An old friend, one of the people responsible for the safety of nuclear power plants in France, has been talking to me for about 30 years about “signaux faibles” – little clues – which, taken alone, mean nothing but when put together correctly in a puzzle, give a picture of a clear review of potential disasters.

I tried to identify the “little signals” that Mr. G and I guessed instinctively, and to reverse-engineer – a decline-era autopsy – the 20-piece puzzle that is becoming clearer every day. Here, in all its glory, is the decomposition of the unsustainable society in which we lived until yesterday and to which we risk saying goodbye starting tomorrow:

1) only the salaries of the first Spanish, German and English football leagues are enough to pay 120,000 researchers (8 times more than in Romania). There are fewer and fewer “socio-psycho-eco-law” students, many of whom will teach us how to pack smoke, fewer and fewer in the sciences.

2) For 20 years we have given cosmic importance to marginal topics. See what have been the main topics of debate in our space for the past 20 years! Empty words, “communication” have become more important than content.

3) We have come to the point that in EU countries we obsessively ask the question whether marriage is really between a man and a woman! And we poke each other’s eyes out with this thing. Hello people?

4) We value weirdos and marginals, we ignore the real elites who have kept our civilization on their backs for centuries with their minds and weapons. Our youth have no idea who our Nobel laureates are, but they raise a strange 15-year-old girl to the rank of an icon. We throw away our cultural pillars and put the minor works of some brave but irrelevant cultural people into our children’s heads just because they represent “diversity”. We deny our own history (and self-flagellate) only because some aspects of it seem to us to be contrary to our values ​​today.

5). An example is the stupidity of anti-vaxxers or those who want to force us to adopt their herbivore lifestyle.

6) The ease with which we ridicule the religion that built our civilization and accept – through intellectual laziness and convenience – the invasion of our intimate space by religions and customs that spread themes that were thrown into the dustbin of history some 4-500 years ago in the West.

7) We are fighting with the wrong weapons for the extremely justified (I don’t think any sane person can argue otherwise in Christendom) equality between men and women. The natural expression of masculinity has become “toxic”, femininity equated with “depravity” or, as the case may be, “subjugation” to an oppressive patriarchal society. Helping a woman lift a heavy box or open a door has become “an unacceptable display of benevolent sexism,” as a gender relations manager at a large multinational company recently explained to me. The press secretary became a press secretary, “Ileana the doctor” became “Ileana the tractor driver” and, behold, the problem was solved – we achieved under the pen a justified desire for equality between men and women in the Western world, forgetting that in the world of “another culture”, which we must respect in the name of…tolerance, women are stoned to death for simply looking at a man. Instead of teaching men to lead by example with women’s vastly superior behavioral decency, we applaud when women live up to the standards of high vulgarity peddled by some poor guy with a microphone. Poet’s words: we look through the keyhole/women’s emancipation.

8) If you love your country calmly and honestly, you are an infrequent nationalist, if you expose the evidence and love the natural order of things, you are automatically a “reactionary”. If there is no more luck, a straight “fascist”!

9) Perfection is doubtful, mediocrity is a virtue.

10) Arrogance about the main cultures, China, India, Japan and even Turkey, combined with geostrategic blindness: many in Europe view the US with more distrust than Russia or China, we teach Americans who for 80 years defend freedom every day in Western Europe and for 40 years throughout Europe how they elected their president.

11) We don’t recognize the huge progress made since 1990: we think spending a weekend in Rome, London or Paris is a right, not a privilege.

13) We teach children origami, “development of critical thinking” and other “cool” things, but we forget to teach them mountains, rivers and capitals of Europe, mathematics and grammar. Because studying them does not generate “well-being”.

14) Everyone demands rights, no one feels that they have responsibilities.

15) The pedagogy of evidence is increasingly necessary: ​​young people torn by democracy and welfare, with beards to hide their double chins in their 20s, unwashed and with a joint in the corner of their mouth or to be “gender neutral”. ”, exalted whores, suitors asking you for explanations about all kinds of natural things, for example: “are you sure you are a woman if you have breasts and a man if you have a penis?” or “yes, why separate toilets for men and women?”

16) We choose bosses who, if not outright morons, are outcasts, rain cats instead of lions in charge. It has become an object of admiration when the country’s prime minister is a supermarket cashier, and an object of public condemnation when the leader is an experienced representative of the intellectual or professional elite.

17) The relentless pursuit of productivity and perfection that has led to the incredible development of our society has turned into an obsession with “fairness” that is most often achieved by bringing down those at the top rather than, as it should, raising the level of those at the bottom.

18) We have neglected the army and discipline: the armed forces of the EU countries are ridiculously small, it has become impossible to imagine guys “wasting time” with minimal training in protecting their lives (à propos, why only guys? they want you to be the one can’t take a step without… the pedagogy of evidence asks in bewilderment), but they’re all video game button-mashing champions. Any investment in entertainment is, in the injection eyes of overworked people, justified, any investment in safety or discretion is “waste”.

19) With the skill of magicians, we find – and consume – entertainment on the smartphone, but there is no social learning reflex, thanks to which we use the fabulous highway of the Internet to go to knowledge.

20) The computing power used for life sciences is millions of times less than for social networks, TV shows and pornography. Such resources.

There are many more such trifles, just as many seemingly insignificant suicidal paradoxes, easily noticeable if you think carefully, extracted from the bustle of the eternal search for comfort – the disease of modernity. None of these features is diagnostic in itself, and each can be countered with a wheelbarrow of arguments. But all together reveal a certain tendency, just as the molecules of water in a stream are harmless, but their whole is frightening. _Read the rest of the article on Contributors.ro