Introduction

With the advance of technology and the decay of the strong meta-narratives that gave solidity to life [1], a new social phenomenon encloses this century. There is a birth to a new psychological typology of the individual, characterized by being a lover of networked exposure, constantly seeking new experiences and sensations, and detaching from an interest in community and political life. This subject of the postmodern era is immersed in priming stimuli of information obtained from a device, which he chooses assiduously and is protected by the armor of his networked identity.

This is the origin of the study of psychopolitics, which is to understand this social phenomenon of a current person typology, self-seduced by sensations, desires, the novelty of information, and fashion trends that confuse the virtual world with reality. This hybridization (virtual reality-reality) characterizes a psychology trained for permanent choice, likes, censorship of what is different, and an excess of positivity through entertainment or the sensuality of the body. This is a fantasy that makes the psychopolitical subject fragile and vulnerable.

In this new era, there is no longer a master or slave. The person is both the master and slave of his own happiness [2]. He demands himself to always be present and to be new in the additive of networked information. Thus, the life of the psychopolitical subject becomes momentary. Their relationships become liquid, as do their work, partner choice, and education. This new person’s life and social conception are measured only by rapid and instantaneous consumption, not by time commitments [3]. Pain and effort are absent as meaning and discourse. In this time, the person is directed towards enjoyment, play, performance, and the ephemeral.

Postmodernity brought with it a deconstruction of absolute truth by micro-narratives, concentration on subjectivity, and irrationality [4]. Here, psychopolitics configures a new flimsy truth, exploiting the appetites and desires of individuals. Thus, the road to networked exhibitionist narcissism is set on a phantasmal reality of new experiences. Added to this is a consumption of extension in all strata of existence (turbo-consumption) as an à la carte choice. From this point of view, most human values and the authentic meaning of life are lost. Problems related to an era of young people, described by Haidt and Lukianoff as IGen, are beginning to emerge. This IGen becomes psychologically flimsy and fragile in meaning, with tribal thinking characteristic of the new identities created by turbo-consumption, along with an emotional instability of depression and anxiety [5]. Psychopolitics of excessive well-being, happiness, and performance appear to drive the postmodern man into \emotional instability.

From a logotherapy analysis, the psychopolitical subject within the postmodern masses suffers from collective neuroses due to a lack of meaning and values of self-realization. It is an existential problem that is exacerbated because the individual seeks to drown his or her meaninglessness with pills, trips, and new experiences that alleviate the symptoms. However, these strategies do not attempt to provide the individual with a will to full meaning or transcendence towards a mission or vocation in life.

Consequently, this essay is based on a hermeneutic interpretative method, recognizing that aspects of human existence cannot be reduced to numbers or objective measures [6] but are oriented towards a profound reflection on an analysis of personal and socio-political existence. For its part, the interpretative hermeneutic method immerses itself in the richness of interpretation and meaning.

For this interpretative analysis, the works of Byung-Chul Han from 2014 to 2023 and the classic works of Victor Frankl from 1984 to 2018 were reviewed. With these sources, an exegesis of the problem of the postmodern subject was carried out from a psychopolitical point of view, in which logotherapy is a hermeneutically oriented theory for the existential problem of this epoch. Thus, this study aims to analyze the psychopolitical subject within the postmodern masses from the perspective of logotherapy. To do so, it explains the digital panopticon, in which people are exhibited adhering to algorithms that are then used to create scenarios that self-exploit sensations, desires, and light ideologies. We describe the problems generated in mental health and education by the psychopolitical vision of postmodern societies. Finally, a dialogue was held between logotherapy and psychopolitics to reflect on today’s society’s emerging phenomena. These phenomena are the loss of the sense of community for isolated micro-identities, algophobia, or excessive fear of suffering, together with love turned into an object of consumption and perpetuation of narcissistic need.

Cybernetic neoclans: our mind within the digital panopticon

The digital panopticon is understood as the exposure and exhibitionism of the subject on the net of their own free will, self-seduced and motivated by emotions, plus a growing narcissism of this new time categorized as postmodernity. The digital panopticon acting in cyberspace creates digital beings, molding the masses into a society of information and transparency. This society loses the sense of narrative and privacy due to the ephemerality of the additive nature of information exposed on the network [7].

