The Religion We Did Not Know We Had

There is something vertiginous in realising that two men who would cordially detest each other at dinner have reached the same conclusion about the world.

Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian Marxist philosopher who loves Hegel and Hollywood films with equal intensity, and Giulio Tremonti, former Economy Minister under Berlusconi, right-wing jurist, scholar of borders and states, share almost nothing: neither biography, nor class, nor method, nor political horizon. And yet, in their most recent works — Žižek's Zero Point (Il Saggiatore, 2026) and Tremonti's Globalisation. The Plagues and the Possible Cure (Solferino, 2022) — both dig down to the same geological stratum and find the same rock: for thirty years we have lived inside a faith, and we did not know it.

Not a theory. Not a politics. A faith.

The promise that seemed a law of nature

From 1989 onwards — the Wall fallen, the USSR dissolved, Internet access opened, containers multiplied across the oceans — the Western world embraced a narrative so powerful it did not need to be spoken aloud to be believed.

The story went like this: more technology, more commerce, and more connection would produce more wellbeing, fewer wars, irrelevant borders. Politics would gradually be replaced by expertise. Markets would select the best. Democracy would spread as a natural consequence of economic development. It was only a matter of time.

Fukuyama said it explicitly — the "end of history" — but he was merely the poet laureate of a belief that had already taken root everywhere: in international financial institutions, in universities, in newsrooms, in the boardrooms of multinationals, in the speeches of presidents and secretaries-general. It was the creed of technocratic liberalism, and it had the structure of a religion: a God (the Market), a church (the WTO, the IMF, the WCO), prophets (Friedman, Fukuyama, the Chicago Boys), sacraments (privatisation, deregulation, the free flow of capital) and a promise of salvation (perpetual growth).

Like all religions worthy of the name, it admitted no falsification. Every crisis was a momentary deviation. Every war was a local anomaly. Every inequality was the temporary price of structural adjustment.

Tremonti: not the end of history, but the end of globalisation

Tremonti arrives at his critique of this narrative from the inside. He is a man of the right — not the naive right that embraced Thatcherism as long-standing liberalism, but the continental, nation-statist right that has always looked with suspicion upon the dissolution of borders and the subordination of politics to economics.

In his book he identifies seven "plagues" — from environmental disaster to the hollowing out of democracy, from the rise of "digital republics" to war — as symptoms not of a conjunctural crisis but of a structural collapse of the model. We are not, says Tremonti, at the end of history: we are at the end of globalisation. And the difference is enormous.

The end of history meant a landing. The end of globalisation means a precipice.

What strikes one in Tremonti's reasoning is his denunciation of the utopian character — in the literal sense: without place, without anchorage in the real — of the globalist project. The system, he writes, was adopted by the West uncritically: as if the laws of the market were laws of physics, not reversible historical constructions. As if borders were mere inefficiencies to be eliminated, not containers of identity, political legitimacy and social solidarity. As if democracy were an automatic by-product of economic growth, not something to be defended and built with effort every day.

Globalisation, in short, was not a destiny: it was a wager. And the wager has proved a losing one.

Žižek: at zero point, where categories no longer work

Žižek arrives at the same realisation from the opposite direction, with different tools.

For the Slovenian philosopher, the problem is not globalisation per se, but the invisible ideology that accompanied it. Žižek has spent decades studying how ideologies work best when they do not recognise themselves as such — when they present themselves as common sense, as nature, as "there is no alternative" (the famous Thatcherite TINA). And this is exactly what happened with technocratic liberalism: it passed itself off as a description of the real world, not as a contestable political vision.

Zero point, for Žižek, is the moment when this invisibility collapses. Not because someone has rationally demonstrated that the ideology was false — ideologies do not fall that way — but because reality has stopped cooperating. The re-election of Trump in 2024, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the return of tariffs, the rise of the "digital feudal lords" who reshape the world economy outside any democratic control: all of this is not explicable with the categories of the old paradigm.

Žižek tells us something even more disturbing: we are not merely living through the crisis of an economic or political system. We are living through the collapse of a cognitive frame, of a way of making sense of the world. And this is far more disorienting, because we do not know what to replace it with.

Zero point is not a position of strength. It is an open field of possibility, certainly — as Žižek insists — but it is also an abyss of disorientation.

The impossible convergence: two diagnoses, one disease

What does it mean that a Marxist and a national-statist conservative arrive at the same diagnosis?

It means, first of all, that the disease is real and deep. The political divergences between Žižek and Tremonti remain abyssal: on the response, on the causes, on the therapy, they would oppose each other point by point. But on the diagnosis they converge in a disconcerting way.

Both tell us that what we are living through is not an economic crisis. Economic crises are measured with GDP, managed with interest rates, overcome with cycles. This is not a recession.

Both tell us that it is not even a political crisis in the ordinary sense. Political crises are resolved with elections, changes of government, constitutional reforms. This is not resolved by any Draghi or any Macron, however capable.

What we are living through is something rarer and deeper: the moment when a civilisation stops believing the story it told itself.

The religion without a name

Every civilisation needs a founding narrative — a story about who we are, where we are going, why the present makes sense and the future is worth building. These narratives function as secular religions: they give coherence to experience, they legitimise present sacrifice, they orient collective choices.

For thirty years, our founding narrative was that of global technocratic liberalism. It was a religion we did not know we had, precisely because it presented itself not as faith but as science, not as vision but as reality, not as politics but as technique.

When explicit religions — medieval Catholicism, Soviet communism — enter crisis, at least one knows what one is losing. One can mourn. One can consciously seek an alternative.

But when an implicit religion, which did not recognise itself as such, collapses, the disorientation is doubled: you do not know what you have lost, because you did not know you had it. You do not know where to look for a substitute, because you did not know you needed something to replace.

This is the deepest meaning of Žižek's "zero point": not a clean starting point, but a cognitive void. A moment when the available categories are no longer sufficient to describe what is happening, and yet we do not yet have new ones.

What to do at zero point

The obvious question is: what now?

Here Žižek and Tremonti diverge radically — as is right, given their profound difference in values and perspective. Tremonti looks to the arsenal of democracy, to state institutions, to the need to recover political sovereignty over the economy. Žižek rejects any nostalgic return and seeks new forms of radical critique, new improbable coalitions, new languages.

But both agree on one thing: one cannot go back. The world of before will not return. The narrative of free trade producing automatic peace, of technology dissolving borders and producing shared prosperity, of technical competence replacing politics — that narrative is over. Not because someone won a debate, but because reality has refuted it with too much brutality.

Zero point is the place from which we must begin again to tell who we are. Not with nostalgia for the past nor with blind optimism for the future, but with the lucidity of one who has just seen something they believed eternal fall, and must now decide what to build in its place.

This is the challenge of our generation. And perhaps, to face it, we need not only economists and political scientists, but philosophers capable of standing in the void without being overwhelmed by it.

As — in their own way, with opposite tools and different conclusions — Žižek and Tremonti are trying to do.