What happens when a philosopher, armed with good reading, finds herself caught in an abusive—yet ordinary—airport search? The result is a profound meditation on the voluntary servitude that accompanies modernity like its shadow…

If there is one work that I have been sharing without moderation in my "Knowledge of the Ancients" workshops since 2021, it is Boethius's Consolatio Philosophiæ. I believe that this masterpiece is indeed one of those that most helps us to face life's misfortunes, and it seems urgent to me to rehabilitate it to the rightful notoriety that befits it.

In the delusional hypochondria of paranoia, illness is everywhere, experienced as dangerous, mortal, the enemy of the living. The sick are opposed to the healthy, as the impure to the pure: the order is given to eliminate (and before that, to "evict" to use the words of Jean-Michel Blanquer, Minister of National Education in France, concerning unvaccinated children) the part of the social body designated as impure.

To see a way out of totalitarianism, we need to understand how minds have been imprisoned in paranoiac madness. This implies making the phenomenon of delusional contagion[1] intelligible, and to bring to light the unconscious psychic interactions that combine to promote ideology.

The totalitarian regime aims at "total domination" (H. Arendt), that is to say, it interferes in the totality of social, private, and intimate spheres, even in the psyche of individuals.