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Table of contents :
The "war on the virus" is a war
1.
"Evil must be done all at once, so that those to whom it is done do not have time to savor it," Machiavelli advised.
2.
3.
The conspiracy
1.
2.
to manage life, but to proliferate life, to manufacture life, to manufacture the monster, to manufacture - at the limit - uncontrollable and universally destructive viruses.
3.
The unreality that we live is not
1.
The press should be committed to ensuring that official messages are given priority and that false messages are suppressed, including through technology. [...] For their part, the press should commit to ensuring that official messages are prioritized ...
2.
"The purpose of restraint measures can be summed up in two words: civil security and public order. Nothing underlines better the inveterate nature of quarantines and their persistence in the architecture of public health
The counter-revolution of answers2020
1.
2.
The Cold War never ended
1.
2.
3.
4.
"Alongside the chemical and hydrocarbon industries, biology, construction and the automobile industry, the nuclear industry has largely contributed to the definition and establishment of a disciplinary regime that constitutes an advanced phase of conf...
"The idea would be that most people spend their lives in narrow steel boxes. The four walls would be television screens, stereoscopic images of course. People could
This world is dual, as are
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
"While the rationality of the Cold War may have lost its
1.
It is a matter of "maintaining internal security and the stability of public order in Germany".
maximum collaboration."
"It is necessary to contain the widespread feeling of powerlessness by the impression of a strong state interventionism. And who advocates, "We must contain the feeling of diffuse helplessness by the impression of a muscular state interventionism."
2.
"If maintained for a sufficiently long period of time, a fright concerning a vague or unknown element of the subject induces regression. [...] Placing the
3.
The art of governing does not produce
1.
as things? Or what are we going to do with these techniques?"
2.
"We have so radically altered our environment that we must alter ourselves to live within the scale of this new environment."
3.
"The Atomization of Man by Terror", 1946)
quickly, efficiently, or aggressively than these technology platforms; such power makes the people who build, control, and use them all-powerful, too."
Life is nothing biological
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Pitkin. Duhamel lends him these words: "There are perhaps a hundred contagious diseases. The day when we will have, against each of the contagious diseases, an effective vaccine whose application will be rigorously compulsory, we will no longer suffer...
The present hell is only the realization
1.
2.
3.
have stopped participating. Yes, only a Great Punishment that would deprive us for a time of the benefits of civilization is capable of teaching us to live again, because the truths, the phenomena, the certainties that Science gives us are usurped tru...
We will win because we
1.
2.
3.
4.
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CONSPIRACY MANIFESTO

Editions du Seuil 57rue Gast on-Tess ier, Paris x1 xe

ISBN 978-2-02-149567-6

Éditions du Seuil, January 2022www.seuil.com This digital document was produced by Nord Compo.

I'll play it first and tell you what it is later. Miles Davis

TABLE OF CONTENTS Title Copyright The "war on viruses" is a war waged against us 1. The world's blow 2. The conspiracy of the amputees 3. Clarities of terror Conspiracy is the name of the conscience that does not disarm 1. The anti-conspiracy conspiracy 2. As in 1914 3. "Everything conspires The unreality that we are experiencing is not that of a staggering catastrophe, but that of a scenario that is unfolding 1. Twenty years of preparedness 2. The city of the living dead The counter-revolution of responds2020 to the uprisings of 2019 1. The turning point of 2019 2. The recovery

The Cold War never ended 1. The great awakening 2. The long Cold War 3. MK-Ultra for ever 4. Containment theory This world is dual, as are its technologies 1. The climate war 2. The domestic war 3. The world made by DARPA 4. The cool guy as extermination machine 5. French Dualities The nudge is a nudge 1. World Cup Method 2. Efforts to drive the other crazy 3. Dialectic of mystification The art of governing produces only monsters 1 The project to govern everything 2 Democratic design and environmental power 3 Architects and supernumeraries Life is nothing biological 1. "Life is our life's work" (Pfizer) 2. The biopolitical metropolis 3. The dictatorship of vulnerability

4. The Family of Man 5. The disease of health The present hell is only the realization of the old positivist project 1. Statistical monstrosity 2. The Rockefeller Foundation and the molecular vision of life 3. Permanence of positivism We will win because we are deeper 1. Society", a reactionary concept 2. The war on souls 3 The virus of secession and the ongoing schism 4 Conspire, therefore Credits and sources of illustrations

We are conspiracy theorists, like all sensible people from now on. For the last two years that we have been taken for a ride and that we have been getting information, we have had all the necessary hindsight to distinguish "the truth from the falsehood". The ridiculous self-assessments that were supposed to make us fill in were indeed intended to make us consent to our own confinement and to make us our own jailers. Their creators are now congratulating themselves. The staging of a deadly global pandemic, "worse than the Spanish flu of 1918", was indeed a staging. The documents attesting to this have since been leaked, as we shall see below. All the terrifying models were wrong. The blackmail of the hospital-that-cracks was also a blackmail. The concomitant spectacle of the private clinics, almost idle and, above all, far removed from any requisition, was enough to attest to this. But the persistence, since then, in tearing apart hospitals and their personnel provides definitive proof. The furious determination to sweep away any treatment that did not involve experimenting with biotechnologies on entire populations, reduced to the state of guinea pigs, was somewhat suspicious. A vaccination campaign organized by the McKinsey firm and a "health pass" later, the brutalization of the public debate takes on its full meaning. This is probably the first deadly epidemic that people need to be convinced exists. The monster that has been advancing on us for the past two years is not, for the time being, a virus crowned with a protein, but a technological acceleration endowed with a power to tear

calculated. Every day we witness the attempt to realize the insane transhumanist project of convergence of NBIC technologies (Nano-BioInfo-Cognitive). This utopia of complete remaking of the world, this dream of optimal control of social, physical and mental processes does not even bother to hide anymore. One will have had no qualms about imposing as a remedy for a virus resulting from experiments to gain function within the framework of a "biodefense" program another biotechnological experiment conducted by a laboratory whose medical director prides himself on "hacking the software of life. "More of the same" seems to be the last, blind principle of a world that no longer has any. Recently, one of the journalists who populate the Parisian newsrooms asked a somewhat honest scientist about the origin of SARS-CoV-2. He had to admit that the grotesque fable of the pangolin was increasingly losing ground to the hypothesis of tampering by a certain P4 laboratory. And the journalist asked him if "this might not bring water to the mill of conspiracy theorists". The problem with the truth, from now on, is that it gives reason to the conspirators. That's where we are. It was high time to launch a commission of experts to put an end to this heresy. And to restore censorship. When all reason deserts the public space, when deafness increases, when propaganda hardens its ferrule in order to force general communion, it is necessary to take the field. This is what the conspirator does. To start from his intuitions and to launch himself into research. To try to understand how we got here, and how to get out of this small rut of civilizational proportions. To find accomplices and to confront each other. Not to resign ourselves to the tautology of the existing. Not to fear or hope, but to serenely look for new weapons. The fulmination of all the powers against the conspirators proves enough how much reality resists them. The invention of propaganda by the Holy See (the Congregatio de

