Exhausted Universals. Modernity at the Threshold of Its Internal Limit

Untitled, Zdzislaw Beksinski (1976)

The Ontological Caesura

We live in the pause between breaths—in that suspended moment when the lungs of history are full of stale air but have not yet inhaled the fresh. This is no ordinary transitional period, no familiar passage from one institutional arrangement to another, one dynasty yielding to the next, one ideology displaced by its rival. Today’s earthlings are experiencing something more fundamental: an ontological caesura, a rupture in the very mode by which human existence structures time, imagines itself, and orders its co-being with others and with the world. What lies behind this caesura is not simply a concluded period but an exhausted project.

A caesura differs from a crisis in both depth and kind. A crisis suggests a temporary disruption within a stable system, a deviation that correction might restore to equilibrium. The periodic crises of capital—those “creative destructions” that punctuate capitalist history—have, for example, always served as moments of renewal, clearing away accumulated contradictions to restore conditions for accumulation (Schumpeter, 1942/2013). But caesura denotes something else entirely: the historical moment when the prevailing mode of temporalization—the unfolding of being in time and world—exhausts itself, while the new has not yet taken form. When former structures of subjectivity, those frameworks through which humans understand themselves as thrown into the world and acting in history, lose their persuasive power without successors to replace them. When regimes of truth, the mechanisms through which society legitimates knowledge and authority, fracture and expose emptiness where certainty once resided. When the very architecture of power—the invisible sovereign whose throne formally remains vacant, yet whose presence has structured order throughout modernity—ceases to be recognizable, becoming something spectral, dispersed, anonymous, and impotent.

Before turning to the concrete manifestations of this caesura, I must clarify exhaustion itself as a category of historical ontology. Exhaustion differs fundamentally from destruction, collapse, or defeat. It denotes not violent termination from without but depletion from within—the internal limit of a historical form’s capacity to reproduce itself from its own resources. Hegel recognized this when he wrote that a form of life “matures” and must disappear because Spirit has developed beyond it, requiring new vessels for its self-expression (Hegel, 1840/1955, pp. 32–33). Dilthey translated this insight from speculative logic into phenomenology of life: exhaustion occurs when the meaning-generating structures of a culture cease providing coherent experience, when “life-unity” loses its integrative force (Dilthey, 1910/1992, p. 191ff). Spengler radicalized this into morphology: civilizations exhaust themselves as organisms do, passing from creative youth through productive maturity to sterile old age (Spengler, 1918/1991, pp. 31–33). Toynbee located exhaustion in elite dynamics: civilizations decline when their creative minorities “burn out,” losing capacity to respond adequately to challenges while retaining dominance (Toynbee, 1934/1987, p. 140ff). Collingwood identified epistemological exhaustion: epochs die when their “absolute presuppositions,” the foundational assumptions structuring thought, can no longer grasp new collective experience (Collingwood, 1946/1999, p. 65). Habermas described “legitimation crisis” as exhaustion of communicative resources necessary for symbolic integration when systemic rationality colonizes lifeworld (Habermas, 1973/1984, pp. 69–72). What unifies these diverse approaches? The recognition that historical forms complete themselves not primarily through external violence but through consuming their own animating principles: exhausting creative energies, categorical frameworks, legitimating narratives, and integrative capacities. Modernity’s current exhaustion, however, differs from all precedents in one critical respect: it occurs simultaneously across five dimensions on a global scale under planetary limits unknown to any previous epoch. This is not merely organic decline, elite failure, categorical crisis, or legitimation erosion, but all these together, rendering our exhaustion unprecedented in depth and stakes.

Modernity, which began as the cultural project of Western expansion, rational state-building, progressing capitalism, and the disenchantment-and-mastery of the world, now malfunctions not merely in its institutions but in its ontological structure itself. What we habitually call “the West” loses its privileged place in world order and human history precisely when the fundamental modes of human existence—ways of being subjects of history, of knowing and acting, of ordering common life—confront their most profound ineffectiveness and exhaustion. History’s irony, that Hegelian dark humor revelation, here proves particularly exquisite: exhaustion overtakes modernity not in a moment of weakness but during a period of success pushed to the limit of its possibilities.

From the heights (or depths?) of philosophical contemplation, this does not appear as a chain of random misfortunes. Before us seems to be unfolding a structural transition from a world in which Western capitalist modernity could claim the status of universal form of life to a world in which this claim is rejected, yet no other universality has been born. The old has died; the new struggles to emerge; and in this historical caesura, the monsters of Chthonic depths rise to Gaia’s surface. But these monsters are not external enemies: they are modernity’s own progeny, returning from the unconscious depths where Enlightenment reason had repressed them, believing it could definitively subordinate the world to calculable rationality.

This essay attempts to think of our time as a unified process of ontological exhaustion unfolding simultaneously across five interconnected dimensions: cultural, economic, political, geopolitical, and planetary. These are not independent processes but facets of a single rupture—the depletion of modernity itself as a civilizational project that has reached the limits of its reproduction. The cultural exhaustion manifests in modernity’s collapsed capacity to structure time with its project-oriented future, faith in progress, and promise of control through reason. Economic exhaustion appears in capitalism’s regime of temporal stagnation, where capital survives by borrowing from a non-existent future, undermining the conditions for the reproduction of both its own and Western modernity. The political transformation reveals itself in the metamorphosis of the sovereign: the throne formally vacant yet occupied by an invisible, mighty bureaucracy whose legitimacy derives not from democratic mandate but from technocratic competence. The geopolitical decentralization shows the West losing its monopoly on defining the universal at the very moment of globalizing its institutions, giving rise to a multiplex world of multiple centers, norms, and developmental paths unsynthesized into a new unity. Finally, the planetary limit emerges as humanity becoming a geological force while the fiction of Nature’s separateness from Culture collapses, yet the objective content of planetary universality, the biospheric interdependence of all life forms, exists without becoming history’s driving force.

These five dimensions of exhaustion form not a mechanical sum but an organic whole, a dialectical process where each dimension intensifies the others. Yet this dialectic operates under conditions unprecedented in philosophy’s long engagement with historical transformation: these contradictions exist in dialectical relation without synthesis, where negation of former universality generates no new one. Humanity finds itself in a prolonged and deep historical caesura: behind us lies exhausted Western modernity; ahead, the unknown. Philosophy’s task becomes helping to birth ideas of common futures under conditions of planetary limits and exhausted universals—a task executable only through accurate diagnosis and the preparation of the ground for forming new modes of subjectivity, truth, and power capable of opening the epoch after modernity.

The Exhaustion of Temporal Imagination

Modernity, if we approach it with sufficient phenomenological shrewdness, reveals itself not primarily as a historical epoch but as a distinctive mode of temporalizing, a specific way of structuring the relationship between past, present, and future. This temporal architecture distinguishes modernity from all that preceded it. Where traditional societies oriented themselves toward an originary golden age or awaited transcendent intervention from beyond history, modernity erected an entirely different scaffolding of time. The future became an open horizon, not fate but possibility; progress emerged as promise, not divine but human; reality itself transformed into something malleable, shapeable through the application of ratio and economic growth (Koselleck, 1979/2004). The modern human dwells not in memory of paradise lost nor in anticipation of apocalypse descending from above, but in a project, that is, in calculation, planning, and deliberate transformation of reality toward desired ends.

This modern chronotope, the space where tomorrow promises to surpass yesterday if sufficient effort is applied today, constituted far more than ideology. It became the flesh of institutions, capitalism’s nervous system, and secular statehood’s metaphysics. Progress required no proof; it appeared self-evident as sunrise. Time itself underwent commodification, converted into a resource. The future became an object of investment and exploitation. Reality morphed into a space for projection and design. This was modernity’s fundamental wager: that human beings, through the disciplined application of reason, could master contingency and engineer improvement (Giddens, 1980; Eisenstadt et al., 2005).

But this temporal structure, this entire mode of being-toward-the-future that characterized modern existence, now fractures before our eyes. The exhaustion manifests across three distinct yet intimately related transformations.

First, modernity entered what Ulrich Beck (2009) diagnosed as the condition of “risk society” and “second modernity.” Modernity, driven by the idea of controlling nature and society, began generating precisely those risks it can neither localize nor fully control. Financial crises metastasize through global economies at the speed of electronic transactions, finding no productive resolution. Nuclear catastrophes, like those of Chernobyl and Fukushima, whose radioactive traces recognize no state borders, remain perpetually repeatable. Climate change inscribes industrial humanity’s activity into the planet’s geological record. These are not external threats that descended upon modernity from outside, like barbarians upon Rome. These are risks produced by modernization’s very successes: these are the unintended consequences of rationalization pushed to its logical conclusion.

The future, which once presented itself as a horizon of possibilities requiring cultivation like Zadig’s garden, has transformed into a minefield, demanding constant navigation. Instead of asking “How do we build a better world?”, that quintessentially modern question, we increasingly ask “How do we avoid catastrophe?” Modernity has entered its reflexive, possibly terminal phase. But this reflexivity bears the color not of hope but of anxiety. The future has become an object not of desire but of dread.

Second, Hartmut Rosa (2013) demonstrated that contemporary societies face structural compulsion not only toward complexity but toward acceleration—technological, social, existential. Faster production, faster communication, faster decision-making, faster living. Each acceleration generates a necessity for the next: if competitors accelerate, one must accelerate too or fall behind in the race. Time becomes not merely expensive but self-devouring. Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht (2004) reveals the complementary dynamic: such acceleration not only compresses but simultaneously expands the present, fragmenting it into a mass of rhythmically discordant pieces of now, rushing at different velocities. The result: fragmentation of the present itself. What we call “now” grows ever shorter and broader, ever more ephemeral and unmanageable. Long-term projects, whether building political consensus, conducting democratic deliberation, or simply the capacity to think without hurrying, require stability and duration that accelerated society within an immeasurably wide present cannot provide. We inhabit permanent Zeitnot, perpetual time-famine, a regime of constant emergency. Politics contracts to crisis management. Economics reduces to quarterly reports. Life shrinks to daily task lists.

Modernity promised liberation from tradition’s tyranny and subjugation to nature’s temporal rhythms. It delivered—and immediately enslaved humanity to the tyranny of its own acceleration, forever rushing yet never arriving at the promised future, trapped in a hurrying present that expands without deepening.

