Today the geopolitical relations of many nations are dominated by division and polarization. But culture, people and politics weren’t always polarized and divided. More than two centuries ago, despite the spread of colonialist domination of European monarchies and other powers, a rapprochement between people and cultures was notable everywhere around the planet. People started to connect to one another, they moved and migrated from one region to another and from one continent to another. It was a period of convergence of people and culture as the planet was on the verge of globalization.
During the Second World War, for the first time in human history, man in power used a mass destruction weapon, the nuclear bombs, and exterminated the population of two entire downtown urban centers in Japan.
Then, after the war, humanity witnessed the monstrous consequences of the global division and polarization with the nuclear arms race between the two blocs, the East and the West. The planet was divided between two ideologies positioned to act as instruments of domination. Each side accumulated thousands of weapons of mass destruction. With the exercise of violence on each side and a minority imposes their conditions on the social whole. During this period, polarization among cultures, people, and nations accelerated.
Then as global polarization grew, social fear and paranoia also grew around the world.
For decades, global fear of total alienation was incorporated into the lives of generations through education and cultural production (mass media and movies). This phenomenon produced a huge psychological impact on the population.
By the end of the 21st century, humanity witnessed a détente of the geopolitical tensions between the West and the USSR, the two military superpowers primarily responsible for a frenzied arms race. During this period, when the Soviet empire fell, there was no violence or destruction, and it allowed great achievement in the convergence of peoples, cultures, beliefs, and ideas. It allowed the Western countries and the ex-USSR to open a dialogue and initiated concerted actions for global nuclear disarmament.
In short, we witnessed the recognition of two great peoples and cultures. People understood that openness and dialogue are decisive factors in the building of conditions for the evolution of all cultures and human consciousness.
But then, a few years later the process of polarization resurfaced as the tensions between major military superpowers rose again everywhere around the planet and as the global military budget increased year after year.
According to estimates by the United Nations Security Council, Today a quarter of the world’s population lives in conflict-affected regions which corresponds to 2 billion people. The UNDP’s Multidimensional Poverty Index has revealed in 2025 that nearly 40% of people are experiencing multidimensional poverty and live in countries exposed to violent conflict.
These figures demonstrate that conflict pushes people and countries into poverty or keeps them there.
In fact, many governments have sidestepped the basic human needs such as public education, universal healthcare, clean water, sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, and choose to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into armament, anti-missiles devices and the maintenance of weapons of mass destruction, such as nuclear weapons.
Jocelyn Gardner, a Concordia university student in Montreal published The pitfalls of a polarized nation in the Link (Concordia University student newspaper). In this article Gardner gave his point of view on the acceleration of polarization in society and mentioned several researchers studying the phenomenon.
He explains, (…) the competitive and isolating nature of capitalism has penetrated its teeth into a plethora of societal structures, making polarization a key principle of America’s hyper-individualistic society that promotes contention over community. (Source: The Link)
According to Jennifer McCoy, from the International Catalan Institute for Peace, the growing sentiment of competitiveness in democracy.
If you win, I lose” accelerated the polarization among political parties and powerful groups of men and businesses. In many contexts opposing sides are seen as rivals to be defeated rather than negotiated and persuaded, said McCoy.
In an article published in the American Psychological Association magazine, Community outreach manager Kirk Waldroff explains that existential fear sits at the heart of polarization. Political parties perpetuate this with distorted perceptions, which are driven by fear of the other, said Waldroff.
Kirk Schneider, a PhD professor at Saybrook University in California, also links polarization with fear: “Existential fear appears to be at the heart of what drives polarization.
One reason we tend to become fixated and polarized is because of individual and collective trauma that is associated with a profound sense of insignificance. In this state, people may feel that they don’t matter and fear “ultimately being wiped away or extinguished. And if existential fear is indeed a root of polarization, our sometimes-warped view of the other side can perpetuate it. Research indicates that the divisiveness will continue to grow if fear of the other and the wounds fueling that fear are not addressed,” says Schneider.
Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist and philosopher, who survived the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps (an experience that profoundly shaped his life and thought).gives a poignant testament to the human spirit’s ability to find meaning even in the most extreme situations and moments of profound sense of insignificance. His story, Man’s Search for Meaning, has become a classic of existential literature and an essential testament to human resilience and the search for meaning in the face of adversity.
At the heart of Frankl’s experience, we find the conviction that humankind is capable of finding meaning in life, even in conditions of extreme suffering, fear and despair.
Perhaps it’s time to understand how the geopolitical tensions and the polarization between the superpowers are continuing human history and the social time in a repetition of endless violence.