propaganda fide or Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith) in 1622 did not do the Counter-Reformation any good in the long run. The discredit of the yelpers eventually absorbed their yelping. The conception of life that the engineers of this society have is obviously so flat, so flawed, so erroneous that they can only fail. They will only succeed in devastating the world a little more. That is why it is in our vital interest to drive them out without waiting for them to fail. So we did what any other conspiracy theorist would do: we did the research. This is what we report. If we dare to publish it, it is because we believe that we have reached several conclusions that can shed a harsh and truthful light on the times. We have plunged into the past to elucidate the new, when all the current events tended to lock us in the labyrinth of its eternal present. It was necessary to tell the other side of contemporary history. At the beginning, it was a question of not letting ourselves be imposed by the firepower and panic of the reigning propaganda. To get used to the new regime of things constitutes then the main danger, which contains that to become the parrot of it. To fear the epithet of The "conspiracy theory" is one of them. The debate is not between conspiracy and anti-conspiracy, but within conspiracy. Our disagreement with the defenders of the existing order is not about the interpretation of the world, but about the world itself. We don't want the world they are building - they can keep their scaffolding to themselves, by the way. It's not a matter of opinion; it's a matter of incompatibility. We do not write to convince. It is far too late for that. We write to arm our side in a war that is waged on bodies with souls as its focus - a war that is certainly not between a virus and "humanity" as the spectacular dramaturgy would have it. We have therefore tried to make the truth "manageable as a weapon", according to the

Brecht's advice. We have spared ourselves the demonstrative style, the footnotes, the slow progression from hypothesis to conclusion. We have stuck to the pieces and the ammunition. Consistent conspiracism, which does not serve as an ornament to impotence, concludes with the necessity to conspire, because what is facing us seems determined to crush us. At no moment we will allow ourselves to pronounce on the use that each one can, in such a time, make of his freedom. We will limit ourselves to plasticizing the most cumbersome mental fetters. We don't pretend that a book is enough to get rid of powerlessness, but we also remember that a few good books found on our way have saved us a lot of servitude. The last two years have been trying. They have been trying for all sensitive people, and sensitive to logic. Everything seemed to be done to make us crazy. It has been important to some solid friendships that we could share what we felt and what we thought - our amazement and our revolt. We endured these last years together, week after week. The research followed logically. This book is anonymous because it belongs to no one; it belongs to the movement of social dissociation that is underway. It accompanies what will happen - in six months, in one year or in ten. It would have been suspicious, in addition to being imprudent, if it had authorized itself with a name or several. Or that he should serve any kind of glory. "The difference between a true thought and a lie consists in the fact that the lie logically requires a thinker and not the true thought. No one is needed to conceive the true thought. [...] The only thoughts for which a thinker is absolutely necessary are lies." (Wilfred R. Bion, Attention and Interpretation, 1970)

The "war on the virus" is a war that is led to us 1. The coup of the world. 2. The conspiracy of the amputees. 3. Clarities of the terror.

1.

It was a worldly move. An offensive of all the devils, without limits, lightning, lateral. A drone strike on the world situation, under the midday sun, as the good people of Earth were about to eat. The declaration without warning of a new underlying state of affairs, lame, but ready to enter the scene. One half of the world's population is over - aninstant suspensionof all habits, all certainties, all life. Then a bombardment, a carpet of bombs of every moment - psychological, semantic, computer and informational. And that has not stopped. Communication has always been about war. It was born in this context, it has never been used for anything else, especially in "peacetime". Its truth never lies in what it says, but in the operations it carries out, which are as legible as a secret in the middle of the face. Too bad for those who can't see it. A world that proclaims, throughout series, novels, television games, manuals of know-how, the eminence of duplicity and the charms of deception wants us to take its word for it. This seems preposterous. But the grotesque is only maintained by terror. From then on, it was only a question of intimidation. This has not stopped either. As the perverts only keep their empire by pushing their abuses further, this offensive can only believe itself to be victorious if it continues to advance.

"Evil must be done all at once, so that those to whom it is done do not have time to savor it," Machiavelli advised. In Colombia, the police went to execute opponents in their homes, directly, for the benefit of containment. In India, untouchable people are sprayed with bleach to make them "disinfect". In Sri Lanka, Muslims are forbidden to bury their dead "because of the coronavirus". And since there is no question of cremating them, they are suggested to bury them elsewhere. In Israel, it is the anti-terrorism department that tracks down "contact cases" and the Prime Minister calls the non-vaccinated "time bombs".

In Australia, in mid-August 2021, a high-profile manhunt is launched by the police to find a "Covid fugitive", Anthony Karam, who is not at the address given for his 40s. He is also not quite white, not quite Anglo-Saxon, not quite Protestant. Finally, the police flush out the "enemy of health

He 1is dragged in front of the cameras in a white suit, before being sent to prison in solitary confinement. He is dragged in front of the cameras in a white suit, before being sent to prison in isolation. In Italy, in response to the demonstrations against the green pass now required to work, the government has banned all demonstrations in city centers with the blessing of the trade union centres. People will be able to hold sit-ins in the suburbs, masked and one meter apart. In Hong Kong, Carrie Lam, the chief executive whose general revolt almost killed her, is taking 2019,revenge by organizing In the case of "ambushes" in working-class neighborhoods, the police cordon off the area and control everyone. In Singapore, after the Boston Dynamics robot dog that barked at passersby in May 2020 to respect the "social distance", it is now the Xavier robot that patrols the streets in pursuit of smokers, street vendors and those who dare to gather in more than five, health standard obliges. The French ministerial delegation "for security industries and the fight against cyber threats" is particularly interested in this experimentation. In France, in keeping with the local tradition of administrative inhumanity, we were forbidden to kiss our dying parents one last time before stuffing them, without care or ceremony, into body bags. No funerals. Pick up the ashes in two weeks. In the spring of 2020, an old friend - an old terrorist for sure - was spending the suspended time of confinement with some of her neighbors, reading poems of their taste, of their heart, from their respective windows. It wasn't long before they received a letter from the condo association telling them to stop this scandal: to have a good time "while others die"! This world no longer holds back when it comes to spitting out its rage against everything that still dares to breathe - the young, the poor, the dancing, the carefree, the irregular.

