better not to mention.

But I know the hearts of my people. I know that in my village, no one would ever blame children for the wrongdoings of their parents.

Yet, if someone were to bring the readings of the Old Testament to light, someone else would defend themselves as being Christians and not Jews.

This meant they were benevolent, and that Jesus had come into the world to correct all this violence written before, truly.

Suddenly, the children of Ishmael and Abraham were no longer beloved, but (entering into a huge contradiction) seen as just like those others among the group preaching falsehoods. They were also among those who had strayed from the path of truth. Not to mention, the historical blame upon them for the murder of Jesus Christ.

However, I believe most people would start seeing that the commandments of this God as being part of a roster of almost diabolical deities.

Among the orders, he demands that the seventh day be kept to him, that no work be done “neither you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant…” (Holy Bible; Exodus 20:10_ In the original Portuguese, it’s written “slave”, not “servant).

Likewise, the benevolent God asks His flock to rest and — how kind — also give rest to the ‘servant’.

Yet, this beloved God does not question His followers’ possession of slaves. For this, there seems to be no reference in a highly ironic commandment supposedly directed at His enslaved people.

The enslaved, however, could enslave.

(A striking reflection on the current situation in this very territory today).

No one at Mass would stand up and ask:

• “But why do they have slaves?

• Isn’t that horrible?”

Yes, it is horrible, but let’s move on.

Finally, God commands:

“You shall not murder” (Holy Bible; Exodus 20:13).

As simple as that: “Do not kill!”

It could almost be the principle for human rights (and even animal rights, since it does not specify who is not to be killed).

The principle of not killing could have marked the beginning of the protection of life, a principle rooted in the universality of humanity.

The commandment could be used to question the following if it had been permitted:

• “If God commands not to kill, why did the Church kill so many Muslims during the Christian Reconquest?

• Why did the Inquisition kill so many Jews and supposed witches?

• Why were so many Black people killed in the transatlantic slave trade?

• Why…?”

At Mass, however, the commandments, the readings, the biblical episodes were read from the pulpit in a language everyone could understand, but that almost no one truly comprehended.

It was our language, with signs and symbols familiar to us, but their deeper meaning was never discussed.

From Mass, we all entered and left silently.

The most attentive to the words might even have made a strange face at some inhumane words, but there was no place to raise hands, debate, or question anything.

And just like in Mass, in catechism, as well-trained as we were, we carried the same feeling.

Both were moments to listen, memorize, and learn. But never to debate. After all, if what was taught as the truth was that it would save us from eternal damnation in the flames of hell, why would we even risk debating it and becoming barbecue for eternity?

Mass and catechism were speeches from a single perspective, with words spoken by an unquestionable moral authority.

But why were they such?

Those moments and places were anything but a space for dialogue, or to understand that a story told from a single voice is a story with only one piece of the puzzle, and therefore, an incomplete and imperfect tale.

In school, this way of seeing the world with no room for dialogue continued to be firmly ingrained in our hearts and minds.

The teacher was the moral authority, whom we, like God, were to fear. Whom, like the priest at Mass, we were never to interrupt. And of course, we never asked questions to someone we feared so much.

All these figures of moral authority had one thing in common: they told stories from only one perspective, leaving no room for questioning or alternative viewpoints.

In my highly manipulated childhood mind, I remember feeling pity for my classmates who did not go to Mass. Immediately, they became part of the spiritually indigent, the straying, the ones who were wrong.

In short, evil, wicked people who would not only divert us from salvation but also be condemned to eternal punishment themselves.

Whether they were adults or children, they would burn in hell.

Because, let’s face it, if they did not love this jealous God, the curse would fall upon them, their children, and their grandchildren.

Zero chance for salvation. It would have been better to obey and to roast in hell.

Tyrants and dictators in our history all use the same technique: “You are either with me or against me,” “You either adore me or I hate you all.”

The method is ancient, but in no way different from modern strategies. We have one group to believe is on the right path, and another is, therefore, the wrong ones, whom we need to dislike. Divide to conquer.

Just look at how even this past weekend (September 21, 2025), the current President of the United States openly said — to the surprise of nobody — that he “hates his opponent.”

From the pulpit, as the main speaker, the people nodded and affirmed, with no room for debate or questioning.

It is extremely easy to manipulate an entire crowd when we are the owners of the narrative.

The formula has never changed. What has changed, though, is the speed at which those narratives reach us today, and how they reach us: with us alone starting at the screen, silently nodding.

This is the same trick we see happening today through the millions of videos proliferating on social media, steering humanity in a very dark direction. It is a kind of new Middle Ages.

There is always some speaker — most often with no authority whatsoever — very confident, telling the story from only one side.

And then, in the comment section, only those who confirm the video’s narrative are allowed, while those comments that question it are erased.

(The chase to silent comedians is the same old tale. And it has a name: censorship.

At the same time, all of this creates the impression for viewers that everyone is going in the same direction. As such, perhaps the mere question that might arise in someone’s mind is, in fact, the question of the wrong path.

However, all these preachers on social media, despite having zero authority to discuss more profound themes, do understand very well how their attitudes of confidence and cheap rhetoric can lead to the easy manipulation of others.

They know that it is very human to want to be part of a group, not to be excluded, even if the ideas of that group seem morally questionable.

You see, in my village, Mass was not about belonging to a line of thought, but to a group with a particular line of thought.

A group that made us feel comfortable, not only through contact with others, but that also reaffirmed that strange certainty of being on the side of the good.

Likewise, today the world is divided in the same way, with each side continuously believing itself to be morally right and the other morally wrong.

For other concrete examples, much has already been said about what is happening in the Gaza Strip and the inhumane and erratic actions of the Israeli government. I know I will not add anything more to the monologues on social media.

But some videos take manipulation to an execrable level.

Recently, one of those showed a Brazilian man speaking with extraordinary energy, questioning:

“How is it that suddenly the world starts treating Israel as the villain? Wait a minute,” he says assertively, “how does this curve happen? How do we go from the people who were victims of the greatest massacre in history, to the people pointed at as oppressors?” he asks, wildly convinced of his questions, which, being rhetorical, will never have an answer.

You see, in a debate with room for such a discussion, someone — me — would tell him, “We go from victim people to oppressor people when victim people become oppressor people!”

However, in the comment section, the statements that fed his ego continued. In the video, the phrase that Israel is only fighting to exist (and not dominate) proliferated, only in that sense, without any nuance or response.

Well, the Nazis also fought to exist with their awful ideas. So did the Belgians, and Leopold II also fought to exist in Congo (let’s just not mention the 20 million people they killed there so they could “exist”).

It greatly surprises me that a Brazilian would adopt this stance. I replied — sarcastically, of course — that I, a Portuguese, also did not steal any gold from them, that I had only borrowed a little and would have appreciated a bit more in order to exist.

And slavery? Nah, we did nothing wrong, we didn’t dominate anyone, we were just trying to exist.

(Yeah, I know how this feels in our minds to read this. It’s exhausting, I know.)

It should be humanly accepted that my existence should not justify the annihilation of the existence of another.

The government of those ideas is saying that its existence validates the extermination of an entire other people. Those who support it are corroborating the same idea.

In that Brazilian man’s video, there are more biased narratives, such as claiming that upon its founding, Israel was immediately declared war on by seven Arab countries.

But no single soul questions why that happened. It only gives the impression that the seven Arab countries are horrible and are simply against the Jews. This is called antisemitism — the supreme irony, when the Arabs themselves are also Semitic.

What is never said is why these seven Arab countries reacted in this way, or what the Palestinians had to do with the European Holocaust.

No one also questions the role of Germany, the direct oppressor, which today supports Israel as if wanting to erase guilt without confronting the difficult questions.

These difficult, but obvious questions disappear in the dominant narrative, while in an open dialogue, they would naturally arise:

• Why did the founding of Israel immediately trigger a war?

• What fault did the Palestinians have in the European genocide/ the Holocaust?

• Why didn’t Germany, the direct perpetrator, offer land?

• And why does it still support Israel so actively today — remorse or convenience?

Today, social media has become this new Mass: a pulpit with only one side, where the comment section acts as a silent assembly. We enter mute, leave silently, and come to believe we are following the right side, simply because everyone seems to agree with the same point of view.

To be clear, ideological manipulation occurs on both sides. What’s important is that we must always ask:

• Who is telling the story?

• What is the intention behind it?

• What’s missing from this narrative?

Searching for the missing pieces in the puzzle to see the whole picture, rather than accepting an isolated piece, is the first step towards veracity. Towards a more just world.

This critical effort is also the first step in understanding how we are being manipulated.

And recognizing this urgency is not because I say so: it is because the speed at which narratives are transmitted today transforms an old trick into a force capable of mutilating truths.

The formula hasn’t changed; it has just become more widespread than ever: one voice, one allowed side.

Blindly following a narrative is comfortable. It is easy. We feel good. Our minds tell us how perfect we are. And, let’s face it, nobody likes to feel they are wrong.

But questioning our own beliefs, what we hear, what we are told, is what can still save us. And it is ultimately what will give meaning to the word 'justice' and bring peace to the world.

I only hope it’s not too late.

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Almost tangibly, a profound tension can be felt in today’s society: never before have we lived in a time when the distortion of reality, of truth, and of historical facts has been so immense.