From this digital panopticon, we understand that the subject does not believe himself to be a restrained subject, but free. This is because he or she self-configures a profile in which he or she denotes his or her preferences, desires and expressions of opinion, among other things, which make a life a scenario where the subject is exposed to everyone. What individuals exposed to the network are unaware of or give little importance to is what is known as big data or macrodata. These algorithms create behavioral analyses in cyberspace, thus getting to know people’s needs, emotions, and desires and then self-seducing them or molding them with light trends or ideologies so they believe they are free to choose [2]. Postmodernity creates subjects trained for permanent choice. This is part of globalization’s consumption that is exploitative but in the form of narcissistic self-seduction. This is also where the digital panopticon offers virtual scenarios in adherence to sensations and light ideologies, which shape a psychological profile in the form of one’s own desires [8,9]. This whole process is carried out through big data and is far more sophisticated than the expertise of a psychologist [2].

To a large extent, a type of digital persuasion operates on the unconscious, as people are driven by a hunger for novelty and information within social networks. Attracted by various priming stimuli, they need unlimited capacity and quick access to the whole maelstrom of information that the stimuli of the digital panopticon bring with them. Our mind is part of phylogenetically ancient and rudimentary thinking and is emotional and impulsive. Moreover, it is driven by a cognitive facility that brings with it more automatic and erroneous decisions, denoting a lack of analysis, reasoning, and critical judgment [10]. This is why our mind, from the networked exposure, turns towards a primitive system of thinking where our interactions are given through a cognitive facility of emotions and automatisms.

The informational stimuli to which the individual is exposed make our thinking unprepared for system two mind processing. This is because it is holistic and complex and makes an effort to understand and discern to make a reasoned judgment [10]. In the digital panopticon, this type of thinking disappears, is oversaturated, and is bypassed by the cognitive biases of laziness in the system one. Self-seduction towards various applications and social networks creates a pleasant, impulsive state with cognitive ease, typical of a new scenario of digital caverns.

Byung-Chul Han’s studies suggest that system one of our minds is becoming more and more predominant in our decisions within the digital panopticon. As a result, our cognitive capacities are diminishing and making humans cognitively lazy. This creates a scenario for the exploitation of desires and emotions [2], where big data and narcissistic self-seduction can operate on the unconscious by priming stimuli, exposing the networked subject to a voluntarism of desire and cravings. People exposed to the network make more impulsive and less reasoned decisions. By knowing our digital unconscious through personal preferences such as likes, pages visited, posts, and opinions in virtual scenarios, big data [7] creates micro-identities (personal preferences) for constant and irrational consumption, turning us into predictable algorithms with technological singularity [11]. This is based on an accumulation of data, which constantly consumes and produces information in a playful and unforced sense. Our cognitive system, accustomed to the self-seduction of selfies and information that matches our desires, shapes psychopolitics, where critique and analysis (system 2) become less and less critical.

The success of the digital age and social media comes from the individual’s sense of freedom, as there is no biopolitical coercion. No biopower is used to dominate bodies as in modernity, with a disciplinary society in which technology cannot dominate our minds [2].

In the late modern era of the digital age, the study focuses on psychopolitics, which moves away from a conception of obedience and disciplinary mandates to shape behavior. As a power structure, psychopolitics uses technology within the digital panopticon to self-seduce and create psychological profiles that are fit for consumption and permanent choice. This is a strategy that also advocates narcissism as a tool for social grooming. It can be pointed out that Byung-Chul Han’s vision, although pessimistic, obeys a reality that has to be exposed in order to know how to give limits to technology. This is so that it is the human being who dominates it, and technology does not end up taking away the freedom of the individual, creating cybernetic prisoners (or neoclans) with an increasingly neo-narcissistic exhibitionism and mass psychology.

The breakthrough of mobile devices is that virtual scenarios and social networks use unconscious mechanisms and exploitation of emotions as a predilection, given that it comprises much of our phylogenetic knowledge from system one of our mind. Knowing how to cope with this temptation to be caught up in a maelstrom of sensations is the challenge for a society where community and politics, with its ethos of solidarity and common good, give way to a new form of isolated individuals and postmodern digital masses.

We foresee a future society and politics dominated by an infocracy. This is an era of post-democracy, no longer with ideologies or political discourses of community interest, but given by isolated human knowledge through virtual and artificial intelligence scenarios. In these scenarios, experts and computer scientists will design a new life for the post-human person [12].

