Luc Ferry: “The quest for happiness and the decline of Europe”

Inside our democracies as outside, I mean among their enemies, Putin in the lead, the diagnosis is basically the same.

Declinologists, pessimists and catastrophists share the same observation: they assure us that our old Europe, and with it the entire West, have entered into decadence, that it was "better before", that we are in decline so as not to say on the verge of extinction and that the world of tomorrow will be Chinese, Indian and Russian.

I spent decades defending the contrary idea, citing the works of those who argued for a victory of the Enlightenment heritage and the idea of ​​progress, which showed facts and supporting arguments that the world was infinitely better than in the 1930s and even 1950s.

However, I must admit that doubt seizes me in the face of these thousands of articles, books, seminars, applications and magazines that elevate the quest for personal happiness to the rank of the one and only purpose of human existence.

I do not…

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