Everywhere, the oppression that was not admitted as political is now displayed as biopolitical. It is the reign of the realized statistic. Everywhere, the rulers dream of China. They are the only ones to dream of it. All this terror is not serious. It is that of a finished world, but which does not want to finish. Which is only this empty will to last. Which is at the mercy of a burst of laughter too contagious. A world whose bankruptcy is exposed every day, between two advertisements for the company of the future and interstellar travel. The terror he deploys is the terror he feels. Shaky people have obviously decided to strike a blow. A big blow to restore their lost authority and declining margins. But nothing can sustainably restore the authority of media and governments, politics and culture, science and industry - of capital in all its forms: every authority burns and re-burns every summer in the planetary infernos. It drowns and is reborn in each unprecedented flood and each monsoon against the clock. It buries itself day after day under the torrent of lies that it has to utter in order to survive. Technology will offer no remedy for the damage of technology. This world will not be able to step over its own dead body. His big move is desperate. The fact that it met with almost no resistance is proof enough of how much nothing holds anymore.

2.

Of course, there is a prestige of terror. There is an aura of power, which hypnotizes. The first pipsqueak to come out of the Attali Commission that we put him as president, looks like a sphinx, and his inconsistency like maestria. Stalin himself, on the cover of the Times, is no1939, longer the beaten-todeath child with webbed feet and a deformed arm that he remains. On the other side, Allen Dulles, the man of the American secret service under eight presidents, the director of the CIA whose head Kennedy had and who in return had Kennedy's head, is suddenly no longer the clubfoot he was as a child when he chased women. This is true for the least "chief", of a construction site or of a cabinet. The social hierarchy is that of mystification. It is also, consequently, that of sensitive amputation. For mystification to be king, blindness must be king. Not a second of this world would be possible, if one could exist in it and see what Kafka saw in it. "We all live as if we were despots. That makes us beggars. [...] The anguish of death is only the result of a life that is not fulfilled. It is the expression of a betrayal. [...] These great political meetings are on the level of the Café du Commerce. People talk a lot and very loudly, and this to say as little as possible. It is a deafening silence. The only thing in there that is true and interesting are the deals made behind the scenes, of which no one breathes a word." (Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka, 1968) Since then, a century of devastation has sufficiently illustrated how right Kafka was in all things and almost alone. It is of the utmost importance that everyone keeps the access to what he nevertheless feels well barricaded. And we will be well inspired to support each other in this laudable propensity - which in no way forbids piloting one's

existence according to the rumors that escape from the condemned basement. After all, amputation has never prevented the sensations coming from a phantom limb. The prevailing social order is more than ever this conjuration of amputees - an objective, structural, spontaneous, universal conjuration. A militancy of amputation runs even from the most obscure data scientists to Elon Musk. As if they absolutely had to spread their evil. An evil that comes from afar and whose evil breath could already be felt when, in 1933, the Chicago World's Fair entitled A Century of Progress adopted the slogan: "Science discovers, industry applies, man conforms." The raging impulse to trample on all sensibilities seems to form the secret engine of the technological acceleration underway. Financial speed and the desire to enslave are also part of it. Just listen to Lin Junyue, the Chinese theorist of the Sesame social credit system, when he explains that "if you had the social credit system, you would never have had the Yellow Vests". Just listen to Mark Zuckerberg, or Yuval Harari, or Bill Gates. Through them, it is the social imperative of deformity that the media slam celebrates. They are said to be brilliant, visionary, daring, but above all intelligent. Their success attests to this. But no: they are only clever. In fact, all their success has consisted in passing off their malignity as intelligence. It is too much to give them credit to paint them as new Satans, except to recognize that what characterizes the Devil is nothing fascinating: a banal disgrace, a simple deprivation of being. What gives them airs of extraterrestrials does not come from a superiority, but from an intimate defect. If they have to "increase the human being", it is because they know him only as an amputee, and to make this amputation final. If they activate themselves so much, it is because they believe their lack thus unsuspected, and in order to turn it into power. The emptiness that they have in their heart makes them insatiable. Nothing can give them the feeling of being really alive. Hence their obsession to rule the lives of others. They are insecure over-achievers, over-achievers who don't know where they stand.

live - and one because of the other. They concede it willingly, in private. In this, their malignity has developed to the extent of their lack. All their obsession with the brain, cognition and neurons can do nothing about it: intelligence has its seat in the heart - this has always been known. Intelligence passes through the brain, as it passes through the belly, but its home is the heart. For the heart is the seat of participation in the world, of the disposition to be affected by it and to affect it in return. Their rage to destroy the world under the pretext of rebuilding it from top to bottom comes from there: from the amputation they have in their heart. It is not enough for them to have monopolized all wealth, they must also be revolted by the carelessness of those they have dispossessed. Their resentment towards the poor is infinite. That the poor still dare to live, to meet and even to feast is enough to spoil their possession of the world. It is not enough that they have surrounded themselves with personal security services: they still panic inwardly about an ever possible collapse how will they, then, guard against their guards? Their dreams are only a long string of worst-case scenarios. They live in terror of their own crimes. They will never forgive us for what they did to us. As an exorcism, they multiply data for good projects and tech for good summits. They want to believe that they are there "for the good" and "for good", these wretches. If they did, they wouldn't have to display it like that - it would be obvious. At this point, it would be foolish to ask whether they are conspiring, the 1% who hold %48 of the world's wealth, who attend the same type of schools, places and people everywhere, who read the same newspapers, succumb to the same fashions, bathe in the same discourses and in the same sense of their hereditary superiority Of course they breathe the same air.

Of course they conspire. They don't even have to plot for that. "Frankly, we believe that there can be nothing more dangerous than a society in which psychopaths dominate, define values, control the means of communication [...] They will turn us into patients. [They will make patients of us again. (Philip K. Dick, The Clans of the Alphane Moon, 1964)

3.

