"Liberty, Equality, Frugality", the key to harmonious societies ?
In his extraordinary Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari tells how the human has gone very quickly from the fodder stage (collector / fisherman) to that of farmer and city dweller. An agricultural revolution that corresponds, contrary to what we commonly think, to enslavement and a reduction of happiness and freedom.
One of the major points of this essay is what Harari calls "orders" or "imaginary realities", in other words "fictions": " This faculty of speaking of fictions is the most singular feature of the language of Sapiens. [...] You will never convince a monkey to give you his banana by promising that it will be returned to him a hundredfold in the sky of the monkeys. But why is it important? All in all, fiction can dangerously mislead or distract. People who go to the forest looking for fairies or unicorns would seem to have less chance of survival than those looking for mushrooms or deer. And if you spend hours praying to non-existent tutelary spirits, do not you waste precious time that would be better used to forage, beat or fornicate? But it is fiction that has allowed us to imagine things, but also to do it collectively. We can weave myths such as the story of biblical creation, the myth of the Australian Aborigines' Dream Time, or the nationalist myths of modern states. These myths give Sapiens an unprecedented capacity to cooperate in mass and flexibility. "
In other words, there would be no culture, no civilization, no social organization on the scale of what we know today without fiction. And what bases them are fictions to which we choose to believe, without which it would have been impossible to put in place all these social and economic "realities": " There are no gods in the universe, no nations no money, no human rights, no laws, no justice outside the common imagination of human beings. [...] Try to imagine how difficult it would have been to create states, churches or legal systems, if we could only talk about what really exists, such as rivers, trees and lions. "
The transition to agriculture
The agricultural revolution had an effect: " keep more people alive in worse conditions", because of the ever-increasing and exhausting tasks imposed by agriculture, the conservation of crops and the enormous dangers that a destruction of those it provoked. What counts is the number, the population growth, that still today, we agree to trim like crazy all our lives to live badly: " One of the iron laws of history is that luxury goods become necessities and generate new obligations. Since people are used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then start counting on it. And they end up not being able to do without it. In other words, our "comfort zone" that we refuse to leave can be extremely uncomfortable, but it's the one we know and do not want to let go.
Unequal "cooperation"
The extra stress, work and fatigue were incumbent and are still incumbent, and probably for a long time, on the poorest: the peasants, the workers, the employees. " Everywhere there arose sovereigns and elites who fed on the surplus of the peasants and left them just enough to subsist. [...] The story is something that very few people did while everyone else was plowing the fields and carrying buckets of water. We will add: digging mines, working on the line, dying on the battlefields ... And the "cooperations" that have allowed the development of ever larger and more powerful civilizations have been and are still imposed and inegalitarian.
To believe that there are free men and slaves, or to believe that all men are equal: in both cases, we are dealing with fictions that allow the construction of a society. As long as the individuals that make up this society adhere, believe in this mythology. If people stop believing in universal gravitation, it will nevertheless continue to be exercised; but if they no longer believe in the mythologies that underpin the imaginary order of their society, it is threatened; " Preserving an imaginary order requires hard work at every moment. Some take the form of violence and constraints. Armies, police, courts and prisons are constantly working to force people to conform to the imaginary order. "
Security and violence
Among those who wrote the mythology of human rights, Montesquieu had understood that equality and freedom were petitions of principle, and that both were threatened because of human nature. He had not made the connection established by Harari with our foraging ancestors: these, depending on the food they found in nature, would have, according to Harari, inscribed in their genes the need to gorfrer as soon as they fell on food because the next day was never insured. This reflex would always be inscribed in us, which explains our voracity, whether it concerns reality (food, alcohol) or fictions (money, power). Something in us, for thousands of years, tells us that too much is never enough.
Without frugality, society is in danger
To compensate for this gluttony that a society of (relative) affluence makes dangerous, Montesquieu had added to equality and liberty a third force: frugality. In other words, the ethical capacity of each to limit his greed, so as not to excessively increase inequalities or not to excessively restrict freedoms. And this, both individually and collectively; Excesses threaten our individual health - obesity, for example - and social peace - when income and wealth gaps exceed a tolerable and tolerated ratio. And without frugality freely accepted by everyone, society is sooner or later in danger.
The seeds of a revolution, the risks of annihilation
Many voices have been trying for a long time to warn the leaders of our countries: if we continue in this direction, where inequalities are widening, where ever-increasing individual wealth is being built while the middle class impoverished, we go to the wall.In other words, the imaginary order on which our society was built breaks up. Kings are naked and people revolt.
Carlos Ghosn - while obviously leaving him the presumption of innocence - would then perfectly embody these gluttons of money and power, which does not detract from their very great qualities of managers and leaders (which are certainly indispensable for the put in this position of power and wealth). What is the meaning of refusing to pay taxes on $ 37 million when you make 80? To pose the question is already an insult to those for whom the amount of these taxes alone represents the total income of several lives. And if it's not Carlos Ghosn, it's his brother, one of his own; because they do not spare much their efforts to save ever more. Too much is never enough ...
In contrast to those white collar workers who run and own the world, yellow vests are showing their anger today. We all said about these people who block roads and show their anger: they were manipulated by Melenchon (A French populist), by fascists, they were racist ... Some maybe, surely; they represent society as a whole, with its leftists, its fascists, its racists, but also its sores, its ecologists, its gogos, its zozos. You and me. People who no longer believe in this imaginary order that authorizes financial obesity Ghosn at the cost of a life increasingly precarious, increasingly difficult, less comfortable.
The myth of growth
Of all the divinities of our sick mythology, growth is one of the most invoked. He is sacrificed everything, including the future. Growth, as it dominates us, is nothing more than this voracity on a universal scale. To speak of degrowth is to translate into contemporary terms the frugality of Montesquieu. For the latter, it was necessary to ensure freedom and equality; Decay is now essential to guarantee not only freedom and equality, but also the survival of humanity.
Change of myth
The capitalism that directs us is nothing but one of these imaginary orders. A very powerful fiction, which brought a lot of benefits and a lot of horrors. Like all those who preceded, and all those who will follow without doubt. But for there to be a sequel to the history of humanity, it is time to change. No software, as we hear all the sauces; of myth. We do not believe in software; we believe in a myth.
Several stories are competing for the Goncourt of the future, of which we have already known variants (because, as Proust said, there are fewer ideas than men ...): the myth supremacist, according to which a race a civilization, a social category has the right to rule the world, even to enslave it, and certainly to despise it; the universalist myth, handed over again and again to the profession, this time deeply ecological, in the strong sense of the term, in the hope that one day this marvelous fiction of human rights becomes a reality as tangible as universal gravitation.
It will be one or the other. Or the end of this brief and magnificent history of humanity.
(From Vincent ENGEL, Le soir, Belgium)