Following on from my book on life, I am once again tackling a task that is impossible but which I believe to be essential in view of the various political ideologies and projects for social transformation. This is by no means an attempt to provide a complete theory of human sociality, which would require entirely different dimensions, but simply to offer some key insights into how human societies function beyond the myths we have created about them. This minimal anthropology is not a theoretical problem but a highly practical one, in that it allows us to determine against the dreams of a fantasized “new man,” what we can hope for in politics and the limits of human plasticity, beyond the fable of a good nature that has been perverted or the appeal to moral values as well as to men of good will, as if all our problems came from the wickedness of the human heart. The problem is rather that in order to understand societies and their relationship to the individuals who compose them, it is necessary not only to adopt a completely discredited historical and dialectical materialism, but also to integrate highly controversial concepts such as social totality, structure, system or cycle (in macroeconomics), social field, discourse, limited rationality, imperfect information, etc.
Society is not a community, not a people, not a family, not just our relationships or exchanges with others; it is a social organization, rituals and institutions, founding texts, a way of life and coexistence on a territory, with, first and foremost, systems of production ensuring material survival and social reproduction. A whole nominalist tradition has claimed that society does not exist, which is appalling blindness, particularly in relations with other societies, not just in war. This reductionism seeks to explain everything by the self-organization of individuals or their capacity for imitation, whereas general mobilization clearly comes from a higher level over which the individual has little control. What does not exist is the autonomous individual, the self-made man who owes nothing to anyone, whose founding myth was created by Robinson. On the contrary, we must recognize our interdependencies and our sense of belonging, not only a common language and all the culture we inherit, but also productive cooperation, currency, gift and exchange circuits, the state of technology and medicine, material infrastructure and the accompanying traffic rules, etc., the very real existence of society above us. One must be blinded by ideology not to recognize the social utility, the public sphere, and the common goods that legitimize the taxes that finance them and that must be democratically approved, the privileged domain of politics. But this society above us can also make its oppression felt by crushing individuals. We will therefore try to sketch out who these individuals are who make up society even though they are its product, what the main social determinants are, and the system of production in which they participate.
The society of individuals
The first thing to recognize is the arbitrary and conventional nature of social rules, just like languages, which is a condition of their diversity. Societies are not organisms but organizations, which differ from organisms in that they are based on a norm that is external to the individuals, the biological bodies that compose them, but which do not have the same DNA or the same knowledge (unlike our own cells). The arbitrary nature of languages should not be exaggerated in view of their capacity for translation from one to another, nor should the contingency of laws in relation to the constraints of all kinds that are exercised. This certainly does not mean that we can do whatever we want, but only that there are things that cannot be decided. Societies are plural, but they also have a history in which many processes continue and transform themselves in interaction with other societies. Far from being entities frozen in their identity, they have internal divisions and external oppositions that bring them into a trying dialectic. Our experience is that of this changing reality.
Just because these processes transcend individuals does not mean that they have no role to play. However, they can only be actors in a drama or comedy whose script they do not know and which they certainly did not write, as if they could decide the course of events as they pleased, often finding themselves the butt of the joke! Quite the opposite of a people united against the enemy, there is always a certain discordance between the individual and society, clearly highlighted by Canguilhem but already implied by the prohibition of incest and exogamy, which break down the first subjective totality and open it up to the group as a new totality (holistic closure) that is itself open to other groups. Through naming (or adoption), individuals find themselves integrated into kinship ties and social structures in which they must take their place and which largely determine their existence, often without their knowledge. Structuralism remains largely unavoidable here. We could legitimately speak of an illusion of freedom since, according to Norbert Elias, our sense of freedom is directly correlated to the multiplicity of constraints between which we must constantly arbitrate, if not to the precariousness of our status. Nevertheless, between individuals and society, there is always room for maneuver, between two asymmetrical orders of causality: normative discourses on the one hand, a society that shapes us in its image, material and massive processes; on the other hand, the intervention of the individual, who can influence the course of events to a greater or lesser extent depending on their position, but who remains linked to their historical moment and, as such, already dated. Every human act can be explained objectively by its social determinants as well as subjectively by desire, motivation, and freedom of action. This non-coincidence between the individual and the effective totalities that encompass them feeds dreams of “totalitarian” harmony, but these dreams are doomed to failure.
