The religious fanaticism of adolescents is the hallmark of a societal and political system that has become paranoid, in which the logic of power is harassing and no longer governed by authority. In the suburbs of France, recruitment has been rather successful. It reveals the deep social, familial, and spiritual flaws in the society in which these adolescents grew up.

If terrorism is about terrorizing others, the question arises: who are the real terrorists? And what are they really motivated by?

Hippocrates reminds us that medicine is an art. Confusing medicine, which presupposes an empirical relationship between patient and doctor, with hard science is a misunderstanding that leads to the objectification of the other. Totalitarianism, which precisely seeks to objectify the human, necessarily engenders an ideology of "scientific" medicine bordering on sectarian blindness.

Marie Antoinette is both the most famous and the most misunderstood queen in the history of France. Born on November 2, 1755, in Vienna, Austria, she died by guillotine on October 16, 1793, in the Place de la Révolution in Paris (now Place de la Concorde). She reigned over France and Navarre from 1774 to 1791 and was Queen of the French from 1791 to 1792, the last queen of the Ancien Régime, Archduchess of Austria, Imperial Princess and Royal Princess of Hungary and Bohemia,

The establishment of the Covid dystopia has led to profound ruptures within our societies. Groups have formed to resist the reign of the absurd and the health dictatorship, new media have emerged, and also, of course, opinion leaders and charismatic figures.

Literature trumps psychology in that it allows us to explore many souls, not just our own. This is Faulkner's proposition, which he illustrates with a captivating and hideous dive into the depths of human nature.

The art of seizing the opportunity is not an exact science. It is not transferable or reproducible according to external criteria, because it calls more on intuition than reason, that quality which creates geniuses, great men, fine strategists, good doctors or even great seducers.

Reading note on Psychopathologie du totalitarisme, Psychopathology of totalitarianism in the journal Éléments by Rémi Soulié. If Plato and Aristotle, according to Pascal, "wrote about politics, it was as if to regulate a madhouse". Pascal did not believe he was right, for want of having known totalitarianism, whose canonical distinction with so-called liberal and representative democracy seems increasingly difficult to maintain for Ariane Bilheran...

In an age of ubiquitous advertising, Klemperer's reflection remains acutely relevant. Better than anyone else, he understood the power of enchantment and self-alienation conveyed by the words of language.

The author of The Language of the Third Reich was a firsthand witness to the German totalitarian drift. Here we continue reading his diary, rich in poignant descriptions.

Victor Klemperer's study of the rhetoric of Nazism is a text of universal scope that allows us to understand the inner logic of all totalitarian phenomena. Ariane Bilheran undertakes here a detailed portrait of this great witness of the 20th century.

Feelings are shrinking like shagreen leather; no one opens up about their feelings anymore, love is relegated to the cellar, even inner life is no longer of interest. This is Günther Anders's sad observation of the generations before the post-Covid dehumanization...

Gabriel García Márquez was not only the brilliant novelist of One Hundred Years of Solitude and other great works. He wrote many stories, some of which have been published. Among these stories, one has, to my knowledge, never been included in a book. It is entitled Algo muy grave va a suceder en este pueblo: "Something very serious is going to happen in the village."

Can love be commanded? Can it be decided? Gabriel García Márquez has attempted to answer these enigmas, the most bitter of a human life, with a flamboyant novel of almost unbearable passion.

This sentence, taken from his masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude, seems to have been predestined by Gabriel García Márquez for his novel about the last moments of Simón Bolívar's life, The General in His Labyrinth.

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.

The psychic development of the human being, to reach maturity, is a long journey, which takes place from the earliest childhood, until psychic autonomy, understood as the ability to set one's own laws, without needing to be contained from the outside. Education has the role of leading the child out of the impulsive state. Authority is therefore central in the psychic construction of the child.

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.