Third, Shmuel Eisenstadt (2000) and Peter Wagner (2012) struck at the very nerve of Western self-consciousness: they demonstrated that modernity possesses no single “correct” model. No such model exists that might flow like baptismal grace from Western Europe and North America to the rest of the world. Multiple modernities exist instead, formed and performed within different historical and cultural conditions, each with unique political trajectories and collective imaginaries. The recent Western path, on which liberal capitalism coupled with nation-state democracy, loses its claim to be humanity’s sole template for the future. More than this, it reveals itself as one variant among others, a variant dependent on highly specific cultural and economic presuppositions, historical fortune (somewhat criminal in origin), and geopolitical circumstances.

Two aspects demand attention. First, Western modernization’s very success in globalizing capitalism and national statehood created conditions for non-Western societies to master modernity’s instruments and turn them against Western hegemony. Second, Western universals exposed their particularity. What presented itself as Reason as such proved to be European reason. What claimed status as Progress in general revealed itself as bourgeois progress. Democracy in the abstract disclosed itself as liberal-representative democracy, vulnerable to bureaucratic capture.

These three transformations—the production of uncontrollable risks, the acceleration and fragmentation of temporal experience, and the multiplication of non-Western modernities—converge in a single diagnostic conclusion: modernity’s capacity to imagine and orient itself toward desirable futures has exhausted itself. The temporal architecture that sustained modern existence for centuries now buckles under internal contradictions it cannot resolve. The future, which powered modernity’s engine, has transformed from a space of opportunity into an undifferentiated field of risks and mutually exclusive projections. We retain the institutional complexes of modernity—capitalist markets, bureaucratic nation-states, expert systems, technoscientific apparatus. But the legitimating narratives sustaining these institutions have worn threadbare. The promise of linear progress that nourished modernity for centuries no longer commands belief. Instead of a confident assertion that “tomorrow will be better,” we hear a nervous qualification, “if only it doesn’t get worse.” Instead of a horizon of possibilities, we confront dread before futurity. Instead of a singular universal project, we face a patchwork of particular paths yielding no new synthesis.

Modernity as a cultural-historical project stands exhausted. Not dead but depleted. It continues by inertia, leading toward the Void. This movement possesses economic foundations, to which we now turn.

Capital’s Twilight: Borrowing from Non-Existent Futures

The economic foundations of modernity rest upon capitalism in its various configurations. If modernity stands exhausted, this exhaustion begins with capitalism’s depletion as a mode of producing futures. To grasp this fully requires moving beyond surface analysis of financial crises to an ontological understanding of capitalism’s temporal structure.

Capitalism, examined ontologically, emerges as more than a mode of production: it constitutes a mode of producing the future. The system operates by transforming not-yet-existent time into present resource through the mechanism of credit and investment. Capital lives by projecting and borrowing from tomorrow, sustained by faith that growth will continue, that the future will deliver sufficiently to repay yesterday’s debts. The Latin credere, to believe, reveals credit’s essence: not merely a financial instrument but a temporal wager, an act of faith that tomorrow’s expansion will validate today’s borrowing. This future-oriented temporality defines capitalism’s innermost logic. It does not simply produce commodities; it produces futurity itself as investable, calculable, exploitable resource (Beckert, 2016; also see Simon & Tamm, 2021).

For centuries, this wager paid dividends. Capital expanded into new territories, new markets, and new populations. Growth appeared limitless, constrained only by human ingenuity’s boundaries, which seemed to perpetually recede. The future reliably arrived bearing sufficient wealth to service past debts while generating surplus for new accumulation. This virtuous cycle underwrote modernity’s promise: each generation would live better than its predecessor; progress would compound like interest.

But 2008 marked not merely an acute episode from which recovery followed, but the revelation of chronic illness. The Great Financial Crisis exposed a regime shift that persists: low growth, low interest rates, and high debt across developed Western economies. A regime wherein capitalism continues functioning but functions at its limit, like a heart pumping blood only through constant external stimulation—monetary interventions, fiscal expansion, quantitative easing extended far beyond their intended temporary duration (Rachel & Summers, 2019).

The phenomenon economists term “secular stagnation” signals something more philosophically profound than technical malfunction. What emerges is capitalism’s chronic inability to locate sufficiently profitable application for capital in productive enterprise. The future into which one might invest with confidence in returns has disappeared—or more precisely, has contracted so radically that accumulated capital finds insufficient outlet (Obstfeld, 2023). Investment remains anemic despite ultra-low interest rates designed to stimulate it. Productivity growth stagnates. The developed world’s economic engine sputters not from temporary breakdown but from fuel exhaustion: the fuel of futurity itself.

Simultaneously, the World Bank documents an ominous pattern: humanity has entered the fourth and historically largest wave of debt accumulation (Kose et al., 2021). Record levels of debt-to-GDP ratios appear across both developed and developing economies. This transcends local bubbles; it constitutes a systemic phenomenon. The three previous waves each terminated in crisis cascades—Latin America in the 1980s, Asia in 1997—leaving behind ruins: devalued currencies, bankrupted states, populations cast into precarity. But crises also served purgative functions, clearing away unsustainable debt and restoring the foundations for renewed accumulation.

The current fourth wave, exacerbated by the pandemic and subsequent shocks, proves “more dangerous” precisely because resolution perpetually defers (Kose et al., 2021, p. 7). Debt grows enormously and continues expanding. The capacity to service it deteriorates. Yet interest rates, after a decade near zero, begin rising again—classic recipe for catastrophe. But the catastrophe never arrives, or rather, never completes itself. Central banks intervene. Governments backstop. The crisis freezes rather than resolves.

Debt, viewed ontologically, represents a claim upon being not only in its present but in its futurity. It harnesses becoming, exploiting becoming’s energy to reproduce capital at the expense of the not-yet-existent. Capitalism has always lived by borrowing from the future: building factories with borrowed money, expanding through credit, colonizing tomorrow for today’s profit. But now this resource, after decades of overexploitation, stands exhausted. What happens when tomorrow’s resources have already been consumed? When faith in growth—and thus in capacity to repay—erodes? Then debt transforms from an instrument of temporal expansion into a dead weight upon a trembling present. Yet capitalism continues borrowing precisely because cessation would mean admitting growth’s end. Each new loan renders the system more fragile, more dependent on deferring catastrophe for one more quarter, one more year.

Thomas Piketty’s (2014) monumental analysis reveals capitalism’s structural trajectory with devastating clarity. When return on capital (r) exceeds economic growth rate (g), wealth concentrates inexorably. We witness not an aberration but capitalism’s default condition: patrimonial capitalism’s return, where inherited wealth dominates earned income, where capital’s dynasty supersedes merit’s fantasy. This occurs precisely when the climate crisis demands radical redistribution and collective investment in decarbonization. Capital resists redistribution. Elites resist taxation. Global competition for investment undermines states’ capacity to regulate capital. The social-democratic state that might finance the climate transition stands weakened. International cooperation that might coordinate global action fractures under competition and distrust.

Moreover, Piketty demonstrates that the Anthropocene’s political economy exposes an obscene symmetry: those who accumulated capital through fossil-fuel-based growth bear minimal consequences of climate change. The wealthiest nations, classes, and individuals, whose capital is derived from carbon emissions, possess the greatest resources to protect against climatic disruption. They construct seawalls, purchase air conditioning, migrate to favorable zones, and invest in adaptation. Meanwhile, populations and nations contributing minimally to historical emissions suffer maximal damage. Bangladesh, Maldives, Pacific island states, the Sahel—they emitted almost nothing yet face submersion, desertification, uninhabitability. The logic mirrors r > g: an unequal distribution of benefits and costs, and wealth’s concentration through extraction from those least capable of resistance, both within a society and in the global interstate system.

But capitalism’s deepest exhaustion manifests in the domain Jens Beckert (2016) illuminates: the imagination. In his profound work Imagined Futures, Beckert demonstrates that capitalism moves not through rational calculation alone but through collectively imagined futures—”fictional expectations.” These expectations are not “fictive,” meaning false, but “fictional,” meaning imagined, constructed, narrative. Investors, entrepreneurs, and consumers act not from knowledge of what will be but from imagination of what might be. They project hopes, fears, and desires into the future, and these projections orient investment, shape expectations, and trigger mechanisms of growth or contraction. Through this imaginative labor, capitalism creates futures, though always with significant deviation from generating expectations.

Capitalism, then, functions as a machine for producing futurity: not actual futures but plausible images of the future, sufficiently convincing to motivate action as if they were reality (Mankekar & Gupta, 2025). And through such motivated action, capitalism indeed produces futures, albeit transformed from their initial imaginings.

But what occurs when the capacity to imagine attractive futures exhausts itself? Secular stagnation represents precisely this: the erosion of the plausibility of growth narratives in a world without transcendent horizons. If growth faces structural impediment, if planetary limits narrow the space for expansion, if demographic trends portend a shrinking labor force and consumer demand, if technological progress brings not new markets but job displacement, then capitalism’s motor itself, fueled by the secular imagination of abundance and endless progress, begins to stall.

Beckert describes capitalism oscillating between poles: collectively imagined futures may prove excessively optimistic, producing bubbles and crises, or excessively pessimistic, generating depressions and stagnation (Beckert, 2009, p. 269ff). But a third, more sinister possibility emerges: when imagination cannot construct plausible futures at all. Neither optimistic nor pessimistic—simply none. When futurity ceases being a horizon of possibilities and becomes a fog of indeterminacy.

This describes our condition precisely. Capitalism has shifted from confident “not yet, but soon” into nervous “perhaps never again.” It continues to function, but as an automaton stripped of teleology. It produces, distributes, and accumulates, but no longer knows for what purpose. The future that justified all effort has evaporated somewhere beyond reach. Upon this economic foundation—precarious, riddled with debt, devoid of dynamic vision—rises the political superstructure of our time, to which we now turn.

The Metamorphosis of the Sovereign

If capitalism survives by undermining its own foundations, the political form of modernity undergoes no less impossible a transformation. The state—that Leviathan of modernity, that rational apparatus of domination Weber anatomized—simultaneously strengthens and decomposes. It becomes technically more capable yet conceptually more hollow. It penetrates deeper into citizens’ lives yet distances itself further from their will. Like an organism whose musculature grows while its nervous system atrophies.

We inhabit an epoch of double transformation. Internally, states reorganize through technocratic and transnational networks, metamorphosing into something other than the classical nation-state. Externally, an unmistakable trend is spreading: the proliferation of unfree political systems and regimes, which political scientists term “autocratization” (Lührmann & Lindberg, 2019). Both processes coincide not accidentally but structurally: they interweave.