It is not so much the legitimacy of these dreams that is in question, but the fact that they can only remain dreams or turn into nightmares. There is an ideal of society that takes us back to our lost origins, to the protective home, which we must not deny. Compassion and solidarity rightly define our “humanity.” Far from being the triumph of the individual, the breakdown of collective solidarity is synonymous with a loss of culture and a total loss of autonomy, and there is nothing more justified than opposing it. This return to the savagery denounced by Hobbes, when man is a wolf to man, was nevertheless caused by religious wars waged in the name of the highest values. We can therefore say that we know, in general terms, where we need to go, but that does not mean that we know how, let alone that we could achieve God's kingdom on earth as promised at every election, and not just by Islamists who believe in it with all their hearts (Yes we can? My ass!). There is no excuse for passive acceptance and inaction, but we must try to make the most of the potential offered by a historical configuration, which is not at all the same thing as a society organized according to our plans, even if we can carry out large-scale restructuring. There is a good chance that we should not let this pass in the name of the dogmatic intransigence of a few religions at war with each other to promise us their cheap paradise. We know only too well that the disease of language, of wanting to tell ourselves stories, wreaks havoc in politics, feeding all kinds of utopias and follies in the name of simplistic ideologies and blind belief in ideas; which is a naive attitude towards language. Indeed, language has something paranoid about it, putting us in the position of author, with a Manichaeism that makes us believe that we can triumph over evil and keep only the good, that it is only a matter of choice, will, and good faith, and that we have waited until now for someone to come up with this brilliant idea! Unfortunately, we have often had to pay the price in blood to admit how deadly these social utopias are, hells of good intentions that turn out to be not at all as desirable as we had so fervently believed. Psychoanalysis can shed light on the dark side of politics, mob movements, and love of the master, not to call for any normalization of desires, as we are not afraid of ridiculing ourselves, but to denounce their heroization and delusions of grandeur, if not their call for sacrifice, the game of the forbidden and its transgression, etc. Fortunately, another disease of language will never leave us alone: the tireless search for truth.
Cognitive dialectics
“The real movement of the process of child development does not proceed from the individual to the social, but from the social to the individual” (Vygotsky)
We cannot, in fact, limit ourselves to an “ontology of social being” that reduces the individual to his or her freedom understood as the ability to make plans and pursue interests. we must add an epistemology, that of a truth that is not given, of knowledge that is constructed step by step, but also of the division of opinions without any supreme guarantor to settle conflicting convictions, none of which are true (human beings spend their time dealing with things that do not exist, whether gods or devils). Despite everything, there is an accumulation of effective knowledge, but this mainly demonstrates our dependence on the state of knowledge of our time, our environment, what we have been able to learn and what we have felt we need to know. This ignorance at the heart of all knowledge is what constitutes our experience as historical, a test of the passage of time in its radical unpredictability, that of what we do not yet know and which prevents us from projecting ourselves into an immutable eternity.
Believing ourselves to be divine in essence may have persuaded us of our clairvoyance and our guilt for evil done knowingly, whereas, for Socrates, no one does evil willingly, but only through ignorance. Indeed, our first characteristic, even though we are undoubtedly the most intelligent animal, is paradoxically our limited rationality, which is clearly evident in past history and ancient beliefs or superstitions, but can be deduced from our finitude and the functioning of the brain. If there is one undeniable progress, it is that of knowledge, which nevertheless remains limited and subject to error, locked within the paradigm of the moment. Because no one has access to being or possesses the truth, it is the subject of endless disputes in which people accuse each other of lying. It is not enough to have “clear and distinct” ideas for them not to be nonsense. All possible opinions will be expressed, and experience will always be the sole judge, after the fact, which promises us a shift from one extreme to another, the very principle of cognitive dialectics. There is no well-known truth somewhere that just needs to be revealed or applied. We can only arbitrate between the options available at the time, without one side being entirely right and the other entirely wrong. We move forward blindly, by trial and error. The only thing we truly share is our ignorance, which is the foundation of our freedom, particularly political freedom (cf. JS Mill), freedom of thought and belief, which makes secularism consubstantial with democracy. It is perhaps difficult to admit, but there would be no consciousness or freedom without the undecidable, questions that require reflection and information rather than automatic reflexes based on what is familiar, which does not prevent us from being free only when we are informed. We must convince ourselves that the limitations of our rationality do not only have negative aspects, as differences in knowledge individualize us and save us from uniformity, each of us clinging to the other as to our own questions. We might add that lying is also an original possibility of speech, preserving its interiority but ultimately muddying the waters. However, it is not enough to criticize the rationality of homo economicus on the grounds of its folly or its emotions, because a large proportion of market players are companies, which respond well to the requirement for instrumental rationality. On the other hand, they are no more aware of the truth than anyone else, and are therefore equally buffeted by speculative movements and the winds of history.