This isolated knowledge of the human being in the infocracy is currently observed in micro-identities as part of the hyper-individualization of the neo-narcissistic subject. This subject has to constantly construct himself under the rule of his desires and sensations because of a loss of the meaning of his life and traditions [13]. The postmodern subject in the network constantly invents new identities and groups itself into neoclans according to fashionable trends. In other words, a turbo-consumerism is generated to commercialize the self under the standard of its desires. Also, within this digital panopticon, it can be observed that virtual communities censor what is different and dissident. Thus, they become what Freud referred to as the age of the narcissism of small differences [14]. This is gradually being observed in a fragmented society, with individuals who are increasingly isolated and with little community and political interest. They are people alienated from reality by virtual scenarios that exploit the consumption of a liquid or evanescent life through networked stimuli and sensations.

Analysis of psychopolitical issues in mental health and education

The psychopolitical vision of individuals brings as a consequence for mental health new addictions. These include nomophobia (excessive fear of being without a mobile phone or disconnected from the internet) and FOMO (fear of missing out). These terms are used to refer to dependence on mobile devices and excessive anxiety about being informed or updated online. Both addictions deteriorate interpersonal and family relationships due to the imperative need to be constantly connected in virtual scenarios [15]. Frustration if one does not receive likes on publications, being constantly aware of other people’s updates, losing hours of sleep because of being connected, the need to photograph everything they observe and do in their lives, and having social networks as a priority when getting up and before going to sleep, are some of the symptoms that the psychopolitical subject experiences today. It also draws attention to new studies in clinical psychology.

Another phenomenon described by Han that is linked to psychopolitical problems is information fatigue syndrome. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was only suffered by communicators who processed large amounts of information for publication, affecting their mental health with hyperactivity, anxiety, and depression [16]. With the rise of the proliferation of mobile technology among the masses in this century, this syndrome has emerged as another mental health trait of the new cyber neoclans. Now more than ever, individuals on the net have to process large amounts of information and consume and reproduce it as a task that is often playful [12]. As a result, they live more tired, distracted, hyperactive, and frustrated lives than ever before. Information fatigue syndrome has now become widespread and is part of new studies on mental health due to the use of new computer technologies.

On the postmodern educational level, the generation of masses that have become cybernetic neoclans is opening up new proposals for artificial intelligence (AI) in the classroom. For example, in 2019, the British company Century Tech in Belgium offered 700 educational institutions virtual platforms for personalized education. In the United Arab Emirates, AI was proposed as a tutor using ChatGPT. Likewise, Big Tech (technology companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Apple, among others) have exponentially massified their commercial market as digital structures in educational centers, institutes, and universities since the COVID-19 pandemic, with a storage capacity in the digital cloud at a level never before foreseen [17]. Thus, students and teachers are instructed to be able to manage in the digital market that awaits them and to be inherent consumers of it. The denotation of these AI use cases within the classroom, without a proposal for practicing human training in the values and virtues of real things, makes the non-things possible [18]. This implies changing and ephemeral information and technologies, which promote a psychology of constant change, uncertainty, and instability.

Referred to as liquid education to the unstable and super-specialist, a constant change of new updates [19] within AI seems to collapse the solid world of human beings and tangible things. This is produced by instruction within data and information, which shapes the psychopolitical subject within the educational plane. Without a proposal of human values and a solid life project in the learner, which complements the world of cybernetic applications, one falls into the traps of education that consider that to educate is to avoid efforts and to have unlimited capacities [20]. To teach to strive in pursuit of a goal is to train the learner to cope with his or her limitations. With the proliferation of the use of AIs, more and more psychopolitical thinking is generated, where all effort is abhorred and all time is evanescent and fast. People are instructed not to wait, as this world of no-things offers immediacy and consumption of cybernetic applications to solve problems. Human capacities become hybridized with digital prostheses. They are enhanced by a technological and psychopolitical singularity that stores data and information by correlations but not by a capacity for human singularity endowed in the personal formation of effort, experiences, sense, and meaning of human learning.

Regarding the traps of education, we can analyze postmodern thinking of algo-phobia (excessive fear of effort and suffering) and the belief that to educate is to generate unlimited capacities for performance. However, education without meaning or without the concurrence of human values technifies the person, leading him or her towards the island of the Homo Machine. This island reproduces information and is governed by data to ephemerally solve its complex world without understanding its sense of life and social ethos.

A dialogue from logotherapy to psychopolitics and the postmodern masses

Logotherapy, or meaning therapy, is a deep existential analysis of life, consciousness, and noetic (spiritual) resources. Consequently, it is not only a psychotherapy but also a pedagogy and accompaniment for the person looking at existential facts and the meaning of his or her life. This existential and phenomenological method searches human spiritual categories for their essence [21] – the epoché of consciousness. The epoché should direct the person towards his authenticity and integrality, knowing that he is free and responsible and that he has as a primary source a will of meaning to face life, suffering, and love, among other circumstances of his human nature.