The springs of the present, at bottom, are childish. To possess them completely, it is enough not to forget what we already know. Not to wait for confessions from the rulers to come authorize our perceptions. Any need for proof is infinite. It is bound to be unfulfilled. The proof of the proof is always missing, and so on. It is a relationship to the world that leaks, not a request addressed to it. That said, as we shall see, as for this world and its "arcane", everything is written. Everything is said. All you have to do is look in the right place and believe. The shock effect, the blast effect of the opposing offensive, the effect sought by terror is to cut us off from everything we know intimately. To make us lose the thread of any certainty. To make us lose our footing. This is the real great reset. In the years under the 1950,pretext of understanding how the As a result, the CIA embarked on a vast program to refine its psychological torture techniques, from how "communists" practice "brainwashing" and how they manage to make a Hungarian cardinal confess or turn American prisoners of the Korean War inside out. They came to the conclusion that there is something much better than genetics, and much better than LSD: there is the "DDD" syndrome for Debility, Dependency, Dread. It is enough to isolate the human subject, to suspend all his habits and to fill him with fear to make him lose all contact with himself, to depersonalize him and to make him malleable at will. This is the kind of technique that is generously lent to "sects", or that is practiced in "management by mental manipulation".

"There is a widespread opinion that fascist terror was only a short-lived episode in modern history, now fortunately behind us. I cannot share this opinion. I believe that terror is deeply rooted in the very tendencies of modern civilization, and especially in the structure of the modern economy. [...] The modern system of terror is essentially the atomization of the individual. We tremble at the torture inflicted on men's bodies; but we should be no less horrified by the threat to men's minds. Terror accomplishes its work of dehumanization by the total integration of the population into communities; it aims at depriving men of the psychological means of direct communication between them in spite of the - or rather because of the formidable apparatus of communications to which they are exposed. The individual in a situation of terror is never alone and always alone. He becomes numb and hardened not only to his neighbor, but to himself; fear robs him of his power of spontaneous emotional and mental reaction. Thinking becomes a stupid crime; it endangers his life. The inevitable consequence is that stupidity spreads like a contagious disease among the terrorized population. Human beings then live in a stupor - in a moral coma." (Leo Löwenthal, "The Atomization of Man by Terror," 1946)

Portugal. "Don't be afraid to be afraid". #cascais-stay-at-home

It seems that to see any connection between this description and what we are experiencing would be conspiratorial. But it is never a good idea to suppress a perfectly distinct perception. The pack of watchdogs can bark, jeer and foam. Not only do we know things they don't want to know, but we also know that "the world is complex" - as those who try to infantilize their interlocutors so much like to say, but who, by this hollow formula, only exempt themselves from any form of courage. The courage, for example, to take a clear position with regard to the operations in progress and the world they are shaping. There is not only an epistemology of methods; there is also an epistemology of virtues. Yes, the "relations of power are intentional and not subjective"; yes, there is an "implicit character of the great anonymous strategies, almost mute, which coordinate loquacious tactics"; yes, it is a question of detecting the "general line of force which crosses the local confrontations, and connects them"; and no, we do not imagine that we will one day be able to flush out the staff which presides over all the opposing strategies.

But these few theses of Michel Foucault cannot serve as a vade mecum for sophisticated cowardice. A world as hostile as the one that is about to be created does not happen by itself. We have been made, we are being made more than ever, a world behind our backs. The very fact that there is one world and not several - and everywhere this same world, ever more barren, ever more frustrating and mediocre, ever more globalized and yet ever more narrow - is the result of a concerted effort. A lot of things happen by themselves, without the conscious will of those who take part in it, and naturally go in the direction of those who consciously want to make this world behind our backs. And this is indeed complex, but it does not detract from their existence or the malignity of their operations. Eric Schmidt, who moved from the chairmanship of Google to the chairmanship of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, may well worry in February 2020 in the New York Times that Silicon Valley could lose the "technology war" against China because of the insufficient digitization of life in the United States. But that China's artificial intelligence is exploding thanks to the ocean of daily data delivered by the country's rampant cyberization remains only an argument for a settled power project. It is this project, and nothing else, that implies forcing us to live, as much as possible, online. As a report of May 2019 of the aforementioned commission finely observed: "Consumers switch to buying online when it is the only way to get what they want." Hence the usefulness, for example, of containment. Those who have a vested interest in locking us into their world and cutting us off are, in effect, our enemies. That is to say, people who work against us, people who certainly don't want us to do any good. This is the unseemly simplicity from which the swindlers of the It is a "complex world" - because it reveals the awful simplicity of their position. Like every historical break, the past two years have produced a kind of earthquake in our lives. They have redrawn the landscape. The

social pressure, increased on purpose, made the friendships of circumstance give way. It also determined dissidences that we would not have suspected, and gave birth to more elementary complicities, deeper, without primers. If we think about it calmly, we will agree that none of this is so fortuitous. The distances that were accused there existed before. So-and-so was more concerned with looking smart than anything else, couldn't help but admire success, refer to the normal, want to be cool, freak out about his social credit. Everywhere, the gradient of stupidity follows the gradient of nihilism. The situation operates as a revelation of the inner cracks of the beings, just as this coronavirus serves as a revelation of the chronic diseases so proper to this civilization. The last two years have been described as a great confusion of minds. But there is a kind of confusion that immediately precedes enlightenment. For those who are willing to see, the past two years will have produced great clarity. For those who agree to clear the field, the field is free. Those who believe that those in power are doing their best despite their incompetence and the bureaucracy that surrounds them, Those who do not hear the abysmal cynicism that sneers behind all the loud proclamations of humanism and good feelings, Those who prefer to forget that eugenics, colonization, population training or the Rockefeller Foundation have never pursued anything other than "the good of humanity", Those who sincerely believe that we can "do good for others" without first imposing on them our definition of good and our otherness,

Those who don't get a thrill out of seeing a photo of a Greek veterinarian turned Pfizer CEO wearing a black mask with "Science will win" printed on it, Those who believe, moreover, that "science" exists somewhere as a stern and benevolent daddy, and not as a battlefield where paradigms are continuously assaulted, challenged and finally overturned, Those who prefer to ignore, out of pride, comfort, daze or lightness, after a good century of refinement in propaganda and the art of communication, that the truth was already socially dead and buried in 1914, Those who are still debating, among sheep, whether the shepherd would not have some project for their head despite all the care he gives them, Those who are reluctant to lend their masters unmentionable intentions, for fear of seeing the little castle of lies that is their own social existence collapse in turn, Those who think they are so smart that they defiantly repeat the nonsense that government trolling has designed for them, Those who have allowed themselves to be won over by apathy and internal resignation in the face of the all-out offensive that the declaration of a "world pandemic" has set in motion, Those who sleep on their two ears while a president who has well studied his Machiavelli claims, under the guise of a "sanitary pass", to re-create a body politic to his liking - no, to govern is not to foresee, and it is not to serve either, it is certainly "to make believe", as Richelieu said, but above all "to govern is to put your subjects out of the state of harming you and even thinking about it" (Machiavelli, Discourse on the first decadence of Titus Livius) Those whose party is to take nothing to heart, to take nothing seriously, to act as if nothing had happened,