The second thing to remember, after taking stock of our cognitive limitations, is that dialectics is not individual, because “no one touches the truth if not everyone reaches it,” even if “the truth for all depends on the rigor of each individual” (Lacan). Therefore, the more “times change,” the more the individual is linked to his or her generation. This generational reality is concretely reflected in the domination of the most numerous generations (currently still the baby boomers and those of May 1968, cf. Louis Chauvet). If recognizing one's ignorance is the beginning of wisdom and what gives meaning to our freedom as a thoughtful choice, then dogmatism, certainties, prejudices, and everything we inherit from common discourse lead just as surely to the worst. It is hard to imagine how much of what we believe “spontaneously,” especially about other populations, does not hold water when we take a closer look, yet politics plays on these prejudices. In a way, we must always free ourselves from the collective hypnosis to which we naturally succumb. However, it is impossible to escape common sense, just as mood cannot be indifferent to the general atmosphere, unless one isolates oneself in madness. As we have seen, the dialectical tension between the individual and the collective is a fundamental part of human societies and politics, a tension that can be found between common discourse or group thinking and the individual need for critical thinking, which is always lacking (assimilated to contrary propaganda). It is a contradiction that cannot be resolved in exaggerated individualism any more than in stifling communitarianism, but rather alternates between competition and cooperation, shameful selfishness and great collective impulses, as between the private and public spheres, whose differences must be cultivated instead of reducing one to the other in the name of totalitarian principles that are too beautiful to be true.
The injustice of the world
Beyond group membership and cognitive dialectics, it can be said that the demand for justice is one of the “diseases” of language, even if rudiments of it can be found in social animals that are sensitive to sharing. Boltanski and Thévenot's theory of justice shows how justice is not at all “within us” but relative to discourse, or the rules of the game, so to speak (inspired, domestic, civic, commercial, industrial, reputational, project-based discourse). It is a bit like medical ethics, for example, which is linked to its own purpose. To move beyond the apparent “complexity” or “multitude,” it is better to go back to the concepts and mechanisms, the articulations that structure a diversity that is more a division of labor and social differentiation. Thus, social ties are differentiated according to the moment, place, and discourse in which they occur (the four Lacanian discourses can be distinguished here as love, politics, economics, and science). The question of “us,” of the discourse in which we participate, boils down to knowing to whom we are responsible, the place where speech, desire, and debt circulate. I find equally indispensable the dialectical journey of moral positions outlined by Hegel in his Phenomenology, which relativizes these somewhat overly categorical positions by showing the extent to which we are their subjects, against our will, and that it is not only the world that imposes itself on us, but also the way in which we denounce its injustice, which changes over time.
There is, however, an ethics of discourse itself, language and speech addressed to others implying the universalization of our justifications and responsibility towards others, if not a certain reciprocity, which is certainly not always respected, to say the least, but which has long been manifested in particular by blood debts (vendetta), not only in the exchange of gifts (where the essential element is the debt, the obligation to repay). This is serious business, as losing face can cost us our lives. Despite these underlying trends and what might be called an ethics of enunciation or communication that leaves its mark over time (this is the cunning of reason for Hegel), we must not fall into Habermas' overly idealistic utopia, which reduces democracy to communicative action, when in fact it is a arena for power struggles, conflicts of interest, social contradictions, and networks of power (positions, money), culminating in the iron law of oligarchy. The refutation of this utopia is evident in politics. Despite a few exceptional individuals, political action is openly the least honest there is, and its discourse is the most hollow and conventional, that of communication and storytelling, since talking beings need to tell themselves stories and, in order to be elected, politicians must say what voters want to hear...
It is not enough to show how the universal aspiration for justice is constrained by discourse and social structures; we must also abandon the illusion that it would suffice to eliminate a few evil-doers, despots or bankers to restore justice. Eliminating violent people has never put an end to violence, but rather leads to its exacerbation. Social causality is not individual. The natural tendency is certainly to attribute injustice to the wickedness of a few, but this is a mistake, and this kind of mistake, which is quite common, leads to exclusion and even extermination. In good conscience, no doubt, but above all in vain. We must convince ourselves that the primary cause of evil is almost always the pursuit of good, in the sense that the best is the enemy of the good. This is part of the disease of language, which tends toward extremes and simplifications due to its categorical nature. The desire to settle issues once and for all is always devastating. Evil comes from this, from what is done to you for your own good, or for the good of others... Apart from this vengeful moralism, most people believe that evil is within us, a form of selfishness that must be fought just like our animal instincts. There is no shortage of age-old wisdom claiming to defeat this monster, nor of millenarianism announcing the definitive triumph over these diabolical tendencies. It is such a widespread illusion to believe in the power of love that we refuse to admit its ravages and, above all, its distortion into the love of the master, which is well known in all sects. It is undeniable that these religious or fascist discourses are dominant, even though they have constantly proven their ineffectiveness and destructiveness. Individual asceticism is all the more useless since the source of evil is not individual but most often stems from what can be called group egoism, which is much more imperative than the pleasure principle when it comes to defending one's family, party, or country. It has been proven in animals as well as in soldiers that oxytocin, which strengthens social bonds, also increases aggression towards others. Moreover, it is often hatred that strengthens love, and external aggression that strengthens solidarity and brotherhood among comrades in arms, even to the point of supreme sacrifice (incomprehensible to individualism).. Even if his anthropology is simplistic to say the least, René Girard was right to insist on the importance of the scapegoat mechanism in uniting a community through the expulsion of its intimate enemy. The need to designate an enemy in politics and to simplify everything into friend or foe is total confusion. Instead of pretending to deliver us from evil, we should rather admit the ambivalence of love, for it is love that causes the most suffering, precisely because it is supposed to give the greatest joys. As Heraclitus said, the road that goes up is the same as the road that goes down! The slightest examination of real love should discredit grandiloquent speeches about ideal love—if we didn't want to believe in it so much... This is certainly not the path to follow if we want to change the world or simply improve things. In any case, we are touching here on dead ends and an ambivalence that cannot be dismissed out of hand in the name of our supposed good will, and which should make us a little more modest and cautious in our search for the real causes, in social mechanisms rather than in the hearts of men.