From there, logotherapy, with its criticism of Western culture, was basically due to the hermetic reductionism of the scientific disciplines, observing homunculi where there were human phenomena. This same exegesis can be made from logotherapy towards psychopolitics, given by a technological reductionism of dataism in infomania (the person is measured by data and algorithms of information that he can generate in the network), and the excess of positivity in the performance of work and experiences. The latter became the new homo machine, as Frankl referred to machine men as technified subjects which are reduced and automated in their time by industry and science [22]. Today, this phenomenon is produced by a massification of devices, which provide pure and permanent choice [18]. We are dealing with machine subjects who are enslaved without realizing it in training for the excess of freedom.

A phenomenon of psychopolitics is self-exploitation and excessive positivity. Both result from inauthenticity, falling in with what others want, or being carried away by postmodernity’s fashions and new truths. It is a social vacuity, which Frankl referred to as totalitarianism (I do what others want me to do) or conformism (I follow others) [23]. Psychopolitics and the postmodern masses are configured in these two categories since the person, having lost his authentic meaning and the answers to his life, immerses himself in trends, new identities, identity groups, etc., which self-educate and self-exploits him, configuring himself through data alone. In short, they are algorithms of an additive life of a digital panopticon, where there is no accurate narrative and the meaning of their consciousness, and the qualities of things are progressively lost.

Excessive positivity and self-exploitation lead to poor communication by only ephemeral sensations within the network. Moreover, this is also a scenario where pornography is shown, the exhibition of the body that has to be sensual and produced, as well as other competencies within the virtual and social world. In this context, both realities merge into one fantasy [24]. Finally, the lived experiences accumulate in the likes of a meaningless, provisional, but additive life, where hermeneutics and the meaning of consciousness are lost in a narcissistic scenario.

On the other hand, if we analyze the psychopolitical phenomenon of social and community life in postmodernity from logotherapy, let us first define the sense of community. We understand the sense of community as the "dynamic, historically and culturally constituted and developed social group, pre-existing the presence of researchers or social interveners, which shares interests, objectives, needs, and problems, in a determined space and time" [25]. In the collective neurosis (existential emptiness) in which the psychopolitical person is immersed, attached to the indeterminate uncertainty, the sense of community and interest in social problems is lost. Similarly, collective identity gives way to fluctuating micro-identities and the deconstruction of the subject. Likewise, narcissism is identified with the new postmodern mass in the realization of new identities of desire. From there, the sense of community is progressively lost through a psychological alienation of segments of a late-modern tribal life, of individualistic sensations.

As the subject of performance loses his sense of community, he also loses his objectives and the shared history of his culture, which gave solidity to the belonging of shared traditions and values. From logotherapy, it is observed that the individual who moves away from the traditions and values of a certain society must realize the meaning or mission of life that the world has in store for him in unique circumstances and motives for his self-transcendence. When this does not happen, the person becomes self-absorbed, frustrated, or falls into an existential void, thus giving birth to a new narcissistic person who worships the body and his or her psychology [8]. This new narcissist invents values, but from a mass nihilism, with purposes based on their desires and grouping themselves according to consumable identities, which are promoted on the net and in an indeterminate life.

Reality becomes a mirage and is increasingly subordinated to a psychopolitics of permanent choice, performance, and over-positivity of mind and body. Narcissistic objects such as the smartphone become a cult rendition, projecting the needs and egocentric control of the increasingly lonely but hyper-communicated person’s life [18]. The medicalization of existence through pills and techniques to improve aesthetics and anesthetize pain and suffering [13] are also anthropotechnies that undermine the true meaning of the person for a subjectivized youth (staying young and pain-free). This youth is the algophobia of the new age, generated by a fear of growing old and experiencing any kind of pain, even if it is a simple disappointment.

Increasingly, the phrase "love should not hurt" is popularised as part of psychopolitics, where the body is made hedonic to cope with frustrations and experience suffering as a true sense of human fulfillment. Old age and the body are seen as something to be repaired or engineered, as psychopolitical control is not only disseminated in the mind but reflected in a body subjectivized from its anarchic and desire-driven psychology. From logotherapy, the body and mind reflect something concomitant, with the most important and exclusive being the noetic (spiritual essence), which directs the person towards the dignity of corporeality. Thus, the anthropotechnies directed towards the cult of the body with its neo-narcissistic modifications (tattoos, surgeries to reshape the body, and transhumanist transformations) overlook the singularity that lies in the essence of an absolute novelty that is the individual with his or her nature. This is an imago hominis that endows the person with exclusivity and sees unnecessary modifications to his or her essence as part of an attack on his or her dignity.

