Chronicles of Totalitarianism – 10: Totalitarianism and Ecosystem
- Ariane Bilheran
- Jul 31, 2022
- 8 min read
Bilheran, A. "Chroniques du Totalitarisme 10 - Totalitarisme et écosystème", in L'Antipresse 348, 31 juillet 2022.
"They had to forge an art of living in times of catastrophe,
to be born a second time, and then fight, with an open face,
against the death instinct at work in our history."
Albert Camus, Speech in Sweden, December 10, 1957.
We are rightly protesting against the totalitarian drift that has been explicitly visible since the spring of 2020. This civic, moral and spiritual protest is essential, because it expresses our concern to preserve the roots, in particular Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian, of our current civilization. If we define, in a laconic way, totalitarianism as the ambition of "total domination" (H. Arendt), with imperialist methods, including the monopoly of communication, the confiscation of the economy in the hands of a few, the functioning of an ever-changing ideology, and control by terror, then it is quite obvious that totalitarianism was not born yesterday, nor even with the totalitarianisms of the 20th century. This is a political conception of the world, in which the human being is reduced at best to a function or an instrument, at worst to a useless waste, stripped of his unpredictable moods, his cumbersome aspirations to freedom, his far-fetched claims to embody moral values. It is in essence a reductionism of the individual: to a "positive" or "negative" case, to a mathematical unit, except obviously those which would correspond to him by their incommensurable and elusive dimension, namely, zero and infinity (A. Koestler).
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