The sources of injustice in the world are more material than moral, primarily the privileges of birth, which demonstrate how much we are not made by ourselves but inherit a history, an education, and a social organization. The most significant and concrete injustices are undoubtedly economic injustices, which are also wrongly attributed to human malice and greed, when in fact they are not a matter of morality but of a system, a way of functioning that has its own logic, guided by profit but which only lasts as long as it satisfies the conditions for its reproduction and thus proves its material effectiveness, its productivity, and its ability to mobilize superior forces. Here we leave behind discourse, structures, ideology, and cognition, and turn to the material infrastructure as a global entity that imposes itself on everyone. What characterizes a system is that its functioning does not depend on its elements but on the organization of its circuits of energy, matter, and information. Many of the undesirable effects are undoubtedly attributable to the system itself, which can always be improved, made more complex or regulated, but certainly not by doing just anything. We cannot do whatever we want in economics, where adverse effects can very quickly cancel out the benefits of the measures taken. There is real room for maneuver, but it is nevertheless quite limited, requiring tact and responsiveness. We have seen that human organizations are not the expression of biological organisms; they retain an arbitrary, artificial, manufactured aspect that ensures they can be changed. This does not mean that we can do so as we please, but that we can adapt them to new situations. There is a whole set of operational constraints and social inertia that we come up against if we do not take them into account, as in 1968 when wage increases were canceled out by inflation before triggering the neoliberal reaction to get out of stagflation...
One of the surest ways to reduce inequality and injustice is through social struggle, at the intersection of ideology and economics. The class struggle is very real throughout history, but we cannot reduce the question of capitalism and surplus value to a power struggle; that would be to misunderstand Capital. On this point, the “critics of value” are absolutely right: what is decisive is the system of production itself. However, they overlook the fact that this system imposes itself materially through its productivity, reducing it to commodity fetishism and abstract labor, which predate capitalism. Class struggle remains decisive for the distribution of surplus value-value, but capitalism is not limited to exploitation, let alone predation, its principle being the production of surplus value through investment that increases the productivity of employees. It is not enough to be on the side of the proletariat, let alone to want to abolish the ruling class (the bourgeoisie) for classes to be abolished and justice to reign, as communist experiments have shown. It is not true that work is productive in itself; otherwise, we would not be able to explain the existence of unemployment. It is not even enough for workers to have access to the means of production; they must also be able to enhance their value, and in this process, inequalities of wealth and power are created. We will always have to fight to restore a more equitable distribution of wealth and to roll back injustices or defend our freedoms. We cannot lower our guard on the pretext that a new power claims to be on our side when it is already riddled with ambition and corruption. The class struggle against injustice is permanent, but it is not what can radically transform things, especially not through the total victory of one class over another, as the ruling class would immediately be replaced by a new bureaucratic, military, or religious class. What can change is the system of production, its material foundations, in accordance with new productive forces, but that is another matter entirely...