Alongside this, human values once considered universal have never been questioned as much as they are today. Put differently, the simple — yet far from simple — distinction between what is good and what defines evil seems to waver.

Nonetheless, this societal tension, which pits individuals against one another, has persisted throughout history. As examples, during the collapse of the Roman Empire, Christians were scapegoated as the source of all social ills. Centuries later, during the Middle Ages, the battle against the Moors in the Iberian Peninsula was framed as a divine mission while erasing centuries of coexistence and cultural exchange between different peoples.

And now, in our present world, we see a similar phenomenon: narratives are once again being reshaped to favor particular groups, and truth is being distorted simultaneously.

Today, this entire process is amplified through social media, including reels and videos, which have even reshaped our contemporaries’ vocabulary by introducing the concept of “my truth.”

In this disruption of veracity, harmful narratives proliferate. Primary examples are the denial of the Holocaust, the romanticization of the enslavement of Black people in America, and, more alarmingly, the denial of indisputable facts — proven by video and witnessed by the world — yet persistently rejected to discredit reality.

A notable example of the latter is the case of George Floyd’s death. I recently read, for instance, that his death resulted from a Fentanyl overdose rather than, as established in court, asphyxiation by a police officer. People choosing to believe in these lies is a theme that I will revisit later.

But beyond these seemingly self-evident facts, my aim today, while writing this article, is to reach the core of more profound questions, which, though they may appear basic, must be asked again:

• How can we define democracy if it is limited to only a minority?

• Is the exploitation of man by man ever morally correct?

• How is that nostalgic past remembered, and by whom?

• What is ‘good’?

• What is ‘evil’?

• What makes a society just or corrupt?

• How can we think about history without rejecting it?

The False Universality of Democracy

The word democracy is often equated with freedom . The freedom of citizens to choose their governors through voting.

Unlike tyrannies, dictatorships, or monarchies, where rulers are imposed upon the people without consent, democracy is supposed to embody popular choice.

Yet history reveals a very different reality from its concept.

Consider Athenian democracy, often hailed as the cradle of Western civilization. Citizenship — and the right to participate in decisions about the polis — was strictly limited to free men of age whose parents were also Athenians.

In practice, democracy was accessible to a tiny segment of the population, systematically excluding women, foreigners, and the enslaved.

What many call the foundation of democratic civilization was actually built on a flawed principle that would persist for centuries: democracy built on the systematic exclusion of certain groups.

Democracy was as such, only granted to those born into a particular place, to a specific status, by sheer chance.

Complete freedom — the freedom to think, decide, and participate — was, in other words, never universal.

We may — hopefully — find this outrageous. However, what we now recognize as radical and unjust exclusion was not confined to the distant past.

Many modern societies proudly proclaim their democratic principles, using this façade to present themselves as beacons to the world, while often being founded on those very same exclusions.

The United States of America is a prime example.

It established a so-called democracy while simultaneously holding millions of people in slavery, depriving them of the most fundamental right of any human being: freedom.

And if democracy truly means the freedom of citizens to choose their governors, then the simultaneous existence of enslaved people — who had no such freedom — reveals a fundamental contradiction.

And this very society and culture was built on a more hideous premise. The premise that the enslaved were not only non-citizens but also not fully human.

The same principle was also applied to women, who, though not enslaved, were denied complete freedom and excluded from participating in the decisions that shaped their societies. For Black women, this oppression was compounded, involving both racial and gendered exclusion.

Although slavery now seems utterly horrific, and although modern society is founded on the principle that all people should be treated equally, it was not so long ago that this idea was absent from human conduct.

As such, given the proximity of all these events, we as a society must stress that the recognition of slavery as a moral wrong is still not as deeply rooted in our society as it should be by now.

We must continually return to the fact that it was, is not, and never will be morally correct or acceptable for humans to be bought and sold by other humans, for one person to exploit another.

Beyond the condemnable horrors of the infamous transatlantic slave trade, what must also be condemned is the denial of the enslaved person’s humanity.

In addition to physical and psychological punishment, they were denied life in its fullness. It is widely understood (at least for now) that the human experience transcends mere survival; it encompasses more than just eating, breathing, and sleeping.

While those are necessary to sustain life, they are not the reason we live.

The enslaved had no right to marry, to raise their own children (who were seen merely as merchandise to be sold), nor to the most basic education: learning to read and write.

It took me years to truly understand how something so seemingly elementary could, in fact, have a profound impact on multiple generations.

People deprived of education remain unaware of their own misery, passive and unlikely ever to revolt.

This was, of course, convenient for the great exploiters who wished it to remain so.

And this logic did not apply only to the enslaved. It also extended to all those deprived of access to education, regardless of their ethnicity or gender.

Those who today tremble at the awakening of so many marginalized voices are the same who trembled in the 1960s when Black Americans were recognized as citizens.

They are the same type of people who resisted the Emancipation Proclamation nearly two centuries ago.

They are the same who fear that equal rights for all might mean a loss of power for themselves.

They are the same who despise progressivism, while, once again, undermining our social fabric with anti-progressive narratives.

Yet, none of these cultural movements is new; they are an integral part of the ideological struggle we have always been aware of.

For example, we saw it in the construction of narratives about the Old South of the United States, through the infamous Lost Cause myth, supported by biased and incomplete perspectives of the Confederate era.

Whether in literature or in cinema — through films such as The Birth of a Nation1 or the cinematic classic Gone with the Wind 2 —  the idea that slavery was idyllic, crime-free, and harmonious is entirely false.

In the early 20th century, minstrel shows ridiculed Black people, fabricating the idea of a comedic, happy era, portraying them as foolish caricatures or content with their condition.

Another film, Song of the South (1946), is another perfect example of this manufactured history. But what kind of romance — or “wonderful day” — can exist in the enslavement of human beings by other human beings?

None at all.

And yet, these forces are once again regaining ground.

Slavery was at the heart of the American Civil War, yet for many white Southerners, it was less a moral issue than an economic one.

How could it have seemed fair that a Southern man could grow wealthy from the unpaid labor of enslaved people, while a Northern man had to pay — even if poorly — another person for their work?

The sense of justice in this context was not about recognizing the humanity of Black people, but about economic fairness among white men.

I often wonder: had slavery remained widespread in the North as it was in the South, would the Civil War have happened at all? Or would the conflict have taken a different form — perhaps a war between the enslaved and their oppressors?3

Whatever the answer, the aftermath of slavery’s abolition made clear that freedom on paper did not guarantee liberty in practice.

While narratives were being fabricated to sustain a “Gone with the Wind” past, Black people newly freed from slavery remained deprived of full liberty in a supposedly democratic regime.

As white audiences flocked to cinemas — often excluding Black viewers — these representations stoked violence against African Americans.

Lynchings, frequently based on little or no evidence, terrorized entire communities. In some regions, photographs of Black men hanging from trees or bridges were even reproduced as welcome postcards.

Often, these lynchings were carried out under the guise of “popular justice.”

Yet, the legal system persistently turned a blind eye, revealing how far Black citizens were from enjoying secure rights. Fair institutions, not mob trials, govern a truly civilized society. Such acts were entirely reprehensible then and now.

Meanwhile, early color films directed by Victor Fleming sought to transport Americans to a supposedly better past or to fantastical worlds4, even as the Great Depression swept across the nation, exposing a reality far from ideal.

The economic collapse, combined with natural disasters such as the Mississippi floods and the Dust Bowl5, triggered mass migrations and left many struggling to find employment.6

For Black Americans, however, the hardship was far greater, as they were consistently pushed to society’s margins.

When African Americans entered World War II, they were sent to fight and die for a country that still refused to recognize them as full citizens — a reality that repeated itself later in Vietnam.

Yet these contradictions gradually awakened the consciousness of a racially segregated population. While the details of these wars are crucial, I wish to focus on the individuals who transformed our world — particularly those who reshaped it for African Americans, laying the foundations for a more just society.

Rosa Parks, for instance, initiated a pivotal movement simply by refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man.

Equally vital were Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X — the latter always more controversial — in the struggle for civil rights. In his Letter from Birmingham Jail, King wrote a piercing truth about the necessity of protest:

• “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed,” and “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

For those familiar with his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech, I want to get straight to the point: why would anyone consider King’s words or actions wrong? He proclaimed, “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’”

How could such a premise be disputed? How could anyone claim it was morally right to deny people the right to exist as full citizens?

And yet, even today, some revisit the past — not to understand it, but to distort it, to misrepresent it, to label as “wrong” the good deeds of those who fought to make our world a better place.

Revisiting History vs. Distorting It

In 2020, many people reacted furiously to HBO’s decision to temporarily remove Gone With the Wind from its streaming service.

The so-called controversy, which should never have existed in the first place, revolved around people outraged by what many called “woke extremism” supposedly trying to erase the past and rewrite it.

But nothing could have been further from the truth. HBO had merely withdrawn the film temporarily to include the following disclaimer:

“‘Gone With the Wind’ is a product of its time and depicts some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that have, unfortunately, been commonplace in American society. These racist depictions were wrong then and are wrong today, and we felt that to keep this title up without an explanation and a denouncement of those depictions would be irresponsible.”

And it’s indeed a product of its time, considering it was released in 1939.

