Today no western person expects any crucial events to arise from history and politics; great events are experienced as abstractions, mechanisms or spectacles, and everything that is of interest is played out in the present time and in private space.
Over the last fifty years the psychological life of the western masses has undergone a profound metamorphosis; we have all been transformed and overwhelmed by it. Today the criteria by which the present is customarily judged, and in accordance with which people take up ethical and political positions with regard to the problems of our time, appear not to come to grips with reality. They either look forward, at a future no longer linked to a political project, so that they are only the projection of a desire, or they look backward, at a past that will never return. What are the main features of this metamorphosis? What has happened?