IJSP Number 6, 2024

84 1. INTRODUCTION Napoleon went forth to seek virtue, since she was not to be found, he got power. J.W. Goethe Are we really lost, meaning lost as in the series “Lost”? Or, are we just lost to ourselves, systematically and systemically? That could be the question this article will try to tackle with. There is nothing new if we say that the contemporary citizen of the world, or at least that of the western world, is not very well. Most of them are highly neurotic if not addicted to some item going from food to drugs, from gaming to crediting and so on, depressive, suicidal, or at least dependent on one or more offers as in the compulsory buying things they don’t really need. They are lost indeed, but not on an island in the South Pacific. They are lost in the intricacies of modern life itself, in all its offers, temptations, and innumerable sources of alienation, in all its desperate loneliness and despair, in a society and a social fabric that inspires a systematic neuroticism (one that has become, in the meantime, ‘functional’). As long as it is only neurosis, as in the ‘normal’ everyday-like neurosis, it is not a very big problem – that is what is actually considered ‘normality’. For instance, it is not a problem to live on a constant and reiterated manic-depressive curve, or its ups and downs of every day: going to work, coming home, on and on, ad infinitum. Or the workdays and the celebrated and much awaited weekends. Or the annual worktime and the holydays planned in advance. That manic-depressiveness of the roller-coaster life is nowadays considered as being the norm and, as such, normality. The ups and downs mentioned above are so normal that nobody pays any attention to the fact that our society in all its dimensions is sickening people by pushing them into a ‘normalized’ manic-depressiveness. And, as long as such a bipolar-ness has to be compensated (and in most cases over-compensated) by buying and consuming, it becomes a desirable or at least ‘beneficial’ tendency, one that has to be maintained if not encouraged. If that is normality, if something so degrading for the human spirit is considered normality, what is then pathology? Where does illness, as in psychological or psychiatric problems, begin?