What will tomorrow bring?

We can’t do it: the repressive state is tightening its grip, closing our social spaces, bringing the university to heel, attacking culture, forbidding walks in the forest⁽¹⁾ Faced with such a wave of increasingly openly dictatorial character, where is the current difficulty that prevents us from expressing ourselves against the State and those who run the media — among others — without being called « conspiracy theorists⁽²⁾  » ?

At some point in the reasoning — we are talking here only about reasoning based on facts that are indisputable by the power itself, such as the health budget compared to that of the army, or the growth of the country’s debt — something is « missing. We will say here what is missing, especially in the discourse of critical scientists who dare to speak out and who, unfortunately, confine themselves to their own field of expertise. As if the adversary confined them to their field of expertise: by calling Alexandra Henrion-Caude or Jean-François Toussaint conspiracy theorists, Power — the State, the dominant media but also the so-called social networks — propels them into another field of expertise than their own: politics, quite simply. However, scientists are afraid of going beyond their field of excellence. Leaving their opponents a clear path, these experts are thrown into the cauldron of media rejection on the grounds of conspiracy, which destroys any discussion.

Yet it’s not so hard to get us onto the real battlefield, which is not the pandemic, or for that matter, the vaccine or the imposition of 5G. If the current policy was limited to this, why would the State take advantage of the pandemic and the containment to impose liberticidal laws, an extremely muscular control of the University, an unprecedented attack on culture in the last three quarters of a century? We are moving openly — and not « quietly » as some who do not want to face reality still think — towards a dictatorial type of regime, whose only novelty lies in the fact that it uses a pandemic as a pretext and that it is being built under a so-called republican regime by using its « weaknesses » from the point of view of democracy. The origin of the virus, bat, pangolin, Pasteur Institute, Wuhan P4 laboratory or other, does not interest us at all. Because what threatens us is much more important, much more worrying too: a crisis of Values — we write this word with a capital letter and we are going to explain it -, a fundamental, infrastructural crisis, of which we are the toys and the victims.

Indeed, what is at stake now is not a health crisis. It is not even just a political, economic or financial crisis. A « crisis of civilization », we sometimes hear, but the term is erroneous, because from what civilization can such a crisis be born? A civilization so destructive that we, for our part, do not worry about its disappearance. We are living nothing less than a fundamental crisis of the Values that make a society exist and hold, that it respects the living and the individuals that compose it. We take the word « Value » in the precise sense given to it by Gérard Mendel:  » In our opinion, Value is only that which the progression of deconditioning to Authority will have allowed to establish collectively « (Pour décoloniser l’enfant, 1971).

However, it turns out that no one in this debate is « truly deconditioned to the Authority « . Let’s not talk about those who exercise Power for our greatest misfortune, since they are obsessed with it and in love with this Authority. Let’s talk about scientists who think that their authority is only related to the recognized skills they have in their field. But no! These experts should rather, once they have highlighted the serious inconsistencies of the Power in the management of the crisis, go beyond this self-imposed limit and say, not anything, not predictions about the future that are a trap for everyone, but what the convergence of the decisions taken shows, in terms of pandemic and in other areas. What are these decisions? Where do they converge?

Digital Survival

The de facto prohibition of a direct, lasting and daily link with the living (countryside, forests, sea, mountains) through limitations on travel; the reduction of social relations to digital connections (closing of social places such as cafés, prohibition of meetings other than videoconferences, incitement to the ever increasing use of so-called social networks…); the near annihilation of non-digital culture; the bringing to heel and digitization of the University; social distancing (but not the good kind, which would be « Distance yourself from a Master!  »); considerable progress in the virtualization of money (generalization of contactless payment, which means an acceptance of total control over our exchanges), and so on: we are all aware of this. The common point is: all towards digital survival.

The management of the pandemic does not aim at imposing the 5G or a vaccine, which are only epiphenomena of a much deeper policy: the attack against the values that bring emancipation, attack by imposing relationships between digitalized beings, through the smartphone in particular. It is a frontal attack on our social life, our culture, our capacity to think, our link with the living. In fact, the living world has never accepted distancing, a notion that makes no sense in everyday life. Social distancing, confinement, and the wearing of masks are several aspects of a single political and ethical program: the reduction of our life to a survival that would be viable through the digitalization of all relations (to others, to culture, etc.). Biosecurity has entered our lives, and would like to force us to elevate survival to a social value. From then on, it is up to each of us to take our responsibilities, and to assume our part of the refusal, the most important one possible and above all always in extension (the part of the hummingbird is very sympathetic, but to stop there is not up to the challenges posed to us by a very oppressive power, such as the so-called republican democracy has become) Several political, social, educational and cultural strategies are valid, from petitioning for the opening of non-digital businesses (a better paradigm than whether or not such a business is essential) to organizing a massive refusal of the wearing of masks by healthy people, for example, or denouncing the real politics imposed by power in the school, in the street, etc.

The year 2020 will finally have discredited the collapsologist strategies, which have only produced discouragement, as well as, of course, the traditional political parties. But there is still some defeatism, which must be overcome. The emptiness in front of which we find ourselves produces, in us, an effect of stupefaction from which we begin little by little to leave. This time, it’s about stopping moving in the wrong directions. The axis can only be to counter, by all the necessary means and according to all the basic strategies, this attempt of destruction of the Values which structure our desire of emancipation and freedom, in order to find the factual freedoms (to move, to meet, etc.) necessary to this process of emancipation. Max Stirner wrote, in The One and His Property, that insurrection  » entails as an inevitable consequence the overthrow of established institutions […]; it is the act of individuals who rise up, who straighten themselves out, without worrying about the institutions that will crack under their efforts or about those that may result from them. Let’s rise up, and not just be indignant, because this is not enough.