Nowadays, privacy is often seen as a series of traps. People feel that in their daily lives they are unable to cope with thoften they are absolutely right about that. Everything a person usually knows directly from experience, everything he tries to do, is within the limits of his private life; his ideas and possibilities are limited by the narrow framework of work, family, neighborhood, outside of which others act for him, and he remains a simple spectator. But the more one feels, even if vaguely, the approaching of an external threat from someone's ambitious plans, the more one feels trapped.
Behind this feeling, there are seemingly independent changes in the very structure of societies and the entire continents. But the historical facts are also the facts of the successes and failures of individuals. In the period of industrialization of society, peasants become workers, feudal lords or lose their power, or become entrepreneurs.
When some classes emerge and others come out of the historical arena, people get jobs, or they do not have a destiny; when the investment curve goes up or down, people get a new lease on life or lose heart. When wars break out, the insurance agent receives a grenade launcher, the shopkeeper becomes a radar operator; their wives live without husbands, their children grow up without fathers. The life of an individual and the history of society cannot be understood separately without understanding both.
However, people usually do not attribute the difficulties they experience to historical events or institutional contradictions, they do not connect personal well-being with the ups and downs in society. Rarely aware of the complex relationship between their lives and the historical process, ordinary people usually do not know that this relationship will determine how they will become tomorrow and how history will be made to contribute to it. Most people do not have the quality of mind that is necessary to comprehend the relationship between man and society, between biography and history, between an individual and the whole world. People cannot control the structural transformations behind them while trying to resolve their personal problems.
That is not surprising. In what other era did so many people experience incredibly rapid and profound social upheavals? If Americans are not aware of the catastrophic changes that people are experiencing in other societies, they owe it to specific historical circumstances, which quickly become "the right history". These historical events have an impact on everyone. In the space of a generation, Europe, once the center of feudalism and backwardness, has become a developed and formidable force with one-sixth of humanity. With the liberation of the colonies from political dependence, new veiled forms of imperialism have been established. Totalitarian societies are emerging, some of which are rapidly collapsing, others are experiencing the success of a fairy tale. After two hundred years of victorious procession, capitalism has proved that only it can transform society into an industrial machine. However, after two centuries of rainbow hope, a negligible part of humanity even enjoys formal democracy. All over the developing world, the old way of life is collapsing, and previously vague aspirations are being transformed into pressing demands. In developed countries, the instruments of power and violence become total in all spheres of social life and bureaucratic in their form. Humanity itself appears before us as a super nation that concentrates on its poles the most organized and powerful forces in preparation for the Third World War.
The speed at which history takes on new forms today exceeds man's ability to navigate the world in accordance with true values. And what values can we talk about? Even without panic, people often realize that old ideas and attitudes fail and that new trends are morally questionable. Is it any wonder that ordinary people feel powerless in the face of such an unexpected need to directly address broader social contexts? They cannot understand the meaning of modern history or the impact it has on their own lives. In an effort to preserve their individuality, they become morally insensitive and everyone tries to lock themselves into their private lives. Is it any wonder they are becoming desperate? People need more than just information, because in the "age of facts", information absorbs their attention so much that they do not have time to assimilate it. Not only do people need to be able to think clearly, but their efforts to acquire them often exhaust an already rare spiritual force.