By Francisco Gonçalves
In Fragmentos do Caos Blogue

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In the mid-1970s, at the age of 15, and amidst a rebellious and informed youth, I dreamed — and saw the world changing every day. And in my eyes shone the light of someone who truly believed.

Utopia?, you might say.
Yes, perhaps a little. But I was no longer that innocent — I had read Utopia by Thomas More, and many other utopias sold as heavens on earth, and much more about the world and humanity.

Yet, even so, just as I witnessed the immense progress of 20th-century science, I believed in a new world and in the continuous evolution of humankind.
In a time when knowledge would illuminate the people.
In democracies blooming like gardens of liberty.
In citizens taking their destiny into their own hands — free, enlightened, and dignified.
Without dogmas, without tyrannies, and free to think and to change, to create, to build a future of dignity for all.

That was the promise of the future.
And I, like so many others, believed in it with every fiber of my being.

More than fifty years have passed.
Today I look around… and I see, with deep sorrow:
we were wrong. Utterly. Tragically.

What I see are not upright citizens.
I see masses who are educated… but not thoughtful.
Graduates who never read beyond the required textbooks. PhDs without ethics, without critical sense, without a single drop of civic awareness.
People who spent years in schools and universities without ever having passed through the fire of reflection.

They are outraged by surface trends, swept up by the noise of the herd.
They march for infantile narratives, for hollow slogans, for causes packaged for quick consumption.
And in the face of the rot of power, the plunder of the public purse, the organized corruption… not even a grimace. Not a word. Not a gesture.

Where is the awareness we were promised?
Where are the fruits of mass education, of the internet, of globalization?
What use are all these degrees if the spirit remains domesticated?

The truth, however harsh, is that humanity has not evolved — it has regressed.
It has retreated in thought, in character, in courage.
We are losing what we had conquered at the end of the 20th century.
Western civilization — once a beacon of free thought — is being corroded from within, anesthetized by comfort and distraction, infiltrated by forces that despise everything that made it possible.

Perhaps it really is time to stop.

To be silent.
To think with brutal seriousness.
And maybe…
To go back.

Not to the chains of history, but to the point when thought was a seed, not an algorithm.
To a time when school shaped restless minds, not obedient professionals.
To when being a citizen was a noble duty — not a bureaucratic formality of voting and returning to the couch.

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Because the greatest disappointment is not what they've done to the world.
It's what the people themselves have allowed to be done.

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