The Ottawa headquarters is spreading around the world.
It capitalizes on a fed up with important layers of the population, who are angry with all the institutions, with all the figures of authority.
The pandemic is just a pretext.
Whether local government is left-wing, right-wing, health-restrictive or not, makes no difference.
Elected officials no longer lead, they want to avoid being overwhelmed.
Equality
The causes are many.
Globalized capitalism has winners and losers. Losers are bitter.
The great ideological projects of the XXe century – liberalism, socialism, national independence – are out of steam.
The school and the family fail to transmit a sufficiently strong common civic culture.
States can no longer meet endless demands.
Social networks circulate lies that cloud minds.
They give the average person the illusion that he knows as much as the expert.
They build parallel worlds that no longer understand each other.
The cult of freedom without responsibility makes people totally allergic to the slightest constraint.
Great minds saw this coming long ago.
For nearly 300 years, the thirst for equality has been the dominant passion of modern democratic societies.
It is healthy, of course, that power is no longer monopolized by a handful.
But this thirst for equality also carries a dark side.
Richard Martineau reminded me of those sentences by Tocqueville written in… 1835!
“There is a legitimate passion for equality which excites men to want to be all strong and esteemed. This passion tends to elevate the little ones to the rank of the big ones. But there is also found in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which leads the weak to want to attract the strong to their level. […]. »
In short, behind the noble claims, there is also, among many, a resentment, a bitterness, a frustration, a jealousy, a resentment towards those above them.
For them, equality is about dragging others down more than lifting themselves up.
It is unbearable for them to admit that others are superior.
Anything superior becomes “elitism”, “pretentiousness”, unjustified domination.
True greatness is unbearable to them, because it reminds them of their smallness. It must therefore be unbolted.
The result is all around us: the triumph of vulgarity and lack of culture.
Chaos
For a democratic society not to fall apart, it needs a cement.
Which ?
Essentially, common values and institutions perceived as legitimate.
If there are no more common values, if there is no more acceptance of the integrating role of institutions, there remains only disorder, chaos and anarchy.
Émile Durkheim, in 1893, baptized this “anomie”.
When the institutions, the laws, the values no longer succeed in creating solidarity, he said, the every man for himself who settles in no longer knows any limits.
He becomes insatiable and pathological. Here we are.
Our societies are becoming ungovernable.
