English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Chinese power and the brutal change 0:00 Other than coal, practically speaking, etc. But the measures they've taken - they talk about a bank, I'll give you the example of a bank we don't know, from the West, that has, brace yourself, 725 million customers. Find me, anywhere on the planet, a bank that simply exceeds 100 million customers. Maybe HSBC struggles to reach 100 million, you see. And here we're talking about a bank with 725 million customers. Then he moves on to what China is doing in space, in 5G, militarily, and he says it's moving at a speed we can't even imagine.
0:43 And he says, good news for exporters, the Germans for example, for mercantilist economies. We have a market that will save us from the crisis. Think again, he says. Because it's illusorily liberal. There's a communist party - he says this himself - running the country. And when a subsidiary of Volkswagen - he takes this very example - a subsidiary, a Chinese partner of Volkswagen makes its profits, and God knows it makes plenty, all right, that money doesn't flow back as easily as the Germans in Berlin would like.
1:19 Because the communist party says, how much? Wait, we need money here for the highway going toward Tibet. Or to build two hospitals urgently. You know the Chinese built two 1000-bed hospitals in a week, while we're still stuck. But I'm not telling you jokes. Don't just take my word for it, go check for yourselves. All right? So, I wanted to say, I'm sure some people thought about a brutal change, saying - to sum up the essential point - the people, if we take the measures that interest us, those in power, the people will take to the streets. So we need to find a reason nobody can contest.
1:58 Here we are. That's the real change, unfortunately. That is a change. So how is it going to end? I'm no prophet, I don't speculate about the future. And I don't know - I'd like to give the floor back to Bertrand, ask him if he has any thoughts on how this period we're living through will end. No, but you put it very well - to my mind, this isn't a health crisis. For me, it's a much broader crisis that encompasses the social, the political, and it even raises ethical and moral questions, all of what's happening.
2:35 And that governments are using health as a pretext to settle their own little interests, their own little affairs - that's what we don't want to see, or rather, that's what's being hidden from us. Of course. If we look more precisely at what it is - I'm not a doctor, I'm not a researcher, I don't have much scientific knowledge in medicine or virology.
3:06 But none of us do. Yet if we listen to Raoult, if we listen to Perronne, if we listen to Toussaint, Fouché, we can still ask ourselves some questions about the reality of what this disease actually is. We were made to believe it was like the great plague of 1340, the Spanish flu of 1918, with carts full of the dead in every street, when we know there's a rate of...
3:37 Lethality - I believe they distinguish between lethality and mortality across the general population. I'm speaking their language here. Yes, exactly. But still, there's a rate that's very, very low, and an average age of 64. So when we see that... Let me interrupt you for a second. I know someone who is 86, very close to me, in my family. 86 years old. She had the most severe form of Covid - in the lungs, of course, confirmed by tests, in the intestines, which is one of the most severe forms, and in the liver.
4:13 She doesn't have any of it left now and she's pulled through. Yes, well, that's good, then. And so this crisis is much broader than that. And so, yes, I was saying the average age of death is 84. So indeed, if you have elderly people whose bodies are immunocompromised and don't defend well against viruses, they have much more risk than someone who's 35. And so we know very well which populations are at risk, we know very well about multiple pathologies, comorbidities - Giscard d'Estaing dies at 94, at 94, and we're told it's Covid...
4:52 To know what someone dies of at 94? I don't know. At Véro-Celle, there's a 93-year-old, Covid-19, but still, Covid-19 isn't the cause. So, I would have liked... there are going to be some pre-existing physical conditions before the Covid. Do I know that in some countries, when you have cancer and Covid, the cause of death is listed as cancer? And not Covid. Here, I feel like we've 'Covidized' society everywhere. So that raises some questions about where the truth, the reality, actually lies...
"Conspiracist": an insult that shuts mouths 5:23 Absolutely. There you go, Ayou. So of course, on the other side, they call us conspiracy theorists. You're a conspiracy theorist, you ask two questions in a row. But all the better, because Socrates was a conspiracy theorist, Plato was a conspiracy theorist, Descartes was a conspiracy theorist. If we make the list, we start thinking against the grain of their era, at some point, and they ended up in prison... Galileo, Galileo is a conspiracy theorist. Galileo, Bruno, Giordano Bruno, hunted down, imprisoned, Marx, Rousseau hunted down.
5:54 Well, I'm happy to be part of that crowd rather than the other. If, at some point, we're no longer able in this country to have a slightly different word, a slightly critical thought about what's happening, and they sell us that as the height of democracy... Yes, can I add a word on that? And that China is a dictatorship. China is a dictatorship. Of course. You're in a great democratic country, but you absolutely have to follow the dominant thinking, the reflections we get from the right and that get passed off as the truth.
6:25 Can I make a little parenthetical remark, a side note on the notion of 'conspiracy theorizing'? Yes, go ahead, go ahead. Or rather not on the notion itself, but on the insult it now represents, as you showed well. That is, they shut your mouth right away with that word, which intimidates more than one person. So I tell them, when they say that to me, to think about one very simple thing. The good news is that political analysis has been simplified as never before in recent times. There are now only two political theories. Listen, at least we can find our way.
6:56 And the official theory - if you stray from it by a millimeter, you're a conspiracy theorist. There you go. A mental prison. So everything that used to simply be called opposition, saying we're not being told the truth - that was common enough, in fact those in power have always been questioned, throughout history. The principle of power is not to tell the truth about what it's doing. That's Churchill. Churchill, you see, I'm not going to dig up some dangerous revolutionary with a knife between his teeth. Churchill said, if the people knew what we're preparing in our conferences among rulers, they would storm our palaces and hang us from the nearest lamppost.