Since the Peace of Westphalia, modernity’s imagination conceives the state as a sovereign unit possessing a monopoly on legitimate violence within a clearly demarcated territory. Borders separate “internal” from “external”; power concentrates in capitals and descends through administrative hierarchies from the center to the peripheries. This cartography of power—vertical, territorial, sovereign—constituted not merely a description of reality but a normative image defining how power should be structured. But in the twenty-first century, this cartographic imaginary fractures along its seams.

Shahar Hameiri and Lee Jones (2016) reveal a mechanism that escapes superficial observation. International regimes that govern security, finance, development, and ecology do not simply “influence” states externally, as if they were separate billiard balls colliding. They operate more subtly and radically: they create and empower specialized bureaucratic units within states themselves. Elected politicians grow increasingly incapable of decision-making in contemporary states, where bureaucrats, not the demos, guard the empty throne of sovereignty. Borders retain their sovereign-national colors, but their permeability to extra-national power centers increases radically.

Consider the anti-money-laundering division within a finance ministry that answers to FATF standards. Climate policy agencies operate within frameworks dictated by the UN. National banks and Ombudsmen function as institutions supposedly immune to influence from national politicians and voters. Anti-corruption agencies (or entire anti-corruption branch of institutions, as in Ukraine), financed by international donors, follow templates from the World Bank and other international organizations. All these elements formally integrate into nation-state hierarchies, but, essentially, they inhabit different coordinate systems. Their reference group comprises not parliament or citizen-voters but international organizations, experts, and partner agencies in other countries. They speak the language of global “best practices,” “technical benchmarks,” and “peer review.” Their legitimacy derives not from democratic mandate but from technocratic expert consensus.

The state thus ceases being a Westphalian monolith. It transforms into an archipelago—multiple islands formally belonging to one national “continent” yet severed by channels of extra-national influence and connected to each other not through internal bridges but through submarine cables extended from anonymous, typically benevolent structures of governance. Power fragments, distributed across network nodes, become opaque to those uninitiated in these networks’ logic.

Lasse Folke Henriksen and Leonard Seabrooke (2021), employing network analysis methods, discover what might be called “invisible government,” except that would sound conspiratorial. No conspiracy exists: only the structural logic of transnational technocracy operates here. A relatively small layer of transnational political elites—people migrating between ministries, international organizations, central banks, corporations, analytical centers—occupies central positions in global networks. They need not know each other personally (though often do, thanks to Davos, Aspen, Alpbach, Munich, countless other conferences). But they share a common language, common cognitive frameworks, and common assumptions about “correct policy.” They form not a mythical “deep state,” but policy paradigms—neoliberalism yesterday, “green agenda” today—which then traverse state borders, bypassing parliamentary control and beyond national communities’ imagination.

Dilbar Valeeva (2022), studying interlocking corporate directorates of transnational corporations, finds identical patterns: the “backbone” of the global corporate elite concentrates in several world cities. Economic power and bureaucratic power stand not separated by impermeable walls, as liberal theory supposed in its doctrine of spheres’ separation. They intertwine like tree roots beneath the ground, while political branches remain formally divided above.

The result? Emergence of what might be termed a global managerial class. Not in the Marxist sense of class owning means of production, but in the Weberian sense of status group monopolizing technocratic expertise, decision-making authority, and access to global power-property networks. This class thinks in terms of humanity while remaining unattached to care for actual organic and large imagined communities.

Jan Aart Scholte (2020), Soetkin Verhaegen, and Jonas Tallberg (2021) document the next stage of depleted modernization: global governance increasingly constructs itself as “multistakeholder governance”: governance with participation of multiple interested parties. National governments openly share power with corporations, selected NGOs, expert communities, and philanthropic foundations. Sounds democratic, does it not? Inclusion of all voices, participation, and consensus. But the devil inhabits details. Scholte demonstrates that elites, including political, bureaucratic, and economic leaders, as well as civil society leaders, typically support such multistakeholder mechanisms. Broad publics regard them skeptically. Why? Because they intuitively sense: this is not their rule, not their representatives. This becomes democracy without demos, governance beyond functioning representation.

In “multistakeholder” forums, voice-weight depends not on the number of represented citizens but on expertise, resources, and the capacity to speak the right language with the right people. A farmer and a transnational agribusiness director from Ukraine might formally sit at the same table, but they possess different microphones, and their voices resonate differently. Decisions emerge through consensus, but consensus among experts already sharing basic premises about the world’s structure and what remains possible or impossible within it. Hence arises the legitimacy gap between elites and citizens. Elites inhabit a world of global networks, international standards, and technical solutions. Citizens inhabit a world of concrete localities, organic and national identities, and existential anxieties. The former speak efficiency and optimization’s language. The latter speak justice and belonging’s language. They cease understanding each other.

Against this backdrop unfolds what Anna Lührmann and Staffan Lindberg (2019) term the “third wave of autocratization,” by analogy with Huntington’s waves of democratization. But this wave’s character differs from that of predecessors in the twentieth century. The first wave of autocratization (interwar period) proceeded through fascist coups and totalitarian revolutions. The second wave (early Cold War period) manifested as military juntas and one-party regimes in the postcolonial world. The third wave operates more subtly and fundamentally. It does not smash parliaments with tanks. It does not ban elections. It preserves them as a façade.

Contemporary autocratization proceeds through gradual legalistic erosion of checks and balances within formally electoral regimes. Constitutional courts packed with loyal judges, or deliberately left understaffed, maintaining quorum deficits for years. Electoral rules changed, favoring the ruling party. Media bought by friendly oligarchs or strangled through tax inspections. Civil society placed under control through philanthropic foundations and “foreign agent” laws and sanction lists. Parliamentary majorities and oppositions preserved but stripped of real levers influencing decision-making.

All accomplished legally. Through obedient parliamentary majorities, via referendums, appealing to managed “popular” attention. Democracy not overthrown, but hollowed from within. Democracy’s shell remains: elections, parliaments, separation of powers. But the content evaporated. Elections no longer capable of changing the courses charted by technocrats. Parliament rubber-stamps decisions prepared by executive power’s second echelon. Courts serve “invisible government’s” interests and their own clan networks. Political scientists call this “hollowed democracies,” “hybrid regimes,” “electoral autocracies,” or “illiberal democracies.” Behind these terms lies a simple truth: contemporary democracy does not die from a bullet to the head but from a thousand small cuts.

Michael Bauer and Stefan Becker (2020) demonstrate that bureaucracy becomes the battlefield. Autocratizing governments deploy administrative strategies: politicizing appointments, promoting loyalists while purging independents; centralizing control, subordinating autonomous agencies either directly to executive power or covertly through clan connections; undermining professional standards, replacing meritocracy with patronage whose clientelist networks transcend national borders and jurisdictions; weakening independent regulatory mechanisms—those very agencies meant to constrain executive arbitrariness and market dishonesty.

Bureaucracy transforms from a neutral instrument of governance into a transmission belt of political will. Weber’s ideal of rational, depoliticized administration serving the common good through rule-application established by politicians and representative organs disintegrates. Yet—and here dialectical possibility emerges—bureaucracy may also become a site of resistance. In another study, Bauer (2024) notes that depending on professional norms and transnational connections, bureaucracy can oppose autocratic politicians’ assault. Judges still exist who rely on international rule-of-law standards. Regulators protected by connections with European or global agencies persist. Expert communities whose legitimacy derives not from national power but from transnational recognition endure.

Here surfaces the connection and contradiction between two processes—technocratization and autocratization. They need not coincide, just as technocracy need not coincide with democracy.

Technocracy’s double face reveals itself. Those very insulated, professionalized, transnationally embedded agencies discussed in the section’s first part prove ambivalent. On one hand, they may serve as bastions against autocratization initiated by politicians or mass movements. Their independence, their international network connections, and their commitment to “rules of the game” render bureaucrats inconvenient for authoritarian leaders desiring unlimited power. The European Central Bank constrains the fiscal arbitrariness of national governments. Constitutional courts appeal to European law. Anti-corruption agencies funded by international donors operate within their mandates.

On the other hand, these same agencies, distanced from demos, speaking incomprehensible specialized language, making decisions through opaque procedures, create a democratic legitimacy deficit that feeds an autocratic turn. Bureaucracy becomes a priesthood of emptiness formed in a secular state where God-chosen rulers once sat. These priests remain hostile to both kings and subjects, yet, controlling the state, they rule both.

“Return our state to us!” cry democrats and populists alike. “These faceless bureaucrats in Brussels (Washington, London, Berlin, Kyiv, or other capital of your choice) have stripped us, the people, of sovereignty! They impose rules we never chose! They serve global elites, not us!” This cry contains truth. Technocracy promised rational governance free from mob caprice and politicians’ demagoguery. It promised efficiency, depoliticized expertise. But what it achieved proved depoliticization in dual senses: not only liberation from partisan squabbling, but also the stripping of citizens of the capacity to influence decisions that determine their lives.

When citizens, deprived of real influence in technocratic structures, vote for populists promising to “return power to the people,” these populists, upon gaining power, do not dismantle technocratic structures. Either victors in elections find themselves in opposition to technocratically appointed “minority governments,” or popular populists face exclusion from electoral participation. Bureaucracy colonizes the republic, transforming it into a technocratic power system, filling power centers with its people, converting republican organs from instruments of political rationality into instruments of expert domination.

Technocracy can serve both liberal and illiberal orders. It also constrains both in their arbitrariness. It is radically centrist and neutral, in the sense that any technique remains neutral. A scalpel in a surgeon’s hands saves life; in a murderer’s hands, takes it. But a technocratic state, continuing the metaphor, resembles a scalpel that grew its own arm, neck, and head—its own Golem, ignoring commands from both demos, democrats, and autocrats.

Yet even this transformed political architecture rests upon demographic foundations undergoing their own crisis. The V-Dem Institute (Nord et al., 2025) documents a threshold that was once unthinkable: autocracies numerically surpass democracies for the first time in over two decades. More strikingly, approximately three-quarters of Earth’s population now lives under autocratic rule, though the inverse was true at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Read this slowly to grasp the scale: democracy constitutes the political form of a global minority. Liberal democracy, which in the 1990s reveled in victory, the “end of history,” a universal horizon of political evolution, and reason’s triumph over arbitrariness, revealed itself as a local, fragile, reversible historical anomaly.

