Newspaper Schizophrenia
Open a tabloid today and you step into madness. One half of the page screams apocalypse: Russia’s drones, ultimatum after ultimatum, the doomsday clock at one minute to midnight. The other half giggles with triviality: reality stars, football scandals, influencer gossip. Doom above, distraction below. Terror and idiocy fused into a single product.
This is not journalism. It is psychological warfare. Readers are pulled in opposite directions at once: summoned to panic, then shoved into imbecility. They are told the world is ending, then told to laugh about a celebrity’s pet. The mind is battered until it accepts incoherence as normal.
But the schizophrenia cannot last forever. It corrodes trust. People either become anxious believers, swallowing every headline, or they drop out completely, convinced it is all staged. A third group simply shops and scrolls, letting the noise wash over them. What vanishes is the middle ground, the space where shared reality once existed.
No society can sustain this for long. Democracy, in its guided form, depends on at least a residue of belief. But the shark has been jumped too many times. After 9/11, after the desert wars, after the financial and the migrant crisis, after Covid, after the endless cycle of fear and froth, too many people no longer believe the grand narratives including the myth of democracy itself.
Where does it end? There are only two paths.
Totalitarianism: The myths remain, the language of freedom is still spoken, but the machinery underneath hardens. Elections become rituals, dissent is managed, choices reduced to illusions. A system that cannot secure consent through belief secures it through control. The mask of democracy stays on, but the face beneath is authoritarian.
Anarchy: The opposite collapse. People switch off completely, stop listening, stop obeying. Institutions lose legitimacy, rules are ignored, order dissolves. Society fragments into parallel tribes of disbelief, conspiracy, and private survival. Democracy doesn’t end with a coup, but with indifference.
Neither path is stable, and neither resembles the promise that “democracy” once held. The schizophrenia of the headlines is not harmless. It is the rehearsal for collapse. When apocalypse and trivia are the only stories left, the public either gives up its freedom for order or gives up on order altogether.