On May 29, 1953, exactly 70 years ago, against all reasonable advice, Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay reached the summit of the world: Everest. At 8848 meters above sea level, they touch their sky.
Doctors had warned them. It was sheer madness, they thought. The air at this height is too rare. And what about the cold, the winds. Not to mention the risks inherent in such a climb. Madness, yes. The case threatened, in other words, to be fatal.
Our relationship to the world has changed. For centuries, the high mountains meant almost nothing. It was hardly a question. In the 19the century, no one considered that reaching a summit could correspond to a form of success. Why risk it? What interests for example a Jules Verne, this writer who is considered a little too quickly as the champion of progress through science and technology, is rather the seabed. By diving with him aboard the Nautilus, twenty thousand leagues under the sea, the reader gives his hand to the next century. It touches on the explorations of Commander Cousteau. The depths of the sea have long been the stuff of dreams, as evidenced by the history of diving equipment.
The Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean is almost 11,000 meters below the water surface. What type of life can one encounter in such abysses? What a challenge to achieve this! The frogmen promise to set up real cities underwater. But these dreams are supplanted by those of toads who are more busy extracting oil from the sea and fantasizing about the conquest of Mars, in anticipation of the catastrophes on earth that they are nevertheless working to materialize.
Everest has become a sort of Walt Disney for wealthy hikers. Packages are sold, at high prices, for those who wish to celebrate their own greatness by reaching this summit. Everest base camps have become circuses. Almost everywhere, heaps of rubbish accumulate, despite the chores to pick them up. A number of oxygen cylinders, intended to compensate for respiratory insufficiency at altitude, lie in the snow.
Each year, about a thousand people try, in single file, to reach the top. Once at the top, everyone waits their turn, sometimes for hours, to take their picture as they would in front of the Eiffel Tower. Only his image, his reflection, the idea of being associated, at least for a brief moment, in a thin veil of air, with the exhilarating feeling of being the strongest, of mastering the elements as much as his life, by making oneself believe that, thus placed on the roof of the world, humanity is at its feet. Everest thus constitutes the perfect image of our time at the level of the daisies.
It is not for nothing that the appetite for such heights was transformed into a rich social symbol only from the 1980s, in the era of unbridled economic liberalism. As the ideas of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek triumph through the policies of all the Ronald Reagans, Margaret Thatchers and Brian Mulroneys, the image of the inaccessible summit, as an allegory of personal power, rises like never before.
The current premier of Quebec is a pure product of those years of deregulation where the state is put at the service of the personal enrichment of the wealthiest who willingly imagine themselves dominating the world. Today, the symbiosis between the economic class and that of political leaders is reaching new heights. François Legault has never ceased to repeat, through a Himalaya of bills, that he only has it for his world, that of business, and for his way of life, that where personal enrichment takes place. of supreme value. He repeated it during an abortive debate on the supposed need to see MPs benefit from a 30% salary increase. “What I said is that a father, a young father or a mother, has the right to earn as much as possible to give as much as possible to his children. That’s how I see life, me, ”summarized François Legault.
In the post-war period, analyzes showed that MPs tended to be more corrupt if they were not paid enough. It is for this reason, in large part, that their salaries had been increased. However, this is not what François Legault invokes to justify these considerable increases. While he is reluctant to pay more school or hospital staff, who are also made up of “fathers and mothers of families”, Mr. Legault only speaks, again and again, of the personal wealth of people like him. Also he never fails to recall that he made so much more money doing business in the private sector… The point of reference in his life constantly comes back to this level alone. From then on, the state is only seen as a kind of base camp, a stepping stone to rise.
To reach all the heights promised by these fine speeches on personal enrichment, the subject matter experts of the École des Hautes Etudes Commerciales (now called HEC Montréal) are now offering more and more courses in English only. Édouard Montpetit, one of the pillars of the beginnings of the HEC, would have been suffocated, he who saw in the development of education in French for his people the first axis of a necessary emancipation from the powers of money. The new road to the summits, strewn with waste, now goes elsewhere, assure us of these experts of a world of which the Prime Minister is an ardent defender. François Legault proposes to us, whatever he says, to continue with more fervor on this path traced by these people as a model of success, while having his head blinded in the clouds of an icy nationalism which always stands far from the depths of humanity.