Kairos N°41

THE SUMMER WILL BE HOT!

This summer, like the previous ones, confirms and clarifies the messages that nature is making more and more perceptible: temperatures are inevitably rising, generating various and multiple modifications on the ecosystems. If, not surprisingly, those who are supposed to govern do not take the measure of the situation, a majority of individuals seems to be quite content with it. How many people are not in this sweet schizophrenia where on the one hand they are afraid of the  » hottest June ever recorded  » while on the other hand they obey the injunctions of the consumer society? To the criminal passivity of the politicians is added the delirious lethargic continuity that leads us to disaster. If it is obvious that no radical political project will emerge from an individually initiated change, it is also certain that the irresponsible people who no longer govern anything except what they can profit from, will not change their trajectory and that it will be necessary to go through a popular revolution.

The atmosphere could be optimistic if we did not feel a circumspect mistrust towards the new icons of ecology 2.0. The main question, to take only Greta Thunberg, is not at this level whether or not she is being led by some interested parties — although this point is not a detail⁽¹⁾ ‑But to ask the question in another sense: why, when for decades a myriad of warnings have come to us from various sources, which have not, or very little, been relayed by the media, why all of a sudden, these media, in the pay of the largest fortunes⁽²⁾Would they change course? We concede that awareness is always possible and that only  » But unfortunately, there are two pitfalls in evoking this old popular adage: why should the media, which have not changed their structure at all, since media concentration has worsened in recent years, change their program without having changed their software? Secondly, let’s imagine that one of these media refutes our analyses and establishes an incredible contradiction between what it is — a tool belonging to the oligarchy — and what it does — seeking the truth and informing people without any private interest -, why would it then be accompanied by all the other media?

It is obvious that the media conformism relies here on the ambiguity of Greta Thunberg’s words and actions, which open the gaps allowing the apostles of the Green New Deal not to fear that the young Swedish woman advocates a total rupture that would go against their interests. When she disembarked in the United States from her yacht sponsored by the Yacht Club of Monaco, whose skipper is the nephew of Prince Albert of Monaco (10^ith in Business Insider’s ranking of royal families, with $1 billion), to go to the UN global climate summit, it sounds like a dissonance; when she invites Donald Trump to  » She doesn’t understand that he only listens to science too much, that it is this science as a religion that has worked for the destruction of the planet and made men believe that they could dominate nature.

There is always something missing in these modern preachings filled with phrases mentioning  » people « ,  » human activity « ,  » humanity « , feeding the confusion and maintaining the illusion that « all » of us are responsible and that « all » of us can do something. There is like a major part of the world absent in this representation of humanity, the one which, like nature, suffers from the depredations of our productivist societies, from the greed of a minority, from the unconsciousness of the mass. Just as there is a demobilizing ingenuity in the appeals to governments, which are intimately involved in the problem.

If Greta and the others instill a taste of revolt, it will have been a good thing. Up to now, however, supported by green entrepreneurs, it symbolizes, perhaps in spite of itself, the change in the continuity, the insolence of the human being setting himself up as a savior of the planet, the soft transition with windmills and photovoltaic panels. We are in an era in which the powers that be will do everything possible to ensure that a revolution, in the sense of a radical change in our ways of thinking, living and deciding, does not take place. He will play with the equivocation that media muses maintain. It is necessary to look reality in the face and to note that our  » immediate perception, even when it is obliged to note the degradation of the surrounding reality, knows indefinitely how to ingeniously not conclude « ⁽³⁾, undoubtedly because  » our conclusions do not come so much from our sensations, from our immediate perception of the nuisances, that they do not orient and determine them: it is necessary to have already fixed a criterion of what is bearable and what is not in order to decide unbearable such or such aspect of the degradation of the conditions of existence, which all kinds of honest citizens will tolerate perfectly « .

Yet it seems urgent to « conclude » once and for all, to arrive at a  » unitary critique of society  » (Guy Debord), to no longer accept the unacceptable. And draw the consequences.