The film’s racial depictions (in the movie and in the book) have been studied extensively and widely accepted as a romanticization of a time that never was like that.

The modern controversy was exaggerated, manipulated, and, once again, wrapped in political forces hostile to the normal progress of society.

But more than the film’s removal, what matters is the debate that opened up: the reconstruction of historical memory, the question of its accuracy, and the power of those who control the narrative.

All these debates are crucial for the advancement of humanity. It is vital that we increasingly recognize that the historical narratives we have been taught usually come from a single perspective , that they are biased and therefore incomplete.

What many scholars have tried to do is to fill in the missing pieces.

George Lipsitz calls this work an act of counter-memory. It is not a rejection of history, nor a reconstruction from a single new viewpoint, but a restitution.

We can all understand that History told through a single voice will always have gaps, omissions, and inaccuracies. Therefore, it cannot serve humanity as a whole, but only a part of it.

This is why facts must be continually expanded with other facts, so that we may gain a more comprehensive perspective of the past and of how it shaped the reality on which our present stands.

Many contemporary writers and filmmakers have drawn on this concept of counter-memory, using personal stories as entry points to add essential missing pieces to our shared history.

And yet, how can we continue moving along a line of progress when our present moment is defined by post-truth, by the distortion of ethical and moral values?

Recently, I came across on Substack an accusation that Martin Luther King Jr. was a terrible and evil Marxist who supposedly destroyed Black culture in the United States and led Black people toward self-collapse.

Here we go again, witnessing lies and the deterioration of reality.

How could anyone argue that a man worsened the lives of an entire community when he fought — and died — for the recognition of their rights as citizens?

And, in what way is it morally wrong for men and women to enjoy full rights?

And concerning counter-memory — the effort to piece together what history has left out — how could such work be negative for humanity’s knowledge as a whole?

We know the moral answer to these questions. It must be stated clearly: it is not wrong.

On the contrary, these efforts are morally virtuous. And they earned Martin Luther King Jr. a heroic place in the history of all humankind.

Any attempt to undermine historical truth is evil. Attempts to seek the truth are morally good.

What is Good and What is Evil?

When I read an article that placed Martin Luther King Jr. on the throne of evil, I could not help but wonder: what definitions are being used for good and for evil? To answer this, I turned to the insights of philosophers who grappled with these notions.

Saint Augustine (4th century) was particularly concerned with the problem of evil. For him, the existence of evil raised the question: if God exists, why does evil exist? Some used this premise to argue against God’s very existence.

Augustine, however, argued that God created humans as rational beings, and rationality required free will, which necessarily involved the ability to choose between good and evil.

Evil, then, was not caused by God; it was the outcome of human choice. Moreover, evil itself was not a tangible entity, but a lack—a deficiency in a world designed to compel humans to exercise reason in their decisions.

Yet the distinction between goodness, the good, and evil remained to be clarified. Thomas Aquinas offered a fundamental insight: we use the term “good” in many ways. Food is good because it is nourishing or enjoyable; a book is good because it achieves literary perfection or brings us joy. In each case, goodness reflects the desire to pursue something more perfect.

Every act of freedom, therefore, is born from the aspiration to seek the good—a principle inseparable from the very notion of human freedom.

Extending this idea, the good can be seen as the pursuit of human perfection: not in physical or biological terms, but in the qualities that define the human experience—love, friendship, justice, and moral awareness.

Human perfection lies in our capacity to recognize goodness and to freely choose love, truth, and justice. In this light, our human experience becomes a spiritual pursuit of perfection, with the good as the ultimate end toward which all actions strive.

A society, then, can only be considered good insofar as it embodies this pursuit. It must uphold truth, enforce justice, and ensure that all people are treated equally under the law. A perfect society preserves the most fundamental human condition: freedom.

From this perspective, Martin Luther King Jr. sought a just society and, in doing so, ultimately pursued a truer, more perfect society—in other words, he pursued the good.

He sought justice and dreamed that all American citizens would be equal, striving to secure for them what was already enshrined in the Constitution: fundamental rights and the pursuit of happiness.

Therefore, in pursuing a just society, his actions must be understood as morally good, contrary to the mistaken claims I had read.

Of course, some may argue that framing morality as a dichotomy of good versus evil is itself incomplete or limiting.

It raises the question: do the ends justify the means in the pursuit of a perfect society? If the means involve morally condemnable actions, can the ends ever be justified?

These questions could be debated in the context of the civil rights struggle—or, more broadly, as a caution against tyrants claiming moral authority. Niccolò Machiavelli explored these issues at length; for brevity, I will leave his reflections for another occasion.

More contemporary philosophers, such as Noam Chomsky, emphasize the principle of universality: we must apply the same moral standards to ourselves that we apply to others.

Any moral claim that violates this principle cannot be taken seriously. And in the aftermath of so much violence we’re witnessing these days, the only reasonable thing we can do is just not to take seriously voices that do not follow this principle.

Universality is inseparable from the pursuit of the good, for it guides us toward a society that seeks truth, justice, and fairness for all.

From this, we can conclude that a lying, unjust, and exploitative society is an evil society.

A society that practiced slavery was unjust.

A society where truth is manipulated is not seeking the good but perpetuating evil.

An imperfect society is one in which humans exploit one another, where reality is distorted, lies dominate, and injustice prevails.

Ultimately, the fight for justice, truth, and freedom is inseparable from the very idea of democracy itself. A society that claims to be democratic yet silences voices, distorts reality, or denies equality betrays its own principles.

The moral imperative, then, is clear: to defend truth, to uphold freedom, and to challenge every distortion that seeks to redefine justice or obscure the good.

In doing so, we honor the legacy of those who strove to make the world better, and we remind ourselves that democracy and morality are inseparable, not in words alone, but in practice.

And if striving for perfection is part of human nature, then there is hope that goodness will ultimately triumph.

Until that time comes, we must endure the reality of evil in our world. Yet, it remains our responsibility, as rational beings, to choose the battles worth fighting.

I hope we all choose the good one.

6

From this era, pictures like the migrant mother became widely famous:

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Thank you so much.

For more than a hundred years now, our vision of ourselves as humanity has shifted — a pattern that seems to repeat every century, as if in an attempt to renew the strange disorder of things.

Woody Allen once said, paraphrasing, that every hundred years it’s as if the planet lets out a tremendous explosion and replaces all the human beings on Earth. Consider this: a hundred years from now, every person alive today will be gone. (And if a baby alive at the moment I write this reaches a hundred, I leave here my posthumous congratulations from my own grave.)

At the beginning of the last century, a new current arose in the arts as a way of making sense of these changes. The most sensitive souls felt these differences acutely. Modern life — the very phenomenon that would give its name to the movement — had arrived.

The century of revolutions, of Victorian certainties and pretty aestheticisms that filled the hearts of the wealthy, had come to an end; the twentieth century revealed a very different face.

Modern life brought with it a radical individualism, while institutions seemed to crumble in relevance. In science, literature, and the arts, new ideas emerged that shook the near-certainties of the previous age. And then, at last, breaking once and for all with what had come before, the First World War erupted in a conflict the world had never seen.

Now, a hundred years later, the world awakens again in a familiar yet altered way.

One senses the same despair born of uncertainty about what the future may bring. Of course, experiencing it ourselves, it seems far worse than what they endured. But if a century ago, countless voices poured this reality into paint or words, trying to make sense of a new world, I wonder: who speaks for us now? Which poets capture the chaos and affliction of our time? And back then, how did they bear such mental strain, surviving it all? How did they go on living?

We know that Virginia Woolf — one of the many who perceived this shifting pattern — eventually found her escape in the most tragic of ways. There are no “good” suicides, yet filling her coat with stones and walking into a river was, in a way, a stark reflection of her era.

On these changes, Woolf wrote:

“There is no unbashed tranquility in page after page of Wordsworth and Scott and Miss Austen (...) From what, then, arises that sense of security which, gradually, delightfully, and completely overcomes us? It is the power of their belief – their conviction, that imposes itself upon us (...) In both, there is the same natural conviction that life is of a certain quality (...) For certainty of that kind is the condition which makes it possible to write. (...) our contemporaries afflict us because they have ceased to believe.” 1

The certainties of the past belonged only to the past.

Whether in Marx, Darwin, or Freud offering new visions of ourselves, or in electric streetlamps flashing where no light had ever shone, or in cars speeding past pedestrians, their headlights cutting through nights once impenetrable — the world was awakening into a new version of itself.

Twenty-first-century afflictions

A hundred years later, the world is awakening again to profound changes, yet in a different way.

The rise of the internet, the spread of social media, the intelligence granted to machines—all while physical labor remains our burden. And above all, what keeps me awake night after night: the looming inevitability of climate collapse, leaving us inert, anxious, and unsettled. It isolates us in a silent affliction, one we confront alone in the dark, driven from one video to the next, one article to another, on a glowing device that feels less like a tool than an extension of our own bodies

An affliction aggravated by the atrocious advance of age, by a mind that can no longer keep pace with the velocity of progress. The modernists felt lost; we feel dismantled—torn apart, hopeless, skeptical, and, above all, haunted by the suspicion that we might be the last generation to taste happiness on this dying planet.

