2023-12-23 13:45:00
LIVRES – Last June, the artist, energy scientist and philosopher Tristan Edelman released his latest work, Discontented civilization: putting an end to capitalismpublished by Talma Studios. A strong critique of capitalism and an analysis of the way in which it penetrates our daily lives. Edelman denounces the wage system which enslaves us and indicates ways out: taking back control of our daily lives, rebelling and thinking in society about creating a new, more coherent form of life, quite simply human again! In the chapter, “De-zombification of the world”, Tristan Edelman highlights the loss of energy from which we all suffer and which transforms us into lifeless citizens, incapable of identifying our real needs. Which leads to too often accepting toxic policies as if they were natural.
Extract :
De-zombification of the world (pp. 82 to 85 of Civilization of discomfort)
Capital is deeply rooted in us. It takes us to the most intimate parts of the body: cells, neurons, nerves, organs, reflexes. The tour de force is the way in which he dismisses death to make it a terrifying fantasy that can be played with at will. The deep body having been reached, it is a matter of regaining it. How can we find this reality with which it is good to live? First of all, let’s make no mistake: our body is colonized. Those who claim that we are all active and participants in Capital make us believe in the fatalism of the commodity as a natural law. It is a strategy to break the mind and secure power. The ultimate rhetoric amounts to demonstrating that the slave wants his own slavery. We arrive at the most specious argument there is: the colonizer is only responding to the request of the colonized. He has nothing to do with it, he is benevolent, we must thank him. As stunning and outrageous as this may sound, it is all true. Yes: fatalism and voluntary servitude are the basis of our membership system. At least as long as the person does not feel their internal colonization and believes in the values of the colonizer. However, from the moment she feels the discomfort of domination and the insane values of the colonizer, then her body and her consciousness wake up. She reconnects with her own real movement and, from then on, she no longer participates: she is obliged to cooperate. Aware of her condition, she becomes a non-submissive slave, a rebel, a threat, a hope. It becomes the guiding principle of the Movement. This person then knows that there is another body, another world. The priority is not to rethink ethics, collapse and representations, but to feel (oneself) and relate intimately to the fundamental needs of the Movement.
When the liberal comes to tell you that you participate in the system because you use a smartphone, you can answer him that you did not need this object, but that it was imposed on you by a capitalist consortium seeking to marginalize anyone who doesn’t use it. Nothing natural, nothing essential. Furthermore, not sharing the values of the merchandise, you develop real communications as much as possible. You consider yourself a chained slave who does the best he can to fight against the rate of profit, work and confinement. You will see behind the cool smile of the liberal the rictus of the miser sending you the coercive forces of the rule of law to suppress any alternative. We quickly move from software to hardware. It is easier to convince a slave accustomed to his slavery in relative comfort than to make a slave chained on the steerage believe that he is on a tourist cruise. The sense of reality is a question of deep memory, of lived and direct experience.
We are well below the change in representation in the manner of ecologists, who are trying to build a new pseudo-morality based on “virtuous” coercion for others and “sobriety to save the planet”. Issuing new commandments by reforming representations has never done anything other than distance the person from the experience of themselves. One more stone to the spectacular building of the Theater of Death. It is a relationship with the world that comes from the guts, the belly, the flesh and the bones. It is up to everyone to make their own crisis journey to feel and understand that the capitalist way of life is toxic, not only through its products, but in its very way of producing. The products (vegan, organic, “clean” energies, etc.) and behaviors (sport, meditation, selective sorting, etc.), which seem the healthiest, do not escape this logic. The danger is that the defenders of these products and behaviors participate all the more in the system because they believe they are escaping it even though they are renewing it.
Confined to partial and therefore recoverable struggles, most environmental associations have fallen into the trap of fear of the virus, precisely because they have stuck to the representation and ethics of good health. They have not assumed a full critique of our alienated relationship to the intrinsic toxicity of Capital and all its proposals. We were also able to follow the vaudeville of the bobos who, yesterday, took pleasure in moral lessons and revolutions (on paper) only to, in an instant, be incarcerated at home. The masks fell by the millions.
On the other hand, everyone has seen people whose eyes it was difficult to believe opened; insight remains in them, without there being any need to display the flags. As such, in my environment as an energy specialist, although depoliticized, I participate in groups which were formed with the aim of reflecting on and denouncing manipulation. This start can be explained by the fact that, on the one hand, being usually attacked by conventional medicine, they know its perverse workings, and, on the other hand, advocating a holistic approach, they are inclined to look at the world as an indivisible whole and, finally, working on the body, they are among the first to suffer the brutal consequences of social marginalization. Awareness and ardor in the struggle often presuppose global persecution, an offensive of the ideology of terror and extremely rapid proletarianization.
Exiting capitalism involves feeling and returning to basic needs. Rediscover the calls of the body, the taste of food, the joys of travel. Feelings of pleasure, pain, joy, sadness, anger; no emotion is to be excluded. Let your immune system work without rushing to medication. Let your body live without the control of the mind. Let the reign of bad faith dissolve. Let yourself go to emptiness and boredom. Follow the rhythm of days and nights, meals and fatigue. Feed yourself the right information at a personal pace, so as not to sink into despair or false hope. Get out of your narcissistic, marital, social ghetto to reconnect with the collective. And come together, meet, touch each other: let fear not come to ravine the traumatic cuts in the body. By following this intimate bodily thread, we will come quite naturally, according to a rhythm that is both personal and collective, to radically question the rules of behavior, education, culture, history, work, comfort, security, the health system, the agri-food industry, techno-science, information, the virtual, privatization, the State, the law, capital, 2.0… In short: our relationship to death. The latter will no longer be this grimmed-up skeleton which springs from the screens and which we find with fear for having tried to forget it. The rhizomes of Capital withdrawing from our body and our imagination, we can finally follow the movement of reality. As the state of war disappears within us, it once again becomes stimulating to fight in complete coherence, and it once again becomes possible to live with what escapes us; at peace with death.
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