Let’s call it opinion fatigue. Mixed toilets? Neither for nor against, quite the contrary, Coluche would have said. The Camillien-Houde route in green? Tear your shirt, sell your grandmother in pieces on Marketplace, cry on the hood of your truck (like the ex-dragon François Lambert on permafrost does not melt. He, she, he? hell ! I don’t care as much as Maria Pacôme in the film Crisis and her domestic tirade which has become a classic of being fed up with maternal after-sales service.
“I don’t care, it doesn’t make a difference to me,” my grandmother Alvine said to her cigarette burning alone in the ashtray. After becoming Alzheimer’s, she didn’t care even more, she forgot to smoke.
Nothing left to polish, like from the year 40, six feet above, the back of a goose which aims headlong towards the South. Courage, let’s run away! Simonac is not depression, it is chronic weariness coupled with a dislocation of empathy, an overdose of opinioids.
And since Meta muzzled the media this summer (a technological dictatorship, that’s what it is) on its very “platforms”, I can no longer get passionate about everyone’s opinions, even the most purposes. I’m bored lambda. I miss a mild diafiltered milk cheddar on a salt-free cracker.
Like many of my colleagues, I desert, I go underground, I have better things to do. Too bad that half of 25 to 35 year olds get their information mainly on social networks.
Simplifying is tempting. Reality is confusingly complex. We are confusing.
Every now and then I post a photo of my latest raspberry clafoutis and it’s like I’ve just discovered the vaccine against cancer. At least everyone agrees in 94 comments. Recipe ? The book is in a box somewhere (I’m moving), but the secret is in the egg, still warm, in the hen’s ass, like a fresh opinion not yet calibrated.
I don’t have the vegan option, sorry, kill each other. Or – note to the desk – have this text read by a “sensitive” reader before publication. It’s the future. Not only do we lay the eggs, but we also walk on them. My father would have said: “I don’t know how to lay the egg, but I know when it’s rotten.” » This is also the title of one of my books which caused a scandal (mea culpa to the sensitive reader); especially because I’m still alive, it makes the oncologists sweat. Sometimes we’d rather die than be wrong.
Be right or shit
You will say to me: but Madam Chronicler, haven’t you been in the opinion profession for a long time? Yes, indeed, a profession, a craft that requires reflection, the luxury of time, messy documentation, consultations with the most learned, a step aside and a certain talent as a storyteller or imagination (from memory too), not to mention ethics and a diploma in storytelling. The conspiracy theorists will tell you that we are at the mercy of power. Lucie Laurier would add: do your research.
I no longer want to depend on the reactions of others. I want to be free.
It doesn’t matter to me. Freedom is not about being right on Facebook. Freedom is more nuanced, more anarchic. I always come back to Gabin’s song: the older I get, the less I know. Life, love, money, friends and roses, all that. I only know that the geese are heading south again and that nothing will hold them back.
In any case, I know that pandemic fatigue has given way to climate and information fatigue (the newspaper The world established a “Good thread” on Monday), that the camps are clearly defined, that the human brain chooses between denial or flight, love or hatred.
My esteemed colleague, the science journalist Michel Rochon, got the point across in his essay Love, Hate and the Brain, where he addresses these contrary movements on social media in times of climate change, COVID and terrorism. We have been programmed for 200,000 years to maintain love towards a clan of fifty people.
Outside of this clan, it is “the other”; Obviously, it gets complicated. The larger the group, the less empathy we encounter. And the anonymous hatred from Steevo80 and Kevin23 is the worst. This is what caused journalist Étienne Leblanc, assigned to the environment at Radio-Canada, to be called a “climatotata”, a “climate acorn” and a “corrupt satanist freemason rot” (!) by skeptics who still exceeded a third of the population.
Passed by, just passed by Still left us an egg A big egg, a new egg Just looking at it, we could really see What Trenet had hoped to find in his Loire
Better than that ! In 2015, Michel Rochon tells us, well before the pandemic and the outbreak of hateful comments, the Council on Foreign Relations carried out a global survey. The question ? “Should individuals have the right to make offensive comments about minority groups? » In the United States, 67% said yes. The global average was 35%.
It makes me want to have some clafoutis again. I add Jamaican rum to mine. Always better.
Limbic impulses
Let’s put it down to the insula, the rum or the premotor cortex. Still. Bad times for pearl gray. The French writer and sociologist Maria Pourchet gave us a wonderful post recently on the show The big bookstore on the desire to no longer choose between two camps, the weak or the strong, the literary or the scientific, the virgins or the sluts: “Reject one to belong to the other, let go of the debate to honor divisions, reactive or awake, me too not me too, author, censor or libertarian […] for the benefit of a simplistic, radical world, cut with borders, torn between genres, people, between ideas, an uninhabitable world of positions and antagonism where “I don’t know” would no longer be an answer , but an infamy. »
She reminds us that the shade is a lamp. And the light of this lamp flickers in the darkness of our hatreds when it could illuminate “unbelievable colors for which we still have to look for names”.
And this monochrome of autumn sunsets torn by a V of chattering geese can only remind us how much we need the clan to fly higher or, at least, go further.