Those who do not feel as a call for retaliation all the concentrated evil that has been inflicted on us in recent years, Those who quietly accept total control as a condition for "regaining freedom", Those who submit to all the invented norms of yesterday and nowhere in the hope of a "return to normal" which, for this very reason, will never happen, Those who not only obey humiliating obligations, but also theorize the need for them, Those who believe that there are brackets in the story as there are in the sentences and reassure themselves that this one will soon close with the "victory over the virus", We can't do anything for them. After all, wandering helps, too.

The conspiracy is the name of the consciousness that does not disarm 1.Anticonspiracyonspiracy.2.As in1914. 3. "Everything conspires".

1.

Pretending to fight against an epidemic, and tomorrow against the catastrophe ecological, by conditioning all social life to the presentation of a "The present power has taken a liking to this recurrent operation: to pose a e delirious reality, then to declare heretics those who refuse to subscribe to it. But we are not a heresy. We are a schism. There are not, at this moment, people who decide and others who protest. There are realities that diverge, perceptive continents that move apart, forms of life that become irreconcilable. It is a divergence that is far more massive and far more silent than anything that is manifested. This situation literally enrages those who need a single world to rule over, even on their own small scale. For those who need a single world to rule over, even if it is on a small scale, it is necessary by all means to reduce the outside world that escapes them. Whether it was Augustine facing Pelagianism or Pope Innocent III facing spiritual movements, the hunt for heretics always proceeded by a double movement of reintegration of the "diplomats" - those who accepted to live, etymologically, "folded in two" - and extermination of the diehards. Contemporary anti-conspiracism is akin to these kinds of cabals, although it also adds an additional twist. The inventor of the anti-conspiracy rhetoric is Karl Popper with The Open Society and its Enemies in1945 . Two years later, he founded

with his friend Friedrich von Hayek, who had found him a position at the London School of Economics, the most successful conspiracy of the second half of the 20th century: the Mont Pelerin Society. In 1947, the Mont Pelerin Society started from a state of complete historical defeat of the liberal camp almost the entire world had become Keynesian. To this, it opposed the ontological certainty of its cause - Hayek, Von Mises and Popper had already advanced epistemological refutations of socialism from which it had never recovered, and to which it had even ended up converting. The Mont-Pèlerin Society had a network of reliable friendships, nourished by close philosophical debate and discreet complicities woven in the administration as well as in the world of business through journalism - so there were not only economists there. It never displays its obsessive political purpose, never letting any of its strategies show, masking its tactical agenda in the conventional form of a high-level theoretical discussion. Through thirty years of methodical, obstinate, sometimes underground, sometimes public work, the Mont Pelerin Society has brought neoliberalism to the baptismal font. It has brought it to power in people's heads before it has been brought to power in the presidential palaces of Chile, France, the United Kingdom or the United States. It has made it the prevailing atmosphere in societies, the spontaneous language of governments, the implicit spring of most of the technologies in vogue. It has gained a foothold in all fields and has metastasized in the four corners of the world into a hundred university departments, think tanks, institutes, and pressure groups, which themselves have produced a thousand proposals, a thousand reports and analyses, and a thousand short-, medium- and long-term solutions. To the point that both the government and the governed often find themselves, borrowing from the zeitgeist, doing neoliberalism without knowing it. Not even the neural network technology at the basis of deep learning does not owe some unknown debt to Hayek & Co.

Karl Popper and Friedrich von Hayek

It took a singularly closed society to impose on everyone the The "open society". The anti-conspiracy rhetoric has, in fact, been used since its inception to cover up intense conspiracy activity. It is similar to the tactic of denial of climate change by the oil multinationals, who have known about it since the 1960s. It dries up the opponent, leaves him speechless, robs him of the common ground beneath his feet. The crudeness of the process is disarming because of the almost punk-like questioning of what is, however, a sensitive evidence, in addition to being an established fact. The one who draws it thus gains the time to complete the operations in progress, and the one to advise for the continuation. It shields this world from criticism, creates a smokescreen and prepares the ground for future operations. The accusation of conspiracy is the guardian of the shameless lie. In June2, protected2006, by an army of police officers, the socialist deputy mayor of Grenoble defended the contested opening of

Minatec, a new research center of the Commissariat à l'énergie atomique devoted to nanotechnologies. To the demonstrators who found fault with this project, he said: "To make people believe that a totalitarian 'nanoworld' would be imposed on the population without prior debate is not only a matter of deceptive manipulation, but also of a well-known form of political paranoia, based on conspiracy theory and hatred of elites, elected officials, and leaders. The debate never took place, of course. And the nanoparticles from Minatec are now everywhere. If the debate never took place, it's because it was dismissed when it could have been decisive. At a time when there was still time to undo this new venture of the disaster-makers. Closer to home, on a beautiful morning in November 2016, Narendra Modi announced without a moment's hesitation the demonetization of the 500 and 1,000 rupee bills, representing 86% of the cash in circulation in India. The aim was of course to fight poverty and corruption, to allow all citizens to benefit from the country's development and to finally make them equal before the tax. Those who denounced the brutal move to end the anonymity of cash exchange and introduce social control through the digitization of all economic interactions were blamed as followers of "conspiracy theories. Three years later, the Indian government announced its "Cashless India" program, advised by the oligarch who had created the national biometric database in previous years. The country now boasts of having the most digitalized economy in the world - an unparalleled means, one guesses, to "fight the coronavirus". "What's the difference between the truth and a conspiracy theory? Eight to nine months" - this cynical joke has made the rounds at the World Health Organization (WHO). Because what matters is what you do in those eight to nine months, how you push your advantage then. The boss