7:35 So he's a conspiracy theorist too. That's what Machiavelli did. Of course, you mustn't let yourself be intimidated. Second quote, but from someone incomparably less well-known - a cultural attaché posted in Ivory Coast when I was working there for Hachette's textbook publishing arm. This was back in the 80s. And this cultural attaché, whom I saw regularly for professional reasons, because he was the one paying, thanks to your taxes.
8:10 It was France that financed the back-to-school supplies for Ivory Coast, because there was a regime whose stability we were keen to maintain. So anyway, I would go see the Ivorian Minister of Education, because it was him - it's an independent, sovereign country that chose the textbook it was interested in. And then afterward, to get paid, I would go see our cultural attaché at the French embassy. And one time, he was there with his little daughter. He had a 9-year-old girl who had just started back at the French high school. And the little girl asks him, in front of me, 'Daddy, what's a diplomat?'
8:43 She hears that word every day, the kid. And he gives this wonderful answer: 'A diplomat is someone who lies for the good of their country.' A diplomat's answer. He said it was for the good. Yes, that's a bit like what the former government spokesperson, Ms. Sibeth Ndiaye, said: 'I lie to protect the president.' But of course! I don't know, it's always the same thing. And yet no one calls her a conspiracy theorist. So, lying and politics, well, that's a bit...
9:15 Yes, no, it's frightening. But I tell you, right now we're joking, but let me be more serious. If words like that appear, it means we no longer tolerate the slightest difference, the slightest opposition, the slightest dissonant note in an opinion that they want to bring into line through unanimity. That's when it gets serious, grave. It's rare for France to be unanimous, for heaven's sake. But that's been the creed of Giscard and of Macron too, since Macron said, 'I am of the left and of the right.'
9:45 For me, before Macron, there was the left and the right. We at least had a choice between the two. Macron told us, 'I am everything.' Yes, yes, and at the same time. The 'everything,' in the end, is Mr. Macron himself. He is the left and the right. It's incredible. He's adored by the right and was produced by the left. Well then, that's fine. So there's no more alternative. It's him or chaos. We're quite content with that. It's a bit... We're navigating blind, we don't know. There's a lot of anxiety, stress, and on top of that, there's a lot we don't talk about.
Lockdown, health and environment 10:18 For example, there are people with chronic illnesses, who have delays in surgical procedures, people with pathologies, cancers, cardiovascular diseases, who no longer dare go to the pharmacist, who no longer dare go to the doctor or the specialist. And we haven't tallied up what that amounts to, but it would produce almost as many deaths as Covid-19. Not to mention the general increase in violence, domestic violence, where everyone is on top of each other.
10:53 Well, because there's lockdown and lockdown. There's the palace lockdown. There's the lockdown in public housing at Verbois where there are five people in 25 square meters. Or on my island in the Bahamas. And then there's all the petite bourgeoisie who fled to the countryside as soon as they could because they had a country house, and they spent their lockdown peacefully with a pool and a garden. So that also played a big role, I think, on people's psychological state, people who probably had some pretty terrible thoughts. And I think young people, in particular, are very depressed by this.
11:25 When you're young, you party, you see your friends, etc. In terms of... Do we actually want a society where everyone is stuck at home and we just end up... It's a disaster for young people. A disaster for young people in terms of employment too, first jobs, training. In apprenticeship programs, it's very hard for trainees to find companies willing to take on young people, because they don't know what to do. So everything is blocked. And then the terrible social crisis that's coming - retail, industry.
11:58 So planes are grounded and no one's buying planes anymore. So it's the aerospace industry in Toulouse, it's all the subcontractors behind it, the auto industry. All the subcontractors are being squeezed dry, it's gigantic. It's gigantic. There are 79,000 layoffs planned for spring. The CGT put up a map online tallying the plant closures. There are roughly 80,000 jobs about to disappear in industry. And that's not even counting the small businesses, the very small ones, the craftsmen, the small shopkeepers who are at the end of their rope, on their last legs.
12:32 We don't even have... we can't tally it up yet. It's too early to have figures. And I heard an analysis saying that when we do know, we'll be stunned by the damage done during this period. I also heard - and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this - an interesting analysis from a philosopher who said there's a kind of obsession in our society that's been going on for thirty, forty years, and that's health. There's an obsession with health. And he analyzed it by saying, look at religion before - the questioning we had, the existential anxieties we had about death, about the end, that was religion's job.
13:07 And what took over from that is health issues. And we've all become absolutely obsessed with health. So we no longer wanted religion, we no longer wanted psychoanalysis, we no longer wanted the science that was able to treat things with medication, Prozac, whatever, since today we're into sophrology, that sort of thing, we don't even really know what it is. Alternative medicine. Alternative medicine, things like that. And so the obsession we have today, the death anxieties - I'm no Freudian either, nor a psychoanalyst - but the death anxieties, the terrors, how they get exorcised too, have crystallized around this issue of health.
13:44 And everything touching on the question of health takes on enormous proportions today. It's become one of people's priorities. I'd love to hear you on this. So, I'm delighted you're getting me onto this topic, but not exactly delighted, I'm also worried at the same time, because I'm going to get insulted. Because from health to the environment, it's not far. And people will say, 'Here comes Pagani with his anti-ecology routine.' So let me remind you, I am not anti-ecology, I am for defending the environment.
14:17 I'm serious about that. Just as attached to my environment, to our environment, to mine in particular and to our collective environment, as anyone. Often, I want to defend it against nature. But I won't even press the point, because as long as it isn't taught in elementary school as a basic distinction - nine times out of ten, sometimes - just go for a walk once in a while and look around you, to find actual nature you'd have to get up early. Because the countryside around Saint-Dizier, the meadows surrounded by forests, the sawmills, the cellulose factories made from wood, all that, the fields - a field is anything but natural, it's sweat, it's intelligence, it's...
