In his autobiography, published before he was sent to prison for embezzlement, newspaper magnate Conrad Black explained, among other things, his ultra-conservatism, while expressing his affection for the Church, his pro-American feelings and his all-out love of capitalism.
Between two private jets and parties of celebrities, Lord Black never hesitated to affirm that society is only the expression of a dynamic process where everyone naturally finds their place. In his view, there is no such thing as a competitive situation where rich and poor face each other. No. According to him, the world is just a simple neutral space. Money is flowing there. And it is by magic that this money is going to agglutinate on those who already have the most. The inequalities of this system appear all the more natural since no one questions the origins of this power of some over others. Especially not him.
The founder of National Post has expressed more than once his deep nostalgia for a Quebec that he sees as “traditional”. This Quebec was that of Maurice Duplessis, to whom he devoted a minimally critical biography. Black’s correspondence reveals his desire to revive Duplessis society. “The project to reassemble the National Union interests me greatly”, he wrote in a letter, while saying that he had supported this political movement with the help of a newspaper and, in a private capacity, of “a subscription”. .
How far could such a man go? In his memoirs, Black said he invented the results of a poll from scratch to help crush the Parti Québécois, in the most flagrant disregard of democracy. He explains, in his own words, having “stunned the Parti Québécois by publishing a poll announcing a Liberal victory”. A very interesting clarification from Black: “We refrained from saying what sampling the survey was based on: I only consulted seven people (including myself). »
Freedom, is it to see the proliferation of fabrications, logical leaps, the most incongruous paranoid hypotheses to plunge deeper, all together, into a great general carelessness of thought and culture?
Disregard for facts and democracy, in the terms of binary thinking, is not new. This contempt for the world, in such people, constitutes the base on which they rise without complex, as great permanent fans of themselves. See Donald Trump. The astonishing capacity of these financial magnates to reinvent measures of enslavement in the name of the freedom of capital is something as fascinating as it is disturbing.
What would Conrad Black have accomplished today if he had relied on a communication network like Twitter, that is, a channel capable of doing without politics by swallowing it, passing over ? I was wondering this this week, while listening to those who, good pears, congratulate themselves that Twitter has finally fallen into the hands of Elon Musk, while confusing freedom with verbal excesses and ” fake news which are held there.
Freedom, is it to see the proliferation of fabrications, logical leaps, the most incongruous paranoid hypotheses to plunge deeper, all together, into a great general carelessness of thought and culture? Is reason about to be supplanted by emotion and the rule of opinion, in the name of this facade of freedom?
Why do so many imagine that a billionaire like Musk defends freedom of expression? To hear these admirers of the billionaire, even the noisy and rough lies professed under cover of anonymity are to be placed on the side of a defense of freedom. By abusing their sensitivity favorable to unbridled speech, they confuse freedom of expression with the simple possibility of saying anything at any time, in a framework that conditions the impossibility of any discussion worthy of the name. . These people seem to ignore that the first victim of such a carelessness of thought is always freedom. How to believe that a fake world, seemingly devoid of limits, does not lead to a kind of dangerous wild west where your life finds itself hanging above the void, held by the threads of algorithms that the financiers use to their advantage ?
There are also those who, never fearing ridicule, rejoice that Twitter has been taken over by an American ultra-capitalist rather than, say, by some Chinese company. They imagine themselves escaping the excesses of the Chinese regime in this way. This obviously means not understanding that both of these systems have been working hand in hand for a long time already. Elon Musk, who owns electric car manufacturing plants in the Middle Kingdom, had hinted that tensions between China and Taiwan could be resolved by ceding some control of Taiwan to Beijing. Like what the freedom of some simply stops where its interests begin.
Caught in such nets, everyone’s freedom comes down to being able to dream of being Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, or other barons of pseudo-dematerialization. Everything will be fine, we are led to believe, provided that the whole world apes them, those who control industry, technology, the economy. Yes, everything will be fine. The billionaires are our friends, yes… We just have to allow them to do everything, to say everything, to buy everything, with as little regulation as possible. Then all that remains is to believe in a fatality that fell from the sky, wanted by a higher order. Their.