It’s a strange film, which captures and portrays the anxieties of our time: I’m talking about the film recently released on Netflix The world after uswhich stars Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke.
Let me summarize it for you: a New York family who dreams of getting away from the world for a few days rents a house in the countryside. Once she’s there, however, she gets more than she’d like, as the world literally falls apart before her eyes.
The Internet, in particular, no longer works. The same is true of the entire communication system that structures our universe, from commerce to transport.
Internet
The United States is the target of a cyber attack. We never, or almost never, see the enemy, and yet we feel him everywhere, without really knowing who he is. Is it an enemy within? Is it an external enemy?
One thing is certain, a society that collapses very quickly sees its evidence decompose. Social trust turns into general distrust. I won’t tell you more about the film, but I would like to think a little about the world that comes to its light.
We all feel, today, that the world that is ours is hanging together.
The pandemic has shown that it is possible to suspend it and push entire societies into total neurosis, with the consent of ordinary mortals, who no longer really know, however, in the end, what is true. and what is wrong.
We clearly feel, with the rise in insecurity on both sides of the Atlantic, that the primary mission of the State, which is to protect us from violent death and to allow the free interaction of individuals with each other, does not is no longer truly up to its means.
We clearly feel that our populations are victims of historically unprecedented conditioning, which is both ideological propaganda and commercial advertising, which intends to transform us into excitable consumers at the slightest signal.
We feel that it is enough for our cell phones to be inaccessible for a few minutes for us to suddenly be on the threshold of a panic attack.
And yet, we act as if nothing had happened, except for a few survivalists, who overreact, and who decide to withdraw from society, to watch for the day of the great collapse.
I come back to the film The world after us: it also indirectly reminds us of the virtue of the materiality of things. We cannot live in an entirely virtual environment without virtualizing ourselves, without becoming in fact pure ectoplasm.
Decomposition
One thing is certain, this excellent film reveals to us, in its own way, that we live on the edge of the abyss.
If I were pessimistic, I would say that we are already engaged in a form of slow process of civilizational destruction and that our societies are therefore less to be saved from the worst than to rebuild, than to reconquer.
But that would lead us to another subject. We’ll talk about it again this year.