Everything could be different - and almost nothing can I change. In these terse words, Niklas Luhmann encapsulates the slowly spreading experience of the present, as it manifests in a fluctuating balance between resigned intellectualism and expressive activism, distributed across different individual talents. This expression of a precarious equilibrium between constructive omnipotence and enforced affirmation of inaction has long been a reproach in Robert Musil's century-defining novel, even before Luhmann. A hermeneutic prelude develops from a thesis-like typology of fundamental figures of (ironically termed by Luhmann) "old European" thinking, self-reflexively grounded in freedom - freedom as self-assertion, self-determination, self-enhancement, self-restraint - the model of existential indifference.