Perhaps it’s time to understand how the image of the human being projected by the old institutions conditioned our perceptions, our beliefs and the way we look at the future and at each other.
The projections of fear into the future
Today, many politicians and business leaders project futuristic representations marked with fear, violence and wars onto social media, and in doing so, they influence tens of millions of people. They fuel division and polarizing rhetoric among their people. They fuel fear of others by creating enemies. They maintain old prejudices about human nature and the human consciousness. Their look upon the human being limits the capacities of their own people to use nonviolent means to resolve personal and social conflict. Their view of humanity is linked to a form of zoological ideology where only the fittest and the strongest will survive. It’s terrifying!
Perhaps it’s time to recognize that geopolitical tensions between military superpowers are not only visible in the physical world through threats, violence and wars. But these tensions are registered by our external senses and penetrate into our body, and generate fear in our consciousness and in our representations of the future.
According to Dario Ergas, in his latest book, he explained how polarization and division are rooted in the social historical configuration of the time and generate profound beliefs about human life and the representation of the future. These beliefs are lived as if they were the obvious truth, but today they are in crisis.
Ergas has participated in the founding of the Humanist Party in Chile during the struggle against the military dictatorship in 1984 and the creation of the Latin American Humanist Forum in 2001. He explains that in a moment of social despair, a rupture of beliefs generates new responses in front of a danger. A new way of being conscious and a new meaning of the future emerge. He characterizes the present situation as a moment where a certain type of collective mentality rooted in the social historical configuration is disintegrating day by day.
Humanity and consciousness in danger
In the recent book, Farrell explains the urgency to address one of the most pressing existential themes, the future.
She explained how in this polarized world, we are not aware that more than 2,000 nuclear warheads are aimed directly at us every day. But the activity of our instincts of self-preservation are always mobilized. According to F the consciousness seeks to escape the stimuli of pain and suffering coming from the threat of mass destruction, wars, and violence through a mechanism called the revêries. These personal and collective reveries compensate for our fear of pain, suffering, death and massive extinction.
According to our research In great danger and despair, the system of vital tensions of the human species is mobilized by the activity of the instincts of self-preservation in order to protect the psychophysical structure. F called this phenomenon the collective state of consciousness in danger. Farrell explained, as the sensations of danger and terror get more intense, human beings experience disorientation towards the future and psychological distress regarding their meaning.
Here a summary of our observation
I understand that I live in a society that makes me believe that events in the world take place outside of me and seem to have no connection with my body and my consciousness and the mass media and social institutions propose representations that reinforce the belief that the world is experienced as external to the body and consciousness. Yet my body is also seen as part of the world since it acts in the world and receives action from the world.
Then, I observe that there is a relationship between my biography and the events taking place in the world. I experience through my body these events that are processed by my consciousness. I understand that my body and my consciousness allow me to act in the world. Thus, the actions of others can also affect my body, my mind, and my consciousness.
I recognize that we are unaware of the influence of nuclear bombs on the human consciousness because, from birth, we are immersed in a state that gives us the illusion that this situation is normal.
The state of consciousness in danger is formalized in childhood thanks to a structural link maintained by the intentionality of consciousness. We call this structure, the subject-consciousness-world. This structure is developed as the child’s consciousness expands from stimuli that are coming from his environment.
The stimuli of pain and suffering are captured at all times by the external and internal senses of human beings. These stimuli are translated into impulses by the sensory apparatus and launched into signals into the psyche. Consequently, these signals act on the vital tension system of the human species by increasing psychological tension.
Thus, we say that the activity of individual and species-specific self-preservation instincts mobilizes responses from the vegetative center (1) to defend the entire subject-consciousness-world structure.
Being immersed in a state of consciousness in danger, we have no records (sensations and memory) of the self-preservation instinct’s activity. But the psyche still receives signals indicating that the psychophysical structure is in danger. Consequently, these signals act on the body by activating tension points distributed throughout the intra-body, which we call the vital tension system. (Un sens de la vie qui défie la peur de l’extinction massive, p. 56)
Farrell explained how these signals and the psychological distress are interpreted and translated into images by many people who have an artistic sensibility or a cultural sensitivity.
Indeed, artists and movie producers translate these signals they perceive in the human mind into narratives. They translate the vital tensions of the human species through dystopias that present a devastating future with depictions of mass extinction of humanity and stories of sociopaths.
While others interpret these signals as the need to protect themselves and their cultures against future threats. They protect themselves from other cultures and potential enemies by proposing to exclude, eliminate, or even annihilate the other culture.
