One of the most poignant experiences of our time is not a spectacular crisis, but a permanent, quiet drift. We get the impression that everything around us is in constant motion, yet nothing really moves forward. Application interfaces, procedures, and hashtags change, but the general direction remains intact. In public debate, this chronic fatigue and sense of burnout is usually described in terms of individual failure, mental crisis, or insufficient resilience. This is a convenient language that privatizes a structural problem and removes responsibility from the system. Meanwhile, exhaustion is not a glitch in the functioning of late capitalism, but its main regulator and stabilizing strategic resource. What we feel as private helplessness is actually the regulatory currency of late capitalism.
Dialogue with Byung-Chul Han: A New Version of Immunology
This is where my fundamental dialogue begins with the diagnoses of Byung-Chul Han, author of the famous concept of the burnout society. Han captured the transition from the old disciplinary society to the achievement society, in which the external executioner was replaced by voluntary self-exploitation in the name of permanent growth, with remarkable accuracy. However, at the starting point of his theory, Han stopped a step too early by declaring the premature death of social immunology. He claimed that in the era of global smoothness, the Other had vanished, and violence had become entirely internal. In my view, immunology did not die at all. It merely changed its code from identity-based to affective.
Today’s system no longer excludes strangers through visible walls, barbed wire, or open hatred. It excludes them in a whisper, under the guise of caring for well-being and a safe space. The stranger has ceased to be an enemy to be destroyed; they have become someone cold, incompatible, who is simply not allowed into circulation.
Continuation of Pierre Bourdieu: Doxa as an Active Filter
To understand this subtle and ruthless mechanism, we must return to Pierre Bourdieu and his classic concept of doxa – a set of unquestioned, implicit commonplaces organizing social practice. For the French sociologist, doxa served primarily to mask and legitimize class domination. In the theory of affective feudalism that I am developing, doxa acquires a new, active, and operational dimension, becoming the foundation of what I call doxic immunology.
This is no longer a passive background, but an active defense system of the exhausted middle class. It acts as an intelligent, atmospheric air filter that, under the guise of concern for mental hygiene or corporate values, eliminates any abrasive and uncomfortable stimuli from discourse. Anyone who brings the stuffiness of real conflict, poverty, war, or structural opposition into the field of social interaction is deemed a pollutant spoiling the climate. The middle class, lacking an energetic surplus, lacks the strength to confront Otherness, so it simply bypasses it, using the elegant and hard-to-verify label of a lack of chemistry or a poor fit.
From Macro to Meso Scale: A Closed System
This micro-selection at the level of everyday relationships and corporate recruitment seamlessly merges with the macroeconomic dimension of the Tired System. Mass exhaustion turns out to be the cheapest and most effective shock absorber of tensions. Busy with aimless activity and devoid of energy, the worker and citizen loses the ability to build horizontal bonds of trust and coordinate lasting resistance. Instead of real politics and disputes over the redistribution of resources, we receive therapy, mood management, and empty energy simulators in the form of polarizing culture wars, which allow emotions to burn without disturbing the structure of power. Fatigue becomes the currency with which we buy the illusion of peace under a constantly monitored thermostat.
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What Will You Find in the Books? A Guide to the Affective Feudalism Cycle
The research project I am developing attempts to prove that today’s world can no longer be described solely through traditional economic categories. Below I present how two key volumes of this cycle map this post-industrial landscape.
Volume I: “The Tired System” – A Macro-Scale Diagnosis
In this part, I focus on the economic and political mechanisms of late capitalism. This book explains in detail how the system uses mass exhaustion to stabilize its position and neutralize social conflicts. The reader will read about:
The mechanism of pulsing mobilizations, i.e., the phenomenon of rapid, highly intense emotional protests that burn out and fade away before they can generate any permanent institutional change.
Agent-Based Simulation models (ABM), which verify the coherence of my theory and show how narrow and demanding of patience is the path leading to stable, long-term social reforms.
Idle activity, i.e., the state of permanent busywork that does not translate into real security and advancement, but serves primarily to maintain the operational continuity of the system.
Volume II: “Homeostasis of the Middle Class” – Meso-Scale Mechanisms
This book descends from the level of macroeconomic theory to the space of office buildings, corporate kitchens, and everyday, intimate relationships. It analyzes how the middle class desperately tries to protect its vital warmth from the cold of reality. In this volume, the author describes in detail:
The practice of doxic immunology, exposing, among others, the modern rhetoric of “culture fit” or “wokeness” as sophisticated filters that, under the guise of inclusivity, serve to quietly exclude individuals who are affectively incompatible.
Organizational ghosting and temperature censorship, i.e., the silent removal of workers and topics from the circulation of relationships without resorting to overt violence or formal dismissal.
The asymmetric dimension of affective labor, with particular emphasis on the fact that women in the middle class most often bear the disproportionate, unpaid cost of maintaining a stable mood and emotional comfort for those around them.
Both of these volumes together create a language that allows us to name what has previously been blurred in psychologizing diagnoses. They show that realizing the structural nature of our fatigue is the first, necessary step toward reclaiming agency.