The Grotesque in Power — Humanity with Its Brain Switched Off

Good morning, 2026. You entered without knocking — as if you already knew the door was wide open. Looking back at 2025, one brutal truth stands out: reality has stopped pretending to be reasonable.

There was a time when satire magnified the absurd to expose it. Today, satire runs barefoot behind the headlines, breathless and out of ink. Reality has become faster than irony.

Politics as theatre — the people as extras

Politics has become a stage where coherence is optional and visibility is everything. The people, often exhausted and wounded, accepted the role of extras — applauding with one hand while filming with the other, mistaking spectacle for participation.

This is where the grotesque thrives: when outrage becomes entertainment and truth becomes "opinion". Debate turns into verbal wrestling. Slogans replace ideas. Fury replaces reasoning. Ignorance — once a quiet misfortune — is rebranded as authenticity.

The age of the "brain switched off"

An invisible button has been pressed by many without noticing: OFF. It is not that people stopped thinking — it is worse. They began to believe that thinking is a waste of time.

Thinking demands effort, silence, doubt. It requires the courage to say: "I might be wrong." In an age where doubt is weakness and shouting is proof, intelligence becomes inconvenient.

And so ignorance is institutionalised — not the innocent ignorance of lack of opportunity, but armed ignorance: the kind that refuses to learn because knowledge feels like an insult. Ignorance that boasts about not reading. Ignorance that calls complexity a conspiracy. Ignorance that labels education as elitism.

Darkness under studio lights

Modern darkness does not arrive in the dark. It comes with studio lights, polished graphics, epic soundtracks and scrolling captions. It comes with "experts" who never studied, leaders who promise without measuring, and crowds who follow without asking.

That is why the world becomes dangerous — not only because of the wicked, but because nonsense is normalised and authoritarianism is applauded when packaged as "simple solutions". Common sense did not disappear. It was pushed aside, mocked, interrupted, dismissed as naïve. And finally, it sat down in silence.

What to do when the grotesque dominates?

There is an answer that does not fit on posters: turn the brain back on. Return to the basics feared by the intellectually lazy: read, compare, verify, doubt. Say "I don't know" without shame. Refuse shortcuts. Reject the cheap pleasure of hatred.

And above all, protect what remains of humanity amid the noise: the ability to listen, to think slowly, to build instead of reacting. The grotesque feeds on haste. And haste is manipulation's closest ally.

Epilogue: a candle in the absurd

Yes, 2025 felt like it was written by a screenwriter who lost shame and gained budget. But there is one irony that still saves us: the grotesque, no matter how loudly it shouts, fears lucidity.

Lucidity does not scream — it builds roads. And if 2026 must stand for something, let it be this: less hysteria, more thought; less worship of the loud ignorant, more respect for those who study and work; fewer neon-lit shadows, more simple light — the kind that appears when someone, in the middle of chaos, refuses to switch off.