15:02 Careful! Well, I won't even mention the built heritage, France's being among the richest, isn't it? I mean, a Romanesque chapel in a wheat field near your home - I mean, neither the field nor... The Abbey of Trois-Fontaines that you'd visited, that we saw. Yes, that was a marvel. The Cistercian abbey. I'm still in awe, it was a marvel. And across the way, not far off, there was the château with its park along the road. Ah, the Château du Grand Jardin. There you go, in a very different style.
15:35 There you go, and then simply the little Venice of Joinville, I mean, all of that... The great lake. All of that presupposed a thousand years of human effort to push back raw natural conditions and produce an environment more harmonious and less merciless than the one found there originally. When all of that was marshland, I mean, let's not forget, forests and swamps, not that long ago. So that's why, seriously, I'm almost afraid to answer you.
Freud, salt and the fantasy of poisoning 16:08 But I've been telling young people for a long time now - and here I really am speaking to young people, because they're starting to wear me out. Including my best friends, that is, my followers, people who do me the kindness of being very loyal to my talks, etc. And when we're at a restaurant, because we see each other often, they tell me, 'Don't eat that, it's not organic.' They're looking after my health. I tell them, 'Listen, when I was your age, it was only old people who talked, who said, watch out, that's bad for your liver, that...'
16:39 'for your cholesterol, that's not good. Oh dear, you're eating too much salt, your kidneys are going to seize up.' Which is medical nonsense, by the way, isn't it? In my view there are reasons. You mentioned Freud rather quickly just now. He really ought to be rehabilitated. No, no, but anyway, Freud and Marx - if Freud and Marx have been executed over the last half-century, there are reasons for that. It's since the bourgeoisie, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, found itself without a rival.
17:09 I mean. Careful, let's not go down that road, it's complicated. But let me take one specific thing. It's Freud and salt. Isn't it? You've all heard it. Oh, you pile on tons of salt, your kidneys are going to seize up, you know, you hear that. It's nonsense. Ask any doctor, it has nothing to do with anything. On the other hand, you are the salt of the earth, the salt of life. Salt isn't necessary. Biologically, you can live without salt - it's a bit sad.
17:41 That's what it means, 'you are the salt of the earth' - it's a superb phrase. It means salt is that little extra, it's pleasure. And in fact we're censoring your pleasure when you shake the salt shaker over your steak. There, let me close that parenthesis. So, as you know, it used to only be old people who talked about health all the time, especially about what you ingest. Because I'll stay with Freud, you see - I'm not in class struggle here, for heaven's sake. Freud is rather a conservative type, a bourgeois, a Viennese, but lucid.
18:16 And, and it's well known in psychoanalysis, long before we talked about pollution, ecology, that if there's one fantasy deeply rooted in man, and especially in middle-class man, it's precisely the fantasy of ingestion, of poisoning, and of injection. Look, all thrillers play on the syringe, you know, the thing they inject into you that turns you into an imbecile, a monster, whatever, an animal, a fly - there's everything you want in there, among filmmakers.
18:52 So you see, already playing on those registers is unhealthy. I'm not saying don't take care of your health, but between us, what's obscene is that these people who talk about health every day and denounce things, their average life expectancy is 85 years. I've lived in countries - in Niger, life expectancy is 42, there's not a single factory. There are so few it's not even worth mentioning. There are Coca-Cola bottling plants, yes, like everywhere in Africa. There are a few uranium mines, but controlled, by our own powers.
19:23 I don't know. I'm being very serious. If it were talk about health for the sake of our health, why not? But no, the worry, the fantasy, the constant preoccupation with the body has other reasons, much more unconscious than rational. That's how I answer your question. What's scandalous is that a power whose task should be education - I don't know - should not let a population lock itself into fantasies. What's more dangerous for the fate of a people than being locked into collective delusions?
19:59 We know where that leads. It leads to catastrophes and the collapse of regimes. I'm thinking of the wars of religion, things like that. Or the terrors of the year 1000, at the end of the Middle Ages. The era when they burned all the black cats, you know, or even all cats sometimes, because cats were diabolical, they brought bad luck. Anyway. So this mania for health, as you rightly noted, has become - and we can date it - how long has it been going on?
20:29 It's not even been two generations. Not even. Yes, that's interesting. A generation and a half - it came along with the ecological concern. Look closely. Even I, 30 years ago, 20 years ago, I don't remember it being this obsessive, this obsessed. Exactly. That's why I'll end my answer on this point, on the linkage, drawing a connection between the health issue and the environmental one, in political discourse, I mean - not in reality. As you rightly said, I'm not a doctor.
20:59 I don't know if Raoult is right or wrong. I'm not into conspiracy theories, nor am I going to say Raoult is, as his opponents put it, a charlatan. Let's not be ridiculous. I did look, as much as I could, at the American ranking of the world's best infectious disease specialist - he simply holds first place. No small thing. Well, there you go. Now, that doesn't mean he isn't full of himself, saying things that aren't true. I don't know, I'm not a specialist. Well, given the level of complexity of science today, everyone has their own opinion on it - oh well, he's well-read.
Forty years of environmentalism have disciplined the French 21:32 I read in a magazine that, etc. There are 67 million doctors in France right now. But of course, soon there will be more doctors than football coaches in France, to borrow a famous image. So, there you go. I'll stress this last point. If the French government, our government - and here I'm speaking specifically about France - was able to bring such a rebellious people to heel, which was Europe's nightmare, 'oh no, the French are going to act up again,' all right...
22:03 If it managed to bring such a rebellious people into line, and has been doing so for quite some time already, using the legitimate pretext of health itself - if it was able to discipline the French people so easily, it's because it had been prepared over more than 40 years of environmentalism. Because how many times have you heard people say, don't eat this, it's not organic, that, etc.
