Our era is suffering from an impoverishment of the imagination. The totalitarian drift narrows our relationship to space (e.g., confinements, reductions in travel, under the cover of different ideologies) and to time (e.g., explosion of our relationship to immediacy, under the influence of consumer capitalism and screens). On the contrary, the imagination is this psychic function that allows us to open new horizons and navigate through the centuries.

Let's continue our analysis of the political marketing deployed on citizens. Omnipresent today, across various crucial issues, social engineering distributes ritualistic codes that signify membership in a particular game, which people choose to be the one designated by those in power. In doing so, they gamble on having a greater chance of "winning".

Is it still possible to educate children? We increasingly doubt it—and we also sense that this is an unprecedented catastrophe. Ariane Bilheran returns here to what constitutes the pillars of education, in other words, the fundamental criteria of a civilized society.

His prestige is such that all his blunders, his excesses and his faults in taste are seen by the Parisian public as trifles or momentary errors. Ariane Bilheran dares here to deliver an unvarnished portrait of the House of Molière as a pimp of the new ideological prostitution.

In the first part of this interview, Ms. Virginie de Araújo-Recchia gave us the details of the incredible search and arrest of which she was the victim in France.

What do you call a regime that makes lawyers complicit in the crimes their clients are accused of? A regime that criminalizes the expression of dissenting opinions, that sends its special services to arrest dissidents in the early hours, that "cooks" them incommunicado and arbitrarily confiscates their documents?

in the context of the current war in Ukraine, I wanted to gather the account of a key witness to wartime Afghanistan regarding the behavior and decadence of Western elites in an occupied country. This witness, of course, wishes to remain anonymous. We will call him Nikos here.

The silhouettes of an occult sect run through all of contemporary history. Are we really sure that we defeated Nazism and closed the file at Nuremberg? How then could we have allowed the personnel, techniques, and ideas of this movement to be sheltered and then recycled in post-war Europe? And why does it arouse so much fascination and denial today?

Arthur Koestler is an important witness and analyst of the totalitarian phenomenon of the twentieth century. After A Spanish Testament and Darkness at Noon, The Scum of the Earth, a manuscript written between January and March 1941, from London, recounts the French period of 1939-1940, the arbitrary round-ups, the persecutions and camps, and the flight from France.

Accompanied by a quote from the writer Stefan Zweig, I want to pay tribute to all the professionals and staff (caregivers, firefighters, doctors, administrative staff, etc.) who, through their heroic refusal of blackmail and the division of the social body (which is attributed to them by a perverse reversal of guilt), have suffered reprisals from the authorities.

This summer of 2021, I had the opportunity to visit France, a country I hadn't visited for several years. It was an opportunity for me to observe a serious deterioration in human relations and values, undoubtedly fertile ground for the ongoing paranoiac decompensation.

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.

It is this very pretension to govern this bare life that has clearly emerged since the first quarter of 2020: restrictions on movement to the point of immobilization (lockdowns, isolation), the distance imposed between bodies ("social distancing"), the reduction of faces to the scopic impulse (the sole gaze), constrained breathing, etc.

power that loses its authority descends into violence. And this violence "from above" is mirrored by violence "from below", which will in turn be used by the "top" to legitimize its oppression. This is the phase some countries will enter, while others are already there. What is the possible way out of this vicious circle?

"We have pushed logic so far in the liberation of human beings from the shackles of industrial exploitation that we have sent about ten million people to forced labor in the Arctic regions and the eastern forests, in conditions analogous to those of the galley slaves of antiquity. We have pushed logic so far that to settle a difference of opinion, we know only one argument: death."

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.

Series in 3 episodes, published by L’Antipresse, n°286, 287 & 288 23 & 30 May 2021, 05 June 2021 - Translated by Thetranslationbridge.com Ariane Bilheran, normalienne (Ecole Normale Supérieure), philosopher, clinical psychologist, doctor in psychopathology, specialized in the study of manipulation, paranoia, perversion, harassment, and totalitarianism.