The material infrastructure
As we know, undesirable effects can be attributed to the evolution of technology, which illustrates that there is no positive without negative and that what is gained on one side is always lost a little on the other. We certainly have no control over the progress of technical knowledge, to the point that there is ambiguity as to whether it is humans who use technology or whether technology imposes itself on them and they use it to continue their evolution, but this is a very general situation. This is a perfect example of the identity between subject and object, which form each other reciprocally, exactly as in biology. Because technology changes the world, because it is a “world configurator,” the false dualism of Kant and The Matrix will try in vain to turn technology into an ideology, a delusion superimposed on reality, a mere distortion, hoping to find a thing in itself in its natural purity, as if we had no role in the matter and technology were nothing more than a foreign body, with the corollary assumption that we could control its evolution at will. The dialectic of internalized exteriority and externalized interiority, on the contrary, restores the interaction between subject and object, the historical process in its dynamics, its cycles, its increasing complexity. It could be said that humans produce themselves, artificialize themselves, domesticate themselves, but this would be to forget that they are just as much the product of their environment and their time, shaped by their tools, and that they do not evolve in a purely self-referential immaterial ether. In any case, this is another dimension of reality in its relentless nature, even though it appears to be entirely a product of humans, a fabricated reality. We can, of course, choose between different technologies, or even decide to opt out of them individually, but this has no overall impact, whereas it often comes at a significant cost. When it is not the military power they provide, it is the economy that has the final say on this point. In any case, we know that capitalism is completely linked to the acceleration of technical evolution, since it always aims to invest in more efficient means of production, which brings us back to the previous paragraph, to our material dependence that inevitably limits our freedoms, what we might call our facticity or our finitude, of being born here and now.
We cannot ignore this historical materialism, in which the economy and technological progress remain decisive, at least in the final analysis, i.e. in the long term, even if we take into account the growing importance of the “immaterial,” of software, which is also very material. Our current situation is, in fact, our entry into the information age, which introduces a break at least comparable to that of the Neolithic era, a new cognitive stage that gives us the possibility of moving from entropy to ecology. There is such a break, such a change in logic between the energy age and the information age that all previous data has become obsolete. The difference between hardware and software is similar to that between the body and the mind. It is therefore a true anthropological revolution, the full extent of which is difficult to measure, but which will have far greater consequences than writing or the automobile. Once again, it is a revolution that is being imposed rather than desired, but one that is consigning the old world to the dustbin of history. This is not a reason to believe that everything will work out on its own, nor to say anything and everything as if no laws apply anymore, when in fact other laws are being added. We need to take a closer look at the implications of digital technology and its reproductive capabilities, particularly its free nature, which is the strength of free software but requires a restructuring of old wage-based production relationships that are at odds with these new productive forces. Although we gain in freedom and autonomy (but with more control, precariousness, and stress, delivering us to what Alain Ehrenberg calls the fatigue of being oneself), we can say that we have no choice anyway and that if we do not voluntarily make the necessary reforms, crises will force us to do so urgently. The enemy here is cognitive sclerosis, the inability to integrate the new, understand our times, or project ourselves into the future. This is where we are, the world we live in, which exemplifies the structuring character of technology on social organization.
The ideological superstructure
We have seen that, even if it is language that drives us to fight against injustice in the world, it is the infrastructure that needs to be changed more than people, but this does not prevent us from being caught in a loop where infrastructure determines a large part of our ideologies. Marx was right at the beginning of his Theses on Feuerbach to want to reintroduce the subjective side of human activity into materialism, but in doing so he overestimated the importance of “revolutionary” activity, “practically-critical” activity, and our ability to transform the world, which are certainly not nil but entirely overdetermined. Wanting to be revolutionary is no guarantee of being right, let alone of having a practical impact. Above all, there is no chance that the transformation of the world will leave the revolutionary intact, as if there were only one truth to be applied. If truth is revolutionary, it is, on the contrary, to burst in and contradict official discourse and shake things up. This brings us back to our limited rationality, but this time, the opposition of truth to knowledge forces us to reintroduce the temporality of the subject and its representations with their dialectical reversals, which cannot be reduced to a bourgeois or proletarian essence in their immutability. I would like to highlight, in its periodic changes, the extent to which ideology is certainly not just an epiphenomenon without any substance of its own, because it has a history, but that it must above all speak of common experience and justify the existing order.
As the material basis is itself changing, with cyclical phenomena, there is also a cycle of ideologies corresponding to the cycles of Capital (innovation/risk, appropriation/rent, concentration/financialization, statization/war/protectionism). This is not of the same order as Polybius' cyclical theory or Prabhat Rainjan Sarkar's Social Cycle Theory, which may have some relevance on other levels (which sees conquering warriors succeeded by intellectual legislators who end up corrupt and in the power of the rich before sparking a workers' revolt), but closer to the seven years of lean cows after the years of fat cows or the Jewish jubilee with the cancellation of debts every 50 years. In economic cycles, what is most striking is to see how, in each phase of the cycle, the notion of justice, for example, shifts from the valorization of risk-taking adventurers to egalitarian and collective justice during years of growth and inflation. Justice then becomes more relative, identity-based, and legitimist at a time of protectionist withdrawal to protect acquired advantages. Then we move from this conservative and community-based justice to an individualistic justice based on the proportionality of gains to actual productivity, at the time of the speculative bubble that amplifies inequalities! During the depression, justice is nothing more than family solidarity, a scramble for survival in the face of growing misery. This is the Protestant moment when it is necessary to convince oneself that the losers are guilty of their fate and those who come out on top are God's chosen ones, that justice goes to the victors even though no one can be under any illusion about their merits of being well-born. We are witnessing, live so to speak, the determination of the ideological superstructure by the economic infrastructure, which must be considered in its dynamic rather than as a supposedly immutable essence, demonstrating all the more how it constrains discourse, causes it to change and contradict what it said the day before, each time with the crazy pretension that this time it will be forever! Critical and revolutionary theories are no exception.
