Compared to alcohol and tobacco, or unnatural industrial food, drugs have a very limited impact on public health (each year in France 10,000 people commit suicide – far less than those killed in car accidents – but only 600 die from overdoses). The crucial issue is that on a global level drugs feed mafias which generate a considerable turnover. Thanks to corruption, these are capable of defying states all over the world and of funding terrorist groups. Drugs also lead to uncontrollable crime in society itself. So the drug problem is a political and social, not a medical one.
Drugs also pose an embarrassing question for environmentalists, who are known to defend the use of soft drugs: in countries such as Morocco and Columbia, 60% of the forests have been destroyed to make way for cannabis crops.
The mass use of drugs among young people, which began in the 1960s, can be seen as a search for artificial paradises in a disenchanted world – a way of creating a semblance of communitarian warmth in a world without genuine, living communities. This is precisely the syndrome Zola refers to in L’Assomoir,[156] where he describes the Nineteenth-century working class finding refuge in absinthe.
People should stop pitying drug addicts as they do certain countries of the Third World plagued by civil war and poverty: junkies are responsible for their own destiny – let’s at least give them their due. Enough with charitable do-goodism.
As for the question of whether I have ever taken any drugs myself, I must answer: yes, of course. I have tried them all, even the worst: VDA, a brew made from birch bark treated with acetyl-salicylic acid (extracted from greenbrier), the base ingredient for common aspirin and a substance Siberians have used since the mists of time. Down there, in the Verkhovyansk area, locals call it ‘vodschkaia’, which means ‘super-vodka’. Compared to a 100 ml glass of this bluish liquid, a line of coke is pasteurised milk. Vodschkaia kills...
The system strives to make drugs chic, cool and trendy. After all, this has been going on since the aftermath of the First World War, when coke came into vogue in certain shady bourgeois milieus. This is all implicit. It is acceptable for bands to get loaded, and for the stars of the showbiz, jet-set society and politicians (who are all part of the same world) to keep on snorting until they’ve ruined their noses. Drug trafficking is allowed to prosper in areas beyond the law’s reach just so that we can have some peace; then, from time to time, some extreme measure is taken. The message that is so cunningly being conveyed is that a person who has never taken any drugs is a fogey – a bit of a virgin.
With extraordinary subtlety in the media, the ruling ideology is striving both to promote the use of drugs – by openly showing tolerance towards people known to be heroin addicts, for instance – and to exercise a form of repression that is as ineffective as it is hypocritical.
Most people who talk about drugs – whether to denounce their use or to hypocritically defend ‘soft drugs’ – know little about the matter. They may have had a puff or two of bad weed, snorted half a line of coke cut with saccharine (and for which they paid five times its usual price), or swallowed a placebo fake Ecstasy pill at some pseudo-rave party. And in the end, it’s the rum and Coca-cola that got them high...
Legalising soft drugs would bring the state a number of advantages: it would provide an additional tax revenue (as from tobacco and alcohol) to make up for its inexhaustible lack of funds, and would deliver a blow to cannabis and hash dealers, thus presumably curbing the crime connected to this traffic. Still, the wiseacres of the Right – from Pasqua[157] to Madelin – who foolishly wish to give the impression of being modern and try to appeal to the young by making similar suggestions, forget that legalising cannabis would mean that dealers would focus on hard drugs. We would thus have an increase in the consumption of both legal cannabis and hard, illegal substances, and a rise in crime as well because more money would be circulating (a gram of cocaine costs around 800 Francs, almost as much as plutonium).
It would indeed be profitable for the politicians of certain countries to witness an increase in the international trafficking of hard drugs: this is an important source of funding.
Another interesting factor which no one dares to bring up – particularly among journalists – is the fact that the media and political elites or pseudo-elites make massive use of drugs, and particularly cannabis and cocaine, both in France and in the United States. The strategy the system is adopting on a global level is thus an extremely hypocritical one: forms of repression are being organised that are intentionally ineffective. Big traffickers are never caught – ‘extreme action’ is only taken by making the occasional seizure or publicising the capturing of some small dealer, who is served on a platter to public opinion. Alternatively, broadcasts are shown of mock military operations organised with the support of GIs in some poor country where illegal plants are grown.
On a planetary level, it is quite clear that there is a will to allow the lucrative drug business to thrive – and to manage it. The system has no intention of curbing the traffic in drugs, but only to limit it and profit from it; so much so, that new synthetic molecules are making their way onto the market that are cheaper, more effective and more specific in their effects than natural drugs of plant origin. This will be yet another problem to face...
The Theory of the Three Levels
In the Dictionnaire idéologique[158] I wrote over ten years ago, I distinguished three levels of political perception: first, ‘worldview’, a global perspective that entails an idea of civilisation as a goal and some general values; second, ‘ideology’, which consists of the explicit formulation of this worldview and its application to society; and third, ‘doctrine’, which simply concerns what tactics to use.
Skill for revolutionary movements lies in knowing how to act on these three levels.
The disputes between ‘pagans’ and ‘Christian traditionalists’ are a secondary matter, as are the contentions between those who romanticise France and those who romanticise Europe as a whole. What is essential for those with revolutionary ambitions is the first level: that of one’s worldview. Secondary problems can be dealt with at a later stage.