Today, amid all this dismay, our minds are also distractedly out of sync with themselves. A mind bombarded with far more stimuli than any modernist could ever have imagined. To the lights of the streets, to the electrifying movement of cars, there has now been added the electrification of our psyche.

I am genuinely concerned about the effects of screens, of reels, of endless scrolling. There will never cease to be content. We will never reach the end of anything.

In connection with this, I recall my childhood, when the television broadcast would end at a particular hour of the night — midnight, perhaps.

After that hour, nothing remained on the luminous box but a tiled, gray, static image, with a small, colorful dot indicating that the session was closed for the day. How comforting it was when journalists seemed to have more normal lives and we got a good night’s sleep. Or, if insomnia struck us through the night, we would allow boredom to come and cradle us again.

I also remember turning it on in the morning while the broadcast was still off, waiting for eight o’clock to arrive so it could begin, as if it were a tiny mini-festival.

Every morning, that opening not only marked the start of our day, but gave us the sense of story chapters opening and closing, separated by a small temporal line called night.

The infinite content available at any hour of our existence will never let us rest.

To endure this new world, we may be missing poems in the spirit of T.S. Eliot, but attuned to the twenty-first century. Verses that could lift us out of this endless stream of entertainment, which offers no substance, no fulfillment, and drains happiness faster than it grants it.

In reflection, I have come to realize that all that once filled my mind with wonder has increasingly disappeared from our lives, giving way to empty entertainment.

When I engaged with poems, literature, history, and the pursuit of knowledge, my life felt more purposeful. There was immense joy in learning, in reading, in feeling, accompanied by sensitive voices that so magnificently illustrated the miracle of life, whether writers, musicians, filmmakers, or painters.

The Time When I Lived in a Modernist Poem

In my old single apartment, after returning home frightened — for I was a woman living alone in a strange place — locking the door was soothed by the large Edward Hopper poster spread across the hallway.

Next to the famous Nighthawks were also clippings from silent films that had brought me joy in earlier times.

In the small living room, to the left, where there was not even a television, a small library was surrounded by more Hopper paintings. In the absence of a television displaying moving images, these were my quasi-films that illuminated my nights and kept me company.

For many years, Hopper’s paintings had such a profound effect on me that they made me long to be one of the blonde women in his works.

Whether the woman alone in the theater watching a performance without participating, or the one at the café, wearing a stylish hat and gazing at her solitary cup with no companion2, or even the blonde leaning by her window in a white wooden house, catching the last summer sun.

Or all the souls sitting in a sunny meadow, silent, solitary companions.

In these daydreams I then had, I could not perceive that the immense loneliness my life had fallen into was a faithful reflection of what I admired while sitting alone on an old sofa, in an old apartment, inside an old building where only the elderly lived.

From that old apartment I inhabited alone, the nights were plunged into a freezing silence, stifled by the fear of falling asleep and remaining in that sense of female vulnerability.

“What if I close my eyes and someone breaks in and kills me?” I wondered every night, waking at the slightest noise, whether real or imagined by my mind. In the morning, I would swear that some wandering spirit had stayed in my bed watching me sleep.

So, paralyzed by a genuine fear, I tried not to fall asleep too early.

I would lean over the balcony for hours, watching the lights flicker on, the cars slip past, people returning to their homes, until everything ceased and the night brought only the sound of crows settling on the enormous oaks of the park across from me. At times, my steps on and off the balcony made such a clamor that they seemed to echo against the massive stone wall opposite, and the neighbor’s dogs, perhaps sensing it, would break the strange calm with a relentless barking that lasted for hours.

The period of solitude I had often dreamed of, when sharing my home with others, revealed itself to be very different from the idealized version. All the romanticized visions of the solitary, yet empowered woman fell away for me.

I could never be happy in that state. Left alone, I sank into a profound disbelief in life.

What was this, and what could it ever become, in a future I had not planned, nor wished to?

Meanwhile, wrapped in the glow of presumed urban happiness, my friends marched forward. They married, had children, built careers, traveled the world, and spoke of their plans with certainty. I, by contrast, wanted nothing more than to make it home in one piece and find a night of untroubled sleep.

Every evening, I left school after the sun had already sunk behind the rooftops. I hurried to the entrance of my building — a crumbling block attached to a bar perpetually full of men — and crossed a sticky floor that soaked the soles of my shoes with beer spilled from cans abandoned there during the early hours. I couldn't imagine why anyone would want to stay there, but they did, as if that chaos were some perverse sanctuary where they always found comfort.

And yet, in the dead of night, their murmuring lamentations were the only sounds that reached me — souls equally lost, yet somehow at home in their own oblivion, while I remained utterly apart.

Night Windows

Locked away on the balcony with seven imaginary keys, I never sought refuge in bed.

I stayed in the living room in comfortable clothing I had called pajamas, though they were never officially such. I would sit there, fiddling with my hair, trying to create some image of what it meant to be an adult woman, convinced that life would never take a new course other than this one.

Alone, and with the house silent, I watched the hours pass on the clock hanging by the bookshelf, simultaneously fighting off the sleep of an exhausted body that would eventually succumb, numbed, on an equally uncomfortable sofa. Sleep came more easily in this unofficial manner, carrying me away without my noticing.

Going to bed as if it were some ritual would formally mark my vulnerability. I could never manage it. So, I remained there, with those blonde women from Hopper’s paintings watching me, my hands either clutching a book or in the company of an old, heavy laptop that, perched on a wooden chair, would enter pause mode hours after I fell asleep.

Without money for new films or series, I relied on old DVDs — now dusty, tucked away in forgotten cardboard boxes — through which my old electronic companion played the same American productions over and over and over again. They soothed the anxieties that settled in me: the same images, the same stories, the same voices, the same lines I had memorized by heart.

That feeling of a familiar routine, in the midst of such helplessness, made me believe that life could be nothing more than that, without my really understanding what it was, in fact.

Yet, it was the boredom from all that unbearable repetition that made me unplug my Toshiba notebook, pick up books, and let the curiosity born from the astonishment of my ignorance finally push me toward the University of Coimbra’s Faculty of Letters.

Life had to be different now!

It could no longer continue to be that sum of days washed and dried by the bar’s alcohol next door, while I hurried home, displaced from all those lives. Displaced from myself.

I would learn that the death of my loneliness would not come from earning a new degree. Yet it was through those studies, later, by confronting the description of the life I had lived, that I found some comfort and relief from the peaks of solitude. After all, other human beings could put into words everything that my fear of living had embodied.

T.S. Eliot’s Poems

T.S. Eliot’s Preludes came to me on one of those many occasions in life, from the hands of an English literature teacher who guided me in that direction.

In that classroom, I was never truly alone. There were others like me, people who shared the same love for letters and for the small details that make up the human experience.

And in those passages written by a great poet, continuously dissolving the solitude that had settled within me, there I found myself.

"You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed and watched the night revealing
The thousand and sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling."

It was me, in that uncomfortable bed of that sordid apartment. It was me in my immense discomfort, in my fear, in the dreams invading my mind even before I fell asleep.

It was me on the sofa, avoiding a deep sleep, watching the night settle everywhere, while I, with artificial lights, insisted the day did not end quickly.

It was me, in the form of Marcel Proust, in Swann, lying in that bed too, in that wandering sleep that makes us believe we are intoxicated with a deep sadness for which there are no words.

But in those verses, all the others were also there: my small town, my crazy neighbor who one stormy night had danced in the middle of the street with her child, unseen by anyone. The drunks from the bar next door. The murmurs that sometimes became calm, or seemed to be part of a mechanical film reel rewinding at high speed, showing distorted images.

"And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;"

They were all there, captured in the words of an American who had written them a century before. There was also my own near-judgment—my terrifying perspective on other people’s lives. That vast distance left me even more isolated from the world around me. And there I was:

"Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair;"

There I was, in an Eliot poem, or in another Hopper painting.

Perhaps playing the role of one of those blonde women, nude, watching the world outside, almost protected between physical walls that sheltered my body, but with a soul completely anxious over monotonous and isolated days.

And there was also that same eternal winter night, with people returning home from work. The nauseating smells along the way, the dogs barking in the distance, the clock hands marking the end of the day, the onset of night, the garbage piling up in the streets, whether leaves or old newspapers discarded at the day’s end.

All shrouded in smoke from chimneys that seemed to crush our heads.

"The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet."

Much later — much, much later — I would also find myself in Eliot’s Rhapsody on a Windy Night:

"I have seen eyes in the street
Trying to peer through lighted shutters."

I was those frightened eyes, watching others, forgetting that I too could be seen.

My despair was almost tangible. And my loneliness marked that same year by the death of a close friend. Death, that tragic event inherent to our condition, entered my life earlier than expected. My friend should not have died; it was not her time, yet she was gone.

Suddenly, the denial of her absence surfaced, tangled in the confusion of my own memory.

"Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations,
Its divisions and precisions."

The places my friend had frequented—and that I passed daily—blurred the line between when she had truly lived and when she had been gone. She had occupied those same spaces before I even existed. And now, I carried on without her presence. At times, confused and adrift, I could not tell who was who, or when was when. My existence felt out of control, slipping through my hands, a constant reminder of the irreversibility of losing one of my closest friends to the earth.

"Every street-lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium."