Changing the world
What we can do depends more on the situation and the general atmosphere than on us. Without any need to resort to the “voluntary servitude” invoked by those who are convinced they know what is good for us, our autonomy of thought and action is therefore extremely limited, much more than we think—except, of course, for the freedom to tell ourselves stories. It is quite incomprehensible that people are invited to imagine utopias or even simply to “think for themselves,” a symptom of the extent of our powerlessness, as if we could expect a miracle when this is the best way not to think but rather to reinforce our prejudices, to scatter ourselves and to be sure of achieving nothing. As Heraclitus said, “Those who believe they have a special thought are asleep while awake.” We need a critical spirit that does not give in to collective hypnosis, but taken literally, the claim to think for oneself is nothing more than a desire to ignore our cultural determinisms. Instead, we should refute all these utopias in an attempt to agree on a possible alternative. We are not inventing anything. To think, we must inform ourselves and subject ideas to the fire of criticism rather than militant declarations. All the social projects hatched by enlightened minds are worthless because of their excessive logic. It is bad science fiction, like the utopian socialisms that flourished in the wake of the unfinished French Revolution. Societies are not arbitrary constructs and cannot be molded into one-dimensional ideologies such as those we have seen with post-revolutionary ideologies (whether fascist, Leninist, or neoliberal). We are now in the next stage, post-totalitarian, more cautious and realistic, that of the precautionary principle and a knowledge of knowledge that recognizes ignorance at the heart of all knowledge and the negative of the positive. We should start from the fact that we do not know what to do and that our task is to build a collective intelligence that is still largely in the future, because the obstacles are much more insurmountable than in the sciences. However, the reality is that urgency pushes us to do anything (or rather, all the false solutions that present themselves), which is how things work, contrary to our claims to control our destiny or make optimal decisions.
Just because the internal depends on the external (technology, language, culture, fashions, institutions, the economy, the weather, the atmosphere) does not mean that we are not involved in political struggles, particularly in the fundamental conflict between the right and the left, and between the haves and the have-nots. In another era, we might have been communists or fascists. Not only are we caught up in the social contradictions of the time, but we are also experiencing temporality in our own changes of opinion over time. As with societies, there is not only external opposition, there is also our own internal division in a completely different sense than between good and evil. After periods of unification, we witness periods of dislocation, and if we cannot be reduced to homo economicus, any more than to homo sovieticus, we are rather torn between the individual and the collective, as between private and public life (Hirschman). It is precisely because there is no stabilization in an optimal equilibrium that there are cycles around the equilibrium point in every living organism, and it is also for this reason that society must be periodically rebuilt, giving greater force to the general interest, which wars[1] traditionally achieved and which now requires periodic social revolutions to overthrow the oligarchy (this is highly topical), revolutions that do not depend so much on individuals, who only participate in them with varying degrees of enthusiasm.
Revolution can bring down a dictatorship and rebuild social solidarity, but it is not enough to change the world, let alone bring us to a glorious end of history. The only thing we can do is reduce inequalities, abolish privileges, win new freedoms and new social rights, but above all adapt the relations of production to the new productive forces with a better distribution of income, integrating ecological constraints and relocalising the economy, with all kinds of regulations and fiscal measures. Within this framework, we can discuss a gradual exit from capitalism and wage labor, not the nationalization of the economy, the abolition of money or work, etc.! We must certainly make the most of the potential of the moment and not allow ourselves to be pushed around or settle for minimalist reformism, but extremism leads nowhere. The need for relocation is beneficial in that it forces us to think on a local and daily level, which brings us back to the realities on the ground and our real capacity for action. What is certain is that in order to understand the world, in its resistance to our desires, we must try to transform it. Changing the world is not that difficult, since it is constantly changing, sometimes in unexpected ways, but not necessarily in the direction we would like, and without us having much say in the matter most of the time (except locally). Although I have never used any of his products, it is fair to say that Steve Jobs changed the world, just like so many others, but this is not so extraordinary when you consider that those who want to change the world generally want to put an end to these constant changes and stop time, which is completely futile...
