International Symposium of Mental Health organized in Portugal by Aliança Saúde Portugal, about the current pandemic of fear propagated in the humanity.

A specialist in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Ariane Bilheran helps us understand the idea of "comfort health" through an observation she makes about the crisis we are experiencing today: "so many people agree to give up their freedom under the cover of a lie, without having a knife to their throat, far from it. Quite simply because many of them aspire to the preservation of their comfort and their privileges, and because they have been chained to them little by little.

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.

All totalitarian islets create their own "newspeak", for example within companies that operate by terrorizing, harassing and persecuting their employees. All totalitarianism lives off the conquest of "ideological pretension" (Hannah Arendt) and the "rectification of thought" (Mao). To overcome these ideological levels, which are increasingly moving away from the search for truth and knowledge, and to persecute opponents, the instrumentalization of language is necessary.

Traditionally, and throughout humanity, there have been places where everyone could take refuge in a "neutral" zone of conflict, in protection, sheltered. With or without papers, with or without money, innocent or criminal, destitute, beggar, handicapped, old, whoever you are, whatever you have done, you could be welcomed and safe there.

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.

No great crime, no human tragedy has remained without witnesses. It is as if destiny, or the collective unconscious, assigns this role to certain privileged individuals, and grants them providential protection to accomplish their mission. This is true as much for the "great History" as for the intimate dramas of families and communities.

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.

Before 1914 the earth belonged to all its inhabitants. Anyone went wherever he wanted and stayed as long as he wanted. There were no permissions, no authorizations, and it always amuses me to see the astonishment of young people when I tell them that before 1914 I traveled to India and America without a passport and never even saw one.