And there I was in the poem, wandering through the ending day, that dizzy human followed by the moon, the street, the hidden sun. While passing through spaces, everyone would tell me to live, to go inside, not to linger on the sofa, to go to bed. It was me, with the overwhelming feeling that it was an insult, living just to live, only to wake up again, condemned to that miserable repetition of those insane and lonely days.

"Here is the number on the door.
Memory!
You have the key,
The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair,
Mount.
The bed is open; the toothbrush hangs on the wall,
Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.
The last twist of the knife."

I wondered then how wonderful it would be to be the moon in that poem, having lost memory, to regain it later and be seen as something spectacular.

But entering that old building was anything but that. It was the awareness of approaching thirty years old with no plan for my life, immersed in an even greater loneliness, not only because those I loved had departed, but because something of me had departed with them.

My friend’s death had such a devastating impact on me that it left me numb to life for an entire period of time.

Eventually, like everything, that phase of life would come to an end. But at the time, that long and painful year seemed to last a whole lifetime.

The modernist poems and Hopper’s paintings transformed that entire period into a secret work of art.

None of them gave me a beacon for life, but they intervened in my death of solitude.

In that old, cold apartment, all the paintings, all the films, and all the written words made me realize something relentless: no matter how displaced I felt, someone, at some point in time, had felt the same as I did.

And that — just that — was enough for solitude to cease being absolute, and for me to feel less alone.

2

Edward Hopper, Automat, painting from 1927

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Stories have always been humanity’s way of making sense of the world, and at their core, many of the greatest tales hinge on a battle between good and evil. 

A typical narrative in any good, classic story centers on the battle between two great forces: good and evil. Personified by solid characters on both sides, the plot weaves through events where evil exists without explanation, and good must endure a grueling journey full of challenges to ultimately triumph. 

Through simple stories, we’ve always taught children that wicked witches are simply evil without reason. 

The desire to poison Snow White with an apple is as inexplicable as the envy of Cinderella’s stepsisters and stepmother, who strive to prevent her from attending the ball.

Likewise, villains like the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz or Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty embody malice without a backstory or justification. The Wicked Witch terrorizes Dorothy and her companions without cause, and Maleficent’s desire for revenge leads her to curse Aurora, plunging the princess into an eternal sleep, driven by nothing more than bitterness and spite

Their wickedness simply is, a moral force that children are taught to resist.

In literature, the White Witch in The Chronicles of Narnia (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe), Jadis rules Narnia with an iron fist, plunging the land into eternal winter.

Read more

Knowledge is power. Without it, even the most intelligent mind lacks the tools necessary to fully leverage its potential. Similarly, brute strength alone is of no use to a stonemason if he doesn’t know how to properly apply it and extract what he most needs from the mountain. 

Analogies could continue almost infinitely to conclude that an intelligent mind paired with knowledge makes a person better equipped to face the world and succeed. 

Knowledge has been and remains a cornerstone of our Western civilization. In terms of social mobility, it is also a key factor in rising within social hierarchies. An educated person can go up the so-called social scales, if not with money, at least in the way one sees the world.

However, when discussing knowledge and wisdom, we must also introduce the concept of culture — a word whose meaning has already filled countless books and continues to generate meanings.

If we think of culture as something that makes us more ‘civilized’ and tempers our more ‘barbaric’ instincts, it becomes a virtue that elevates and refines us. 

Surely, it is a concept much talked about, and this definition as a ‘virtue’ has been deeply contested in the modern world by “old-new” thinkers such as Michel Foucault —who argued that culture often serves as a tool for societal control — or Edward Said —who exposed the ways culture can reinforce colonial and orientalist perspectives. 

These modern critiques planted the seeds of deconstruction, revealing culture as neither neutral nor purely elevating but rather as ‘something’ shaped by constant power dynamics, historical context, and the intricate relationships between individuals and societies. 

Yet, many of these new thinkers under the ‘umbrella’ of this ‘old-new’ Left have forgotten concepts of morals and ethics from the culture’s definition and could be appalled if culture is defined in such ways as a way to ‘achieve refinement.’

Perhaps many would immediately neglect the concept of virtue, which was explored by the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 BC — 322 BC) and later recaptured by several English writers in the late 19th century, who viewed culture as a virtue enabling a man to ascend to the status of a “gentleman.” 

Mainly, I highlight Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism (1867–9) to address this matter. This Victorian poet and literary critic  tal about the difference between the so-called “High Culture”, or simply culture defined as the best what has been thought and said, contrasting deeply with what he refers to as the anarchy that threatens to destroy it.1

Arnold was alarmed by the advent of technology and mass production, which led to the proliferation of a mass culture that clashed with this ideal of virtuous refinement.

I'm perfectly aware that 21st-century readers may view these definitions as conflicting with modern policies, quickly labeling them Left or Right2. A division—rooted in the French Revolution— that has since polarized private lives, fueling clashes over what is 'good' or 'bad’.

Conservatives might defend Arnold’s views, arguing that beauty, harmony, and the sublime are understood and felt by all, while progressives from the Left would insist that viewing culture through the lens of taste alone is flawed, as notions of “good” and “bad” taste are social and class constructions.

All these reductive definitions that don’t invite debate or reflection are abject to me. Until I came across this definition, and coming from a working-class background, I always felt that when classical music was on television   I was in front of something that, although I didn’t understand it, I was perplexedly enchanted by. 

Having had no social education to discern what was good or bad, I’ll give two cases as an example of something that I felt was inherently better than the other.

The first is the case of a large painting in the dining room of my parents’ house. It was and is a painting by an unknown author, but despite this ‘ignoble’ fact, it has always touched that intangible part of me that some people call the soul. 

The painting was and remains sublime—a concept that the modern world has unfortunately lost. It depicts a romanticized 19th-century landscape, showing a bucolic, harmonious, peaceful country scene with nature shining through.

During my childhood, I just felt that the image was beautiful. As simple as that: beautiful. It transported me to other places, inspired my imagination, and made me want to live inside that painting. 

In stark contrast, in my working-class life and family, whenever I visited my uncles’ house — who were more prosperous in money —  reggaeton was always playing on their radios. Simultaneously, too many pictures of motorbikes were hanging in their corridors.

Without anyone having taught me what beauty or ugliness was and speaking only of what I felt, the orchestras on TV and that beautiful painting pleased me, while what I witnessed at my uncle’s made me uncomfortable because of their ugliness.

I maintain that there are objectively beautiful things and objectively ugly things. The deconstruction of this small notion is a danger and an invitation to chaos for many thinkers—myself included.

Yet, it has been in vogue for many decades already, and contradicting it seems forbidden. We can all thank Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002), who argued that “good taste” is this social construct of the ruling class that reinforces inequalities rather than representing an objective measure of cultural value, ultimately perpetuating social disparities. 

I wish Bordeau had studied my case: a girl born in a rural, isolated village surrounded by popular dances and drunkards, born from parents with little schooling who, despite those facts, was perplexed by the medieval cathedral in her city, wanted to live in the painting of the dining room and was interested in classical music.

I know he would probably argue that these interests of mine could only be part of a power dynamic: I’d like all that because I’d only want to go against the paternal power — inclined towards things that I find uglier. 

Fortunately, I’m still in control of the narrative of my life, and I could say that nothing would be further from the truth than such a definition.

On the other hand, conservative British philosopher Roger Scruton would counter by emphasizing aesthetics, claiming that true masterpieces stand out for their beauty, while much of modern art is driven by horror and ugliness. He posits that beauty — and thus culture as defined as ways to refine humans — are universal values anyone can appreciate. 

I lean toward this latter view, supporting what I will continue to argue through this article: that contradicting this notion by claiming that culture or beauty is class-based does more harm than good. It ends up depriving disadvantaged classes of the opportunity to access it, leading to the very contradiction that modern leftist policies often find themselves entangled in.3

The Battle Over Culture: Shifting Ideals and Political Power Plays

Today, we observe profound confusion about the state of culture and which political faction is ‘playing’ with it. Both factions use culture as a tool of power to manipulate private lives through continuous social experiments.

We might ask: who seeks to preserve an 'elite' culture grounded in knowledge, and who aims to dismantle it by promoting pop and mass culture as alternatives to this supposedly superior tradition reserved, in their view, for an exclusive few?

Historically, conservative right-wingers defended the former, while the revolutionary Left advocated for the latter; today, however, these lines have not only blurred but have transformed — some might say they have been lost. 

Culture, knowledge, wisdom, and the educational effort needed to attain it are being neglected by both sides , whose identities seem to be lost.

Supposed far-right groups today are often represented by wealthy politicians — Donald Trump heads this list, and Elon Musk as well.  However, these figures do not necessarily espouse traditional conservative ideas like those of ancient Greece or Victorian England. 

Trump, a demagogue with wealth and no apparent sense of aesthetics — one only has to look at photos of his New York apartment to understand this — is not even inclined toward traditional Christian conservatism, despite pretending that he is.

If we consider that for much of humanity, knowledge was historically preserved and protected by the Christian tradition — whether we like it or not — and that priests were traditionally regarded as highly literate, the contrast with this so-called right-wing kitsch is striking. These individuals claim to uphold Christian values, yet their grasp of language and culture is often primitive and rife with barbarism, making it difficult to draw any meaningful connection.

They neglect knowledge and intellectual thought — one only needs to hear them speak to assert this.