22:33 There, there are ingredients. Now I can't wander through a supermarket anymore without seeing people lose an hour looking at labels as if they were chemists. I mean, what do they know? Because even what's written on the labels is truthful. I can say whatever you want. I learned from a specialist at Rungis, in distribution, who told me — my poor fellow, when I was talking to him about Corsican sheep's cheese, well anyway, a real discussion between Frenchmen — and he told me, you're allowed to put 'pure goat' when there's 60% goat.
23:07 You can put 40% cow's milk and still label it pure goat. On the other hand, you're not allowed at that point to put 100% pure goat. You see, we don't know all these details. But that doesn't stop us from watching labels like hawks while we're buying products that are controlled nowhere. Nowhere. Food is also controlled — I say this because for 50 years we've been saying we're eating garbage. Go explain that to those I saw starving to death in Niger, in Mali, who are still starving to death. My brother did reforestation work in Ivory Coast.
23:38 Careful now, I'm no longer in Niger and Mali, I'm in the richest country in the region. There, it rains. But there were reforestation projects, as they say, and they worked there with a labor force that was essentially immigrant — not Ivorians but Burkinabè. You know the structural conflicts between the north and south of the region. He told me that every day, what the farm workers on his reforestation site ate on average — imagine a somewhat Amazonian setting with snakes, whatever you like — from time to time it was a plantain.
24:17 What's a plantain? It's a banana like that, about 30 cm long, that's starchy, not very good as a fruit, but when cooked in embers has a slightly sweet, starchy, filling side. No sauce, nothing. I'm not even talking about meat. One a day, that's it, in wealthy Ivory Coast. Do you think that guy's health, his life expectancy, is any less threatened than that of someone who buys—
The prefix "pro": no progress without a purpose 24:50 I don't own shares in Franprix. And of course, I too preferred, I used to prefer my grandmother's cooking to what I... who's no longer with us. Sadly, grandmothers are ephemeral, unlike what we buy at Franprix. But wait, if we make an effort of memory, back in the days of pantries, how much food poisoning was there? Look at the newspapers of the time. It's frightening. It was frightening, all of it. Look it up. Don't take my word for it. That makes me think there's a small notion you're fairly precise about that we haven't discussed, and which — you see — comes from the title of our little gathering: Progress.
25:31 And since you're saying that indeed, is it in fact hard for oneself to measure progress? And that it's only once we no longer have it — once we notice the hospital doesn't work anymore, so I can't go get my MRI — that we realize we did have... progress was the good old days. It was the good old days, etc. And when we're deprived of something — whether it's happiness, love, work, freedom—
26:02 And then we realize that indeed, what I had acquired, that form of progress — can you tell us how we can understand... We said earlier that revolutions aren't necessarily progress, measurable progress, at least not for everyone. They can also be regressions, they can be steps backward. And how can one, for oneself perhaps, judge that?
26:33 Oh no, well, I'm glad you asked that question. So I'll answer as truly seriously as I can. I mean, I'll try to answer philosophically, because it's a deeply philosophical question. Why? Because of the prefix. Pro. Not everyone has studied Latin, but you find 'pro' in 'program,' in 'proposition' — it means for, with a view to, for the purpose of. So to decide whether or not there's progress, you have to know what end is being pursued.
27:04 Yes, let me give another example. Is rain a catastrophe or is it useful? You see, the question doesn't mean anything by itself. It depends whether you ask a beach operator — for him it's a catastrophe. See? He's got no more customers — or a farmer who awaits it like the Messiah during a drought. There you go. So these judgments, what we call value judgments in philosophy, are ones that presuppose an end beforehand, and it's in relation to that end that we say this is good, this is bad, this is progress, this is a setback.
27:37 I'm now for progress. What you said very well is that it's not linear, there are regressions, and God knows there are some. Let's not forget that when Germany moved from the Weimar Republic, which was a bourgeois democracy, to the Third Reich, we can't say that was progress. Well, even though they still spoke of a 'new order.' But — and I insist on this — looking closely at this prefix, there is a progress you can imagine as linear, abstractly, that is, by taking the resultant, as we say in science, of the comings and goings, the rises and falls — there is somewhere still a general tendency, an arrow, isn't there?
28:29 And so, how was it decided? I can't say that we've progressed morally, aesthetically, compared to cave-dwelling man and his admirable cave paintings. I can't say that the barbarism unleashed in the 20th century, as never before, in the most technically developed region in the world, Europe, — I can't say that's moral progress. You see, I'm answering your question seriously. It is a question — yes, it's serious.
Technical progress and the neutrality of the means 28:59 So there is one domain — the only one — where we can speak of progress in an objective, measurable, and consensual way, and we never do it. It's technical progress. Technical. Because that's measurable. How much time does it take for me to have something to eat? Do you realize how much time it used to take before? You spent your whole life earning your living. At this very moment, in Australia, there are Aborigines who walk eight days, which we mentioned earlier.
29:31 There, there are Aborigines who walk eight days across appalling deserts. Among the most scorching in Australia, to go fetch a root that will let them survive for a month, an enormous root they bring back. There, I've seen it — of course, I'm deliberately taking extremes because it lets us see the problem better. There are still other domains though. Science progresses. Yes, but it's linked. When I say technology, I'm thinking of technology in the industrial sense, not the craft techniques I admire — flaked pebbles, or houses on stilts from the lake-dwelling era.
30:11 I'm talking about the progress that took the detour through the scientific, through theory, and that multiplied its power many times over, especially from... Your question is interesting because it lets us periodize history. In the 16th, 17th century, in the transition from one to the other, we have what's called the scientific revolution. Galileo, and so on, culminating with Newton, up to roughly the 20th century. A century later, we have the industrial revolution, that is, the practical application of the achievements of the scientific revolution.