The director of Alcatel, a polytechnician from the Ponts et Chaussées, confided to one of his advisors: "Our people, even those who are educated and who think they are lords, do not know how to think. When they get involved, it is to trigger disasters. You have to think for them, occupy their minds. They just keep harping on it and turn everything into a routine. While they are trying to understand and justify the new things they are asked to believe in, we can work, make decisions and confront everyone with accomplished facts. (Marcel Bourgeois, Les Yeux pour pleurer. 50 ans chez les patrons, 2019) As an exergue to the book in which he first vilified "conspiracy theory," Popper placed this sentence from Walter Lippmann, the most influential American columnist of the early 20th century, the "creator" of neoliberalism: "The rout of liberal science is at the origin of the moral schism of the modern world that so tragically divides enlightened minds." Popper made little secret, for those who can read, of what he was up to. His argument against "conspiracy theories" can be summarized as follows: 1 - it is not because there are conspiracies that they are victorious;2 2 - everything is more complex than we imagine; 3 - there is a "logic of the situation" that escapes, like the market itself, all control. In short, we cannot say because we are not everywhere, and we cannot therefore be certain of anything. To try to produce a historical intelligibility of the course of events is a fatal presumption. Whoever says something about this world that it does not already say about itself is overstepping his epistemological rights. Moreover, there is nothing to say about this world. There is only to adapt to it. To every otherwise refutable statement about the state of things, the anti-spiracy rhetoric responds with an argumentative diversion about the statement itself, or even about the person making it - his cognitive biases, his lack of method, his erratic psyche, his paranoia. This is how it really protects this world - and this is its function -, by diverting the shots, by disserting on psychological flaws and "epistemological handicaps". While we talk about the world, the anti-conspiracy people only talk about

of us. Popper, father of all trolls, leads to the famous "paranoid style in politics", so elegantly dismissed by Richard Hofstadter as1963 the expression of a simple apocalyptic anxiety in intellectually deprived subjects. The world, then, is this immense unquestionable positivity. The only possible wisdom is skeptical. If it is necessary To "keep the controversy open" on neonicotinoids, oil or nuclear power is just to tactically avoid the crystallization of some disadvantageous truth in the opinion - this is at least the opinion dripping with contempt of those who are on the side of the handle. "Doubt is our product", was the title of a 1969memo from one of the tobacco industry's executives. So much comfortable doubt goes so well with the axiom that only the market, being alone omniscient and omnipresent thanks to the price signal, can produce truths. Who can dare to argue that this world is steeped in relations of domination and must constantly be made to forget it, and a fortiori that it has had its day and must be overturned? The parade is unstoppable, at least formally. Historically, on the other hand, it is aberrant: if the most nefarious plots sometimes stumble, it is because opposing forces detected them in time and worked to combat them when they were still in embryo - at the time, therefore, when the good people, who stick to appearances, denied their very existence. "Hell is truth seen too late", reminded Philip Mirowski, the great historian of neoliberalism, by hijacking Hobbes. Popper's argument is only valid because there are conspiracy theorists, and they act accordingly. If there are conspiracists, it is simply because there are conspiracies. We are far from alone, epistemologically. In our support, we have many generous analytical minds. We must only regret their sudden silence since March The2020. historian of science Steven Shapin explained in December to 2019his colleagues at Harvard

that if so many people no longer believe in "science", it is not only because of "lack of pedagogy" or mental retardation, but perhaps because, since the atomic bomb and the Manhattan project that gave birth to it, and since the enlistment of research in the service of capital, "science" has succeeded so well in this world that everyone knows it is too self-serving to be honest. It has served power so well that no one expects it to serve the truth as well. On the other hand, there is no shortage of left-wing scribblers trying to enlighten the good people in heavy volumes on this conspiracy that It "protects the system" and "harms the social struggle". We will refresh their memory, in terms of historical edification, with this little anecdote full of lessons. Following Popper, during the Cold War, when the confrontation between McCarthyism and Stalinism certainly did not help one to think freely, there was no shortage of liberal, even libertarian, intellectuals who tried to deconstruct conspiracy theories, their "diabolical causality" and to blame the way in which all political radicalism leads straight to the gas chambers. One of the first articles on what was then called "the police conception of history" appeared in the anti-totalitarian magazine Preuves in 1954 under the pen of Manès Sperber. Ten years later, the American magazine Ramparts provided proof that the magazine was unknowingly financed by the CIA. In a world of paranoids, it is the paranoids who are right. The anti-conspiracy rhetoric aims, for the owners of this world, to claim a monopoly on the ability to conspire.

2.

In many respects, the rupture of is 2020sister to that of 1914. The same stifling, shameless, phoned-in but effective character of the propaganda. Same gaping betrayal from the left. The same desert that is suddenly formed around those who do not flinch. The same war declared to the enemy as an instrument to bring its own population to heel. The same prescription for lying, not only in newspapers but also in human relationships. The Council of State even invokes"exceptional circumstances" to complete the destruction of any legal principle. The same lightning restructuring of production methods and the sameinstantaneous revision of all social norms. The same submissive lassitude that wins, in the end, despite the mutinies. As in the most hilarious 1914,spectacle offered to us by all those radicals who cannot admit that they have passed into the governmental camp. In 1914, we had a good laugh at seeing the anarchist supporters of the "social war" converted in the moment to the war against the Boche. Today, yesterday's radicals are in favor of confinement, as long as it is self-managed. Against the "health pass" as long as everyone does not have it. For "vaccines", out of solidarity, but without really knowing what to think of what is inside or of those who produce them. There are even those who push the taste for paradox to the point of judging the vaccination obligation as infantile and consequently ask for "more pedagogy". Recently, some strange anarchists quoted Bakunin "when it comes to boots, I refer to the authority of the cobblers" - in order to clear their political honour: they have never submitted to the State, in matters of

health" restrictions; they only relied on the doctors, that's not the point. The rulers whom they were defying only yesterday, and who so skillfully caught them at their game, must be laughing at their dinners. But it is, in a general way, the whole left that has been giving its best for the last two years. It will have fallen into all the panels set up. It will have relayed all the same things produced by the governmental communication agencies and will not have balked at any emotional blackmail, at any paralogism, at any complicit mutism. It will have revealed itself for what it is: irrational by dint of rationalism, obscurantist by dint of scientism, insensitive by dint of sentimentality, morbid by hygienism, hateful by philanthropy, counter-revolutionary by progressivism, stupid for believing itself to be cultured and evil for wanting to belong to the camp of the Good. During these last two years, in all the countries of the world except perhaps Greece, the left, socialist as well as anarchist, moderate as well as ultra, ecologist as well as Stalinist, will have systematically supported the coup of the technocratic world. No confinement, no curfew, no vaccination, no censorship, no restriction, will have seemed extreme enough to revolt it. She was the voice of fear as long as fear reigned. To the point of letting freedom, democracy, alternative, revolution and even insurrection fall into the conceptual lap of the extreme right. It must be said that it has always embodied the party of biopolitics. Finally, the trendy Marxists of the Jacobin magazine will have hallucinated, from New York, the announcement of the socialism that comes in the wearing of the mask, while others went as far as to theorize the "vaccinal communism". Exciting discussions are to be held in the dustbin of history.

