Resilience. Here, with the term benevolence, a very popular word these days, a word that hides a certain ugliness and which is used in all sauces: resilience in the face of illness, in difficult personal situations, in preparation for rising levels of the sea, resilience to temperature rises, the spread of a new virus, we even talk about the resilience of our forests!
In the field of materials physics, resilience exists when a deformed material returns to its original shape while retaining its properties. No wonder this word has been borrowed by psychology since the 1970s to describe behavior that allows humans or a group to rebuild themselves in a socially acceptable way in situations of traumatic shock.
Where the shoe pinches is when politics appropriates this word which then becomes a key locking without complex the causes of our troubles without our being able to question them, hidden as they become by the call for resilience. Behind the resilience of the survivors of the floods in Saguenay and Fukushima, or that of the children of the DPJ hide problems.
However, governments and more and more bodies are constantly instilling in our psyches the need for citizens to be resilient, as if everyone had an inexhaustible reservoir of the ability to bounce back, and that this ability could be, today and in the future, mobilized to order. The idea here is not to deny the existence of the human ability to overcome challenges, no, it is rather to show that in Quebec, in Japan, elsewhere in the world, we encourage illusion that our ability to bounce back is the solution to our problems. The focus is thus shifted from the problem to the human’s ability to overcome it.
All living beings are now invited to be resilient to compensate for the ineptitude and inertia of a few who alone are the cause of the majority of our environmental and societal miseries. Life, in 2023, is therefore a constant battle, a battle in which one of the essential shields is resilience. Blessed are those endowed with resilience, they will be kings in the kingdom of the announced desolation.
Why rely so much on resilience? Is this the signal that the system will not help us, will not save us? The call from our governments to maximize our resilience is appalling. Wouldn’t it be better if they worked to iron out our difficulties?
life raft
Since the system is collapsing, it is necessary for the immediate future to learn alone to tinker with his own life raft. But the gifted, the intellectuals and the influencers ridicule the means taken by the “rabble” to get out of the game by building their survival craft. To cite just one: “Time enjoins us to withdraw into our ‘authentic self’, to reach our ‘full consciousness’, in the name of ‘individual emancipation’. This cult of the individual encourages the worst fads. »
Let’s be kind… pfft! they say, it’s living in a world of unicorns; let’s seek more inner wisdom, pfft! they say it is not supported by evidence; let’s meditate… pfft! they say, softness; let’s balance our lives… pfft! they say, we don’t have time for that, and productivity will suffer…
More of us have never been schooled, educated and educated, and yet our level of existential distress has not stopped rising for 60 years. So what is the ingredient that we sorely lack to enhance our potential? We constantly seek to surpass ourselves: but who is this individual in oneself that we so much wish to surpass, would it be the one we are trying to flee?
Existence precedes essence, man being free to define himself: he is what he makes himself be (that’s philosophy… Some of these gifted people say: pfft! it’s incomprehensible !) From my point of view, the beginning of an answer to the question is precisely to start thinking and philosophizing for ourselves about what we have become through the fault of our actions. The solutions thus found will not only be advocated, but embodied.
Our government’s objective for 2023 is to reduce the wealth gap between Quebec and Ontario. Let’s stop doing more and more of what we do, which ultimately only causes more damage. Very unfortunately, so much stupidity invites us to be resilient and consenting, not philosophical. The injunction becomes: be resilient in order to compensate for the stupidity of our actions.
So, let’s go back to sleep and fully experience our resilience. ” How do we sleep while our beds are burning? we sang three decades ago… No wonder that in 2020, the word “collapsology” entered the dictionary.