30:47 The steam engine wouldn't have been possible without the calculations of minimum and maximum pressure. Of course, all that becomes... There you go. Only, what... I said... The only progress that can't be denied is technical progress. But is that progress in the value sense I was talking about earlier, the moral sense? Does it bring us closer to the good? Not necessarily. Why? You see, I'm trying to be honest. Because what does technical progress bring us?
31:18 What does it multiply? What does it increase? The power of our means. And means never make a politics, nor a morality, nor a law, on their own. Means are just means. Let me give a very simple example to start. It's the knife. With the same knife, I can stab my neighbor — as the tough guys in the housing projects say — I can kill him. But I can also save his life if he has peritonitis, if I know how to use it, with the same knife.
31:50 So you must never put the means, the technique, on trial, as people relentlessly do in a certain environmentalism that isn't mine. Because I, again, am... Like Martin Heidegger. Sorry? Like Charles Heidegger. Heidegger — that is, the most arid of philosophers — he never stops. And what I forgive him the least for isn't having had reactionary ideas in the 1930s. The Germans were coming out of a misery, a crisis. Maybe I would have been worse than him. I try to be intellectually honest. All right? Caught up in the atmosphere, etc.
32:21 Because educated people are not immune to propaganda. In Heidegger's time, in the 1930s anyway, the greatest physicist in Europe, no doubt, was Heisenberg, who was known for his sympathies for the Nazi regime. He's one of the fathers of quantum theory. We have to stop thinking, like some leftists do, that the right is just my thick-necked brother-in-law. No! It's more dangerous than that, unfortunately. There's almost no left left among us.
32:51 Meanwhile, the right has been at work for 50 years. We shouldn't be too surprised we've come to this. Well. They threw identity politics at us to make us forget class struggle. I repeat: men against women, old against young, gays against straights. You see what I mean? Precisely, isn't that exactly where the notion of progress matters too? I'm thinking of social progress. Well, there we go. There we go. You see, it's measurable too after all. Technical progress is measurable.
Social progress, robots and deindustrialization 33:22 Scientific progress that enables technical progress, and through which technique becomes technology. Fine. But again, that's not enough to make something good or bad. Because it can be put to use either way. Look, with the atom, we cure cancer or we raze Nagasaki. So we can speak of the axiological neutrality of the means. The more powerful the means, the more evil I can do. Let's be clear. But also the more good I can do.
33:53 With the means we have now, we could turn the Sahara into an orchard and the Amazon into a vegetable garden. I'm not saying I want that. I'm not saying I want that. We'll always need to keep some part wild for our enjoyment. Let me give another example. I'm strolling through one of your forests. You have very beautiful ones. It's one of your resources, in fact, at the very least. And then Bertrand next to me says, no, no, don't look left and right, there are no more animals here. There's been a massacre. The hunters killed everything. The forest loses a bit of its charm for me.
34:23 Oh yes, I'm an environmentalist too. But where I'm not an ecologist, where I'm not 'eco,' where I'm truly concerned about the environment, is that I regret there are no wild animals. Not for the sake of some cosmic balance, as if every species were indispensable. If we could get rid of the mosquito that gave me malaria three times, that wouldn't bother me. I'm white, I have Nivaquine, and I'm well fed. But I mean it remains the leading cause of death throughout the whole southern hemisphere. I don't know. Every year.
34:53 And over there, there isn't... Well. We're not proclaiming the end of the world. We're right there. So it's not out of concern for preserving species that I regret not seeing a deer or a wild boar cross the road. It's for my own enjoyment, for my fun, because as human beings we need to stay in contact with what that wonderful Rimbaud, despite his youth, wisely called 'our old savagery.'
35:24 Our old savagery, which we will carry until the end of our lives. For I'm no naturalist, as you can see, but I'm aware that until the end of my life I'll have to eat to live. So there is always a natural, animal part within us that shouldn't be denied. We have an old kinship with the animal, which should remain a companion and not a victim. There, of course, I fully agree with those who want to limit animal suffering. So that's how I answer, or how I steer the answer, on progress, toward other, much more fundamental questions.
36:01 As you say, there's social progress, but as you said, 'social' means we've decided that technical progress would serve social progress. But what does our government say? The opposite. Oh yes, they lay you off, you understand, there are robots. That's exactly today's news. But wait, when the industrial revolution happened, it was the age of machines. It created hundreds of millions of jobs. And now, we're told it only eliminates them, it no longer creates any.
36:32 What's this story? But it's very good news if there are robots. Oh yes, I agree. I'm in favor of self-checkout machines. There, there, I'm speaking to the younger ones who haven't seen. I don't think Bertrand has seen — he's still much younger than me. Lucky for him — but I don't think you've seen the ticket-punchers in the metro. You're too young. No, but I know Gainsbourg's song. There, there, 'Poinçonneur des Lilas.' Except it wasn't just at Lilas, it was in every metro station, you'd see a woman. It's not that you saw her varicose veins. Anyway, well, a woman, deliberately, poor thing, who could have been our grandmother, who was always two years from retirement.
37:08 She had no other resources, the poor old woman up in her seventh-floor maid's room. She spent her whole day underground, and believe me, the hygiene was disgusting compared to today's metro. Believe me, you had to remember what the smell of the metro was like back then, given the standard of living. She spent her time punching your ticket to make sure you had the right to get on the train. There were thousands of little confetti scraps on the ground. Don't you think it's progress that you now have automatic gates, and that you punch your own ticket as you go through, all the same, all the same.
37:46 So since when — how can we let people say every day, yes it's a shame, there's a human problem there, we're going to sacrifice thousands of jobs, but on the other hand technical progress, we can't go against it, it's a pointless fight — but let someone prove to me that technical progress must mean, must imply, social devastation. Yes, there's no cause-and-effect relationship. No, we have to move from one mode of production to another, but we're very careful not to train people, and God knows there are thousands of young people who'd love to learn a new trade.
