Climatologists have been warning us for a long time. Hydro-Quebec also says so. Even François Legault recognized it more than once on Thursday during his press conference: Weather-related power outages will become more frequent.
Our Prime Minister has called for solidarity, inviting us to watch over lonely people. “We will get through this together,” he said.
To protect yourself
He is right to speak of solidarity and not only to deal with this crisis in the immediate future. It has always been one of the best bulwarks for humans against chaos.
Solidarity brings with it mutual aid and cooperation, which are important factors in the development and progress of societies.
Yuval Noah Harari demonstrates this very well in his highly successful book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, which we had better not forget.
Supported by historical research, it presents solidarity as one of the main mechanisms that have enabled the human species to reduce its vulnerability to dangers of all kinds, including environmental ones.
Emancipate
So, as counterintuitive as it may seem, history teaches us that humans get rich by sharing.
Mutual aid, more than competition, is a foundation for the evolution not only of species, but also of societies, organizations and individuals.
Where people manage to bond and join forces, they improve their living conditions and their performance.
Other research has observed that countries where there is more solidarity and social and economic equity are likely to have a higher happiness index than countries where individualism and every man for himself are cultivated. .
Solidarity is not the only factor, of course, but it plays an important role that we tend to forget in this world that pushes us towards division and new polarizations.
Resilience
In this time of great upheavals, where many people have fragile happiness, it seems to me that it is time to get back to sowing solidarity all around us.
Many of us feel vulnerable and powerless in the face of the climate crisis, artificial intelligence, wars and so many other phenomena that are upsetting our relationship to the world and to the future.
We can have the impression of protecting ourselves by withdrawing into ourselves, individually and collectively. However, it is not by closing our doors and our borders double-locked and by cultivating the fear of the other that we will build solutions.
We see what happens in the United States.
Thus, it is not only the material resources that count. Especially when they are inequitably distributed and outrageously wasted. Here too, too many people live with food insecurity and housing shortages while working valiantly.
Giving our children a viable future means pooling our intelligence, skills and more resources. We will all be winners. History has shown this to us. We would be wrong to forget it.