However, they are skillful at using demagoguery to attract the underprivileged classes, who now rightly feel patronized by an elitist Left. Yet, right-wing conservatism isn’t (or wasn’t) this. This is something else, perhaps wild capitalism allied with dumbness may be a good way to define it.

But it’s not conservatism, not at least how it once was. If we consider the broader meaning of the word “conservative,” even Americans in the 19th century associated the preservation of nature with it.4

Conservatism included preserving life as it exists, with the environment as an inseparable part. The word itself says so: conserve and maintain rather than destroy.

On the other hand, during the same time, Leftist progressivism championed a type of “progress” that, in hindsight, has proven destructive: industrialization and factory fumes filled cities, covering them in soot and erasing the beauty and harmony of life. 

The famous Impressionist art of that time was more than just a romanticized cityscape; it was an artistic response to cities choked by smoke, blurring their outlines and dissolving them into the horizon.

Yet, we all know everything has changed sides, and trying to define what’s one faction or the other is increasingly complex.

Confusion in our modern minds about what is one or the other arises when we witness right-wing politicians veering far from this idea of conservatism — environmentally, culturally, or in values of seriousness and responsibility.

However, the perplexity surrounding culture in leftist circles is equally real.

By insisting that all culture is simply an unequal power struggle, where resources are unfairly distributed due to the ruling class’s constant usurpations, the Left reduces the complexity of human nature to a single dimension. Culture is thus deconstructed solely through the lens of class struggle and power distribution, yet I fear the human condition is far more intricate than this.

I began this article by briefly exploring culture to address an urgent question about current leftist policies: despite their supposedly noble intentions, these policies have become entangled in a philosophical paradox, failing to anticipate their implications and, in most cases, achieving the opposite of what they intended.

The Left needs to adopt an ethical stance that accounts not only for its intentions but also for their consequences. I

I’ll provide an example.

While writing this, I came across educational policies in England that, under the guise of left-wing cultural preservation, show how well-intentioned actions, without considering consequences, can end up disastrously wrong.

Consider the case of an English primary school teacher who is forbidden from correcting her students’ speech errors.

Why, you may ask?

The students come from working-class families with limited access to education, which results in objectively incorrect linguistic patterns. The teacher, now under scrutiny, cannot correct her students because doing so would disrespect their cultural identity.

It’s shocking!

This policy, disguised as preserving the cultural identity of ‘disadvantaged’ students, ultimately deepens the divides it aims to address.

As I argued earlier, knowledge is power. Ignorance and illiteracy are its opposites. A population denied access to educational tools becomes more easily manipulated and subjected to political propaganda. This applies to any ideological faction.5

By seeking to preserve the local identity of working-class children, this leftist policy ensures that those children remain in the same place, unable to achieve social mobility.

Noble intentions do not always lead to just or beneficial outcomes. The purpose is well-intend, but the result is the same as its opponent on the extreme side.

As the daughter of working-class parents, I’ve always felt that, under a conservative system, the knowledge offered to me, in particular, was limited. Teachers from higher social classes had low expectations of me, so there was little effort to correct or refine my speech.

Yet, I would have welcomed such corrections, as they would have allowed me to reach the exact places where others, with their polished words, condescendingly reiterated their views.

By restricting access to knowledge, the Left is doing the same, inadvertently ensuring that these groups will never grasp or value the “good intentions” behind its policies.

Moreover, prioritizing identity and cultural issues while neglecting practical outcomes alienates the working class.

Very ironically, it opens the door for right-wing movements to exploit the discontent of those who feel marginalized, ultimately pushing them to be recruited by dangerous factions, whether through vandalism, violent crime, drug trafficking, or terrorist groups or, of course, supporting demagogues like Trump.

For the Left to reconnect with these potential voters, it must rethink the role of education and language as instruments of empowerment.

Rather than viewing education as an imposition or cultural oppression, it should be seen as an essential tool for freedom and equality.

In this way, everyone, regardless of their background, can start from the same point, empowering them to understand, critique, and transform society.

But all these cultural issues are increasingly intertwined with political life, making it clear that an ideological debate is urgently needed on both sides. Moreover, for this reason, access to a greater culture of knowledge, be it history or more ancient and ‘heavy’ philosophy, takes on a high value even for both factions. It teaches us to think, to rethink, and to look for examples of good practice.

To help us out, we can always turn to history and philosophy for guidance when direction feels uncertain.

For example, in Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle emphasizes that intention is necessary but must be paired with deliberation and practical judgment (phronesis).

Intention, in isolation, is insufficient.

It must be informed by reason and the pursuit of the good. In other words, it’s not enough to want to act rightly; we must carefully consider how to act and aim for the best practical outcome.

In the political sphere, Aristotle’s ideal suggests that rulers and legislators should prioritize the good of society through balanced, reasoned actions.

Thus, public policies must be crafted with a clear focus on their practical consequences, not merely on the “good” intentions of their creators.

Aristotle would argue that a truly virtuous educational policy fosters the full development of the individual, equipping them to think and act autonomously, critically, and to their highest potential.

Therefore, virtue in education lies in balanced teaching—avoiding paternalism while ensuring students gain the intellectual and cultural tools necessary to thrive and contribute to society.

The growing divide between the Left and the working class underscores the urgent need for a new balance. To reconnect with this voter base, the Left must shift its focus from complex, niche cultural agendas to policies that address tangible economic and social concerns. 6

This is not a dismissal of cultural issues but a call for the Left to engage more closely with the material needs of the population. The challenge is to find a way to address identity and inclusion without neglecting the real-world economic and social issues affecting most people’s lives.

The Left faces a significant philosophical dilemma: when its policies' consequences contradict their intentions, there is a moral responsibility to reconsider practices and rethink strategies.

This misalignment between intention and outcome highlights the need to balance idealism and pragmatism. The (re) election of Donald Trump on November 5, 2024, illustrates this very well, revealing a backlash against its growing elitism and its voters turning to the right.7

Rather than clinging to outdated political labels, a more productive focus would be on evaluating policies based on their intentions and the real-world consequences they produce.

By prioritizing values like justice, dignity, and well-being, politics can shift from ideological purity to pragmatic solutions that benefit society as a whole. 

Such an approach encourages ongoing reevaluation of policies, ensuring they evolve to address changing social needs without being constrained by rigid political frameworks.

By focusing on human values and practical outcomes, politics can move beyond divisiveness and toward a more inclusive, pragmatic approach to governance that prioritizes the common good over ideological allegiance.

This conception, we will favor society and, ultimately, everyone.

Hello, I’m Araci Matos. “Tales of Culture” is my way of delving into how we see and feel history, the arts, and classicism—all with an eye toward the present moment.

Every week, I’ll aim to bring you thoughtful, engaging articles that offer fresh insights. However, each piece here will involve careful reading, reflection, research, and investigation. If this article or its podcast version brings something meaningful to your life, please consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber or giving me a tip here.

Thank you for reading!

Araci

As a Western society, our grasp of historical time is both weak and flawed. There is a growing disinterest in intellectual pursuits, in-depth thinking, and genuine curiosity.

It’s a lightness that, as such, only touches the surface, leaving the depth and detail relegated to oblivion and connoted as irrelevant.

Such an approach is problematic in multiple ways: culturally, it leads to an erosion of values; philosophically, it fosters a decline in meaningful reflection; and even psychologically, it undermines our well-being, affecting both individuals and the collective.

I’ve been hearing, reading, and discussing how our way of life is driving us toward an identity and values crisis—a moment in history when both personal and collective stories and history are weaponized for political purposes, regardless of the ideological faction.

But the most worrying thing is that we tend to think only about recent history, even focusing only on the day's news.

The world seen through screens shows a reality artificially constructed by biased narratives, falsely presenting itself as a ready-made world as if it had always been this way.

Thus, we are left with no room — or even the possibility — to reflect on the long history we literally base our cities on, willfully ignoring what ruins found in excavations tell us.

As we pass by, we believe we are detached from these ancient stones, connoting them merely as “old” without really being able to place them in a particular time.

“When?” we may ask ourselves.

And in the line, circle, or wheel of time — whatever you want to call it — even the most educated get lost in the thread, embarrassed by their ignorance, trying to answer that same question.

“When, really?”

And if even they feel humiliated—searching their brains for information that has been distorted, incomplete, and misinterpreted—how can we ask others to look at relics and feel the great human dimension before their eyes?

How can we ask them to do the simple exercise of going back in time and being able to situate stages of humanity within it?

In this confusion, even the meanings of what is old, ancient, or recent become loose words, at the mercy of each nation’s and its individuals’ interpretation.

So, history becomes a crucial discipline that is easily manipulated. This is most evident among citizens with limited access to their collective past, where those in power use history as they wish for their ideological purposes.

The proof of this can be seen in the continual distortion and interpretation that each ideological faction gives to historical facts. Politicians, dictators, and corrupt people do with history as they please because the individuals to whom they are presented don’t know it either.

As notorious examples are ex-colonial powers — Portugal among them — which once depicted their rule as a benevolent mission, omitting the exploitation and repression they imposed.

Another example is how, during the Cold War, the U.S. and Soviet Union reshaped historical narratives, promoting freedom or Communist ideals while erasing inconvenient truths — be it in America with its internal racism, inequality, and the role of imperialism or in the Soviet Union, with the promotion of the working-class struggles while downplaying its oppressive aspects.

