For years, modern societies gave their young people a clear set of instructions: get an education, work, adapt, become more flexible and wait. They were told that, if they tried hard enough, they would be able to stand on their own feet and live better than the generation before them.

The absence of tuition fees is not enough to make education genuinely free

Until recently, our face and our voice were the most immediate proof of our presence. Not anymore. Artificial intelligence can make us appear to say things we never said and then force us to prove that the person everyone saw and heard was not us. A deepfake does not merely forge a message: it forges us.

A state’s power is not measured only by its weapons systems, alliances or economy. It is also measured by its ability to know what it seeks, maintain its strategic direction and act before its choices are constrained by others

The rights we now treat as self-evident were not granted because power suddenly became generous. They were won through persistent, organized and often painful struggles by people who rejected the rule of their time.

Perhaps, then, we do not simply have the politicians we deserve. Perhaps we have, above all, the politicians whom a closed system selects, promotes and permits to survive