israel Centeno

“We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?”

— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Somewhere between the end of the twentieth century and the opening decades of the twenty-first, the dream of liberal democracy, forged through the slow revolutions that began in 1789, quietly dissolved.

Not with tanks or coups, but through a transformation so subtle that many did not even recognize it: the free citizen was replaced by the user, the consumer, the data point.

Postcolonial capitalism no longer needs to justify itself with myths of popular sovereignty.

Today, the elites who control biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and global finance manage not only markets, but life itself — redesigning the conditions of human existence.

Even outlets like The Wall Street Journal now acknowledge that power has slipped beyond traditional politics into the hands of a handful of corporate giants.

The corporatist system that fascism once attempted to impose by force has triumphed differently:

not through boots and banners, but through silent, global integration.

Today’s global corporatism no longer requires overt ideology — it governs through platforms, algorithms, and the managed desires of fragmented individuals.

The fragmentation of rights has been one of the most effective strategies.

By granting endless isolated rights — without a unifying vision of the common good — the modern citizen has been atomized into a swarm of competing claims.

No more “people” capable of forming a coherent will: only consumers of causes, clients of personal grievances, disconnected from the idea of acting together.

The loss of collective mass consciousness, capable of changing history, is perhaps the most devastating silent achievement of this new order.

Everyone now fights for their fragment of recognition, while the real decisions about their lives are made elsewhere — in corporate boardrooms and biotechnological laboratories.

Meanwhile, in impoverished nations — Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, much of Africa and Asia — new forms of slavery emerge:

forced labor disguised as social integration, resource extraction under systems of perpetual debt, mass migrations treated as a currency in global bargaining.

The Arab world, too, is not a mere spectator.

Massive investments in biotechnology, AI, and control technologies reveal a clear intent: not just to survive in the new order, but to shape it — perhaps with models even more authoritarian and technocratic than those of the West.

In this landscape, an inevitable question arises: What role remains for the Catholic Church?

The answer is twofold.

First, the Church still holds a Social Doctrine that upholds timeless principles: the inviolable dignity of the human person, the primacy of labor over capital, the necessity of the common good over private accumulation.

Second — and more crucially — the Church must remember that its mission is not of this world.

It does not exist to compete for influence among corporations and states; it exists to bear witness to a truth that no structure of power can contain.

As biotechnological experiments and transhumanist ambitions seek to manipulate life itself, to create redesigned “humans” in laboratories, the Church will face a far more radical challenge than any political crisis of the past.

If the Church remains faithful, it will have to take an uncompromising stand:

denouncing these attempts not as mere technical errors, but as fundamental violations of the created order, assaults against the mystery and dignity of human life.

This will be one of the greatest ethical battles in modern history.

And what remains for those who still believe in freedom and political responsibility?

Resistance.

Refusal to be fragmented.

Refusal to be reduced to a profile, a client, a data point.

Refusal to forget that each human being bears a dignity that cannot be manufactured or erased by any elite.

We may not be able to stop the new multipolar order from dividing the world into corporate territories.

But we can preserve — in the heart, in the conscience, in small, heroic acts — the essential principle of any true civilization:

Man is not property. Man is the image of God.

And in the end, the greatest battle before us is this:

not to become cynical, and not to become hypocritical.