However, democracy confronts not only external siege but internal exhaustion of the most literal kind: demographic depletion. According to UN projections, many Western nations will face population decline by mid-century due to persistently low fertility and aging (UN DESA, 2022). For several decades, fertility in most democracies has remained below the replacement threshold: approximately 2.1 children per woman. In OECD countries, the average fertility coefficient fell to roughly 1.5 in 2022 (OECD, 2024). OECD experts note that EU fertility has remained below replacement level for half a century and is expected to remain low through the end of the twenty-first century, driven by childbearing postponement and renunciation, extended education, and changing partnership norms (ibid.).

This transcends temporary fluctuation. It represents a structural shift that “second demographic transition” theory links to value transformation: rising individual autonomy, increasing female education and labor market participation, secularization, increased cohabitation outside marriage, partnership instability, and proliferating “gender roles” (Lesthaeghe, 2014). Democratic societies confront not merely demographic stagnation but direct demographic erosion in reproductive and young cohorts. Demos in the literal sense ceases reproducing itself.

Another set of studies shows that in liberal democracies, family forms are becoming increasingly unstable. Cohabitation outside marriage, delayed marriages, high divorce rates, rising childlessness, complex life trajectories—all now constitute norms rather than exceptions (Smock & Schwartz, 2020). Simultaneously, the feminist revolution predetermined women’s educational and career achievements and labor market entry. Yet care institutions and family policy lag behind these processes within families. This mismatch produces extremely low fertility in cultural contexts expecting women to behave simultaneously as full workers and de facto primary child caregivers. Moreover, UN experts in State of the World Population 2023 emphasize “reproductive autonomy constraints,” high housing costs, precarious employment, expensive childcare, and weak social protection in neoliberal economies, directly limiting desired childbearing (UNFPA, 2023).

Here, the central contradiction emerges: liberal democracies succeeded in creating egalitarian, highly autonomous individual life trajectories. But they failed to restructure the institutional architecture of work, housing, care, and family life to support demographic reproduction under these conditions. Consequently, family roles and institutions no longer reliably ensure demographic renewal. Liberalism liberated individuals from traditional constraints but created no new structures enabling free individuals to reproduce society. This dialectic of liberal biopolitics: equality turns to sterility; emancipation becomes demographic collapse. The individual autonomy project’s success undermines the conditions for collective reproduction.

As fertility falls and mortality among the elderly remains low, migration becomes the primary source of population renewal in many liberal democracies (UN DESA, 2022). The Global Migration Data Analysis Centre notes that in 2023, approximately 304 million international migrants resided worldwide, most in high-income countries (Global Migration Data Analysis Centre, 2024). Young migrants aged 15–24 comprise about 11% of all international migrants, concentrated in Western trajectories, replenishing the young cohorts of aging societies in Europe and North America. This produces structural asymmetry. High-income liberal democracies disproportionately rely on youth and skilled labor from low-income regions, often exacerbating “brain drain” or “care drain” effects in sending countries (IOM, 2024). These migratory flows stem from demographic imbalances, economic differentials, military conflicts, and individual aspirations in the Global South—not elite conspiracy for “population replacement.” Conspiracies about the “great replacement” constitute ideological noise, obscuring real structural dynamics and repressing anxiety about their peoples’ futures into the unconscious.

Yet this dynamic may legitimately be characterized as a new form of demographic externalization. Liberal democracies externalize part of their biological reproduction to other regions. Incapable of producing sufficient children within their own societies, they compensate by importing already-raised, educated young people from countries that invested in their upbringing and education but receive no return on these investments. This is not a moral judgment about Southern migrants or Western migration policy. This is a structural observation: Western demographic reproduction depends on non-Western demographic vitality. The exhausting center parasitizes the periphery not only economically through unequal exchange, debt, and resource extraction, but also demographically through the extraction of human resources.

The West, which for centuries colonized, exploited, and subjugated non-Western peoples, now depends on them for its own survival—not as plantation labor but as members of its own society on its own territory. Yet anti-migrant populist rhetoric exposes an important contradiction not of populists’ making: societies that fail to reproduce themselves demand external rescue while growing increasingly intolerant of their rescuers.

Demographic exhaustion intersects with sharp shifts in intergenerational economic inequality in Western societies. Comparative data show that, in many developed economies, by approximately 2010, older generations surpassed younger ones in disposable income, driven by pension systems, real estate wealth accumulation, and labor market dualization (Guaitoli & Pancrazi, 2022). OECD analysis reveals young people confronting precarious employment, high housing costs, and stagnating wages (OECD, 2024). This transcends economic statistics. This undermines modernity’s fundamental promise that each generation would live better than its predecessors. Thus, even shrinking youth cohorts cannot achieve parental living standards. A narrowing, financially constrained, and demographically diminishing young generation cannot sustain the political or economic dynamism of democratic societies.

Democracy loses vitality when demos ceases reproducing itself—biologically, socially, economically. Youth represents not merely an age category but the embodiment of a free society’s continuation, renewal, and transformation. Old generations may govern, but young ones imagine otherwise. Without a sufficient number of prepared youth willing to dare to dream and build, society becomes trapped in a permanent present managed by the interests of those no longer invested in distant futures.

Gerontocracy as a system means not simply old people’s rule but rule by those no longer investing in futures they will not survive to see, despite faith in biotechnological eternal life. Gerontocrats’ rationality proves short-term. Their horizon is to maintain position until active life ends, securing large pensions, accessing premium healthcare, and preserving accumulated capital. Youth who might demand long-term investments, climate action, and radical reforms—they are few, poor, and politically marginalized.

This closes the vicious circle of exhaustion. Democracy in which older generations dominate politically and economically, with unprecedented significance and duration, creates no conditions for youth to have prospects and children. This only intensifies generational schism. Demographic compression generates gerontocracy. Gerontocracy exacerbates demographic compression.

Liberal democracies have entered a sustained regime of low fertility and population aging in which family systems no longer reliably ensure demographic renewal (Lesthaeghe, 2014; OECD, 2024). Their populations increasingly depend on migration from the Global South, generating structural interdependence between disappearing center and formerly peripheral regions becoming central (Global Migration Data Analysis Centre, 2024; IOM, 2024). Young citizens grow fewer and more impoverished, undermining intergenerational mobility, common solidarity, and democratic dynamism (Guaitoli & Pancrazi, 2022). Liberal democracy’s demos is not merely institutionally hollowed or politically fragmented. It stands demographically and socio-economically exhausted.

Democracy presupposes demos: not as an abstraction but as a living, reproducing, ruling community. Demos means not population in the statistical sense but a generational chain of sovereignty, wherein elders transmit to youth the world, the republic, and the constitution—and the responsibility for them—while youth renew, criticize, and transform this sovereign inheritance. Without this chain, without young generations’ vitality, without their capacity to imagine and build other futures, democracy transforms into a global minority and an internal wasteland. Elections occur, parliaments convene, but meaning evaporates because the collective subject who might bear historical projects grows ever scarcer.

Western liberal democracy has exhausted not only economic and political resources. It has exhausted the very capacity to reproduce people who might inhabit, renew, and defend it. Demos ages, contracts, and grows increasingly dependent on imports. This constitutes perhaps the most radical dimension of crisis because it concerns not institutions that might be reformed, not policies that might be changed, but free society’s biosocial fabric itself. Upon this economic foundation of stagnation and debt, this political basis of technocracy and autocratization, this demographic substrate of compression and aging, unfolds yet another dimension of the caesura: geopolitical decentralization and planetary limitations, to which we now turn.

Planetary Limits and the Disorientation of History

If we survey the last five centuries from a sufficient altitude, we observe the West’s protracted hegemony. First Iberian, then Dutch, then British, finally American, with a brief Soviet counterweight. Forms changed, emphases shifted, but essence remained: the world organized around a Western core. The West established rules of the game—diplomatic, economic, ideological. The West became the measure of things. Its time became world time. Its values claimed universality. Its institutions—from the Westphalian system through Bretton Woods to the WTO—framed the possible.

This hegemony never achieved absoluteness. It faced contestation, experienced failures, suffered defeats. Yet even resisters employed conceptual language borrowed from the West: national sovereignty, economic development, and human rights. Modernity’s grammar remained Western even when deployed to write anti-colonial manifestos.

Now this long epoch departs alongside Western decentralization and the entire world-system’s transformation. Western nations lose their global centrality: they escape their capacity to set agendas, claim universality, and occupy the natural pole around which the world organizes itself. Economically, the West’s share of global GDP declines decade after decade. China, India, and Southeast Asian nations grow faster not only in absolute economic and demographic indicators but in technological inventiveness, capacity to compete in advanced markets, and ability to articulate new universals. The West no longer constitutes the sole innovation center, capital source, or market toward which global corporations orient themselves.

Politically, Western influence erodes. Its attempts to impose sanctions, establish trade rules, and promote its democratic model encounter mounting resistance or, more tellingly, indifference. Non-Western powers do not merely resist; they increasingly ignore the West, constructing alternative institutions and forming coalitions from which the West remains excluded. Symbolically—and the symbolic dimension in politics often surpasses the material—the West has lost its aura of inevitability. In the 1990s, the entire world seemed to still follow the Western path, if at different velocities. Now, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, the world evidently travels multiple paths, the Western merely one among others.

Amitav Acharya (2017, 2025), among the most penetrating theorists of contemporary world order, proposes the “multiplex world” metaphor. The metaphor derives from cinema architecture. Where old theaters had one hall and one screen, multiplexes have multiple halls and screens, each showing different films. Viewers choose what to watch. No single narrative consumed by all exists. The same occurs with world order. No single center of values and norms exists. No one state or civilizational bloc establishes rules for all. Multiple centers exist—the United States, China, the European Union, Russia, India, and regional coalitions such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and ASEAN. Each center tries to establish its sphere of influence, its set of norms, its vision of desirable order. Critically, the “rest of the world” no longer passively receives rules established by the West. It increasingly attempts to shape these rules itself.

The 2020 Munich Security Conference (2020) captured this transformation’s tonality in one word: Westlessness—being-without-West. Not “anti-West” but precisely without—absence, void where center once stood. According to the report’s authors, the West lost internal cohesion—Brexit, first Trump’s sovereigntism, Biden administration’s democratic adventurism, second Trump’s Dunroe doctrine, populism’s rise amid technocracy’s growth, Western value fragmentation. Simultaneously, the West lost external dominance: its voice no longer decisive in world affairs, its sanctions circumvented by formerly peripheral players, its model no longer attractive.

Westlessness transcends mere geopolitical observation. It describes existential condition: the evident fact that history no longer revolves around the Atlantic, that futurity is being made elsewhere, and we, Western inhabitants, have transformed from authors into characters in alien narratives.

