It is the journalist Jean-Claude Guillebaud who tells the anecdote in his essay The betrayal of the Enlightenment (Threshold, 1995). The day after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the poet Claude Roy (1915-1997), who had been close to far-right movements in his youth before joining the Communists in the ranks of the Resistance, will pose this burning question by a friend of his: “But who will scare the rich now? »
Christianity, with its image of the poor rich, gave a bad conscience to the wealthy. “You cannot serve both God and money”, Jesus clearly says in the Gospel of Luke, thus establishing a long Christian tradition of criticism of abusive fortunes.
In his sermons, the Jesuit Louis Bourdaloue (1632-1704) goes all out in this direction. Woe to you, the rich, he wrote, “because always wanting to expand and not harm anyone, these are commonly in practice two contradictory wills.”
In the same spirit, the fiery Léon Bloy (1846-1917) became radical. “All the sophistry of the demons, he proclaimed in The blood of the poor in 1909, will change nothing in this mystery that the joy of the rich has for substance the pain of the poor. When one does not understand this, one is a fool for time and for eternity. »
Marxism, for its part, will want to go beyond the moral denunciation of the scandal of wealth by conceiving a political and economic means of putting an end to it. The systems inspired by them have certainly resulted in human catastrophes, but it is not unreasonable to postulate that their existence has, on the positive side, incited capitalists all over the world to show restraint for fear of passing in the twister.
However, Christianity and Communism today, through their own fault in many respects, have fallen into discredit and no longer make many people tremble, especially not the rich, who have a field day in absence of any serious moral or political opponent.
In The Provocative Society (Lux, 2023, 240 pages), a vigorous pamphlet against the arrogance of the ultra-rich, the sociologist Dahlia Namian, clearly camped on the left, is part of the beautiful and great tradition of denigrators of economic injustice. It reiterates the scandal of a world in which some wallow in ostentatious abundance while others starve, while admiring those who reduce them to poverty.
“We live, writes Namian, in a very curious society where the masters allow themselves all provocations, confident that these will never push their servants to revolt. One can thus accumulate fortunes and palaces, then be applauded for their philanthropic spirit. »
The ultra-rich, illustrates the sociologist, destroy the world and the social fabric, leaving the scorched earth behind them. Here, while “the top 1% of the wealthiest Canadian families own almost a quarter of all the wealth in the country”, public services, especially hospitals, are left to deteriorate and 7 million people go hungry.
Canadian food giants, which are raking in record profits, protect their reputation by donating a little to food banks, but behind the scenes are opposed to raising the minimum wage. “The greater the inequalities in a society, notes Namian, the more the number of charitable foundations multiplies. »
Environmentally, the picture is overwhelming for the cresus of this world. In The Press of February 27, 2023, Francis Vailles reports that in 2019, “American households belonging to the richest 0.1% emitted 955 tons of GHGs per year, or 23 times more than the average household and 57 times more than those belonging to the 10% least affluent”, which everyone looks down on. From 1996 to 2019, continues Vailles, GHG emissions fell by 16% for the average American household, but those of the richest 1% increased by 23%.
And as it begins to heat up everywhere, continues Namian, these unconscious rich men, when they do not dream of taking refuge in space like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, buy preserved private islands, where they go with their hyperpolluting yacht , to grow organic vegetables there by exploiting non-union employees, like at Amazon.
Borrowed from the writer Romain Gary, the concept of “provocative society” refers to a social order that glorifies the obscene and toxic way of life of the rich in defiance of the misery and resentment it engenders in others. It is, for example, Dubai, in a world where 800 million people do not have enough to eat. We are there, and it is intolerable. Who will scare them?
Columnist (Presence Info, Game), essayist and poet, Louis Cornellier teaches literature in college.