Benjamin Sire is a composer. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Printemps Républicain.
It is at least in disbelief that we can turn the pages of recent news, whose epicenter is called the Twitter network. It begins with the tragic, with the Mila affair, from which we will spare you once again the story of the facts, which we have already told here. Then the tragedy drowns in the backwater of ridiculous abjection with the fall of Benjamin Griveaux, victim of an American porn revenge that we thought was reserved for footballers, where all boundaries between public life and private. Then the abjection is withdrawn, leaving room for the ridiculous only when the political debate crystallizes around the possible candidacies for the presidential election of Cyril Hanouna and Joachim Son-Forget, the insatiable buffoon of the "new world" (and actor central of the Griveaux case). Meanwhile, hand in hand with that of Son-Forget, Alexandre Benalla perorates with humorous tweet, applauded by this grotesque court that once Saint-Simon crunched with an unstoppable acidity.
Benalla, a false clown and central figure in the disintegration of the state, who, at a time when glib crushes morality, would almost come to forget that there are all the bad things that weaken democracy.
The democracy? Let's talk about it, because it is she who vacillates under the combined assaults of the entertainment society and the age of identity.
A system that we thought was unshakable is falling apart.When populisms are everywhere acclaimed (without considering here to judge them), when some elected officials of the Republic spend their time participating in coups against the institutions, when a normally elected president constantly sees his legitimacy questioned , when activists adorn themselves with the sesame of journalism to twist reality and impose their militant truths on the pretext that they have an iPhone, when politicians, even the government, quibble on freedom of expression and are ready to let go of ballast to the contenders of blasphemy, when censorship advances under the mask of progressivism, when, on the part of institutions as of civil society, violence stirs up the argument ... When all this happens, it indicates that a system that we thought was unshakable is well in the process of collapsing.
The more history accelerates at an exponential speed, the more the mass of information delivered overwhelms us, the more our brains are called upon, the less we are able to step back and put the facts in perspective. We would almost forget that this cherished democracy, in the form that we know it, is perhaps only an epiphenomenon of History, that all the models of society, all the regimes, have in their very nature the fact to inspire a destructive reaction. Democracy, no doubt more than all the others, because it precisely leaves everyone the right to contest its existence. Recently, in a program on the Paris Première channel, the philosopher Raphaël Enthoven noted that "The paradox of democracy is that it only promises itself. [...] Nobody decently wants to get out of it . [...] Everyone wants to be able to criticize it, even to say that it is a dictatorship. [...] It produces the desire for adversity which we lack. The result of that is populism. ”.
Except that, if we subscribe in part to this analysis, the consequence of a possible generalization of these populisms will mark the end of this democracy, from which it is not so obvious that nobody wants "decently to get out".
Individual demand meets the desire for order and is the bed of populism.On this topic, the professor of political theory at Harvard University, Yascha Mounk, published in 2018 a shock book entitled The people against democracy . In this brilliant work, Mounk reminds us that “voters have always expressed their disgust for certain parties, politicians or governments; now most of them are tired of liberal democracy itself. He tells us that, according to his research, today less than a third of American millennials consider it " important to live in a democracy ", and that one in six people think that living under the domination of a military regime would be a good thing. The report is apparently frightening, but it testifies above all to a polarization of the society and a telluric shock between aspirations for the least paradoxical.
At a time when the philosopher and keen observer of social change, Denis Maillard, called the market society, which he defined as "a society of individual rights and special interests which seek to balance themselves as on a On the one hand , citizens would like to dispense with all representation in a quest for unlimited rights and recognition, and on the other to obtain total sovereign protection without giving anything in return. No more intermediary bodies, structuring institutions or associations; each one is a political object all by itself which would like to eruct its "me" on any subject without claiming any specialization, and to be recognized directly by a power which, too, would exempt itself from any intermediation. This is how individual demand meets the desire for order and populism makes its bed. Politicians themselves, from Sarkozy once to Trump today, spend their time " asserting [their] disdain for the most basic constitutional principles " and institutions, as Mounk recalls. The leader speaks directly to the people who, in turn, try to do the same. During this time, the legitimate representative bodies get their feet in the carpet of the entertainment society and justify their disqualification, as much as they prepare the ground for their disappearance and the putting into orbit, in addition to the populists, of sad clowns and other adventurers, such as Juan Branco or Taha Bouhafs, who feel like they are growing ego wings and confuse media audience and political skills.
Everything is going too fast for our brains, constantly tossed about on a sea of non-hierarchical information.Another dimension exacerbates the phenomenon and brings us back to social networks and the reign of the image. The more numerous, short and scathing the messages delivered, the more raw the images are delivered or edited from a militant angle, the more the emotional factor takes precedence over any form of analysis and intelligence (literally). It is the triumph of the feeling so dear to Cyril Hanouna. Nothing escapes the society of transparency, but everything is fleeting, fleeting, immediately commented on and so quickly forgotten. Our daily lives are made up of a mixture of indignation and amnesia, snapshots empty of meaning but not free from reactions. Everything is going too fast for our brains, constantly tossed about on a sea of non-hierarchical information, and we all go crazy, without being aware of our wants and needs, without knowing what really guides our thoughts and if they really belong to us.
The democratic idea will soon be only a distant memory and we will have only our eyes to cry.So, often, in such a case, all feverish of our freedom without object, we turn to the figure of the chief, sometimes of the adventurer, towards this fantasized order which would come to whistle the end of the recess, towards this supposed magician who would indicate again the way and would put an end to the maelstrom of the claims of a people both in lack of identity and who marries them all.
It is high time to pull ourselves together, because when the day comes, the democratic idea will be only a distant memory and we will have only our eyes to cry. Because it is all our fault, and we are as always accomplices of our servitude.