On the other hand, another phenomenon of the postmodern and psychopolitical masses that are analyzed from logotherapy is algophobia. This phenomenon would be seen from logotherapy as meaningless suffering, an emptiness of life that is also transformed into a collective neurosis. Frankl would describe algo-phobia as existential disturbances of our time that frustrate the person’s authentic sense of life. These frustrations lead to social ills such as addictions, depression, suicide, and aggression [26]. In the Franklian view, suffering is necessary for personal growth, a transmutation of values that leads to repentance, and a life mission. This is how one can "transform a personal tragedy into a human triumph" [27]. The psychopolitical society is dataistic, reductionist, and ghostly by skewing the image of the whole person for a utopian well-being of a psychophysical parallelism that neglects what makes humans. We are talking about his noetic resources (spiritual dimension) and sense of self-transcendence, whatever the circumstances of his life.

A phenomenon of the postmodern masses is undoubtedly also the growing neo-Narcissism as a psychopolitical objective. For an interpretation of logotherapeutic theory, this is a symptom of hyper-reflection: constantly looking at oneself and being the object of attention. This is part of the existential and neurotic disturbances of our time. Frankl refers to hyperreflection as the eye that, by looking at itself, shows that it is ill because this organ must be the reflection of looking at what is outside itself. In the same way, the person who places his attention only on himself becomes frustrated and falls into a void as he finds no purpose outside himself. To be a person is to be another and to give oneself to the world and one’s fellow human beings in order to be able to fulfill oneself in self-transcendence [27]. But the person dominated by psychopolitics is narcissistic. Centered in a digital panopticon, he watches over his life and exposes himself by baring himself through the fluctuating experiences of the indeterminate. This narcissism, or hyper-reflexivity, is an extension of egocentric and ego-centered needs in childhood cognitive stages [28]. Through this egocentric and thought-centered (biasing reality by one’s vision), two mechanisms occur in the narcissistic subject. First, he creates an imaginary audience, thinking that he is on a stage and everyone is watching him. Secondly, they produce a personal fable, feeling that their emotions and thoughts are unique and special.

Undoubtedly, these characteristics of narcissism and its egocentric thinking are part of a growing sociogenic pathology, which attracts attention as an existential and cognitive process. This is because this process must be overcome in adolescence or youth as part of psycho-affective maturity. However, this dissociation between primary narcissistic needs and a chronological age occurs in the new psychopolitical person self-seduced by priming stimuli and by the exploitation of his or her sensations that disrupt his or her psychology. In this line, Ortega syndicated him as the new spoilt child [29], trained for the permanent choice of an à la carte life offered by an open society [8].

From this narcissism and egocentric psychology, existential disturbances (understood in the light of logotherapy) proliferate as a pathology of hyper-reflection, self-absorption, and absorption of the self. This pathology can lead to excessive anxiety and body and health obsessions. In addition, it can divert an authentic, value-oriented, world-oriented will to pursuing excessive pleasure or power as human self-fulfillment. Consequently, this frustrates the person, which is a problem evident in a postmodern society self-seduced by consumerism and the utopian well-being of an obligation to be happy.

The principle of pleasure ruling the strata of a person’s life occurs when he turns himself into the object of his attention [30], falling into a hell of sameness. This is reflected in narcissistic tendencies, where the self covers all objects and persons, leveling them to their satisfaction and desires. The world ceases to have value and meaning because it is centred on biased tendencies of the ego. Likewise, power, as a phenomenon of hyper-reflexive narcissism in our time, is also aimed at achieving position, fame, and status as a means and an end. Thus, it frustrates the sense of power on its way, denoting a mental disturbance that can lead to severe personality disorders typical of an autonomic profile of a narcissistic and antisocial personality formation [31].

If we point out that society is being configured from a psychopolitics towards the new postmodern masses with a highly narcissistic component, love also becomes psychopolitical, drifting towards a means of consumption and no longer as an end in itself. The loved one ceases to be otherness and becomes an object for the satisfaction of egocentric needs, exploiting her sensuality and the performance of her body in mercantile exhibitionism [24]. From there, everything that can be consumed should not hurt or be uncomfortable but pleasant and pleasurable. Thus love, from a psychology that incites an excess of positivity, is enclosed within a prison of paroxysms and sensuality that drowns in the enjoyment of the drives of one’s own ego. In this context, sexual performance is seen as an addition of new experiences. It is the sum of gratification that one is capable of experiencing, losing the sense of love as otherness and human transcendence of surrender to the other.