What specifically characterizes this multiplex order? First, Western institutions—NATO, the European Union, IMF, World Bank, the entire Western-born financial system—remain powerful. They have not vanished. They still command enormous resources, establish standards, and influence global processes. But they no longer stand as uncontested arbiters of legitimacy, increasingly disconnected from member states’ national interests.

Second, rising great and middle powers of the non-West articulate alternative principles and construct parallel institutional networks. China promotes concepts of “community of common destiny for mankind” (countering the “rules-based world order”), “civilizational state” (countering the nation-state), and prioritizing development over human rights. Russia insists on “multipolarity” and “politics of fear.” India balances between Western and non-Western coalitions, defending its own path. BRICS has transformed into a platform for coordinating non-Western powers, from discussing dollar alternatives to forming common positions on climate. These alternatives need not cohere. The point is not whether these alternatives prove good but that they exist, and their existence undermines Western monopoly on defining humanity’s desirable future.

Third, Global South nations practice strategic hedging or active non-alignment. They do not definitively choose between West and “the rest.” They maneuver, defending their interests and ensuring their growth. They trade with China, receive military aid from the United States, purchase Russian oil, and collaborate with the EU on climate. They exploit great power competition to negotiate better terms for themselves. They refuse the Cold War logic that demands side-taking. This represents the sovereignty pragmatism of middle and small states, possible precisely because the world has ceased being unipolar, becoming multiplex instead.

The West, for centuries, claimed to embody the universal, not merely one possible life form, but Reason’s life form as such. Its values—freedom, human rights, rule of law, market economy, representative democracy—presented themselves as universal values toward which humanity should strive. Its institutions, including the capitalist market, the nation-state, and the rule of law, appeared as the political-economic organization’s final form. But globalization, conducted by the West itself, produced results directly opposite to expectations. Instead of universalizing the Western model, it achieved universalization of particularity.

The West distributed its modernity instruments worldwide. But these instruments, once mastered by non-Western societies, did not lead to their essential Westernization. Contrarily, they enabled these societies to assert their own particularity, their own civilizational and national identities, their own modernities’ paths. China mastered capitalism but built it with Chinese Marxist characteristics, relying on Confucian ethics and a party-state. India adopted democracy but refracted it through Hindu nationalism. The Islamic world borrowed state forms but filled them with Sharia law and ummah ideal content, achieving precisely these forms’ primacy after secular Arab republics drowned in “Arab Spring” waves. The universal revealed itself as particular. What presented itself as Reason as such proved European reason. What claimed to be Progress in general revealed itself as Western bourgeois progress. Democracy in the abstract disclosed itself as liberal-representative democracy vulnerable to bureaucracy and West’s geopolitical games.

Now, after rejecting Western claims to universality, humanity confronts the question: does universality exist at all? Or do only multiple particularities exist, incommensurable with each other, forced to coexist yet incapable of synthesizing into something common? In other words: can we conceive new universality—neither Western nor relativistic, not reducing to simple “to each their own”? Universality that would acknowledge civilizations’ plurality yet insist on common norms making possible not merely modus vivendi but genuine coexistence of diverse humanity? This remains an open question. The multiplex world has not answered it but posed it with maximal acuity.

Yet multiplexity itself constitutes no evil. Multiple centers, multiple voices, multiple paths—this can be good, rich, liberation from modernity’s uniformity and tyranny. But a boundary exists beyond which multiplexity slides into mere fragmentation. Plurality presupposes that different centers, despite their difference, recognize some common framework within which they interact: common game rules, common language for disputation, common understanding of legitimate power, just world and war, acceptable international behavior. Fragmentation, however, means the collapse of any common framework. A world where each center or fragment lives by its own rules, recognizing no common rules. Where disputes resolve not through argumentation or international law but through compulsion. Where right derives from might, not might constrained by right.

We balance on the edge of fragmentation. On one hand, the multiplex order still retains common elements. The UN, despite all its weaknesses, still exists. International law, despite all contradictions and violations, still receives recognition as a rhetorical reference point. Global institutions and elite networks function successfully. On the other hand, these common frameworks thin, fracture, and lose legitimacy. Great and middle powers openly violate them. International law applies selectively—to the weak, not the strong. The UN stands paralyzed by the great powers’ veto rights. Global institutions have become arenas of geopolitical struggle, not spaces for cooperation. Hunts for “globalists” and “national traitors” in newly sovereignizing democracies and autocracies proceed at full speed.

The danger lies not in the West losing hegemony, but in the world losing common interaction frameworks. The danger is that, in Western hegemony’s place, emerges not a new order but the absence of order. Not a pluricentric cosmos but multilevel chaos. Not an ideal of global res publica, but a war of all against all on a global scale.

This can be viewed through Hegel’s dialectic, wherein the world Spirit should move from thesis through negation to synthesis, to a higher unity form. Western universality’s form was thesis, now negated—these steps completed. But where is synthesis? Where is a new, higher universality that would incorporate both Western values (not as Western but as genuinely universal—freedom, dignity, reason, one civilization) and non-Western values (solidarity, harmony, rootedness, many civilizations) and planetary imperatives (Earth-care, responsibility toward exploited futurity)? This synthesis does not yet exist. Only negation exists, old universality’s rejection without new universality’s affirmation. Precisely at this moment, humanity’s history stands. In the caesura of negation and synthesis-awaiting.

But all these forms of exhaustion—cultural, economic, political, geopolitical—while serious, remain intrahuman affairs. They constitute crises in ways humans organize production, distribute power, and construct order among themselves. Yet one dimension exists before which all these differences—between capitalism and socialism, democracy and autocracy, West and non-West—pale and reveal their subordinate position: the planetary dimension.

We customarily think of human history as drama unfolding on Nature’s stage. Nature was scenery, background, resource: unchanging, silent, infinite. Humans on this stage built civilizations, waged wars, accomplished revolutions, while Nature remained Nature. Mountains, rivers, forests, oceans, atmosphere—they existed there, beyond human action, in necessity’s sphere that Culture could only partially subordinate, not essentially transform. This illusion collapsed at the end of modernity.

The term “Anthropocene,” proposed by geologists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer (2000), formally designates a new geological epoch: the epoch wherein human activity became the dominant force shaping Earth’s system. Not merely one force among others, but dominant. Humans leave traces in the planet’s geological record comparable to tectonic shifts, glacial periods, and asteroid impacts.

Read this slowly, allowing words to settle in consciousness. Humanity, that is, eight-plus billion primates inhabiting the thin biospheric film covering a stone ball revolving around an ordinary star on an ordinary galaxy’s outskirts, has become a planetary-scale force. We alter the atmosphere’s chemical composition, acidify oceans, and cause the sixth great biological species’ extinction. We move more earth than all rivers combined. We alter the global climate, not locally, as previous civilizations did by clearing forests or irrigating fields, but globally, affecting atmospheric circulation, glacier melting, sea levels, and precipitation distribution.

But the Anthropocene can be read in another register—not only as a geological fact but as a historical caesura of a special kind. Zoltán Simon (2019), reflecting on contemporaneity, proposes the concept of “unprecedented change.” He insists: we live in times when change’s very quality has transformed. In our century, the future no longer continues the past along familiar trajectories. It does not constitute the next stage in a linear sequence, another step up the ladder of progress. Instead, it threatens to completely transform the very possibility of the Earthlings’ existence, human and non-human.

The Anthropocene embodies precisely this unprecedented logic. Climate crisis constitutes not simply new content in the old biogeological drama’s six acts. This represents a change-type not fitting modernity’s developmental logic. Modernity promised control, progress, and nature’s conquest through reason and technology. The Anthropocene exposes the fact that conquest became control’s loss, progress generated regress, and reason produced planetary-scale unreason.

Simon places the Anthropocene’s climate crisis in a broader framework: the triad of existential cataclysms hanging over humanity (Simon, 2020, p. 79ff). Three absolute threats, three scenarios wherein the future not merely worsens but vanishes: nuclear war, the possibility of instantaneous self-annihilation accumulated since the mid-twentieth century, and never eliminated. Arsenals suffice to erase civilization from Earth’s face multiple times. Nuclear winter following the exchange would render the planet barely habitable. This threat we have grown so accustomed to that we almost ceased noticing it. But it has not disappeared; Damocles’ sword still hangs by a horsehair.

Climate collapse, a slow catastrophe stretched across decades, yet potentially equally fatal. Not instantaneous destruction but gradual degradation of human and remaining wild nature’s life conditions: temperature rise, glacier melting, sea level rise, and extreme weather events will lead to further disruption of the agricultural cycle, mass migrations, and wars over water and land. If feedback loops in the climate system trigger uncontrollable processes—methane release from thawing permafrost, Gulf Stream collapse, Amazonia’s degradation as carbon reservoir—then the planet may transition to a “greenhouse planet” or an “ice planet” state, neither compatible with human civilization in its current form.

Technological singularity, that is, the possibility of artificial superintelligence’s emergence or other transformative technologies radically altering the human’s very definition. This is not necessarily a catastrophe in the classical sense. But it potentially means the end of human history—and the beginning of something else, posthuman, whose meaning and content we cannot foresee. Here, the future is not destroyed but becomes absolutely other, unimaginable from today’s point.

This triad creates the background against which Western-led history unfolds. The deficit of futurity discussed above does not mean the absence of the future but rather the excess of catastrophic and posthuman scenarios. The future has not disappeared; it has multiplied. But precisely those versions multiplied that inspire not hope but horror. Modernity promised one bright future. The approaching historical epoch offers multiple dark ones.

Bruno Latour (1993), among contemporaneity’s most penetrating thinkers, insisted that the Nature/Culture division constitutes not reality’s description but a powerful fiction that once constituted modernity’s grammar. Modernity built itself on this division. On one side, Nature: objective, law-governed, knowable through science, exploitable through technique. On the other side, Culture, Society: subjective, governed by freedom, regulated by politics, and developing historically. Nature—necessity’s sphere. Society—freedom’s sphere. And these two kingdoms never finally mix: humans wrest freedom’s space from Nature, but Nature remains there, beyond the human world’s boundary, as something external, untouched in essence by human activity.

The Anthropocene destroys this division. It appears Nature and Culture are not separated. They interweave and interpenetrate, forming a single, unstable hybrid complex. What we do in Culture’s sphere (industrialization, urbanization, consumption) alters Nature (climate, biosphere, geochemical cycles). And these changes, in turn, crash back on Culture as droughts, floods, hurricanes, epidemics, migrations, and resource wars.