New York City Subway. Stop Contamination. Put on a mask."

It is obviously in its crusade against conspiracy that the Left will have given its full measure. All that it can count of approved intellectuals, of idle journalists and of small entrepreneurs in alternative media, all that it can conceal of narcissists inflated with the approval of the herd, will have hastened to pay their dues courageously. No one, or almost no one, to notice that all the great "left-wing" authors, all these monuments, all these references that look good in the libraries of never-opened books, are all uniformly conspiratorial. Foucault? He described, at the end of Surveiller et punir, the delinquency as a product of the prison institution itself, which aims by this to maintain in a perimeter under control the always threatening diffusion of illegalisms. He saw everywhere only strategies and counter-strategies, captures and escapes. He dared a "I am a materialist because I deny reality". Go and proclaim that in public today! Worse, he was not afraid, during one of his lectures at the Collège de France, to say: "This excess of biopower [over sovereign right] appears when the possibility is technically and politically given to man, not only

to manage life, but to proliferate life, to manufacture life, to manufacture the monster, to manufacture - at the limit - uncontrollable and universally destructive viruses. The great thinker of Reason in history, Hegel? He believed in animal magnetism, in a universal feeling soul accessible in a hypnotic state. He answered in advance to the scientists, zeteticians and other skeptics: "It might seem that facts need verification, but such verification would in turn be superfluous for those who would demand it, because they make their task most easy by letting pass for illusion and imposture the infinite number of accounts so well attested by the culture, character, etc., of the witnesses. They hold so firmly to the a priori of their understanding that not only is any attestation powerless against it, but they have denied in advance what they have seen with their own eyes." Marx, Nietzsche, Freud - all those who have been classified as "thinkers of suspicion"? They would all pass for conspiracy theorists today. Freud liked to confide in Ernest Jones, during their vigils, his passion for extralucid visions, remote action or trade with the spirits of the dead, and concluded with a "There are more things in heaven and on earth than our philosophy dreams of". Just imagine. Adorno? Adorno-the-theory-critic, so unsuspecting of irrationalism that he devoted an entire book to the vituperation of horoscopes, spoke in Minima Moralia of "the secret collusion of every physician with death". "It is in the normal," he still assured, "that the disease of the age lies." Devil! And Deleuze, with his "society of control". Guattari, with his "integrated world capitalism" and his "molecular revolution". Not to mention all the national "great poets" - Nerval and Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Lautréamont, Artaud and Michaux: all of them conspiratorial to the core! And K. Dick, and Pynchon, and De Lillo, and Bolaño - we'll have to think about emptying the literature section too!

All the authors that the left adores, it would hate them alive; and they, alive, would despise it. It only loves them dead, to reduce them to cultural mush. A superconspirator such as Guy Debord can only be elevated to the rank of "national treasure" because he is no longer there to spit on those to whom he has finally sold out. One would almost forget Rousseau, that immense conspiracist whose tears lit the fuse of the French Revolution. Well, let's talk about the French Revolution! Here it is, a conspiratorial event to the point of caricature! With all its rumors about the satanic morals of the court, about the famines fabricated by the clergy, the financiers or the English, or about the sapphic love affairs of the Princess of Lamballe. No one thought of classifying Robespierre as a conspirator when he wrote: "What is the first period of this conspiracy? The very origin of the Revolution. What are the first engines? All the courts united against us. The goal? The ruin of France. The victims? The people and you. The means? All crimes." And all these journalists who now make it their profession, paid by Facebook and Google, to track down conspiracy content: do they even remember that barely ten years ago, in the glory days of WikiLeaks, they adulated a certain Julian Assange, author of a small manifesto soberly entitled "Conspiracy as a mode of governance"? A conspirator who was dedicated an awful boulevard in Paris, and who spent his life plotting when he was not in solitary confinement, said: "Arms and organization are the decisive element of progress, the serious means of putting an end to misery. Who has iron, has bread. We bow down before the bayonets, we sweep away the unarmed crowds. [...] In the presence of armed proletarians, obstacles, resistances, impossibilities, everything will disappear. But, for the proletarians who allow themselves to be amused by ridiculous walks in the streets, by planting trees of liberty, by the sonorous phrases of a lawyer, there will be

first holy water, then insults, then machine-gun fire, and always misery. (Auguste Blanqui, "Le toast de Londres," 1851) The left has always been on the side of ridiculous street walks, freedom tree plantings and lawyer sound bites. This is one of the definitive clarifications of the last two years. From the right, there has never been anything to expect but the perpetuation of inherited injustice. But the fact that the left has always been on the side of the victors, of which it was only the hysterical bad conscience, is something that had only appeared in the eyes of all, in history, in bursts that were quickly forgotten. For two years, it has been a daily, endless, unmissable spectacle. Reactive, entangled, dead weight, the left has always been counter-revolutionary in the most effective way: by claiming to "support the movement". Always absent at the moment when it is necessary to be there, it lives only in the future tense, producing the narratives, the notions, the justifications that explain and ratify the defeat. Of the proletariat, it has only ever loved its defeat, which also forms the condition of its own existence. The episode of the Yellow Vests, which saw the Left in unison with the general calumny as long as the movement was insurrectionary, to find with it ever stronger affinities as it became weaker, had certainly put it back in the closet. But the last two years have finally rid us of it. Any lively mind can now hear these words, inaudible when they were written in 1955 by the communist writer Dionys Mascolo: "The opposite of being left-wing is not being right-wing, but being revolutionary [...From everything that does not dare to be frankly, absolutely right-wing, or reactionary (or fascist) to everything that does not dare to be frankly revolutionary, it is the reign of the left, dubious, unstable, composite, inconsequent, prey to all contradictions, prevented from being itself by the indefinite number of ways of being united that propose themselves to it, once again torn, as they say, and never torn by misfortune, malevolence or awkwardness, but by nature. " (On the meaning and use of the word "left")

In March, as2020 in March, there was suddenly 1914,no one left. Like 1914, March 2020 has delivered the world from this mortgage - the left. Those who, accompanying decades of defeats, bellowed against the existing order suddenly fell into line, at the very moment when the courage to leave it was required. This is how they ranked among their fellow human beings. In 1914, the mystification of the left had to end in order to make possible the revolutionary wave that ran from Dada in Zurich to the occupied factories of Turin, from the insurgent sailors of Hamburg to the women's demonstrations that initiated the Russian revolution. Of course, it also took this cursed war to liquidate French anarchosyndicalism, the "great fever" of the English workers that had been rising since 1910, or the heroic International Workers of the World in the United States. It was the purpose of this war, as it was the purpose of the crisis management of the "pandemic", to freeze the wave of world revolts that preceded them.