Love in the liquid (postmodern) age is characterized by a lack of bonds and commitment, assimilated to the fragility of relationships, where everything is ephemeral and changing, where new sensations or erotic experiences are fleeting. This is explained by the fact that this vision does not consolidate the fraternal in time, but rather the evanescent and rapid that occurs in the present [3]. From this psychopolitics, love is liquid. Love is suspicious of solid relationships, as these are anachronistic to the time of turbo-consumption, where the person constantly chooses. In this era, there is no pain or commitment and no surrender. Only from this perspective is there a continuous narcissistic quest for satisfaction, turning the other person into an object of the drive extensions of the ego.

In logotherapy, this social and psychopolitical phenomenon of the hedonic person in liquid love can be explained as immaturity in the lack of psychosexual development, typical of the egocentrism of the new psychopolitical spoilt child that emerges in the postmodern masses. To achieve an integral sexuality, this must be given in an erotic tendency, where one meets another singular and exclusive person whose spirituality is what moves and gives meaning to love. Moreover, it must be accompanied by surrender not only on the sexual level but in the commitment to accept her for her uniqueness and unrepeatability in the world [32]. Prior to this, logotherapy points out as immature stages the sexual impulse, which is a tendency, but without a goal or object of attention. Later, the sexual instinct arises, which sees in the discharge of drives a fixed object but without a goal to which to direct itself. These two phenomena are primitive stages of early sexuality, which need to be complemented by an erotic dignity of surrender to a loved one.

In disturbances of sexual origin due to the emptiness of erotic love, there is a regression to the sexual impulse and instinct. This is given in the degradation of eroticism as a product merely of sexual performance, which proliferates in the postmodern world as sexual commerce, where enjoyment and pleasures can replace the immanent erotic tendency. The latter is the capacity for love as a form of human dignity. When the person’s experiences are given over to the mere sexual impulse, they are transformed into perversions and onanism. Both are produced by not finding their drive discharge in a goal or object, becoming a polymorphous sexuality that knows no object nor a defined goal. The indeterminate is its path on the sexual plane. Also, in the stage of sexual impulse, masturbation and autoeroticism can be the path of inactivity in the search for the other as a subject of love. Finally, the sexual instinct brings as a consequence paroxysms and joys of sexual performance, with a defined object, but without an exclusive surrender, turning the other into the degradation of simple partial objects of erotic consumer trade. These stages, which should be overcome in youth, are prolonged or regressed in a psychopolitical society, which self-seduces pure sensuality and the awakening of drives. This voluntarism also fills sexuality with neuroticism (premature ejaculation, vaginismus, etc.) because it deviates from what is humanly achievable. That is, love as a human tendency and disposition [32,33].

In logotherapy, love is understood as an essentially human and primary phenomenon, which directs the consciousness towards the unique and unrepeatable person, underlying a spiritual totality behind the psychophysical layers and through which the human being tends towards self-giving and dignity. Consequently, it is conceived as "exactly the experience of another human being, in all that is peculiar and singular in his life" [32]. From there, love is also an alterity, a negativity in Byung-Chul Han’s terms. Because the other is understood as different and exclusive, understanding its singularity disrupts one’s own narcissistic ego, which levels everything to its desires. The other, as an erotic tendency, implies knowledge of its essence and pain when it becomes absent or unrequited. The loved person becomes an irreplaceable otherness and novelty in the world, with value and human meaning of self-transcendence.

Conclusions

Postmodernity brings with it a psychopolitical society, which, within a digital panopticon, is given over to self-seduction. Exposure to the net affirms the condition of postmodernity, which centers the individual in his or her own self. This creates a voluntarism and, by contingency, a neo-narcissism that parcels out their human and social condition by drifting them towards an automaton individualism. These conditions also alienate people from their communitarian and political vision of the common good, isolating them in a psychological alienation.

From logotherapy, the characteristics of the psychopolitical person within the postmodern masses can be analyzed in the phenomena of the emergence of the new collective neuroses and the sociogenic pathology that occurs due to the decay of the sense of life and values. Both lead the individual towards existential frustration. The psychopolitical subject focuses on the insatiable search for new experiences, sensations, and the primacy of desires, seeking pleasure and power in his or her yearning for self-realization. This is projected into the digital panopticon and extends into their reality as part of a project of self-seduction.