38:23 I don't know, 3D design, for instance. There are things with a future. Yes, well, Engels — we talk about the Jenny, I don't know if you know what that is. Sure, the machine, the machine. The spinning jenny, the machine. They used to do their little work in their corner, and as soon as that machine appeared, they got angry. They all ended up unemployed, massive unemployment — but it's not because of the technique itself, it's the bourgeois capitalist mode of production that made it so that a large part of the weavers found themselves without work and fell into the sub-proletariat. Well, let's stay with textiles since you use that example.
39:10 In '53 or '54, I'm a bit unsure, in any case, the Queen of England, Elizabeth, very young, very newly crowned — well, her crown, her status as queen was very recent — comes on a visit to France, to Lille, to Roubaix. No, she doesn't even come to Paris. She goes to visit the great, the great textile complexes of the region.
39:44 At the time, it was, I don't know, Boussac, I'm saying that at random, for those who remember, the fabrics, there you go. They were huge. You know there's nothing left of all that. It's like the hosiery industry in Troyes, in Champagne. You'd say it was a textile region too. But of course, I know, Colmar, in Alsace, over there too. On the other side of the Vosges, I mean, there's nothing left except, I don't know, I was told there are only 4,500 people left in textiles now. There used to be nearly 100,000. It's unbelievable. Why?
40:14 Because meanwhile, in Bangladesh, a thousand textile workers die in a building fire over there. Not only is it cheap, but even when they burn, it doesn't cost much in damages. Over there, there's a billion people waiting for a job. So it's really the responsibility of our business owners to choose how to manage technical progress. Opening up capital, opening the files on capital — well, to whom it concerns. So again, if someone was killed, murdered with a knife, don't send the knife to prison.
Child labor in Marx's Capital 40:48 While leaving the other one free. That's how I'll approach your question. So on social progress, we can measure it too, for example, through child labor. But of course! Since you bring that up... Engels' descriptions, of the manufactures or the kids of 8 years old found in mines, in commissions... but even 8 years old, that was already an old one. No, no, I'm not joking. You absolutely must read up on this. It's not propaganda. Marx reproduces reports from English labor inspectors.
41:23 Oh yes, no, but that's very... Yes, it's journalism. I recommend to everyone listening to us to read Capital. There are very difficult passages, but some are very clear and stunning to read. There's a whole chapter called, in Book 1, 'primitive accumulation.' It's extraordinary. We learn a great deal, and it makes us think of today, for a theory we're told is outdated. For example, he shows that industrial capitalism — the chapter is called primitive accumulation—
41:56 Inside it there's a subchapter I recommend even more, called industrial capitalism, since that's the birth of what we're living through. He says it could only begin because of colonization and world trade. And we now talk as if globalization were something recent, since you're talking to me about the world before, the world after — as if it's only today that we'd have globalization. No, Marx says globalization had to be achieved first. I'm thinking especially of the report on the English who ruined the Indian textile industry, in the Indies, I mean, to keep Manchester's cotton mills running.
42:31 Before, people didn't say a cotton fabric, they said 'an indienne' in the 19th century. The fabric. A dress like that, they called it 'an indienne.' So much so, because it was India that produced the cotton. So Marx shows under what conditions production takes place. And there, on children, you have to see the struggles, the back and forth, between the courts, the law that gets passed, how it gets circumvented. And when the law, I don't know, in '52, says you have to go from 14 to 13 hours a day, that was already progress.
43:12 Do you know what the unanimous response of the child-employers was? The economy is going to collapse. It's in the 14th hour that all the profit is made. Oh yes. Right? Now it's 8 hours, and it's never made so much. There you go. So it's doing quite well collapsing. That can be measured. We can say that can be measured. Of course. Like everything linked to the world of technicality, which is after all produced by man. And so I think you're bringing us back to three fairly specific things again.
The accursed triangle and cultural relativism 43:46 All of today's news, the whole world as it is today, namely the universal, the... Ah yes, that's what's called the cursed triangle. And humanism. Is it possible that all this, everything we are, everything we're living through today, everything being prepared for us, comes a little bit from the disappearance from the landscape of these three notions — the triangle, progress, and the notion of the universal.
44:17 And that has, all the same... And of man, of humanism. Yes, of humanism. And that does have precise intellectual roots. That's why I was saying the right has been at work, there's been an ideological battle. Yes, I was thinking of Foucault, who relentlessly attacked this triangle that I call the cursed triangle — cursed by those who rule over us. What's evil, what's bad? It's man — look closely, nature is wonderful, every animal species has its role to play, it's extraordinary, soon we'll be saying the lion and the gazelle cooperate.
44:51 Well, let's move on. But... Half the planet because there are too many of us. Yes, yes, yes, that's it. Those who say that never count themselves among the 'too many.' Because in their place, I'd commit suicide to make room for others if they really think there are too many of us. All right, let's move on. This is going to get me riled up, this Malthusianism. Nazism always begins that way. But anyway, let me go back. Yes, when Nazism talks about 'living space,' it's because it thinks that in the space we're in now, before we've yet conquered the rich plains of Ukraine and Russia, well, we're too many.
45:23 Careful, these are notions. Right, so I'm coming back to my triangle, if I may. I haven't registered it with SACEM, don't worry. But I mean, yes, this accursed triangle, cursed by our powers-that-be, these three notions that have been completely discredited by dominant discourse since the beginning of the 1970s. That's quite a while now. That's 30 years in the 20th century, plus 20 more, that's half a century. In peacetime.
45:56 This triangle, what is it? I'll repeat it after you: it's man, I just said it. Everything is fine in nature except man, who is a catastrophe. As soon as he moves, it's a disaster, a problem. I'll come back later to the contradictions this brings, all that. There's man, there's the universal — but no, what you're saying is valid for us, but among the Bororos or the Bantus, it's not like that at all. Relativism, you know, of cultures. Cultural traditions must be respected. There's no truth.
