A real madness of man

Speaking of madness about our consumer society may seem excessive. Comfort and abundance also bring his satisfactions, it would be butchering his eye as to deny it. When you come back from the supermarket, the trunk filled with victuals, clothes, appliances, electronics, toys for children, plus an advertisement for the next car, you feel a joy that reminds us of the Christmases of childhood. The avalanche of gifts was like a pledge of love, and it’s so good to get back to those happiness despite the wear of time… A satisfaction also to the idea that one can afford all this, that one has reached a certain standing, that one has succeeded in life…but this satisfaction multiplied by fifty weeks a year and by a billion families would suffice to ruin the planet permanently. Inconvenient contradiction that might well hide flaws in our way of thinking life and thinking ourselves.

In the past, there was one king per country, one noble per region, who built palaces, fell asleep and drunk of wealth. Today, everyone would like to be king at home, to live in his small palace, to fill themselves with the band to gogo and to throne among his possessions. The monarch’s madness has become democratized. And at the same time, multiplied to the point that nature can no longer follow the movement.

And what about our petrochemical society… We take billions and billions of tons of CO2 away from the planet for millions of years from harm, and reinject it into the biosphere to make often useless and never needed kilometers, or to manufacture all kinds of toxic substances that are supposed to cure and treat our plants. The ambient temperature rises, the storms and floods follow each other, the glaciers and the ice floes strove, the oceans pollute, the fauna and flora degrade, our health marks the blow. And most people rejoice when we find new reserves of methane or shale gas…

Let’s not talk about the demographic explosion, the increasingly beautiful ivory hunt, mines that increasingly mine the soil and distill heavy metals, fake oil palm forests that condemn orangutans, or anything that the pacifier spationauts dream of forgetting on an exoplanet…

The most striking is the contrast between the supreme intelligence of scientists, technicians, inventors, engineers, industrialists, publicists and other actors of progress, and the inability of humanity as a whole to see where this form of progress leads. Both ecologically and spiritually. It all happens as if men had placed the meaning of their existence in material satisfactions, forgetting that these satisfactions are bestowed upon them by an environment whose ruins will remain only when a part of the world has quenched its thirst for growth.

Never have technological progress gone so far, never have so many people lived in profusion, but never had the apocalypse been so close. Will we avoid it? Not wanting to see him and continuing on this momentum is a real madness. But does not this madness begin much more upstream in the chain of progress?

The sense of satisfaction we feel in possessing wealth, accumulating it, making it an object of power depends directly on the importance that the feeling of power and possession takes into our minds. The visceral fear of lack of food, of protection, of means of defense, prompts us to accumulate goods, food, weapons, but isn’t this fear excessive?

The problem is inevitably psychological or psychoanalytic. The level of fear depends on unconscious anxieties. The taste of power, greed, selfishness are related to ego. So we have to go to the bottom of our unconscious people to see how these trends are taking place. And if one finds educational or other factors that disrupt their development, to realize it is to correct them. A great program, but one that deserves all our efforts: this is where the root causes of the madness that has taken the world and led it to its loss are hidden…