What kind of society are we heading towards?

There is no longer any need for the Gulag, because a Gulag is already the society you live in, even if you don't even realise it because you have got used to living in it and you are convinced that the others, those outside the West, live in the Gulag, while you, on the other hand, are free, you are wertfrei, literally 'free of all values'. Which doesn't mean that you don't have obligations: to work, for example, it is enough to be up to date with vaccinations and take the obligatory periodic refresher courses on security and privacy.

This also applies to the 'profs' (strictly lower case) who have now become bureaucrats.

For the rest, you are still free. Free to make love even with trees or robotic women, free to feel like a man one day and a woman the next, or to make a child of your own by buying eggs and sperm at the supermarket. It is the new categorical imperative of society, as has been said, that gives you an order: enjoy, think only of what you want, of your desires, fulfil them all. Only, far from being a vector of freedom, the Western diktat sooner or later reveals all its sadism: because to enjoy without restraint, to do whatever comes into your head, actually means self-destruction, losing all sense of relationship with others, living desperately alone and becoming dependent on the very enjoyment you seek.

Living, then, where 'freedom' no longer has any brakes, no obstacles, and can go beyond all civic and moral rules. Rape a woman? And why not? Killing mother and father, brother and sister, or killing with a rifle or a knife like that, simply, random people in a crowd? Why not? Kill your neighbour as yourself. We have come to this reversal.

Taxi Driver by Martin Scorsese had already anticipated what was to come: the phrase 'are you talking to me? Hey, who are you talking to? Are you talking to me? There's only me here', which Travis utters while pointing a gun at his own image in the mirror, expresses exactly the principle of this self-destruction. The realisation of my freedom, of my desires, no longer requires the 'mediation' of the other: the other does not exist, he is only a reflected image, annoying, an obstacle to my enjoyment, which I have to get rid of, by taking him out.

At this point, however, no society is no longer possible. So, when the policeman inside you is no longer enough, you still need the one outside, with the truncheon. In short, you can't do without surveillance, which, after all, is the other side of freedom, and the more the imperative of absolute freedom, limited by nothing and no one, is asserted, the more surveillance also becomes absolute, penetrating even the most recondite spaces that were once considered inviolable by others.

Thus, if everyone is given the right to freely realise their own identity, to be who they 'feel' to be deep down, to live without censorship and without limits their 'self', their desires (the imperative of neo-capitalism: be yourself!), at the same time absolute surveillance is triggered on everything that can be said, on the opinions that can be expressed, on the language with which they are expressed, and everything suddenly becomes progressively forbidden.

There is no control without control of language: every single word, every single sentence becomes potentially sexist, racist, transphobic, homophobic, colonialist; every expression of your 'freedom' is potentially liable to turn into a crime. 'Be yourself, then, make a difference, but please be inclusive in your use of language and avoid conflict'.
But back to the original question: what kind of society are we heading towards? I don't know, but I feel that at the point where we are, on such a slippery slope, we can no longer stop, in fact the speed is increasing and there are no longer any braking forces.