We rightly protest against the totalitarian drift explicitly visible since the spring of 2020. This civic, moral and spiritual protest is essential, because it expresses our concern to preserve the roots, in particular Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian, of our current civilization. If we laconically define totalitarianism as the ambition of “total domination” (H. Arendt), with imperialist methods, including the monopoly of communication, the confiscation of the economy in the hands of a few , functioning with an ever-changing ideology, and control with terror, then it is quite obvious that totalitarianism was not born yesterday, nor even with the totalitarianisms of the 20th century. It is a political conception of the world, in which the human being is reduced at best to a function or an instrument, at worst to useless waste, deprived of his unpredictable states of mind, his cumbersome aspirations to freedom, of its far-fetched claims to embody moral values. It is essentially a reductionism of the individual: to a "positive" or "negative case", to a mathematical unit, apart of course from those which would correspond to it by their immeasurable and elusive dimension, namely, zero and infinity. (A. Koestler).
Humanity has never defeated totalitarianism. She is eternally, regularly, periodically, victim of it, whatever the facade decorations, the local color, the ideals brandished for the “good” of the masses, the type of sacrificial requirement required. We could point to our growing aptitude for self-destruction as a human species, and reasonably share Günther Anders' views on the subject. Now, sometimes, I adopt another perspective, from which I detect in such apprehension a sin of hubris: our proud claim to believe that we would be so powerful as to eradicate all life on earth, or again, the human race . The more I delve into the study of totalitarianism, the more I would be tempted to embrace another vision, according to which totalitarianism would be a necessary moment of our human ecosystem.
My immersion in the lush nature of the Caribbean coast of Colombia allowed me to make several observations of the functioning of nature. First of all, nature is organized into a system, that is to say that several parts coexist, and interact together, until they form a living, abundant, singing whole, which cannot be reduced to the sum of parts: ants, bees, wasps, mosquitoes, hummingbirds, eagles, earthworms, bats, various and varied plants, etc. When the system is balanced, each species has its living space, and harmony reigns. On the other hand, when too much aggression occurs, phenomena appear which weaken the whole, and make it ill. I will take an example. Every year, in my area, mango exporters fumigate the mango trees with chemicals, which always leads to the loss of beehives at the same time, and leads to an invasion of beetles. Pesticide fumigation does indeed attack flies that like mangoes. However, flies are predators of cockchafer larvae. This is how the imbalance occurs.
In this same system, there are periods. Let's sow tomatoes: we plant the seed, which then develops the plant, which will bear the fruit. Then, the plant will wither, and its waste will feed the earth again. This is where pests come in, starting a process of destruction and decay of leaves, fruits, plants, etc. which were no longer viable. If you fight to remove the parasites in your ecosystem, you will quickly realize (at least, if you are observant) that they come back stronger, more numerous, and that you will not just get rid of them! It is therefore above all a question of diverting their attention from the place where you do not want them to intervene: for example, in the context of the ants devouring a young moringa shrub, deterring them by painting the stem of the tree born with neem oil, and at the same time attract their attention elsewhere, where they will be enticed by a better meal at a lower cost.
In the ecosystem, everyone has their function. There is no "good" and "bad". But everyone must stay in their place, and above all, everyone has their function according to specific periods. Eliminating insects that serve to decompose materials in the soil would be a huge mistake: how then to fertilize the soil naturally and create a soil rich in minerals? The fumigation of the mango trees I mentioned is an equally serious fault, because on the pretext of saving the mangoes of this harvest for Westerners in search of tropical flavors, we take the risk of killing bees. However, the bees fertilize the flower, which itself will give the fruit, from which the bee will feed. Here is a cycle, where each element is necessary.
In nature, everything is communication. There are plants that get along well with each other: by making them neighbors, the system becomes virtuous. On the other hand, if you place an invasive plant next to a rather quiet plant, one will devour the territory of the other. Finally, nature is a living being, which reacts to the environment, to stress, to the lunar cycles. Pruning a tree on a full moon presents a danger of "hemorrhaging" the sap from the tree, while pruning it on a waning moon is far less traumatic for it. Cutting wounds can be wrapped in bandages or poultices, but I won't go into these technical details any further, except to say that trees obviously have sensations[1]. All living beings feel: there are permanent interactions. Did you know that trees and plants warn each other of the existence of a predator or stress through their roots[2]? Or that bees attacked by a predator organize extremely skillful labyrinthine traps, to the point of blocking the entrance to the hive?