This division, on which modernity founded itself, was never complete. It was practical fiction while the human impact on the planet remained local. But now the scale is global, and the fiction stands exposed. Nature now is not scenery but actor. Earth’s system responds to industrial activity in ways that transform human and non-human lives’ conditions. Climate, which we considered a relatively stable historical background, proves sensitive, dynamic, and capable of sharp transitions to other states. The carbon cycle, nitrogen cycle, and water cycle—all these are no longer “natural constants” but variables depending on human activity. We inhabit a world where external Nature no longer exists.

Donna Haraway attempts to develop this in the Chthulucene concept. Chthulucene represents an alternative way of thinking about the contemporary “ecological crisis,” counterposed to both Anthropocene and capitalism. While the Anthropocene attributes planetary destruction to the abstract “humanity,” thereby smoothing over historical power and inequality differences, Haraway argues that such a perspective leads to fatalism and technological utopias (Haraway, 2020). Capitalocene, capitalism’s epoch, accurately indicates the capitalist system’s role but, conversely, remains too monocausal and does not allow for imagining multispecies co-evolutionary forms necessary for survival. Chthulucene, instead, is conceived as the epoch of “becoming-with,” wherein no species exists or can act alone, and sustainability results from sympoietic connections among humans, animals, plants, and technologies (Haraway, 2015). Haraway insists precisely such local and interspecies practices, not global megascenarios, can form real paths responding to ecological destruction. Thus, Chthulucene serves not as a geological designation but as an ethical-political project that criticizes the Anthropocene’s abstractions and the Capitalocene’s structural determinism, offering forms of earthly, mutually-forming coexistence instead. But such concepts remain on the margins of thought and practice.

In philosophical debates from Latour to Haraway, nevertheless, understanding emerged that one unified socio-natural system exists wherein human and Earth connect through feedback loops, where action immediately generates counteraction, where subject/object boundary blurs. Modernity attempted to separate itself from Nature, mastering it, subordinating it, and converting it into a resource. The Anthropocene represents Nature’s revenge or, more precisely, the discovery that Nature was not what we considered it. It is not an object lying before us. It is that within which we find ourselves. And if we destroy it, we destroy the conditions of our own existence.

Amitav Ghosh (2016), writer and thinker whose work weaves from attention to climate, empire, and violence, proposes examining our caesura in terms of “the great derangement.” What does he mean? Our political systems, cultural forms, and imagination modes prove incapable of adequately representing climate futurity. We know climate changes. We know the consequences will be catastrophic, yet we cannot articulate this. We cannot integrate this knowledge into our daily lives, long-term plans, or political decisions.

Why? Because the climate crisis does not fit habitual narrative forms. The novel, modern imagination’s basic form, constructs itself around individual fates, psychological dramas, and historical events with clear beginnings and endings. Series with sequels and prequels, by contrast, model the imagination of a short, fragmentary present described by Rosa and Gumbrecht. But imagining a climate catastrophe, this is violence too slow, stretched across decades, dispersed across space, lacking a clear perpetrator and a clear victim. How does one tell a story about a half-degree temperature rise? How does one make the carbon cycle heroic?

Contemporary politics is structured around temporal horizons of four- to five-year electoral cycles. Climate demands thinking in centuries. Democratic institutions orient toward responding to current voters’ demands. Climate demands today’s sacrifices for those not yet born. How does a politician facing reelection in three years convince voters to endure privations for the 2100s’ benefit?

Capitalism’s economy constructs itself on discounting futurity. A dollar today is worth more than tomorrow’s dollar. The further into futurity, the less the currency’s weight. But the climate does not discount. Catastrophe in fifty years is catastrophe, not a statistical error in NPV models.

Modernity’s culture was raised on progressive ideas, control, and technological problem-solving. Climate exposes control’s limits. We cannot simply “invent our way out” of the climate crisis as we did in past energy crises. Technologies will help, but only if embedded in a radical transformation of production, consumption, and life modes. And this demands not technical but political, cultural, existential upheaval.

The result is a collective incapacity to act adequately to the threat’s scale. We adopt half-measures, set ambitious goals (carbon neutrality by 2050!), but create no mechanisms for achieving them. We sign international agreements immediately violated. Ghosh calls this derangement—not metaphorically but almost clinically. We collectively behave as if someone who a doctor informed of a fatal diagnosis, yet who continues living as if nothing changed. Denial, repression, dissociation.

For global capitalism, climate collapse represents not simply a “problem” requiring a “solution.” This is a radical contradiction inscribed in its very logic. But to understand this contradiction more deeply, one must examine the structure of twenty-first-century capital. Thomas Piketty (2014), mentioned above, also demonstrated that the Anthropocene results not from “humanity in general,” nor from some abstract, greedy, wasteful “human nature.” This results from a specific capitalist growth trajectory based on fossil fuel and concentrated capital ownership. The long period from mid-nineteenth to the 1970s—what Piketty calls the industrial rise period and post-World War II “glorious thirty years”—was a time when economic growth and mass prosperity seemed to proceed hand in hand. Incomes rose, inequality declined, and the middle class expanded. Capitalism appeared as a system capable of producing abundance and distributing it more or less fairly.

But this period proved an exception, not a rule. Since the 1970s, structural tendencies characteristic of nineteenth-century capitalism returned: growth deceleration, capital’s high share in national income return, wealth concentration in elite hands. Piketty formulates this as capitalism’s “second fundamental law”: capital’s income share tends toward β = s/g, where s equals savings rate and g equals growth rate. At low g—precisely what we observe in developed economies—even moderate savings lead to gigantic capital accumulation relative to current production. And this capital accumulation occurs by exploiting fossil resources on a planetary scale.

Carbon capitalism was not an accidental choice. It was a structural necessity of industrial growth. Coal powered the steam revolution. Oil powered automobile civilization and mass consumption. Gas provided a “clean” transition. Each growth stage deepened fossil fuel dependence. Those accumulating capital from this fossil growth suffer least from its consequences. The wealthiest nations, classes, and individuals, whose capital derived from carbon emissions, possess the greatest resources for protecting against climatic disruption. Meanwhile, nations and groups with minimal historical emission contributions bear maximal damage. This is not merely injustice. This is r > g logic transferred to the climate dimension. Capital’s return exceeds the economy’s growth rate, and wealth concentrates. Rich people’s historical emissions exceed poor people’s contributions, and climate damage concentrates in inverse order. Capitalism accumulated not only wealth but atmospheric carbon. Both accumulations work by the identical logic of unequally distributing benefits and costs.

Capitalism historically legitimized itself through the promise of mass prosperity, not merely elite prosperity, but for broad population strata: the “growing pie” from which even those below receive crumbs. This narrative worked: imperfectly, with crises and reversals, but worked throughout two centuries while the planet seemed infinite and resources inexhaustible. Now the planet has disclosed its finitude. And it appears growth itself, growth in the physical sense of expanding production and consumption, proves incompatible with preserving livable Earth conditions.

Can “green growth” resolve this contradiction? Can we divorce economic growth from emissions growth and resource consumption so radically as to fit within planetary boundaries? Theoretically, this is possible; practically, highly questionable. Absolute divorce of growth and emissions at the necessary scale and pace has never been observed. Green technologies grow, but traditional resource consumption also grows. Solar panels do not replace coal; they add to coal. We build more windmills while also extracting more oil. Moreover, green technologies themselves require resources—rare earth metals for batteries, copper for solar panels, and lithium for electric vehicles. Their extraction destroys ecosystems, pollutes water, and exploits labor in the Global South. “Green capitalism” risks becoming simply another form of extractivism with identical structural contradictions.

The fundamental question: can capitalism reproduce without growth? Or is growth not an incidental feature but capitalism’s essential condition, without which the entire system enters crisis, stagnation, or collapse? If the latter, then we face a dilemma: either capitalism or a livable planet.

For the West, the climate crisis possesses yet another specific dimension: it undermines its moral authority. For centuries, the West constructed its identity around being progress’s vanguard. Modernization, enlightenment, development—all these were projects the West bore to the rest of the world. Rarely selflessly, often through violence, yet with the claim that the Western path meant a better future for all. But now it emerges that precisely the Western industrialization model, based on burning fossil fuels, created or significantly contributed to the climate crisis. Historically, the overwhelming majority of greenhouse gases accumulated in the atmosphere stem from eighteenth- to twentieth-century Western industrialization. Europe and North America grew rich by burning coal and oil. Now, when China, India, and Africa want to industrialize along the same path, the West insists: “Impossible, the planet cannot bear it.”

Is this so? Formally—yes: the planet cannot bear for India and Africa to follow the same carbon-intensive path the West took. But morally, this is hypocrisy. The West demands from others what it itself did not do. Consequently, moral authority’s erosion. Non-Western societies justly point to double standards. Climate negotiations transform into haggling where the Global South demands compensation and technology transfer while the West attempts to minimize obligations.

Thus, the Anthropocene presents universality of a special kind—planetary. No society, no civilization, no state can any longer imagine its future isolated from the biosphere. Planetary universality compels recognition: we, humanity, are interconnected among ourselves and with our planet. Not metaphorically but physically, materially, biologically. Our fates interweave not because we so decided but because we inhabit one planet with finite resources and sensitive climate system. The search for a new conviviality formula, even such as Chthulucene, must continue.

Subjectively, humanity has not yet learned to think and act planetarily. We remain stuck between particular political identities and abstract, intangible “humanity” incapable of mobilizing will and action. Our future images undermine each other, leaving us project-less. Common unimaginable futurity results from double negation: we cannot continue as before, yet we cannot agree how to live otherwise. And here, in these exhaustion dimensions of economy, politics, and planet, our caesura’s connectedness as a protracted historical moment reveals itself. These constitute not crisis sums but dimensions of one exhaustion, modernity’s very depletion having reached its limits.

Dialectics Without Synthesis: The Horizon of the Possible

The five dimensions of Western modernity’s exhaustion dimensions, including cultural, economic, political, geopolitical, and planetary, form not a mechanical aggregate but an organic totality, a system of mutually intensifying processes where each presupposes and mirrors all others. Capital borrowing from an ever-less-existent future through debt pyramids. The state, technically omnipotent yet politically ever-more hollowed. The demos, incapable of reproducing itself biologically, and thus losing its will to historical action. The West, having globalized its institutions, thereby forfeits its monopoly on meaning-generation. The planet, transformed from a mute background into a demanding interlocutor whose imperatives admit no negotiation.

