We believed it for a while. I believed it. That this global pandemic would be an opportunity to see things differently. To review our priorities, our daily habits, consumption, life.
For a few weeks, the smog-polluted skies of Indian, Chinese and American megalopolises cleared up. The streets of Manhattan have been deserted. Many trucks remained parked, planes remained on the ground.
Nature seemed to take back its rights, not to say its revenge, over humanity and its imprint. And many of us thought it was a fair turn of events. That from this global ordeal would perhaps spring a new hope, a new solidarity, a renewed empathy for his neighbor.
I didn’t stick a rainbow on my window. Neither do my boys. I can be a blue flower, but I am also cynical. To each their own paradoxes.
But the truth is, I believed it for a while. That a flower would be born from the manure. That we could see the sun better after the storm.
During my internship in journalism at Diplomatic world, about a quarter of a century ago, the editorial director at the time, Ignacio Ramonet, signed a famous editorial entitled “Another world is possible”, which oversaw a dossier on the same theme. It was an indictment against neoliberalism, a cry from the heart in favor of utopias, of that idealism which has sometimes, in history, allowed citizens to take their destiny back in hand.
“Are there other avenues to explore so that humanity can find a sense of the common good? Ramonet asked. “Against all the rhetoric that advocates the need to adapt, many citizens remain in search of ‘acting together’ and wish, to begin with, to introduce a pinch of humanity into the cogs of the neoliberal machine”, concluded -he.
It was the end of the 1990s, anti-globalization was on everyone’s lips in leftist circles, less torn than today, it seems to me, between the universalism inherited from the Enlightenment and postcolonialism in the Deleuze and Derrida style. I translated Edward Saïd and Noam Chomsky during the day, and I went to see World Cup matches in the evening and on weekends for the French black-white-beur team, the future champion. Another world seemed possible to me.
I’m not sure I believe it anymore, after almost two years of a pandemic. You don’t change human nature like you don’t change your own nature, unfortunately. This is what I said to myself when reading the report by my colleague Catherine Handfield (“Farewell solidarity, hello individualism”) on the collective findings of this pandemic in Quebec.
Has mutual aid taken the edge? Has individualism been dormant all this time? Catherine posed the question to experts. Of course, at the start of the pandemic, there was a sudden surge of solidarity. Those who were already generous have become more so. But with the situation stretching to the point of imposing itself as a “new reality”, everyone seems to have returned to their pre-pandemic habits. That is to say, those who were selfish are not so much less so today.
Seizures are indicative of ingrained personality traits, much more than agents of behavior change. This certainly was. Those with conspiratorial tendencies invested body and soul in conspiracy theories, closing in on their concentric circles of questionable or downright false information, refusing science and its conclusions when they are not perfectly aligned. with their beliefs.
I am interested out of curiosity, on social networks, in these few rare Quebec artists, influential in conspiracy circles, who have sunk into paranoia and have plunged into the “rabbit holes” of the anti-vaccination movements.
You know them. They only seem to be interested in that, relaying seven days a week the propaganda of far-right groups here and elsewhere, of fallen and discredited scientists, or of people who claim to know more about it. immunology and epidemiology as postdoctoral fellows who have developed expertise in these subjects for years.
These conspirators embody more than anyone this exacerbated individualism, this refusal to compromise for the benefit of the common well-being, which will always be stronger, in our societies, than the lasting movements of solidarity. “Comfort and Indifference” is not only the title of a documentary by Denys Arcand, in which Machiavelli is played by Jean-Pierre Ronfard…
I am no better than my neighbor. I started dreaming of air travel again, despite the carbon footprint and global warming. I too have gradually abandoned solidarity and once again said hello to individualism. I console myself by telling myself, as the specialists consulted by Catherine Handfield conclude, that this is normal. It’s human nature.