This meticulous observation for several years of the ecosystem that surrounds me in the Sierra Nevada of Colombia made me think about totalitarianism. What if totalitarianism, this moment of radical destruction, was simply the moment when parasites come to devour what is no longer viable? I thought that would explain a lot of things. In particular, why we almost always remain in the same percentages of social psychology concerning the submission of the masses to the totalitarian system, despite the colossal amount of alternative information circulating today. The proportion between the lucid individuals, the sheep of Panurge, and the predators is always the same, at the start of the totalitarian movement. As if the mass had to be sufficiently anesthetized to allow the work of destruction. Accordingly, and I have expressed myself on this several times, there is no totalitarian system without witnesses, and there is no totalitarian system which does not spare witnesses, whereas it would have the freedom to delete them[3]. However, it is precisely these witnesses who will take over after the work of destruction, because once the waste has been transformed into compost, the seed will have to be sown and the new cycle start again. The awakening of the consciousness of individuals and the exit from the psychotic hallucination in which they are taken by believing in the ideological fiction of paranoid delirium, are progressive, but above all, proportional to the amount of destruction generated by totalitarianism.
With this grid of analysis, the totalitarian moment, which I readily associate with the "moment of the negative" according to Hegel in the dialectic of History, is quite simply the instrument of the destruction of a civilization which is not more viable. Why is it no longer viable? Simply, because it is completing its decline. For there is nothing on earth that does not obey the following cycle: birth, growth, apogee, decline, and death. Plants obey it. Animals and individuals, too. Businesses. Dynasties. And of course, civilizations.
The totalitarian moment is that of the raw death drive. Individuals regress to a psychic confusion such that "the four pillars of the house", as I try to image it, collapse: prohibition of murder, prohibition of incest, difference of generations and difference of sexes. We must understand these taboos as psychic and symbolic dikes. More than a temptation, this instinctual regression of humanity, at cyclical moments in history, would then be: a need and a necessity.
With such a perspective, the control group[4] belongs entirely to the ecosystem in its totalitarian period. He is not separate from it. He is not aloof. Its function is to ensure, like the Vestal Virgins, the preservation of the sacred fire between the old and the new. In the moment of decomposition within nature, the parasites also never eliminate all the elements that will be essential to start the new cycle again. Of course, some can be eliminated to intimidate the whole: the parasites do not allow to be prevented from carrying out their work. But the cookies are never all deleted: on the one hand, because it is impossible, on the other hand, because they have a backup function in the ecosystem.
We are at the end of a civilization in decline, which is coming to an end[5]. It takes a while, with major destructiveness, in stages. The functions of predation and parasitism carry out their work of deconstruction and decomposition, necessary for the elimination of this civilization which is dying. According to such a hypothesis, we would be used in the ecosystem for our capacities and our dispositions, a role to which we would consent simply because it emanates from who we are. Massive denial would then have a metaphysical meaning, and would be essential for the destruction to take place. The exit from denial would be proportional to the need to slow down and then stop the destruction at the collective level, because it will have been sufficient for a renewal.
"An art of living in times of disaster" (Camus)
This hypothesis is irritating, because it forces us to modify our classic conception of freedom: we would be, in short, actors in life cycles that are beyond us. But what is the use of thinking if thinking does not disturb us in our certainties and our comfort?
In the spring of 2020, very few of us were talking, and even fewer were saying: “all this is totalitarian and will last”. The continuation of the current program is the radicalization of the tensions between two movements which no longer manage to find playgrounds and common ground: order and freedom. The situation presupposes doing a lot of work of detachment, mourning, acceptance, to regain flexibility, creativity and agility. When the house collapses or burns, what are we going to and what can we save in the fire? Some objects or furniture, which seemed so important to us, are perhaps not so useful to save. On the other hand, others will appear essential to us, whereas we had always considered them as trivial. The moment of totalitarian decomposition also invites us to sort out our own inner house, to carry out internal and external purification work, and to deploy “an art of living in times of disaster”.