Kairos 50

Will we save ourselves from ourselves?

More than 15 months that we hear only that, that we read only that, that there is every probability that strangers that we pass in the street speak about it between them, that all seems to have stopped to « save » humanity. We will therefore take the challenge in this editorial not to quote him once 

times: it comes out of all our pores, preventing us from thinking, from touching, from gathering. However, it should not be used as an outlet for a population at the end of its tether, because this poor virus can’t do anything about it, contrary to what the media and politicians have done⁽¹⁾. Men, or history, will judge them. 

We are asked to talk about other things, but the paradox is that the monomaniacal focus of the political-media caste prevents us from doing so. We would like to evoke life, theater, nature, love, friendship, reading, poetry, travel (not « vacation »), the beauty of the world, of a painting, of a flower… they confine us to distancing, to the unilaterally and arbitrarily defined essential, to existential flight, to the fear of the other, to division, to screens 

The management of this virus, perniciously defined as « the pandemic of the century », has formidably highlighted the mismanagement of the States, their placing at the service of the interests of a few multinationals, assisted by Facebook and YouTube — zealous censors of incorrect speech -, their totalitarian functioning, their contempt for life… but it will also have allowed to draw the attention of some people to the crimes they were committing or allowing to be committed before. For what has become of those who accept that the poison of Roundup can continue to flood our fields; that industrial food makes our children obese, generates cancers, hypertension, diabetes, these « co-morbidities » that make the lethality of the « great evil » of the 21st century; that finance rules the world. Those who let people die in the streets while misery was endemic and the gaps in wealth were getting wider and wider; who tolerated that we were suffocating under tons of food while, every 5 seconds, a child was dying of hunger; that the air was becoming unbreathable; that biodiversity, which is the miracle and the beauty of this world, was being destroyed slowly? They are the same, they are always there. The planetary « evil » — the virus — generating the « state of war » and allowing to hide everything else. 

For 15 months, we could not talk about « evil » in any other way than the way the patent « experts » defined it. Now we have to accept its antidote: the « solution ». Their solution. As if a vaccine was going to eradicate this virus and promise us the nirvana of zero risk, a fantasy leading to the ultimate transhumanist delirium of the « death of death ». It would also allow us, one day, to return to the « world of before », a pretext which, after months of manipulation of the masses, will convince the quidam ready even if it is necessary to take the risk to die to be able to continue to live. 

Proof of this formidable alienation: people are now willing, and sometimes impatient, to be inoculated with a product developed in a rush that is more a result of shareholderhubris than a desire to save lives, all so that they can go on vacation. Or how to accept to potentially put one’s life in danger in order to continue to run away from it. The governments, zealous servants of the decision-makers from the multinationals, will have succeeded in doing something unprecedented and appalling: dividing the people into two, but also making each of these groups distrust the other, and the whole thing forming nothing more than a cluster of monads in which the Other is no more than a decorative element. 

The same people are still in power, those who want us to do « good », from the Boston Consulting Group, Friends of Europe, McKinsey or the pharmaceutical lobby, these big companies and other Think Tanks of « decision makers », magnanimous in communication, realistic in practice: 

 » Cures that heal immediately would be a tremendous benefit to patients and society, but could be a hindrance to those seeking a sustainable financial cash flow « ⁽²⁾.

These technocrats who, when the apartment burns down, hastily install 5G, LED lighting on the highways, wind farms … rather than calling the fire department, saving what is left, finally sitting down and thinking about the world to rebuild. For this is the moment, the kairos. There will be no more. 

Alexandre Penasse