4. For a Two-Tier World Economy
Two Ideas in Crisis: Progress and Growth
‘Progress’ is clearly a dying idea, even if economic growth may be continuing. Yet, no one is really deriving the right conclusions from this. People no longer believe that ‘tomorrow will be better than today, just as today is better than yesterday’ thanks to technological and scientific advancements and the alleged educational and moral improvement of humanity – the dogma promoted by Auguste Comte and the French positivists[159] – as well as the spread of ‘democracy’. Evidence is mounting that ‘growth’, this measurable mockery, does not actually lead to any objective increase in well-being. The decline of the secular eschatology inherited from Christian messianism is a hard blow for the egalitarian worldview, for it erodes the very philosophy of history on which the latter is based.
Some people believe we are being offered an opportunity here: that we are entering an age of greater clarity and wisdom. Why – they reason – should the end of the myth of progress stand in the way of real improvements and more intelligent forms of progress? Why should it go against the pursuit of equality? These objections, which are frequently raised by members of the ‘New Left’,[160] are misguided: for progressivism, this pillar of egalitarianism and one of its chief expressions, once served as a global belief and part of its secular religion. A collective ideal cannot be ‘fiddled with’ like an economic plan. Deprived of its quasi-religious basis – belief in progress as a historical necessity – the present civilisation has started its decline. But of course it will take an oil tanker whose engines have stopped running some time to come to a complete stop before it starts drifting off towards the rocks...
Historicism vs. Progressivism
The question we must ask then is: with what can ‘progressivism’ be replaced?
The failure of liberal capitalism to attain its goals of equal justice and
prosperity for all, and the collapse of the Communist dream, which pursued the same objectives, have cleared the way for the establishment of a third path. Attempts in this direction have been made around the world by various sorts of authoritarian regimes, all of which have failed – and it is unlikely that fundamentalist theocracies will succeed. Whatever will be the case, this alternative to progressivism can only be based on inegalitarian paradigms, removed from the reductive view of mankind as homo oeconomicus.[161] Yet the global intelligentsia, which is still nostalgic for progressivism and whose perspective is twisted by hegemonic thought – the burdensome utopia of egalitarianism – is not ready to seriously consider the prospect of embarking on any new course. Rather, it is clinging to the embalmed body of a dead idea and continuing as if nothing had happened.
What has now emerged is not a world unified and nourished by history – the linear and automatic outcome of progress – but rather a chaotic and multipolar one that is undergoing globalisation (through markets and telecommunications); a world that has exploded but is being held together, a disorderly and labyrinthine world that will be increasingly laden with history and ‘stories’. The ascending line of progress, which was meant to lead to the redemptive eschatology of a heavenly end of history, is now being replaced by the winding, unpredictable and mysterious flow of this very same history.
The Collapse of the Paradigm
of ‘Economic Development’
An intellectual revolution is taking place: people are starting to perceive – without daring to openly state it – that the old paradigm according to which ‘the life of humanity, on both an individual and collective level, is getting better and better every day thanks to science, the spread of democracy and egalitarian emancipation’ is quite simply false.
This age has come to an end. This illusion is dead and gone. This advancement (which some, such as Ivan Illich,[162] had already questioned) lasted just over a century. Today, the perverse effects of mass technology are starting to make themselves felt: new resistant viruses, the contamination of industrially-produced food, shortage of land and a downturn in world agricultural production, rapid and widespread environmental degradation, the development of weapons of mass destruction in addition to the atomic bomb, etc. – not to mention the fact that technology is entering its Baroque age. All great and essential inventions had already been made by the late 1950s. Later enhancements constitute not so much concrete improvements as additional refinements of little use, like decorative touches added to a monument. The effect of the Internet will be less revolutionary than the telegraph or phone: for it only enhances a pre-existing universal communications system. Technological science conforms to the ‘80-20’ law of energy: initially it takes 20 units of energy to produce 80 of power; but then it takes 80 units of energy to produce only 20 of power.
A possible objection: are we not pessimistically exaggerating the negative consequences of global progress and growth?
The answer to this is no. By contrast to the widely echoed suggestions made by French intellectual Jacques Attali, humanity as a whole has nothing to gain from things like the economic boom in Asia: for the price the older industrial countries would have to pay in terms of an increase in competition would be huge. In any case, this growth will not continue for long: it is becoming difficult to manage – it will have an environmental impact and cause massive socio-political, as well as strategic, problems. Catastrophe itself – not the will of governments – will bring change to the current economic system.
The few positive effects global economic growth brings are actually transient and fragile, and laden with momentous consequences.
In the global spread of technological science, each step forward implies one step back. So life expectancy is on the increase (although it is stagnating if not falling in many countries), but does this mean people are living in greater harmony and with less anxieties? More and more methods of mass destruction – such as nuclear, bacteriological and genetic bombs – are being developed. Agriculture is improving, but ultimately the return of famines is threatening an over-crowded humanity, which inflated thanks to the fall in mortality. We must now face problems such as soil erosion, the destruction of the tropical rain forests, the decrease in arable land, and the depletion of fishing resources.
