On the disjunction of the world: elitism versus conspiracy

Despite the clarity of such remarks, Harari is accused on social networks of being a purveyor of ideas at the service of world leaders, whether heads of state, economic actors or organizations. supranationals. It goes without saying that it is in “conspiratorial spheres” that we find these accusations stated and relayed. These same social networks are increasingly vilified for their ability to produce and transmit false information that would harm social cohesion and generate too many doubts in populations. This free and amplified speech would therefore become a problem in democracies, generating a widening gap between the governed and the rulers, the former increasingly mistrusting the latter. Harari being a prominent man, he therefore becomes one of the brains of this elite that he nevertheless denounced in his book…

The gap is widening, but it is not only to the credit of the plotters. In effect, political, economic, scientific and media leaders could be tempted to act like the men of the famous episode of the tower of Babel in the Bible (Genesis 11). Wanting to become gods, they rise above their condition. But as God is no longer there to constrain them – there is no longer even the barrier of Morality -, so they arrogate his power to themselves and turn against their fellows who have remained at the foot of the tower – the toothless , those who are nothing, the “useless”, worse than the proletarians of the industrial era according to Harari. And since everything circulates very quickly, from one continent to another, from one language to another, as if a global language were being put in place, these new gods monopolize the power to scramble this language so that the multitude disperses. So, their solution is obviously the verticality of discourse and information, supposed to discredit the horizontality of fake news and extremist points of view. Only problem, if this verticality imposes some on the whole of a population, still passively informed by the audio-visual one, the horizontality increases in number, as the citizens master the digital tools.

We have known for a long time that the Genesis of the Bible was partly inspired by Babylonian mythological stories – Babel is undoubtedly an allusion to the great Mesopotamian city and the Deluge is a monotheistic adaptation of a story that was originally polytheistic. In this story, the gods are upset by a mass of men, always more numerous, always more noisy – decision is taken to reduce them to nothing by a great rise of waters. Comparable to these gods, actors in our world also believe that human overpopulation is not compatible with the viability of the planet. From then on, everything is mixed up: the elite, ignorant of demographic mechanisms, says in half-words that the birth rate should be controlled in order to attenuate the increase in the world population, the conspirators imagine that this elite seeks underground to eliminate part of this population by various means including vaccines. In the Mesopotamian myth, the gods have no wisdom in wanting to eliminate men, and men have hardly any. Also, the lesson of this story is to send men and gods back to back.

In mythical stories, there are still characters who stand between men and gods: the heroes. They do not shine by their wisdom so much they are seized withhubris, whether they are called Gilgamesh, Samson or Achilles. The first of them is in search of immortality, but it fails miserably in the myth. Harari, in his book Sapiensthus evokes a “Gilgamesh Project” supposed to lengthen the human life of all, even to overcome death – the scientists are working on it. The “best” among us (the richest) dream of becoming “a-mortals” since they are Similar (Homoioi) as in ancient Sparta, not the equals of the Athenian democracy. In order to evoke this mad science which forgets its ethical questions, the same author writes with a certain fantasy: “Dr. Frankestein is perched on the shoulders of Gilgamesh”…

In a totally secularized Western world, thehubris of the hero wins a share of the elites who imagine they can prolong life indefinitely: transhumanism. As the philosopher Michaël Fœssel wrote in his book After the end of the world, criticizing contemporary “apocalyptic reason” – Anthropocene, collapsology, etc. -, the increase in life expectancy remains the only hope since individual mortality, fully materialized, is falsely accepted. By emphasizing the importance of organic life, as he stresses, and no longer the human world, society, one runs the risk of creating a demiurgic caste charged with having to maintain “Creation” as it is, to the detriment human suffering. Under the pretext of ecology or public health, capable of keeping citizens under control, this elite is more likely to adopt the casualness of the Mesopotamian gods than the wisdom of the Bible.

The oligarchy of these demi-gods is already in place, it relies on scientific and informational knowledge. Devoid of philosophy and spirituality, she will not provide any wisdom as she is often arrogant. Between thehubris of this elite, who no longer want to debate, and the awkwardness of citizens who struggle with contradictory and sometimes fantasized information, there is hardly any room for a return to democratic reason, especially if the whole of a population – the mass – is passive in the face of this information. Gods can cause a flood in myth, but men can lead a revolution in history. Being a society consists in not creating such socio-cultural gaps. A regime of truth is necessary, it must still be intellectually honest, without any desire to dominate or overthrow. Is the phenomenon reversible or is the inevitable already happening?

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Marion Dapsance recently published The Sacred Heart and the Reinvention of Catholicism in 2021 and Alexandra David-Neel, the invention of a myth

in 2019. (**) Christophe Lemardelé published Hebrew Bible Archeology in 2019 and Nazir’s Hair