Changing people
It is no more difficult to change people than it is to change ourselves, as we are constantly changing, moving from laughter to tears and from love to hate. What is impossible, however, and for good reason, is to make people what we want them to be, to educate or govern them (or analyze them, as Freud added). The most common and damaging utopia, which distracts us from the real battles that need to be fought, is the desire to transform men, which reflects a completely erroneous conception of society and human nature. We must hammer home the message, against religious aspirations and revolutionary romanticism, that political action cannot claim to create a new man; its scope does not extend beyond the threshold of private life. It is not a question of “becoming a revolutionary” to see oneself as a hero, but of making revolution for a little more justice. Creating people in our own image is an understandable temptation, but it cannot be effective, only serving to ruin our lives or even lead to massacres. The educational delusion is twofold: to consider ourselves as ideal models and to attribute to education the exorbitant power to shape humanity to our liking, as if education were nothing more than an ideological apparatus of the state, as arbitrary as political propaganda, whose purpose is to produce docile subjects. We are back in The Matrix with a cruel lack of dialectic, but it must be noted that it was communist regimes that created re-education camps. There is no doubt that education changes people, but above all it teaches them to read, write, and count! We can try to develop critical thinking, although this is much more risky, but the result will never live up to our expectations. Wanting to change people is all the more futile because it is the evolution of the world that changes us. We are not in a divine position, capable of deciding the fate of the world, and others are not passive or as wise as images, but the real reason why we can never change people is that we have too simplistic, false, and, frankly, unworkable a conception of them, however wonderful this enchanted kingdom may seem to us. Educators should also be educated! We need to rely on solid anthropology here, and instead accept our contradictory nature (opposing systems) and the limits of human plasticity and cognitive processes. Thus, education can do little if we think in terms of inherited patterns and traditions, which is in line with the way society works and justifies social divisions and their naturalization. But it is not enough to denounce this in order to avoid falling into another, more sectarian form of group thinking. It is certainly not enough to believe that we are on the “right side.” we must not talk nonsense and we must support credible proposals.
A certain materialism can lead to the most complete idealism by pushing constructivism to the point of absurdity. It is not because humans are the product of their material living conditions that we can change them completely by simply changing their living conditions, a bit like laboratory animals. Taken to these extremes, the materialist creed paradoxically amounts to denying determinism (which we could modify at will) while affirming the absolute determinism of the individual from which we exclude ourselves. The result is that these exalted revolutionaries join the most repressive right wing in rejecting the social sciences, which we could simply ignore. The only difference is that neoliberals declare them null and void right now, convinced that they deserve their success just as the poor are responsible for their own neglect, while utopians claim to liberate us from the laws of gravity only after they have taken power over the world and reconfigured social organization! In both cases, determinism is denied in the name of the absolute value of the individual and their freedom, even though in one case they are made to feel guilty and in the other they are molded.
History, sociology, and political studies should teach us not to repeat the same mistakes and misplaced enthusiasm, to take difficulties into account and encourage the expression of negativity instead of hypnotizing ourselves with our good intentions and raving about our collective strength to move mountains. It is just as crazy to believe that we can get rid of all economic “science” despite its excesses and failures. To be a true revolutionary, the minimum requirement would be to come back down to earth and submit to criticism. For many, any form of realism is unacceptable because the world is unacceptable, but do we really believe that we can go against anthropology? There is hardly a counterexample, except for gender equality and the end of patriarchy, but there are material reasons for this (education, wage labor/services, the pill, washing machines). The victory of feminism is a textbook case of the transmission of transformations in production to the ideological level, and not just the result of the feminist struggles that followed. This illusion that it was the combativeness of a few women that determined feminist gains justifies the illusion that we can win other battles simply through the force of our will. Well, no! Reality resists, and it is not enough to firmly desire the abolition of prostitution to achieve it, just as the prohibition of alcohol or drugs is not only ineffective but counterproductive, leading only to worse, illustrating once again a supposed Good that is the cause of a much greater Evil, instead of a policy of risk reduction, as in the case of abortion, which no one can consider desirable but whose harm had to be limited. All moralistic attempts to create a new, purified human being are fascist in their blindness, because they are based on an ethic of conviction that allows people to feel very good about themselves, rather than a more demanding ethic of responsibility that is attentive to the consequences for individuals of these overly good intentions, which justify the most ferocious repression, the extension of social control, and the erosion of our freedoms. Excessive idealism leads to excessive indignity. We can always inhibit and constrain, but there are limits to what we can demand of all people throughout the world...