These are not independent “crises” that descended from outside. This is the exhaustion of modernity’s very ontology, of cultural projectivity having reached the limits of its own possibility in its center, in the West. Economic stagnation renders climate transition impossible. Demographic compression drains democracy of vitality. Geopolitical fragmentation transforms planetary threats into competitive fields rather than collaborative ones. Climate catastrophes provoke migrations, undermining political stability. Each contradiction manifests not as an external shock but as an expression of a unified process: modernity’s exhausted capacity, at least Western modernity’s, to produce images of desirable futures and projects for their achievement. With this, the world of modernity’s Dasein itself disappears. In caesura stand both the world and human existence, and their history.

At the center of these exhausting processes stands the state’s metamorphosis into a system that reduces all human and natural interactions to two media—power and money. But this exhaustion opens the door to new forms of sovereignty. Modernity’s classical sovereigns—absolute monarch, sacred people, deified nation—possessed a face, a name, and a visible location to conceal the vacant throne of secular power. Their legitimacy rested on clarity: who rules, in whose name, for what purpose. The new sovereign, it appears from the caesura’s depths, does not yet possess a unified center. Currently dispersed across transnational and national networks of appointed agencies, expert communities, and algorithmic systems, this sovereign is neither elected nor overthrown. It likely reproduces through appointment procedures, cooptation, and control of knowledge and attention infrastructures.

Bureaucracy acquires ever more power with ever less responsibility. It makes decisions determining millions of lives: from monetary policy to safety standards, from migration quotas to climate norms. Yet it answers to no “electorate.” Its reference group comprises not citizens but colleagues in other countries, international organizations, and global expert consensuses. A class of priest-custodians emerges whose legitimacy derives not from democratic mandate but from technocratic competence in care; precisely this competence renders their power opaque to the uninitiated. Until such time as a new grand narrative concludes the caesura, bureaucracy’s protean form will continue ruling faceless.

This new-type state governs not through violence or ideology in the classical sense but through solicitous management of attention and imagination. It does not forbid thinking about the future: it narrows the corridor of the thinkable, counterposing horizons of the possible. Social networks, recommendation algorithms, information space fragmentation, stimulus overload—all create a regime of permanent present wherein the capacity to imagine the radically other atrophies. If Dasein’s being temporalizes, then in different historical conditions, it temporalizes differently. Presently, acceleration of the present to permanent Zeitnot, life’s transformation into a sequence of “crises” and “challenges” demanding immediate reaction, strips human existence of “leisure for contemplating the long-term.” Modernity’s ideal Dasein’s objectivation—the rational, autonomous citizen, scientifically educated, capable of critically assessing power, co-formulating alternative projects, and participating in their realization—transforms into a dependent consumer of information and a subject of anonymous structures. The authenticity problem, which has stood so acutely in high modernity’s time, has not vanished but now demands a solution in the form of reassembling a new historical human subjectivity, a new regime of truth, and a new articulate and legitimate power structure. From this trinity, the new epoch will arise.

The current new sovereign—anonymous bureaucracy embedded in global networks requires an economy of a special kind. Not a growth economy demanding mass mobilization and promising better tomorrows, but a managed stagnation economy where the absence of articulate possibility horizons and presence of inarticulate unstable multiplicity of horizons becomes the norm, accustoming populations that tomorrow will not surpass yesterday, that futurity constitutes not possibility space but risk field requiring avoidance. A rentier economy where wealth concentrates through asset ownership rather than productive labor. A debt economy where the present finances itself by extracting resources from future generations, incapable of protest. Economy without teleology, functioning as an automaton stripped of historical purpose. This is unlikely to constitute a stable system. More probably, this represents merely the caesura’s economic hypostasis from which will sprout seeds of a new material order—neo-capitalist or something presently unimaginable. But for now, it stands obstructing the reassembly of a new world and its correlated subjectivity.

In this constellation, only now forms a new order type wherein subjectivity (another inauthenticity of Dasein), truth (legitimation of new inauthenticity), and power (realization of new inauthenticity) find a new point of mutual grounding. The new ontological order may prove durable, not because it is legitimate but because alternatives will be destroyed after the caesura’s completion.

Yet to grasp this moment’s full depth requires returning to dialectics’ fundamental structure and recognizing how our caesura differs from all historical transitions philosophy has previously contemplated. In Hegel’s dialectic, every negation already contains within itself the germ of a new affirmation. The old form exhausts itself because Spirit has outgrown it, requiring a higher, more adequate expression. Aufhebung, sublation, simultaneously cancels, preserves, and elevates, transforming contradiction into a foundation for richer synthesis. History thus moves not in a circle but in a spiral, each epoch incorporating its predecessor’s achievements while transcending its limitations (Hegel, 1807/1977).

But our condition defies this dialectical architecture, at least so far. Western modernity’s form of universality stands undoubtedly negated. The pretension that liberal democracy, market capitalism, and Enlightenment rationality constitute humanity’s telos has collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions and the resistance of alternative modernities. Yet no synthesis emerges. No higher unity arises incorporating what was valuable in Western universalism while transcending its particularity. We have negation, the antithesis, but the synthesis remains absent, perhaps impossible.

This represents dialectics without sublation, contradiction without resolution, negation without affirmation. We inhabit the zwischen—the between—that Heidegger identified as Dasein’s fundamental structure, but now this between has become historical, collective, planetary (Heidegger, 1927/1962). Humanity stands suspended between an exhausted past and an unborn future, and this suspension reveals itself as potentially indefinite. The caesura may not resolve into a new epoch but extend, deepen, become itself a mode of historical existence—permanent liminality, perpetual crisis, ontological homelessness as a condition rather than a transition.

Consider the structure of this suspended dialectic more carefully. Thesis: Western modernity as universal project—progress through reason, emancipation through markets, freedom through democracy, mastery through science. This thesis dominated roughly from 1800 to 2000, achieving its apotheosis in the brief post-Cold War moment when Fukuyama (1992) could proclaim the end of history, when Western institutions appeared destined to encompass the globe, and when no alternative seemed remotely plausible.

Antithesis: The multiple negations of Western universality we have anatomized—cultural (risk society, acceleration, multiplicity), economic (stagnation, debt, imaginative exhaustion), political (technocracy, autocratization, demographic collapse), geopolitical (multiplex world, Westlessness), planetary (Anthropocene, climate crisis). Each dimension exposes Western modernity’s insufficiency: its incapacity to deliver on its promises and its transformation of emancipation into new forms of domination.

But where is synthesis? Where is the Aufhebung that would preserve what was genuinely universal in Western modernity—its commitment to human dignity, its methods of critical inquiry, its institutional innovations in limiting arbitrary power—while incorporating non-Western wisdoms and responding to planetary imperatives? This synthesis does not exist, not as realized actuality nor even as plausible imaginary.

Instead, we confront what might be termed negative dialectics in Adorno’s (1973) sense: dialectics that refuse the consolation of synthesis, that insist on dwelling with contradiction, that recognize suffering and rupture as potentially irreducible rather than stepping-stones to higher harmony. But our negative dialectics possesses a dimension even Adorno did not fully anticipate: its planetary scale and existential stakes. This is not merely the dialectic of Enlightenment revealing reason’s complicity with domination. This is dialectic confronting the possibility that its movement has reached an endpoint not in achieved synthesis but in exhaustion—that the motor driving historical transformation toward ever-higher forms may have depleted its fuel.

The metaphor requires changing. We stand not on a Hegelian spiral ascending toward Spirit’s self-realization but perhaps at a spiral’s terminus, where the upward movement has exhausted itself, and the path forward remains obscure. Or perhaps we stand at a point where the spiral’s geometry itself must transform, where movement continues but according to principles we have not yet learned to perceive.

What would such a transformation entail? Here we approach this essay’s argumentative apex, the point where diagnosis must gesture, however tentatively, toward possibility.

First, the recognition that planetary universality exists as objective content regardless of subjective acknowledgment. Climate physics, biospheric interconnection, the finite carrying capacity of Earth’s systems—these constitute not matters of opinion but material facts structuring all possible futures (Steffen et al., 2015). This objectivity represents something genuinely new in history: a universality grounded not in cultural norms, religious revelation, or political ideology but in the inescapable conditions of existence on this particular planet. Every society, every civilization, every state now confronts the same biophysical constraints. The Anthropocene, with the Chtuluscenic corrections, thus presents what might be called material universality, universality written into the fabric of Earth systems themselves.

But objective universality does not automatically translate into subjective recognition or political mobilization. Humanity knows about climate change, about biodiversity collapse, about crossing planetary boundaries. Yet this knowledge remains abstract, incapable of reshaping fundamental institutions and practices. The gap between objective condition and subjective capacity constitutes perhaps the deepest dimension of our caesura: we face predicaments requiring unprecedented coordination and transformation, yet our inherited political forms, economic structures, and cultural imaginaries render such coordination nearly impossible.

Second, the exhaustion of Western-centric universality paradoxically opens space for genuinely planetary forms of universal thought and practice to emerge. So long as the West monopolized the universal, claiming its particular path as humanity’s general trajectory, other civilizations and cultures could only position themselves reactively—either accepting subordinate positions within Western-led modernization or rejecting modernity entirely in the name of authentic tradition. Both responses remained trapped within conceptual frameworks established by Western hegemony.

But Westlessness, while producing disorientation, also creates unprecedented freedom. Chinese, Indian, Islamic, and African civilizations no longer need to define themselves primarily in relation to the West. They can draw on their own intellectual and spiritual resources, their historical experiences of ordering collective life, and their understandings of human flourishing. More radically, they can combine elements from different traditions in novel syntheses that no single civilization anticipated.

This is not relativism: the lazy claim that all civilizations are equally valid, that no common standards exist. Rather, it is recognition that universality, if it is to emerge, must do so through polilogue among civilizations rather than through one civilization’s triumph. The planetary challenges we face require cooperative responses transcending any single civilization’s or naitons’ resources. These challenges may thus become the crucible in which new forms of universality are forged, not as imposed doctrine but as practically necessary coordination emerging from recognition of shared predicament.

Third, the demographic exhaustion of Western democracies, while representing a profound crisis, also illuminates deeper questions about political form and temporal orientation that modernity has evaded. Democracy, as developed in the West, presumed a demos capable of biological and cultural reproduction, a citizenry perpetually renewed through generations whose interests aligned sufficiently to maintain solidarity across age cohorts. But when reproduction fails, when populations age and shrink, when the old vastly outnumber the young, democracy’s generational contract fractures.

