If there is a time when the ordinary person, the ordinary citizen or the man in the street, if you will, can be heard by elected officials, it is during the election campaign. But this citizen still has to speak the language of power, accept its codes and play the game.
This language is obviously not the one practiced by Pierre Lefebvre, who these days signs the essay The virus and the prey, at Ecosociety. If his book, which is written in letter form, is addressed to a man of power, his hopes of being heard by him are slim. The author is not fooled, he who writes from the outset: “Sir, you will not read this letter. »
Here, rather than words, there are clashing visions, convictions, ideologies. Because beyond the programs and the promises, it is the entire system that Pierre Lefebvre denounces, or rather what underlies and justifies it: mainly profit and the lure of profit. In an interview, Pierre Lefebvre says that this letter was first started as part of a show put on by Olivier Choinière, when the liberal Philippe Couillard was in power.
Over the years, the opportunities to write to this man of power have multiplied. The letter has lengthened, until it has become a book.
“At the start, one of the themes I addressed in the letter was the impossibility for an ordinary citizen to have a full discussion with a person of power,” he said.
An unequal relationship
“For me, this is a very important question. We always say that we are in a democracy, but it is the people in power, in government, and those who run big companies, like Facebook for example, who shape the world. »
He speaks knowingly, he who has refused until now to bring a mobile phone. “If you don’t have a cell phone today, you find yourself marginalized,” he notes. Me, I don’t have one, but it’s because I have a pig’s head. But it’s starting to get a bit problematic. For a long time, I didn’t have a credit card, but now I got one, because it gets boring if you want to book train tickets,” he says.
This context, people in power have, or would have, the ability to modulate it, he says. They do “not always to our advantage”. But the citizens, who have to adapt to it, do not have the opportunity to discuss it.
“This obligation, to operate all the time, at full speed and more, terrifies me. Performance, efficiency, speed, these are qualities that are expected of machines. Ordering human beings to ape them is perhaps the most appalling thing that can be demanded of them,” he writes.
Pierre Lefebvre does not call himself an anarchist. “I am a literary man,” he says, adding that literature is for him the opposition par excellence. “I’m not an anarchist, I’m Balzac”, he says simply.
The current context, he believes, exerts violence. He takes as an example the case of a man, who has to place his sick mother in a CHSLD, because it is impossible for him to offer her decent care at home.
“What interested me in the question of the CHSLD is that we often have the impression that politics is a bit abstract, whereas on the contrary, it is very concrete. When you see, for example, that the difference in life expectancy between Westmount and Saint-Michel is ten years, it’s very concrete,” he says.
Yet he is wary of politics. “When you see what scientists have been telling us about the environment since the 1970s, and nothing has been done, you understand that it’s not that simple,” he says.
Resist by writing
His resistance is in the writing, through which he slips into the skin of a powerless person, and which addresses a powerful person.
“We also sacrifice anyhow, sometimes vulgarly, sometimes muddled, through relocations, restructuring, legislation offshorepublic-private partnerships, twisted financial arrangements, zero deficits, with the result that the violence necessary for any immolation comes out each time like a river from its bed to spread everywhere, which may be a sacrifice, for the very first time in the history of mankind, a heinous, cruel gesture,” he wrote.
This opposition is also in his relationship to money, he who signed another essay in 2018, Confessions of a Broke. “Might as well admit it outright, he wrote then, I never understood anything about the value of money. I even want to say that it is a precocious vocation. I wouldn’t dare say that I can’t help it, but a dollar always remains an ambiguous object for me. »
Suffice to say right away that he finds himself marginalized. But what he most deplores is not finding a place where people in power mingle with those who have none.
While he acknowledges that these discussions could take place during an election campaign, the reality is less rosy. “Don’t ask yourself why voter turnout is dropping every time. No one believes in your empty carcasses anymore,” he wrote.
In an interview, he gives details: “I think there is a disaffection with institutions. There are not many people who believe in justice, who believe in education. Most institutions are shaky. In fact, the trust that most citizens have in institutions is shaky. »
However, Pierre Lefebvre continued to exercise his right to vote, despite his disillusionment. “I don’t feel like one vote every four years” is going to change things, he said though.
By the simple value that Pierre Lefebvre places on words, more than on money, his essay, even uneven, forces a different, disinterested look at the power and forces at play. “Hope is on the side of speech, he said. There is a kind of euphoria in saying that we are not fooled, in naming what suffocates and overwhelms us. »