In order to achieve its genocidal ambitions, totalitarianism constantly strives to strip us of our humanity. Yet, it is easy to lose our compassion, worn down by repeated harassment: I might even wish that the next blows would fall on someone else rather than me. Augustine urges us to do the same: above all, we must not become desensitized. Christ lived through his trials with his full sensitivity.

For Ariane Bilheran, clinical psychologist, author of Psychopathologie de la paranoïa (Psychopathology of Paranoia) and Psychopathologie de l'autorité (Psychopathology of Authority) (Dunod), our societies are sinking into totalitarianism.

"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."