After the end of the Cold War, a belief was proclaimed in a ‘New World Order’, an ‘end of history’, world peace characterised by democracy and trade (Pax Americana). Now the Twenty-first century is preparing for us perhaps the most bellicose situation in the entire history of humanity. The enormous wars of the Twentieth century will be smaller than those that we and our descendants are going to experience.

Based on the balancing act of the golden mean, bourgeois marriage mixed moderate but continuing sexual attraction, a mutual social and economic interest in living together, respect for the wife, a will to create a lineage, significant socio-cultural similarity, hypocrisy for dissimulating and managing adulterous liaisons (hence the importance of legal prostitution), and the building up of a patrimony to be transmitted. When the couple gets old, this leads to a habitual tenderness much stronger than the passionate and ephemeral simulation of today’s young couples.