Others, like Farrell, interpret these signals as the need to change the direction of things in order to liberate the mind of the human being from fear and suffering, amplifying the operational freedom of consciousness and amplifying the space of representation (3).
The main interest of Farrell’s research is the demonstration of the possible intentional change in the subject-consciousness-world structure, thanks to personal and social actions that are driven to overcome the suffering in oneself and in others.
An intentional change driven by the aspiration of giving a new meaning to the future. A future without polarization and division, generating violence and fear. A future where people would transform the world and transform themselves.
In short, F quest in the meaning of life is not only about my own liberation process, but about a broader process characterized by a historic opportunity. The opportunity to free humanity from the danger of global annihilation and to free the human being from the state of consciousness in danger in which he is immersed and limit his consciousness and his actions in the world.
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Source: Books
Ergas, DarioLa Mirada y su Profundidad, The look and its Depth, Park of Study and Reflection Punta de Vacas, September 2019
Farrell, Anne, Un sens de la vie qui défie la fatalité de l’extinction massive, Henri Oscar Communication, Montréal, 2025
Puledda Salvatore, On Being Human, Interpretations of Humanism from The Renaissance to the Present, New Humanism Series, Latitude Press, San Diego, 1997.
Others media:
The polarized mind: Why it’s killing us and what we can do about it, 2013, University Professors Press, .Kirk Schneider, a PhD professor at Saybrook University in California.
Healing the political divide: How did we become such a divided nation, and how can psychologists help us bridge the gap?, American Psychological Association, Kirk Waldroff.
Polarization as a Global Phenomenon talk with Jennifer McCoyJennifer McCoy, from the International Catalan Institute for Peace
The pitfalls of a polarized nation, the Link, Concordia University Montreal, Jocelyn Gardner
Themes
Centers of responses: Abstraction or conceptual synthesis referring to the different activities of the human being, which encompass the work of different physical points. This conceptual synthesis refers to the mechanism of the psyche that provides a response to the world of sensation. The response is the manifestation of the activity of the center towards the external and – or internal environment. We can differentiate the response centers, either by activity or by the function they fulfill. The centers are in no way separate and work in structure and dynamics, producing a register of concomitance between them; a certain type of energy circulates between them, which we will provisionally call nervous energy, they work with registers of their own, through the internal senses and through the connection between the centers and consciousness. The responses of the centers towards the environment have different speeds. The intellectual center is the slowest while the vegetative center is the fastest – in short, it is the vegetative center that mobilizes the response of the instincts of preservation in the formalization of the state of consciousness in danger. The work of the centers has a structural tendency that is recorded as inner unity. When this work is experienced in different directions, a register of inner contradiction appears. This dysfunction, opposition of the activity of the centers, is recorded as inner pain, as an increase in internal tension. Inner unity is summarized as: thinking, feeling and acting in the same direction. (Amman, 2004 p.314, French edition)
Vegetative center: It regulates the internal activity of the body by giving balancing responses to the imbalances produced and by sending signals to the other centers, so that they are mobilized to satisfy its needs, to avoid the pain that one feels or to prolong the pleasure that one experiences. From another point of view, we say that it is the base of the psyche, where the instincts of individual and species preservation are activated; these instincts, excited by signals corresponding to pain and pleasure, are mobilized for the defense and expansion of the entire structure. There is no register that indicates that a part or the entire structure is in danger (instincts are not devices but activities). The vegetative center is mobilized by images of the cenesthetic register caused by fatigue, hunger, fear, threat, and by reflexes coming from the sex. The vegetative center almost completely avoids the mechanisms of consciousness, but its work is captured by the internal senses whose signal, upon reaching consciousness, is transformed into an image that can mobilize the involuntary parts of the other centers. (Amman, 2004, p.163, French edition)
Space of representation: is a kind of mental screen where images, formed from sensory stimuli, memory stimuli and the activity of consciousness are projected. In addition to serving as a screen, it is formed from all the internal representations of the cenesthetic sense. The representational space has markers, a volume and a depth that allow us to situate, depending on the location of the image, whether the phenomena come from the internal or external world. (source: Amman, 2004, p. 281, French edition)
Human landscape: it is a type of exterior landscape made up of people, and also of human facts and intentions concretized in objects. It is important to emphasize that mentioning the landscape always includes the one who looks at it; on the contrary, in other cases, when we speak of society, it appears to us as exempt from any interpretation of the gaze of oneself. (Silo, 1996, p.56)
