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The Gaseous Society

When there is no room left for what is solid, all that remains is the superficial, ephemeral, the gaseous. The immediacy, the search for profitability, the lack of demands and self-demand, the disdain for tradition, innovative obsession, consumerism, placebo education, the cornering of the humanities and philosophy, self-help, accepted mediocrity, and satisfied ignorance cause what we thought was more conscious to falter. Everything arises, propagates, is sold, bought and used just as soon as it evaporates. More than in a liquid society –as explained by the great thinker Zygmunt Bauman– we live now in a gaseous society. With the hope that we can still change things, this essay proposes a lucid and possibly uncomfortable reflection on the varied and subtle ways in which what should have more substance –education, relationships, culture, knowledge– becomes gaseous.

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