by Andrea Zhok
Telegram channel
The images of flames engulfing the town hall in Limoges, France, and of its bell tower collapsing, are going round the world. Episodes like this can only be condemned, just as one can only condemn the looting that has accompanied the protests in many parts of France.
And yet, if we stopped at this level of reflection, we would simply be engaging in a classic exercise in petty-bourgeois conservatism — which has its reasons, but which is also dramatically short-sighted. To start preaching about burnt-out cars and smashed shop windows, and go no further, merely shows that one has not yet grasped the seriousness of the circumstances in which we find ourselves.
What we are witnessing in France — and, in different forms, in many other European countries by now (Spain, Portugal, Albania, Belgium and, since yesterday, Italy too) — is anything but an irrational event. There are historical events that appear irrational only from close up, but which possess an evident rationality when viewed from a sufficient height.
Rational does not mean painless, nor does it mean free of injustice.
We must train ourselves to hold two levels of analysis together: one at which specific acts and specific individuals can be judged barbaric, uncivilised, vandalistic; and one at which we can (and must) understand that history is always a river carrying debris and corpses — but one that cannot be stopped by sermons.
What is happening has an iron collective rationality, even if those taking part in it often have only a limited understanding of it, or none at all.
For many years now, Europe’s peoples have experienced their ruling classes as an anonymous technocratic organism — a self-propelled rubber wall moving on “autopilot”, utterly indifferent to the needs of the population. The wager of these finance-linked technocratic elites has been that they could lull consciences to sleep with today’s opium of the people, the media (entertainment and infotainment), and tame the recalcitrant with restrictive measures (a truncheon blow here, a closed bank account there, a tweak to an electoral law one moment, an annulled election the next, and so on).
The general assumption of Europe’s leaderships — tacit and unquestioned — is that one does not reason with the plebs: one simply alternates the carrot and the stick.
Everything that is said publicly is always an instrumental lie, without exception — save for the occasional case in which a truth can itself be put to instrumental use. Public discourse has become an endless performance that cares less and less about preserving even a semblance of credibility.
Thus no one in their right mind really believes that Russia is about to invade us, but this does not stop legions of institutional nonentities from repeating this bollocks with a straight face every day. And of course everyone knows that, in this game of fairy tales pumped out by a press for hire, the only thing that matters — the one fixed point as circumstances change — is the intention to dispose arbitrarily of public resources and channel them towards private interests.
In short, the ruling classes have long since grown used to treating the population as a dumb beast, to which no rational justification is owed and which is to be handled, on the one hand, with selective flattery and targeted privileges and, on the other, by being rendered powerless.
And this mechanism can work, and does work, for a long time. Until it doesn’t.
And it stops working the day too many people are losing too much to be able to afford to remain in a state of torpor. “Losing too much” here should not be taken to mean something like “death by starvation”. In a modern society, people enter a condition of unbearable deprivation long before they “starve to death”.
Today, for instance, being unable to afford to use a car or to access the internet means, for the majority of the population, being cut off from the world, from work, from social life, from life itself. And the fact that cars and mobile phones were once luxury goods means nothing: this is now the new threshold of “participation in common life”, what separates life from non-life.
Plebs raised like beasts of burden, to be fed the occasional panem et circenses, shit jobs and televised snake oil, are not — and will not be — receptive, on the day this game breaks down, to arguments about public decorum, respect for property, reverence for monuments and so on.
Those burning cars, historic buildings and shops are culturally and morally deprived. But the real culprits, the ones who should be made to pay, are the elites at the top who cultivated and wanted that deprivation, thinking it served their purposes.
Today the pressure cooker is about to blow. Even if this wave subsides, this is only the beginning, because Europe’s ruling classes are in no position — neither materially nor culturally — to change course. So fasten your seatbelts: we are heading for a crash.
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