The triangle of power

In the confusion of times, anywhere in the world, in either the richest countries or in the poorest ones, three society models at least are sharing the utopia. Each of these models comes into countless variants and sometimes all three are mixing in complex and nuanced realities. However, it can be useful to describe them separately to deduce an interpretation of dynamics of the present.

A technological model, in which the technical progress and the market impose a progressive artificialization of life and a political and economic domination by few companies’ masters, widening the gaps of incomes, fortunes and opportunities between a tiny minority and most of the world’s population. We already see its most caricatural manifestation in the speech and practice of the leaders of the biggest firms in the U.S. West Coast, and in China: they glorify individualism, narcissism and disloyalty, and even dream of enabling a privileged few, one day, to flee their own planet and escape their own bodies, by transplanting their self-consciousness in artificial intelligences on their way to distant galaxies. Abandoning the bulk of humankind on an Earth that would have become impossible to live on, due to the lack of soil, air and water.

A populist model, that refuses the most immediate consequences of globalization and technical progress, closing access to multinational firms, denying science and its consequences, denigrating journalists and teachers, looking for “clearing off” elites of money, power and knowledge, in favour of tribunes, minstrels or self-proclaimed spiritual guides. From this will also emerge nationalist claims, secessions, partitions, identity or religious totalitarianisms, wars also.

An empathetic model finally, betting on objects and heritage sharing, free services, accumulation refusal, freedom of time, respect of women, of the weak, of nature and of the various forms of life, altruism, non-violence ; and even betting on, eventually, the unveiling and the fulfilment of the spirit strengths, beyond what is too simply named intelligence ; these are such new powers that begin to be known by neurosciences as well as mindfulness meditation techniques ; and beyond that, they are the most heterodox expressions of the immense potentialities that are neglected by bodies and souls.

These three utopias have their own dynamics. They are set off. Nobody knows, a priori, which one will win, but it will differ, probably depending on countries, at least in the beginning.

As for me, in the long term, I have no doubt : the technological speech will fascinate elites of money, power and knowledge for a time, attracting the best students around adventure and profit expectations; leaving a few wealth and glory leftovers to those who aspire to join them. Afterwards, the rational globalization will fail against peoples’ revenge, who will chase these arrogant elites in a democratic or a violent way, to impose identity ideologies in their various avatars. This populism will also end up failing, like all the closed societies that men, by nature, always want to flee. Then, an altruist model will settle down, in pain or in softness, a model that has already groped for a reasonable answer, in many behaviours of all generations, to ecological and social issues. It might probably be wiser to reach this model at the earliest, skipping the most barbarian steps.