To make things clear enough to be stated with complete confidence, let me return to the veritable witch’s cauldron of our present, a place where indeed, swirling up and down, the most horrendous elements of the past stew with extraordinarily powerful potions.
In my opinion, the future will derive its traits from a timeless will to live to which human beings must be grateful for repeatedly raising them up every time wars, massacres, epidemics, droughts or other natural disasters laid them lower than the ground itself.
The collapse of an economy founded essentially on the exploitation of the earth and of human beings is underway, awakening and stimulating an irrepressible force innate in our bodies and indeed present in all that is alive.
What lives within and around us can lay the foundations of a human society by getting beyond mere resistance to oppression, beyond the raging protest in which human creativity has stagnated for too long.
Enabling the birth of a civilization emerging with great difficulty from a devastated world is hardly a relaxing task. And creating the conditions capable of preventing any backsliding calls for continual vigilance.
The best way to explain what I mean by backsliding is perhaps to recall the situation with which my generation grappled.
Far be it from me to say how fortunate you are to have escaped an agonizing past. I am concerned only to warn you against possible aftershocks that might cause a wave of despair to rise suddenly from your doubts and in response to the immensity of the task of reconstructing a world.
How often history has capitulated to acts of collective folly whereby civil behavior has turned briskly into savagery! Just think of the German democracy of the 1930s plunging into Nazi horror.
May you learn how to nip in the bud any attempt whatsoever to restore any form of inhumanity.
Consciousness of the living forces may slumber, but it is never extinguished. The occupations movement in May 1968 sowed radical seeds everywhere that make the world’s spring inevitable no matter how brutal the coming winters may be.
Since 1968, patriarchy has come to an end in the sense of a system in which the father’s authority over his wife and children served as a model for the power wielded by the State and by the hierarchy of masters running down the social ladder from the highest to the lowest rungs. Even regimes still dominated by agrarian attitudes, such as those of the Maghreb, have recently been threatened with destruction by the renewed spirit of the French Revolution.
You will no longer have to experience the odious ascendancy of the army or the sinister compulsory military where one was taught murder, rape, hatred, contempt and xenophobia. Even if the police continue to fulfill the repressive function assigned them by the State, you will be less at risk of having a cop break your door down with a rifle butt at four in the morning.
After so many years of ruling, torturing and massacring to the cry of “Love one another,” Christianity is now nothing but a shred of almost forgotten folklore. The democracy of the supermarket shelves the Bible cheek by jowl with sex toys. Islam, the vogue for which has been mistaken for a religious revival, is destined for the same fate. By contesting an Islamism which acts as a front for business mafias, democratizing Islamic movements will eventually be absorbed by the great blotter of social struggle that the totalitarianism of financial power creates everywhere.
You will no longer have to endure the insufferable scorn directed at women, children and nature on behalf of predatory males. In the 1950s a wife beaten and humiliated by her master and the child mistreated and often raped were more likely to arouse off-color humor than indignation.
It took centuries to get rid of a death penalty whereby a hypocritical society exorcised its endemic guilt. Justice must now take a further step, ending incarceration and banning the ignominy of prison forever.
The glorification of work is now part of the cynical masquerading of the bankers and their civil-servant flunkies. Even as it accuses strikers and retirees of parasitism, a genuinely parasitic capitalism closes their factories and gambles with their assets on the stock market. It reduces useful work in prime sectors of the economy such as steel, textiles, education, health, transportation, or postal services, in favor of work whose sole justification is a salary—and one earned only to be splurged immediately on consumer goods.
You will escape the ideological conflicts that fueled the passions of earlier generations, all the arguments over abstract words, thanks to which (as in bygone days the interpretation of biblical texts or the glossing of abstruse dogmas) Marxism, Leninism, fascism, Freudianism and deviations of every kind taxed the brains of faction leaders and caused the gutters to run with the blood of militants.
I have always had reservations about militantism. I do not question the effectiveness of a “mobilization” of consciences. I readily acknowledge that many a prejudice or injustice has retreated in the face of great movements of outrage and valiant affrays with the oppressor. But the militant’s behavior is perverse at its core: how could a true solidarity between the happiness of each and the happiness of all ever be founded upon self-sacrifice and self-denial?
What is given can never be reduced to economic terms. The pertinence and determination of an individual attitude are of a quite different nature. A surge of life will suddenly precipitate the refusal of something intolerable: for David Thoreau it was the State’s oppression; for Rosa Parks it was segregation. Militants then take over, serving as spokespersons, but whereas the insurgent creates a zone of turbulence and resonance, shaking up apathy, awakening consciences and breaking down the walls of resignation, the militant sacrifices creative joy to agitprop. The very meaning of emancipation is lost when it is changed into a duty or a moral obligation.