These distortions remind us that history, without scrutiny, is a powerful instrument for those seeking to control collective memory and influence contemporary beliefs.

As such, a flawed view of historical time not only allows room for these manipulations but also does not allow us to position ourselves as part of that history. This distortion, often manipulated by nationalist narratives, is also at the root of this misunderstanding of historical time on a larger scale.

Individuals in young Western nations, such as Australia, Canada, and America, often view the concept of “old” through a self-referential lens. They see history primarily through the prism of their own national identity, which, in the last case, spans a mere 250 years.

This narrow understanding of historical time fosters a self-centered perspective of each nation, viewing the rest of the world as somehow “less” — less civilized, less competent, less wise, shaping its citizens on how they perceive themselves (their sense of identity and place in the world).

Such a view disregards its limitations and remains stagnant, oblivious to the rich and complex world surrounding it.

In my interactions with various individuals worldwide, this superficiality of historical time is particularly almost palpable among technologically advanced societies, which cannot often connect with historical time that stretches back millennia and the human dimension that comes with it.

Yet, they are winning and prevailing.

All the “older civilizations” and their profoundness concerning historical time are exponentially erased by globalization driven by the “wrong forces.” It’s a loss that fosters apathy toward our “priorness” and a tragedy for mankind.

When we fail to nurture a love for something, allowing it to fall into oblivion, we fall into a collective amnesia, failing to know how to live, be, or exist. The connection to technology and the lack of interest in ancient history go hand in hand. Our brains are nearly being brainwashed by the distraction, emptiness, and boredom that we continue to consume nonetheless.

And nowadays, even those with a modicum of curiosity struggle with a severe attention deficit.

The books containing this ancient wisdom have yet to be opened. And if they are, we can’t connect with them, feeling tremendous anxiety about how long it will take us to reach the end. because that’s all that matters today, only the end, getting there, before moving on to something else.

This feeling is fuelled by a lifestyle in which everything is presented quickly in short videos, in which modern ‘sages’ chatter in an entertaining and intrepid manner to hopefully capture attention for the next few minutes.

The way many subjects are presented — rapidly and lacking profoundness — may fill us with anxiety while making us feel we should be learning Greek or Latin through an app or quickly tackling history, math, or philosophy.

We feel pressure to read the entire literary canon, but feeling behind, we’re tempted to settle for summaries instead.

Ultimately, it all collapses into mental chaos, leading to confusion, until we close the screen and do nothing at all.

Amid these intellectual anxieties of modern life, where we are expected to know everything but often end up knowing very little, we increasingly lose our roots and, precisely, our sense of historicity.

But returning to this sense of historicity or historical time, Westerners tend to place history’s beginning in Classical Antiquity or simply “antiquity.” However, in a world where words increasingly lack meaning, we wander when asked “when,” turning the answers into questions for ourselves.

“When, really?”

We don’t know exactly when or what this antiquity was. The answers become vague, adrift like a sailboat without wind.

We imagine a time without dates, elastic, too stretched and never condensed, perhaps “before Christ” — the Christian/ Western temporal marker when “we began counting the years.”

Our discussions about the Romans often revolve around their representation in blockbuster films, where the saga of a gladiator is more important than the real nuances of the history in which it is set.

In this entertainment industry enamored with war and action, the Greeks rarely appear unless framed in an even more distant past where the Trojan horse becomes a symbolic checkmate.

Yet, we struggle to pinpoint when this event occurred or fully grasp what it entailed.

While cinematic portrayals can be valuable in recapturing ancient myths, they often suffer from the same superficial treatment of history, condensing complex narratives into two or three hours.

Moreover, contemporary films face an additional challenge: a runtime of two hours can seem daunting even to the most curious viewers, who are now accustomed to the format of TV series with episodes lasting at most 40 minutes. For many, even the prospect of an hour-long episode feels now overwhelming.

This incompleteness—exemplified by the lack of more quality information—gives individuals a fragmented view of historical time.

We know little about ancient Greece, summing it up as far as knowing only about feta cheese, olive trees, olive oil, social media photos of idyllic islands, or whatever remains our eyes can catch in Athens, where timeless ruins stand amidst a chaotic modern city.

The better-educated might go a little further, speaking of city-states, ostracism, democracy, the concept of barbarians, philosophy, and mathematics — buzzwords meant to show how much they “know” of nothing.

From this nothingness, we leap from era to era in a partially correct sequence yet fundamentally incomplete. We begin with ancient Greece—whatever that may entail—before transitioning to “ancient” Rome, noting its fall. This is followed by an ambiguous period that leads into the infamous Middle Ages and finally culminates in a Renaissance that rekindles nearly all of humanity.

A few dozen concepts are tossed around, and suddenly… we’re in the contemporary age, with the man landing on the moon, returning to Earth, and getting lost in the digital world.

DONE.

Of course, having some knowledge is better than having none. However, what troubles me most is how this superficial overview can create the illusion of completeness, stifling any motivation to delve deeper into what seems already “discovered.”

This limited conception of reality is profoundly detrimental to our pursuit of knowledge. We often need a clearer understanding of how the beginning of one era might coincide with the end of another, leaving us with fragmented insights rather than a cohesive historical narrative.

For' ancient Rome,’ we begin with the mythological tale of Romulus and Remus, the legendary twins nurtured by the she-wolf of the Capitol.

We often find this story amusing, snapping photographs of the statue near the Roman Forum, blissfully unaware that this myth dates back nearly a century after Homer penned the Odyssey, a work that recounts heroic times even earlier than his own.

From ancient Rome, where myths intertwine yet lack depth, we are often left in the dark about the foundational aspects of the Roman monarchy: its duration, the subsequent establishment of the Republic, and, eventually, later, the creation of the Roman Empire, which was contemporary with the birth of Jesus Christ, being ‘founded’ merely about forty years before his arrival.

Yet how frequently do we conflate historical events, believing they exist in isolation rather than in tandem?

For example, how often do we mistakenly associate the birth of Jesus with the fall of the Roman Empire instead of its inception?

It is as if history and the time it encompasses form a singular, linear narrative belonging to one people rather than existing as parallel, complementary lines with multiple beginnings, endings, progressions, and regressions.

If I haven’t bored the reader by this point, I’d like to share that all these observations arise from my own astonishment at how I have misinterpreted historical time for too long, falling into the simplistic temptation of presenting this particular sequence of events as linear.

In my flawed understanding of ancient Greece, I once believed that Homer was a contemporary of Odysseus, Achilles, and the legendary conflicts between Greeks and Trojans. I thought the renowned author of the Odyssey was recounting events he had personally experienced.

But that’s all wrong.

I’m guilty, of course, but it’s also important to blame the educational systems and how they teach history and the humanities. They present mere facts without making us feel that these characters we’re talking about, sometimes enigmatic and sometimes banal, were humans, like us.

It would have been much more revealing to me if the history teacher had told me that 1933 was the year the dictatorship officially began in Portugal and had made the parallel that it was the same year that my maternal grandfather was born.

If history were taught by feeling that we were part of it and not outside of it, our perception of reality would be much more concrete than abstract.

In this more real perception, we would find our strength and fragility; we would see ourselves as active subjects and victims of that same history. Subjects who sometimes invade and sometimes are invaded by human forces, but also by the brute forces of nature that have continued to affect us and will continue to affect us in the future.

A great example of all this is when history talks about invasions without explaining why they came about or connecting them to the fundamental human need to survive. Teachers may teach the consequences of those invasions throughout history, but students lack the parallel connection to our planet and the natural systems to which we inextricably belong.

Throughout history, invasions, such as the Roman conquest of Britain, Viking raids, European colonization of the Americas, Mongol invasions, Bantu migrations, the Syrian Civil War, and the Opium Wars, reveal not just military might but the underlying human needs for resources, land, and survival that often drive these conflicts.

Natural disasters, whether due to climate change or other tragedies, drive mass migrations. Seeking a better place—whether out of necessity or for the spirit of adventure—could be the title of our story as humans.

For too long, I have speculated on what might have happened to “humanity” had the barbarian invasions not toppled the Roman Empire and placed “all of us” into the dark Middle Ages period. I played with my imagination but did not venture beyond merely viewing one unique cycle of progress, collapse, regression, and rejuvenation.

In this weak temporal notion, I, like many, thought that the Middle Ages had been a period of cultural regression and fervent religious fervor unmatched by anything humanity had ever experienced.

And while it was indeed a unique time — as all periods are — it is framed only within a continuous cycle of our long history, in several places, at various times, and sometimes even simultaneously.

The collapse of the Roman Empire and the establishment of the Middle Ages was merely another process of decline, war, and the establishment of another civilization or way of life amidst others equally similar.

When we are taught history, we often forget what happened centuries before Greece in the so-called Classical period—between 500 BC and 300 BC.

Classic Greece met humans like Alexander the Great and Socrates and witnessed the creation of the famous Parthenon in Athens. This is the time of the ‘city-states’ that, with luck, some learned about in school.

However, this differs from the time of Homer, who lived in the age of Archaic Greece, which dates back to 800 BC.