Among the illusions that Marxism believed it had triumphed over is religion, which nevertheless returned as soon as communism ceased to embody the hopes of the people. Marxism itself having degenerated into a religion of salvation, it can be said that we have never left religion behind. There are, however, objective reasons for moving beyond millennia-old religions that have lost their material basis, but the empty space left by common discourse, by the justification of the existing order and of our daily sufferings, does not remain empty for long. We are still savages, incapable of living without myths and legends that grip and bewitch us, but which are not as arbitrary as one might think. On the contrary, they are highly structured, playing on cultural and social oppositions without our knowledge. It is a massive manifestation that we are merely repeating the dogmas of our tribe and that the mystical experience itself is overplayed, giving substance to God and the devil, who are nevertheless learned and purely verbal constructs. This is proof, finally, that we cannot do without it. This is certainly not a reason to embark on a new religion that is supposed to be more reasonable, like Robespierre, whose Supreme Being hastened his downfall. We just need to leave room for human folly and try to respect strict secularism. Really, it is better to abandon any pretensions of changing people or delivering them from their illusions and instead recognize our divisions as the extent of our stupidity amplified by the media, rather than mimicking a false wisdom with the myth of the rational citizen and democratic crowds. It is a little more complicated and risky, as we know very well from experience.
There is no alternative
Understanding society and all our determinations should put us back in the position of actors, among others, in a historical conjuncture and its power relations, rather than in that of masters of the world. It is not a question of letting ourselves be pushed around and not reacting, but of not fighting against windmills. We can say that we have no choice, any more than when war is declared. It is simply a matter of doing what we have to do and choosing our side. From that point on, we can say that it is true that there is no alternative. The crisis makes this clear, forcing European leaders to take decisions under pressure that they did not want to take the day before. It can also be said in the sense that there is no credible alternative: the strength of the right lies mainly in the weakness of the left and its “project.” Of course, many will say that they have alternatives, but there are many, ranging from the most timid to the most radical (impossible to arbitrate between them), and none of them are truly viable. What does an alternative mean if it needs other forces, other strategies, other people to impose itself? On the other hand, where there is no alternative either is in the face of ecological constraints that are becoming necessary despite all the reluctance and backtracking. It is for this reason, and because the globalization of networks makes the relocation of production essential, that we can believe that local alternatives to commercial globalization will prevail, but not by the force of our will alone. Similarly, it is because the digital revolution has fundamentally changed the world that we will have to adapt production relations to the new productive forces.
We have tried to focus on what is possible and necessary rather than on what is ideal or even desirable, in order to reduce diagnostic errors and be able to concentrate on what is feasible (the fight against inequality and precariousness, with a guaranteed income in particular). In any case, it is through these attempts to transform it that we can develop a theory of society, albeit very different from what is usually done, by confronting social structures, economic cycles, and the effects of language. We have tried to show all the constraints that are imposed on collective action in society, whether cognitive or discursive, economic or systemic. Our sovereignty is much more limited than we are led to believe. Democracy does not give us absolute power to turn lead into gold, only to arbitrate in its distribution or even to serve as a ritual of submission. There is a lot of exaggeration about what politics and the law can do, with voluntarism pretending that it is a question of will rather than justice, when the question of truth should take precedence over that of commitment and the friend-enemy logic.
Let there be no misunderstanding. This does not mean that nothing can be done. Social struggles remain absolutely essential, as does helping to bring about local alternatives and a new system of production. It is impossible to rest on one's laurels; freedom wears out if it is not used. Politics can play a decisive role, provided that it does not misunderstand the issues at stake. The truth here is a highly practical question, both for society and for individuals. In fact, if our political freedom is so limited, this highlights by contrast the extent to which what remains of our effective freedoms are mainly socially constructed freedoms, social rights that establish concrete freedoms. It is a fable we like to tell ourselves that our natural freedom is curbed by a repressive society, when in fact there is no freedom without the social production of autonomy (what Robert Castel calls the social supports of the individual). We must continue these social conquests and cannot turn away from politics if we want to gain new freedoms, since true equality is that of our concrete freedoms, of being free to live our lives and choose our activities. We just need to be aware that we are dealing mainly with cognitive or ideological processes that are determined by the situation rather than determining it. But what should encourage us, a development that is moving in our direction, is the valorization of autonomy through immaterial production and the specialization of knowledge, which could overcome a society of control threatened with stagnation, but not without our determined intervention.
Notes
[1] "In order to prevent particular systems from taking root and hardening in this isolation, and thus to prevent the Whole from disintegrating and the spirit from evaporating, the government must from time to time shake them in their intimacy through war; through war it must disturb their order, which has become habitual, violate their right to independence, just as individuals who sink into this order detach themselves from the Whole and aspire to inviolable being-for-itself and personal security, the government must, in this imposed work, make them feel their master, death. Thanks to this dissolution of the form of subsistence, the spirit represses the engulfment in natural being far from ethical being, preserves the Self of consciousness, and elevates it to freedom and strength." Hegel, Phenomenology II, p. 23