This crisis, however, forces reconsideration of democracy’s very meaning and purpose. If democracy cannot be sustained through the biopolitical reproduction of ethnically homogeneous national populations, perhaps it must reconstitute itself on different foundations: civic rather than ethnic, political rather than social, based on shared commitment to principles rather than shared bloodlines, capable of integrating newcomers as full members rather than treating them as threats or temporary guests. The failure of one form of democratic reproduction might necessitate—might even enable—experimentation with others.

Moreover, the dominance of gerontocracy in aging societies raises questions about temporal justice that democratic theory has barely begun to address. If current generations consume resources and foreclose options that rightly belong to future generations, if the old use their electoral weight to protect their privileges at the young’s expense, then formal democracy may contradict substantive justice. This realization could catalyze innovations, representing future generations in present decision-making, extending voting rights to younger ages while limiting them for the very old, and creating institutions specifically charged with protecting long-term interests against short-term pressures. The crisis thus contains within itself the seeds of democratic renewal, though whether these seeds will germinate remains radically uncertain.

Fourth, the technocratic metamorphosis of sovereignty, while threatening democratic accountability, also reveals possibilities for more rational, expert-informed governance—if and only if it can be reconnected to democratic authorization and public judgment. The problem with contemporary technocracy lies not in expertise itself—complex societies require specialized knowledge—but in expertise’s insulation from popular accountability and in its frequent service to elite interests rather than the common good. Reconnecting expertise to democracy represents one of our epoch’s central political challenges. It requires neither populist rejection of expert knowledge nor technocratic dismissal of popular wisdom, but rather new institutional forms enabling productive interaction between specialized competence and democratic judgment. Citizens’ assemblies selected by sortition and provided with expert briefing, participatory budgeting processes that allow communities to allocate resources based on local knowledge, and open-source approaches to policy-making that enable broader scrutiny of expert claims—these and other innovations point toward possible syntheses of expertise and democracy (on that see Landemore, 2020).

More radically, the crisis of national sovereignty in an age of transnational challenges may necessitate entirely new scales and forms of political authority. If climate, pandemics, financial flows, and digital networks all transcend national borders, perhaps sovereignty itself must become multi-scalar—simultaneously local, national, regional, and global, with different levels addressing different challenges according to subsidiarity principles. The withering of Westphalian sovereignty need not produce only chaos; it might also enable experimentation with cosmopolitan federalism, polycentric governance, and nested authorities that previous ages could not imagine.

Fifth and most fundamentally, the exhaustion of growth-based capitalism’s temporal structure creates both crisis and opportunity. Crisis because capitalism, as we have known it, cannot function without the promise of perpetual expansion, without the faith that tomorrow will deliver more than today. When this faith collapses, when futurity contracts, capital’s mechanisms of accumulation and legitimation falter. But opportunity, because growth’s end, if it can be accepted and metabolized rather than denied, might liberate humanity from what has become a pathological obsession. The endless pursuit of more—more production, more consumption, more accumulation—has devastated ecosystems, degraded social bonds, and left even the affluent anxious and unfulfilled. Economic growth, which began as a means to human flourishing, became an end in itself, a treadmill from which no exit appeared possible.

Degrowth, post-growth, steady-state economics—these emerging frameworks propose accepting planetary limits not as tragedy but as liberation, redirecting human creativity from quantitative expansion to qualitative improvement (Hickel, 2020; Raworth, 2017). What if we measured success not by GDP but by health, education, ecological restoration, cultural vitality, time for contemplation, and care? What if we organized economies not around profit maximization but around meeting needs, enabling capabilities, and stewarding commons? These questions, unthinkable within the growth paradigm, become not only thinkable but necessary when growth’s impossibility becomes undeniable.

The transition would prove enormously difficult, requiring the transformation of property relations, labor organization, financial systems, and cultural values. Vested interests would resist ferociously. Coordination problems would prove daunting. Yet the very depth of the crisis we face renders the previously impossible potentially necessary. Modernity’s central wager that human ingenuity could master contingency and engineer continuous improvement has failed not because humans lack ingenuity but because the wager itself was flawed, premised on infinite growth within a finite system. Accepting this failure does not mean despair but rather clear-eyed recognition of reality’s constraints as a precondition for wisdom.

What unites all these possibilities—planetary universality’s recognition, civilizational polylogue, democratic innovation, expertise-democracy synthesis, post-growth economics—is their character as potentials rather than actualities, as maybes rather than certainties. The dialectic remains suspended, synthesis unachieved. We cannot know whether these seeds will sprout or wither, whether the caesura will resolve into a new epoch or deepen into a prolonged dark age. But the future will arrive. History does not pause awaiting our readiness. Being tolerates no Void. The question before us, therefore, concerns not whether the future will come but how it comes and who shapes it. Will humans collectively exercise agency, imagination, and will to co-create futures worth inhabiting? Or will we be swept along by forces beyond our control—algorithmic governance, climate catastrophe, authoritarian retrenchment, market dynamics indifferent to human flourishing?

This choice—between active and passive relation to futurity—constitutes the political and existential question of our moment. It is not a choice in the liberal sense of individual preference but in the existential sense of fundamental orientation. Heidegger (1962, 1977) distinguished authentic from inauthentic existence partly through temporality: authentic Dasein projects itself into its possibilities, taking responsibility for its thrownness and its mortality; inauthentic Dasein loses itself in the “they,” in busy-ness and distraction, fleeing from the weightiness of existence.

At the historical level, the same distinction applies. Authentic collective existence means confronting our civilizational predicament without evasion—acknowledging the exhaustion of inherited forms, mourning what must be released, and, nonetheless, gathering the courage to imagine and enact alternatives. Inauthentic collective existence means denial, distraction, continuing to perform rituals whose meaning has evaporated, and hoping somehow that old formulas will magically resume functioning.

We stand, then, before a decision that is simultaneously philosophical and practical, simultaneously intellectual and existential. Philosophy’s task in such moments cannot be to provide blueprints, the temptation of ideology, nor to proclaim impossibility, the temptation of cynicism. Philosophy’s task is midwifery in the Socratic sense: helping birth ideas not through implanting them from outside but through drawing out what already gestates within the contradictions of the present.

What gestates in our caesura’s contradictions? New forms of subjectivity no longer based on autonomous individual or homogeneous nation but on interdependence, multiplicity, planetary citizenship. New regimes of truth no longer claim God’s-eye objectivity or pure cultural construction but acknowledge situated, partial perspectives that can nonetheless achieve practical adequacy. New structures of power no longer require a unified sovereign nor collapse into anarchic fragmentation but enable polycentric coordination and subsidiarity. These forms remain inchoate, barely imaginable, certainly not yet institutionalized. But their necessity becomes ever more apparent as old forms fail.

The process will be agonistic, fraught, uncertain. Different visions will conflict. Reactionary forces will attempt restoring imagined pasts. Catastrophic possibilities remain all too real. We could fail—individually, collectively, civilizationally, even as species. The Anthropocene’s three absolute threats could actualize, and the caesura could deepen into collapse. But so long as thought continues, so long as humans retain the capacity to imagine otherwise and to act toward the imagined, hope remains not as optimism but as commitment. Hope in dark times means not confidence in positive outcomes but the refusal of despair’s seductions, and the insistence that other futures remain possible even when their paths appear obscured (Lear, 2006). It means doing the work of imagination and institution-building even without guarantees, even knowing the probability of failure.

Dwelling rigorously with our moment’s contradictions, neither minimizing their severity nor inflating them to apocalyptic certainty, creates the conditions for genuine thinking. And genuine thinking—thinking that risks itself, that abandons reassuring certainties, that opens to what Heidegger called “the question concerning the meaning of Being”—may yet disclose possibilities foreclosed to calculative reason (Heidegger, 1977).

We began by characterizing our situation as an ontological caesura. We traced this rupture’s manifestations across five dimensions, interweaving into a unified, if unresolved, dialectic. We examined the metamorphosis of sovereignty into technocratic priesthood, the demographic hollowing of democratic peoples, the impossibility of continuing capitalism’s growth trajectory, the West’s loss of orientation-giving centrality, and the planet’s emergence as an undeniable constraint. All this constitutes a diagnosis, necessary but insufficient. Diagnosis alone leads to paralysis or despair. But diagnosis paired with recognition of latent possibilities, with attention to what Benjamin (1968) called the “weak messianic power” residing in every present moment, enables orientation without false certainty, action without naïveté, hope without illusion.

The future is on its way. It approaches whether we prepare or not, whether we welcome or dread it. Our choice lies not in whether it arrives but in how we meet it: as subjects capable of shaping, however partially and provisionally, the conditions of our collective existence, or as objects swept by forces we cannot comprehend or influence. Between co-authoring and being authored, between walking hand-in-hand with fate and being dragged by it—this is the question of the present moment.

Philosophy cannot answer this question for humanity. But philosophy can illuminate the question’s stakes, can dispel the illusions making genuine choice impossible, and can articulate the alternatives with maximal clarity.

And so we return, finally, to where we began: lungs between breaths, poised between exhalation and inhalation, between epochs. The stale air of modernity’s exhausted promises must be expelled. But what fresh air might we inhale? What new mode of temporal existence, what new structures of subjectivity and power, what new relations among humans and between humans and Earth’s systems might emerge? —These questions have no predetermined answers. They constitute not problems admitting solutions but aporias demanding creative response not in philosophy’s seminar rooms alone, but in social movements, political struggles, technological laboratories, artistic experiments, spiritual practices, and countless ordinary decisions about how to live amid ruin and possibility.

Yet philosophy has its part to play: vigilant diagnosis, relentless questioning, and careful articulation of the stakes. And perhaps most importantly, keeping alive the sense that human beings remain capable of new beginnings, that the exhaustion of one historical form need not mean history’s end, that in the rubble of the old lie materials for building anew.

The historical caesura we inhabit is real, deep, and dangerous. We may not survive it. But if there is to be a future worth the name, if history is to continue rather than merely persist in entropic decline, then it will be because enough humans, in enough places, proved capable of the imagination and courage required to think and act beyond exhausted universals toward forms of life adequate to our planetary, pluralistic, precarious condition. This is the horizon of the possible that opens before us. Whether we can reach it remains the question to which our age, in its practices and failures, its experiments and catastrophes, will provide the only answer that matters: the one lived rather than merely proclaimed, the one enacted rather than simply theorized.

The future will come. How we meet it, this remains ours to determine.

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