Perverse effect

The generally unintended and unforeseen negative consequences of any action are called effet-pervers. We can also speak of collateral damage, to repeat the expression inaugurated during the Iraq war.

Most human inventions have effet-pervers, simply because they are by nature outside of existing natural laws and ecological balances. Reciprocity is also true: any environmental degradation results either from a natural accident (eruption, earthquake, meteorite, solar explosion…), or from human action, because man is in principle the only creature capable of new actions contrary to the natural laws that founded ecological balances.

Should we then regard man as an accident of evolution? There is nothing rational to exclude this possibility. It should be resolved to put in place artificial limits prohibiting eco-destructive behaviour, with all the difficulties of coercive measures against natural tendencies.

The path that human ecogenetics proposes to explore is based on the opposite hypothesis: anti-ecological behaviors would result from disorders affecting human behaviour. At the origin of harmful artifacts would not be natural aspirations, but some false needs induced by cultural, biological or other sources of distortion of natural psychic functioning.

It should therefore be called into question a paradoxical psychic functioning (deroging from the natural laws of psychism). Knowing that natural psychic functioning has developed during evolution in an environment of ecological balance, it is no wonder that human inventions as we know them systematically have effet-pervers.

The demographic expansion itself would be a perverse effect of some useful artifacts, such as medical care and the reduction of infant mortality, or of a certain culture of love and sexuality based on the great leitmotiv of “grow and multiply”, or of temporary overabundance due to petro-agriculture, or even physiological disruptions induced by an antigenetic diet…