2023-05-10 12:30:00
TRIBUNE/OPINION
I.- One can only be grateful to MM. Xavier Azalbert and Stanislas Breton for their recent and rich interview on “the intoxication of the West”. Interesting, this word: “intoxication”. It comes to us from the Greek “toxicon”, which means venom, but a venom inoculated by arrows. Indeed, “toxon” means “bow”. Intoxication, in its primary sense, therefore designates a deliberate, calculated, and not natural act of aggression. An act intended to kill.
The venom, here identified, is the lie. In the biblical tradition, lying does not primarily relate to speech but to action. It expresses a betrayal of trust (1)especially against God who is faithful (2). The lie is thus the characteristic of a diabolical action tending to destroy the divine creation and to bury with it humanity itself. (3).
Mr. Breton also evokes a distinction between the lie that politicians would use to protect their citizens and the venom lie he is talking about. Plato, already, distinguished the “utilitarian” lie of the ruler, which he identified moreover with a “lie in words”, and which he excused by its protective usefulness of the citizens; and the “true lie”, which consists in voluntarily plunging the soul of another into error, and which is always detestable (4).
All of these elements come together here. The modern lie is indeed a weapon, voluntarily wielded by the powerful against the citizens of all Western societies, whose trust they betray, in order to establish their hold on them by poisoning their minds. Their “arrows” are all the vectors of propaganda, political, cultural or media which, through manipulation, newspeak or direct persecution, plant the “venom” of subversion and lies in people’s minds and morals.
As the issue of truth and lies always refers to the judgment passed on the being of things, clearly identified or deliberately concealed, it is not surprising that the venom of lies directly intoxicates the “identities” of men themselves. same. Identity, by definition, indeed refers to the reality of what one is; and what we are not. It is therefore logical that the subversion of “identities” is, in fact, at the heart of the current collective lies, to deal a final blow to all that could resist in a humanity worthy of the name.
Consciously or not, this “intoxicated West” first lies about itself. If the historical West may have been the object of the admiration evoked by Mr. Breton, the contemporary “West” is only a travesty of it. He usurps its prestige to give himself a moral authority over the world of which he is not worthy, while he applies himself, on the contrary, to relentlessly denying and ruining all the founding principles of the historical West. , from the individual to society, including the family. This is why, in another place, it seemed to me more appropriate to call it “the Oxidant” (5).
II.- Once this lie has been identified, which applies in all areas, it is a question of combating it. However, this fight does not only concern the question of whether we are well or badly informed, manipulated or not, and whether our rights are threatened by it; it concerns the survival of man, rational and free.
This issue, whose “1984” by Orwell presents such a powerful illustration, yet is not always well perceived in its seriousness and gravity. For what ? Because many think and react today, including in their revolt against the manipulation of which they are the object, from the same “intoxicated” principles, instilled in them by education and the media, which command the lies they are the victims. Lies about themselves, about their dignity as men, about their rights, about the meaning of their life or the meaning of a political life. If they rise up against globalism, for example, it is in the name of an individualism, a subjectivism and an egoism which are in reality essential springs of this globalism.
Thus, by drawing the resources of their revolt from the principles which enslave them, they only tighten the bonds of this imprisonment, like those insects caught in a spider’s web which, by agitating themselves, more surely condemn themselves to death. dead.
One cannot usefully rebel against this enslavement without cutting, deliberately, with the roots which nourish it. How, for example, to rise up against the wokisme if one is convinced that there is no truth except in one’s own opinion of everything? Fighting against the empire of lies is only wishful thinking if you are already lying to yourself by nourishing in your life the principles whose devastating effects are condemned everywhere.
The crises we are going through have the merit of brutally putting before our eyes this dilemma which, here again, can only be resolved by choosing the truth: feeding the monster ourselves by agreeing to think and live as it expects precisely that we think and live, for its own benefit, as docile “consumers” of goods and fashions, material or ideological? Or dry it up by choosing the truth as it is, not according to the construction and whims of our opinions, but according to the objective reality of things.
When a Roman magistrate judged a man, the first question he asked him was this: “Under what law do you live?” It was this law that judged him. If my personal law, that which governs by choice my reflections and my life, is that of liberalism, that is to say that of an individualism which has no other supreme instance than its own opinion, then I have no right to complain about living under this yoke I have chosen.
SIf, on the contrary, I want to free myself from it and for the society in which I live to be freed from it, then I have to look back on myself and question the principles that this liberalism seeks to destroy. In this regard, many are mistaken when they believe they see in Christianity, which forged the principles of the “historical West”, an enemy to be feared.
In this, they are on the wrong target and make themselves the involuntary instruments of those who seek their own death. Authors as unsuspicious of Catholicism as Michel Onfray, Douglas Murray, Niall Fergusson or Tom Holland have, on the contrary, through the study of history, understood and maintained that the survival of Christianity, often betrayed by its own clerics, is essential. to that of an authentic West where freedom and law can retain meaning.
The news also gives us a lesson of things. To free itself from the decadent totalitarianism of the “Oxidizer”, what is Russia pursuing? Not self-hatred but the return to one’s identity. What is China, or India, or Iran looking for? Be themselves. What are African countries looking for? Live and act according to their respective identities. The salvation of the authentic West and its healing from liberal intoxication also pass through a return to one’s own roots.
- Patrick de Pontonx is a lawyer at the Paris Bar
(1) Pair ex. : 2 Samuel, 18,13.
#law #live