46:26 I remember when I was in Niger, I was working on traditional music thanks to your taxes, because it was the European Union that was funding it. Thank you, I've never been paid so well. Sorry for the parenthesis. I had a Nigerien colleague, an ethnomusicologist as they say, who was concerned about preserving a bit of his country's traditional music. And he told me that when Islam settled in Niger, in Africa, brought by the Arabs crossing the desert, they burned, they made bonfires, mounds of traditional musical instruments.
47:03 Because they were tied, he told me, to pagan rites, including cannibalism. I know some people who'd be ready to restore cannibalism as long as we're respecting traditions. Me, I'm for preserving heritage, you know me, I'm delighted with, what do you call it, the abbey? The Abbey of Trois Fontaines. Of Trois Fontaines. It's such a beautiful name that I forget it every time. Of course, but a sorting-out has to be done. Likewise, there are animal species that I hope we should cultivate, that we should develop, protect, which are endangered, and others that we should exterminate.
Descartes: to become masters and possessors of nature 47:41 They're a source of appalling diseases, and they're proliferating, and they're not at all endangered. So that's to say this discourse that tends to demonize man and to say that progress is a relative notion and that, in fact, things were better before. And we come back to the before and after. It's curious. Those who talk about the world of tomorrow at the same time have a cult of the day before yesterday. It's curious.
48:12 So that doesn't only concern the right. Look at someone like Michéa, who isn't an idiot. And often he induces, like that, an illusion that all misfortunes would soon come from progress. So here we are, right? Ever since a certain Descartes said — he tells of his education, he says 'I found myself,' it's a man of learning; when he was educated, we're still in the Renaissance where the Church plays a big role in schooling.
48:47 'I found my mind cluttered with a heap of prejudices, and I had more doubts at the end of my studies than at the beginning.' Well, I'll skip all that, it's famous. And he makes an exception for mathematics, in whose history he played a major role. When you make a coordinate axis, it's called the Cartesian axes. It was he who worked that out, by uniting, as he says, the geometry of the ancients and the algebra of the moderns. The geometry of the Greeks and the algebra of the Arabs. So again he says, 'I was especially fond of mathematics' — I'm quoting him word for word — 'because of the certainty and evidence of their reasoning.'
49:20 Well, for now we get the impression there's a kind of rigor, a play of the mind, that it's intellectual. 'Because of the certainty and evidence of their reasoning, but I did not yet notice their true use. And thinking that they should serve the mechanical arts to make men's work easier, I was astonished that, their foundation being so solid, nothing more elevated had been built upon it.' In short, when it comes to playing mind games, among gentlemen we do equations, but when it comes to vital problems — law, morality, politics, health — that's where we should use math, and we build nothing on it.
50:02 There you go, that's already the case. Whereas if we did it, he says — and this is where his famous formula comes in — 'to render man, thanks to it, thanks to techniques, masters and possessors of nature.' But say that today and you get lynched. Nowadays, that's death. You get lynched. We get lynched. And so that people don't think I'm some diehard Marxian, attached to productivism, right, and thus also a lackey of capital — because our environmentalists, I distinguish them from true friends of the environment, are convinced that the enemy is productivist, whereas capital gave that up long ago.
50:42 It's not productivism that is its obsession. It prefers to make financial profit, to take wealth that's here and move it there, but not to create new wealth. When wealth is new, it gets vampirized privately, by shareholders, you know all that, we know it if we think about it a bit. So it's been a long time since capitalism — it's no accident that it throws us Greta Thunbergs in the media or things like that — it's because that suits it. When you want to put millions of people out of work, it's in your interest to spread an ideology of degrowth.
The universal against identities 51:17 That's Michéa, Michel, a bit on that. But of course, I won't say more about it, if you like. But that answers the question of how to situate the problem of progress. Again, I'm not starry-eyed about progress. The Third Reich is not progress compared to the Weimar Republic. We agree on that. Pétain is not progress compared to the Third Republic. We must be vigilant. But we must also know that we have goals to set for ourselves. And there I come back to the third vertex of the triangle: the universal.
51:48 We're fed up now with being divided by genders. You know, you can feel it's catching on. And then, within genders, let's isolate the female gender. Within lesbians, dominated lesbians, dominant lesbians — you no longer know where you stand. Meanwhile, the MEDEF is twiddling its thumbs. Because when we say 'Madame la ministre,' oh he says, these are changes I love. It hasn't cost me a single euro, a change like that. I'm not against it. I've always found it a bit odd to say 'Madame la ministre.' I'm not taking a stand on the substance.
52:20 But still, the fact that we now privilege everything — let me say a philosophical, ontological word — everything that is not due to history, to labor, to human initiative, but that is a matter of birth, so to speak, to go quickly: skin color, sex — you see, that we privilege that, already, it's troubling. It's not clear. Africans, when they're suspicious, say 'your story there isn't clear.' Well, you see, in that sense it means someone's hiding something from us and preparing a bad move against us.
52:53 When we fight over a notion — we thought these notions had been discredited since the end of the last war and the carnage they entailed, good grief. You open the books of the period, they were full of notions like Caucasians, the... You know, when I was a child, there were still geography books dating from before the war that told you there are the Indo-Europeans, there are the Semites, and then there are the Hamites. Do you know the Hamites? A bit less well-known, huh? Doesn't ring a bell. Lucky you've forgotten it. H-A-M-I-T-E.
53:23 Do you know who that referred to? No. Well, Egypt of the Pharaohs. You're not going to tell me that it was 'wogs' who created history. That's not possible, it's unbearable. Especially since the Egyptians were developed, and what a magnificent civilization, while we Gauls were in smoke-filled huts. Right? So they invented out of whole cloth a race that never existed, called the Hamites. To say, well, still not Semites, you see? These identity stories, they never end.