It will take twenty or thirty years for the pernicious effects of growth to manifest themselves, but after a deceptive phase in which living standards appear to be improving (and which is now coming to an end) they will certainly hit hard. The increase in production and trade leads to new forms of cooperation, but also multiplies the causes of conflict and expressions of nationalistic chauvinism – and everywhere feeds the counter-fire of religious fanaticism. Communication is branching out across the world, while solitude plagues individuals and a sense of despair takes hold in communities.
The urban and technological way of life is shared by 70% of humanity, but what it means – particularly in the South – is life in hellish cities, real cesspools of violence and human chaos. Few know that proportionately more people are living in misery and poverty now than before the Industrial Revolution. Health care has improved, but this has led to a demographic explosion and made the new viral diseases, spread by immigration, more resistant. The global level of energy consumption is rising, while environmental degradation is worsening and the threat of environmental collapse mounting. African and Brazilian farmers now have machines to clear the land, but they are destroying their forests, thus paving the way for desertification and future famine. In other words, after a latency period, progress, growth and the unchecked spread of technological science are producing effects opposite to those desired, engendering a world that is much harsher than the one they wished to transform and improve.
The Announced Death of
Global Economic Development
A serious objection must now be addressed: that we cannot possibly prevent poor or ‘developing’ countries from pursuing industrialisation, striving to attain wealth by all available means and following in the footsteps of the West and of the ‘global religion of GDP[163] growth’. For what an injustice this would be...
Make no mistake: historical dreams and hopes are not based on morals, but on physical limits. It is the logic of catastrophe that will limit the ambitions of southern countries to ‘develop’. These countries, and particularly those of Asia, have yet to become disenchanted with progress. Behind the West in this respect, they still have a positivist approach and are attached to the egalitarian universalism they have just discovered. They wish to imitate the North and have their share of the pie. But alas, it is all too late. The Asian financial crisis was a sign of what is to come. The planet – and hence humanity – would never be able to cope if all of Asia and Africa were to attain the same level of techno-industrial development as northern countries. To believe this is possible is to exhibit the kind of faith in miracles typical of universalism. The mass industrialisation of ‘emerging countries’ is most likely physically impossible because of the depletion of resources and the destruction of ecosystems. The prophecies made by the Club of Rome[164] will no doubt prove to be correct some fifty years too late.
Already in the 1960s some Africans, such as Credo Mutwa in South Africa,[165] argued that pre-colonial tribal societies – small, scattered and demographically stable societies – were far more pleasant than contemporary African societies, which are complete failures based on a botched imitation and poor grafting of the European model, one totally alien to them. After all, why should everyone want to reach Mars, travel on 500 km per hour bullet-trains, fly in supersonic jets, live to the age of one hundred through transplants and antibiotics, chat online, watch TV dramas, etc.? This fever only belongs to certain peoples and groups, and cannot be extended to humanity as a whole.
Should radical structural changes occur, even in Europe and the United States, most of the population would no longer be able to share the techno-industrial way of life. But here another objection must be a
ddressed, one raised by technocrats: that it is possible to control the perverse effects of technology; that we can fight pollution and find new resources if there’s a common agreement and willingness to do so.
This is all very optimistic, but it’s only empty talk: it will never happen. The system displays an overall consistent logic and will not transform itself. It is literally incorrigible and must be changed.
On the other hand, a new system will affirm itself – and will do so in the chaos. We must take a concrete approach and stop having daydreams based on the intellectual masturbations of sham experts. None of the resolutions made at the summits of Rio and Tokyo, however insufficient in themselves, have been respected. Nature, which we have sought to dominate and control in all of its molecular and viral forms – and the Earth itself – is now reacting with a violent backlash after a quiet period. Collective certainties are giving way to doubts and distress. A new sort of nihilism is emerging, a highly dangerous, because desperate, one, which has nothing to do with the philosophies of decline and the reactionary prophets of decadence, who merely represented the other side of the dogma of progress: attachment to the past. It is now philosophies of catastrophe that will take the stage. We are faced by uncertainty, which is casting its disturbing shadow over the very science of technology that we considered predictable and governable. Heidegger was right in his opposition to Husserl[166] and the rationalists[167] – and the Jewish allegory of the Golem[168] was a most apt one.
Towards a ‘Fracture of Civilisation’
What new ideologies or forms of social, political and economic organisation could replace the pursuit of progress and individualism? Are we to return to theocracy, as many Islamic countries would like to suggest? The first thing to note is that non-progressive ideologies that reject egalitarianism are not necessarily unjust, cynical or tyrannical. It is the egalitarianists who, conscious of the failure of their plans for justice and humanitarianism, wish to portray their enemies in a diabolical light. New inegalitarian worldviews must prove concretely anthropophilic rather than ideally humanitarian (like egalitarianism). This end of progressivism clearly also coincides with that of Hegelian rationalist Idealism.[169] Inordinate, irrational, anti-scientific and anti-industrial ideologies are already spontaneously spreading across the world – something which has worried the signatories of the Heidelberg Appeal.[170]
Archeofuturism Page 18