In other words, Socrates is separated from Homer by about three to four centuries. This would be equivalent to comparing myself today with someone who lived in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, like Isaac Newton (1642–1727) or Voltaire (1694–1778).

Just as Socrates would have viewed Homer as a figure from a distant and legendary past, we view figures like Newton and Voltaire as thinkers and creators who profoundly shaped our world but belong to a time very different from our own.

And curiously — breaking the conceptions of a single period steeped in dark ages — before this Archaic period in which the writer of the Odyssey lived, the territory we now call Greece also underwent a Greek Dark Age (800 BC to 1100 BC).

This Greek Darg Age followed the fall of the great Mycenaean civilization around 1125 BC — a fall primarily attributed to the invasion of the Dorian people, or simply those “coming from the sea.”

The civilization of Mycenae is where we can situate the mythological stories of wars between Greeks and Trojans, the most famous being the abductions of beautiful Helen, Achilles, and Odysseus and the trickery of the famous Trojan Horse.

However, all these legends, commonly called “in antiquity,” date back to around 1200 years before Christ!

And if that gives us more headaches, by the time of Archaic Greece and Homer (circa 8th century BCE), the Great Pyramid of Giza was already ancient. The pyramid, built around 2560 BCE, was already over 1,800 years old by Homer’s time.

This fascinating fact often surprises people, as it puts into perspective how ancient Egyptian civilization was relative to Classical Greece. It shows that even the “old” societies of Greek antiquity saw Egypt as a distant, ancient culture.

For the great writer Homer, the pyramids felt as they do to us today with the Colosseum in Rome: a prestigious ancient monument, symbolizing both the power of an ancient civilization and its fall.

With these unusual comparisons, I want to emphasize how, after the fall of this Mycenaean civilization, there followed a dark, shadowy period of ‘darkness,’ whose renaissance would also take time to arrive.

And how, here, too, we see these constant cycles of civilizations that fall due to various factors, whether they be eternal conflicts, crises of values, the disbelief of the people, injustices in the system, changes in trade routes, or economic declines arising from successive years of poor harvests…

As I mentioned earlier, this last point, the factor of nature, is of extreme relevance. Food shortages or natural disasters bring turmoil to the streets and the subsequent abrupt break with the peace experienced or any time of prosperity.

Empty bellies and hunger led not only to the death of people but also to their movements to other territories, often marked by solid invasions and plundering that led to the destruction of the ancient civilization.

In turn, in a domino effect, invasions and conflicts lead to forced displacement of people who will seek peace elsewhere. It is a domino effect in a world where the history of land possession is almost inscribed in our DNA.

The fall of this Mycenaean civilization during the Bronze Age (1600–1100 BC), which gave us the stories of Odysseus, is similar to the rise and fall of other empires in a human and natural cycle. It is a metaphor for birth, life, and death.

Empires last, expand, and when they reach their peak, they enter decline, revealing that peace seems to unsettle our deepest being.

Looking at history with this temporal burden, it is easy to draw a parallel between our current world and see it merely inserted into this endless repetition of cycles. One day, our society and its supposed civilization will be beneath the earth, whether it be our skeletons or the houses we inhabit today.

Regarding insertion into these cycles, studying history in this way means looking at our time and knowing how to place ourselves in any cyclical phase.

And the evidence that we are in the decline phase is proper before us. Humanity — for the first time in history, not being reduced to a small piece of land — is living through climate changes on a planetary scale; as a cause and effect, populations are entering wars, fleeing harsh places, and seeking better locations.

We see this with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in search of obtaining the enormous granary that the country represents.

We see this in the reckless imperialism of Israel, in the absurd ambition for expansion at the cost of eradicating an entire people.

We see this in the hundreds of thousands of migrants who set out on foot from Latin America to North America;

We see this in the thousands of Africans afflicted by hunger, storms, and now even monsoons, whose only dreams are to reach Europe, an El Dorado that seems to them like a dream and from which many never reach their land, dying in that big cemetery that the Mediterranean has become.

Simultaneously, and telling the story within these parallel lines, we face increased polarized political opinions among populations, dividing opinions and weakening the political system and the values on which society rests.

The most direct consequence is an identity crisis among the nations and peoples that constitute them. The most dreadful consequence, of course, is war, whether civil or not. Once again, America serves as an example with its 19th-century Civil War between a South and a North with opposing values. This situation hasn’t changed much to this day.

We are also witnessing a growing disbelief in the institutions that support us — in the educational system, healthcare, justice, and especially in the political system and the people who compose it.

We pride ourselves on having democratic systems, where now our choices lead us to vote not for who we like but against who we hate.

On a larger scale, skepticism about the actual functioning of large institutions is palpable. In Europe, the voices of the members of the European Parliament have become almost imperceptible, distant, and even invisible within a bureaucratic system and a heavy machine that the average citizen does not know and that the more educated hope to understand.

And beyond borders, on a scale that should be global, the United Nations reveals itself as what it has always been: the continued legacy of a failed project, like the League of Nations in its genesis. Born already crooked in its cradle, the UN makes its lack of power evident, marked by the permanent veto of a group of countries that, undemocratically, have self-appointed themselves as “owners of the world.”

What good does it do for most countries to vote against the end of the American embargo on Cuba when the United States — obviously part of the issue — has veto power, and its allied satellites (Israel, dependent on it; Ukraine, for the same reason) — also vote against it?

What good is a global condemnation made by the UN of what Israel has been doing for decades with territorial expansion, annihilating an entire ethnicity and, as such, contravening all regulations of international law if they continue to do as they please? They even go so far as to label the UN Secretary-General as persona non grata, barring him from entering.

These are some examples of the UN’s enormous failures. The UN has yet to achieve its goal of establishing peace among peoples.

Its failure to prevent numerous genocides since its founding is evident: the Cambodian genocide in the 1970s, the Rwandan genocide in 1994, and ongoing atrocities today, such as the targeting of the Rohingya in Myanmar and violence in Darfur. Moreover, the devastation in Gaza, ongoing since 1948, has intensified before our eyes. It’s also now impacting the West Bank and extending ambitions toward Lebanon under the pretext of dismantling Hezbollah, with little regard for limits.

In all cycles of history, a society has entered a decline due to all the above aspects. Internal divisions, polarizations, climate change, the movement of people to other lands, and the typical conflict between civilizations open the door to instability and the emergence of authoritarian regimes that vainly preach the restoration of order or a return to another golden age.

Leaders like Caesar, Augustus, Cleopatra, Philip, Hitler, and Mussolini exploited their societies’ desire for stability and past glory, promising to restore order or revive golden times. However, these promises often came at the cost of the freedoms and institutions that sustained those societies.

Unfortunately, this entire paragraph could describe our current situation, and it is easy to identify Trump’s name in that continuity. His slogan, “Make America Great Again,” fits perfectly within these ideas. But if history serves us, it shows that all those leaders had their ambitions thwarted.

Caesar, for instance, was assassinated just as he was about to become dictator for life and annihilate the Roman Republic — a scenario that resonates with concerns about polarization and the weakening of democratic institutions in the United States.

Augustus brought stability to Rome, but at a cost: the end of the Republic and the beginning of the autocratic empire that, over the centuries, degenerated until the final collapse of Rome.

Cleopatra, seeking to restore a sovereign and glorious Egypt, also paid dearly for her ambition; her failed alliances resulted in the Roman Empire annexing Egypt.

Moving to more modern times, leaders like Hitler and Mussolini successfully exploited nostalgia for a “strong” and “powerful” past, but this led their countries to ruin. Hitler, with his Third Reich, devastated Germany and Europe, while Mussolini, promising to recreate the glory of the Roman Empire, brought dictatorship and disastrous war to Italy.

This is how Rome collapsed, Greece disintegrated, and Egypt was annexed. History shows us that the true challenge is to deal with the present without falling into illusions about a past that can no longer be recovered.

This same history, neglecting its time, its deeds, and its events, is also what we desperately need to recapture to understand where we are, as we have seen up until now in 2024.

Today, our society also faces challenges echoing the elements of those historical collapses. We observe economic and social inequality, with ever-widening disparities between the richest and the poorest.

All these signs illustrate the repetition of historical patterns that have led to the collapse of societies.

However, if we have any hope left, we might ask: Are we really at an inevitable end or living through a turbulent phase before a possible rebirth?

Many societies have reinvented themselves, emerging from deep darkness into a more enlightened period.

It will be up to us as a society to determine how we will face future crises. Knowing and feeling history and its historical time gives us tools to make informed and, thus, better decisions.

Whether we unite or fall into polarised ideologies that stifle dialogue will determine how we face these challenges. The ability to choose leaders up to the task will ultimately decide whether or not we enter an effective decline or a new phase of adaptation and regeneration.

I would like to believe that our decisions are wise enough to favor the latter.

Hello, I’m Araci Matos, a writer here on Substack, and I have other publications where I explore self-fiction narratives.

However, this new publication, “Tales of Culture,” is my way of delving into how we see and feel history, the arts, and classicism—all with an eye toward the present moment.

This first article is free, and I’m excited to share it with you.

Every week, I’ll aim to bring you thoughtful, engaging articles that offer fresh insights.

However, each piece here will involve careful reading, reflection, research, and investigation. If this article or its podcast version brings something meaningful to your life, please consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber.

Thank you for reading!

Araci