53:53 It's imaginary. And imaginary, I do mean imaginary — someone says to me, what do you mean, imaginary? Excuse me, but a Black person, a white person, that's still real. Yes! But what's also real is that if I have a car accident and I'm hemorrhaging and I'm blood type O positive, it's better for me to have an African, even a very Black one, as they say in Abidjan, give me his O positive than a white man like me, even a Corsican, of a different blood type, send me to kingdom come and the cemetery. So let's be clear, let's stick to the real differences — those aren't the decisive ones, and yet we dwell on them all the time.
54:29 There you go, that's why — I mean, I got jumped on when I was worried to see the demonstrations that took place when there was the vile police repression in the United States. Well, there was — I'm speaking in the past, it's chronic. A guy who's Black doesn't have time to take out his driver's license before he's already shot, I mean, well. Except that in France, all of a sudden, they made it a fight of Blacks against whites in the demonstrations. It immediately became identity-based.
55:00 And that's why I brought up, I'll mention it in passing, the file of the immense singer, a prodigious bass, named Paul Robeson, a Black American. I say it because everyone's forgotten him. In the 1920s, he was the first African-American — I say Black, that's not politically correct, but I'll be trendy. Africans aren't stupid, they say 'the whites,' they don't say 'the Euro-Caucasians' or whatever. So Paul Robeson was a prodigious bass, put it on YouTube, Paul, like the first name, Robeson, R-O-B-E-S-O-N.
55:37 Right? You listen, it's phenomenal, his voice — he's the one who made a song almost everyone knows, 'Ol' Man River,' a worldwide hit. A Communist Party militant, that's why we don't talk about him anymore. He went on tours, he was a great basketball player, all that, he toured in American football — sorry — he toured in Europe, and once he gave a concert in front of a mine that was threatened with mass layoffs in Wales.
56:10 The trains were packed throughout Great Britain with miners coming to hear him. These were white people and they said 'your struggle is the same as ours, African-Americans.' Whereas now people say it's whites who cause the misfortune of Blacks, as if it were you and me, Bertrand. Right? Because of the color of our skin, they claimed that Africa was dominated. So there, these identity quarrels that occupy every media panel. Everyone has the right to oppose everyone else, as long as it isn't class struggle.
Pagani sans détour and popular philosophy 56:40 Because class struggle unites, it federates. Absolutely. Well, Dominique, let's wrap up if we can wrap up. But I'd still like to mention that you brought out a book, well, you brought out a book, 'Pagani sans détour,' quite recently, well, about six months ago, no? Credit must be given right away where it's due. Let's not let people think Bravo m'apparaisse — I lent a hand.
57:13 It's one of my listeners who was kind enough to ask my permission to put my lectures into writing. There you go. It's incredible. He did a job that... It must have been quite a task, though. He skipped my digressions — you know I make a lot of them — but he skipped all that, he did real work, he didn't just transcribe like a stenographer. So, I pay tribute to him, right? His name is Alexis Manago, and you can find his book at Éditions Delga, it's called 'Oui, Pagani, sans détour.' I'm the one who suggested the title. That's the only thing of mine in it.
57:44 So, I recommend listeners refer to this book, which is really an introduction to philosophy. What's good with Dominique is that he makes things accessible — things that may seem inaccessible — he makes them accessible, and there's also a progression that unfolds as you read the book, and I think it's for someone who doesn't have much training in philosophy, or none at all, but who wants to get into it. Absolutely, absolutely.
58:14 I care a lot about what you're saying. I had the chance to teach in countries where French isn't even the mother tongue — I come back to sub-Saharan Africa — where there's nothing in the huts, no books, the father can't afford to continue and do the teacher's job for the kid, you see, you're forced to lay everything out plainly. It's an immense service they did me. In what I pass on, I strive to speak in a way that hooks both someone with an agrégation in philosophy and a guy who stopped at the BEPC and is, well, either working in a factory or dealing drugs, I don't care, that's his business.
58:50 In any case, so that it's accessible, as you say. And I'll finish on that, my little extension here, I'm playing a bit of a traveling salesman for Alexis's book — well, I fought to sell Hachette's books, 'the octopus,' as it's called in the trade, so I have every right to advertise for a more democratic publisher. So let me specify, it's called 'Initiation à la philosophie.' Yes, meaning I know people who said, I bought another copy for my little sister because she's taking the bac.
59:20 It's perfectly, it's especially geared toward the philosophy exam of the bac. There, I'll mention that in passing. Yes, yes, well, but what I often answer is that Socrates didn't have a philosophy degree, he didn't have some 30-years-plus-bac diploma of... Well, there you go. And that everyone is capable of... He didn't write. There you go, well, please. 'Let us hasten to make philosophy popular,' said Diderot. There you go, we're in Diderot's country, Haute-Marne. Absolutely. So that fits very well into this framework.
59:50 Diderot, that's Langres, isn't it? That's Langres, yes. Ah yes, that's the southern Haute-Marne, not... I think there's even a Diderot high school in Langres. Absolutely, so there we go, we have a few philosophers around here. And then, so, recommend this book warmly, and then there's a scoop you're going to give us. So, to follow on Aymeric Monville's channel, Musicosophie, it's absolutely... Ah no, there you go. Because, well, he did talk a bit about music just at the end.
1:00:23 I wanted to say too that American, United States music — not the whole heritage it owes — I mean American, I know it wasn't very rock'n'roll, I know, but in any case, when you see... No, but it's true that the African-American source is inexhaustible. Those who had huge success in the '60s, everything they owe — well, the fanbase that's missing, moreover, that there's been — to blues, rhythm and blues, and all that gospel music. And even beyond, of course. ...invites me, is that there's a...
1:00:53 h...