3.

There is something crazy about seeing the supporters of a regime born of "13 conspiracies of May 13, 1958" - the Ve Republic - embark on a crusade against conspiracy. Or absolutely logical, on the contrary. Only those who have fully tasted the joys and powers of conspiracy can so seek to reserve the exclusive right to it. If conspiracy is so banal and so popular, it is because it holds itself entirely in this effectively popular banality: all power maintains itself only by conspiring against those on whom it is exercised - employees, citizens, clients, population, patients, litigants or prisoners. There is, by construction, no serious emancipation except in the growth of a force opaque to the rays of power: a conspiracy, therefore. In order to be able to decree an anti-conspiratorial crusade without laughing, it was necessary to organize, for decades, the rarefaction of historical knowledge. This was the condition. On our side, we can of course refine the distinction between plot and conspiracy. The plot evokes the image of conspirators gathered in the same room, and weaving together a precise plan according to an explicit and shared will. It is based on a common secret that can easily be betrayed. The conspiracy has no need to gather its members. It floats. Its element is aerial. The agreement, here, can remain tacit, diffuse, as elusive as an idea. This is what makes it so formidable. There are objective conspiracies that are the product of reflexes, of representations, of social structures, and that know how to turn all obstacles to the realization of their program more agilely than a well-conducted plot. It would be difficult to detect their origin, to assign them a seat, to isolate a subject. The present world is, without any possible doubt, the

the result of two centuries of an objective conspiracy of engineers whose perimeter is everywhere and whose center is nowhere. What can they do? Such is their nature. They should stop engineering, they should desert themselves. Conspiracies, with their transversal character, go beyond the conscious aims of those involved. They can sometimes be broken down into a discreet multitude of local plots. Nothing resembles a concerted maneuver, a centralized conspiracy, more than the unity in the daily journalistic falsification, which results in the first place from an effect of structure, from an ideological uniformity, from a social selection, from a professional servility, which accommodate very well authentic operations of coordinated intoxication. Above all, it is necessary to wrest from the conspiracy its aura of exceptionality. In Latin, conspiratio means agreement, musical agreement as well as agreement between beings. In the liturgy of early Christianity, conspiratio is the moment of the osculum, the kiss on the mouth that the faithful exchange, becoming "one breath", one "spirit". The ritual soon became so embarrassing for the ecclesiastical hierarchy that it was replaced by the "peace of Christ". It survived only in the medieval homage of the knight to his suzerain, and still today among the mafia. A "conspiracy", in Old French, is simply a gathering - a crowd, a meeting or a company. Wherever people breathe the same air and share the same spirit, there is a conspiracy. Wherever they physically gather, there is conspiracy, at least potentially. That these notions have taken on an evil meaning only testifies to the weight of the state in defining our vocabulary, and consequently in the way we look at the world. For it is only from the point of view of the state that every singular agreement and every gathering is a threat. The ability to conspire is inherent to all existence. It is even the mark of all living things. If everything lives, it is because "everything conspires", said the Stoics.

There is no human reality, there is no transparent life. There is a rest to the representation of all things, to the capture of all beings. All publicity is set with opacity. Where there is stage and spectators, there is backstage and machines. Where there is field, there is off-camera. Where there is official policy, there is secret service. The organization chart of the organizations finally overrides thereal hierarchies, in the companies, in the parties, in the associations. So much so that an era in which advertising has penetrated all spheres of life can only be an era in which the conspiracy has in turn intruded into every corner of existence. The aberration is not conspiracy, but subconspiracy: the fact of discerning only one big conspiracy, when there are countless conspiracies going on in all directions, everywhere and all the time. It is not only the X-Mine mafia, the Athanor Lodge or the Françafrique networks that conspire in France. Every time friends talk to each other, every time something happens between people, in the street, at the café or in music, a conspiracy begins. A conspiracy does not necessarily mean a joint venture, but possibility of a common lead. How many strikes were born from one too many guns in the bar, from a casual chat at the coffee machine? Look closely: there is no consistent adventure, no living revolt, no dazzling attempt, which does not have its roots in the conspiratorial dimension of existence. The schemers who have taken over the state are terrified of any agreement that would be found between the beings. Hence the relentlessness of the last few years to empty all the physical places where we meet, to close them down, to lock them up, to lock ourselves in between four walls with or without a garden.

Hence the wild vindictiveness, otherwise incomprehensible, of the State against the party people. Any kind of chaos engineering is better than this. The algorithmic transparency of relationships between people, since the advent of smartphones and u b i q u i t o u s computing, coupled with the police takeover of public space, expresses this same feverishness. For everything, in its consummate disaster, calls for the overthrow of the existing order. That is why such a fierce preventive counter-revolution is in full swing, under the pretext of managing an epidemic. Innocent people will always find it hard to believe.

The unreality that we live is not not that of a staggering catastrophe, but that of a scenario that is unfolding 1. Twenty years of preparedness. 2. The city of the living dead.

1.

Since March in 2020,all places and in all languages, the same feeling of having entered a dystopia from which we can no longer wake up. Some try to get used to this "new normal". They hope, by not resisting it, to suffer less. The others are groping for the exit doors, which the authorities are trying to close for them, step by step, on their fingers. What the mutations of the virus hide is the staggering mutation of the political order. What the debate on the origin of the "pandemic" obscures is the fact that the modalities of its management are in part fabricated. The unreality of what we are experiencing is that of a plan being carried out, of a scenario being unfolded. For twenty years, the governing teams have been preparing, training and coordinating themselves to implement what has become our daily routine, at an accelerated pace in recent years. For twenty years, they have simulated this crisis management. Now they are carrying out this simulation. All of this is known, documented and theorized. All this is thought out, even in its most subtle, most indirect effects. Crises only benefit those who have previously organized themselves. There is nothing to expect from them. But having a plan and the means to carry it out is not enough to ensure that it goes smoothly. It is also necessary to ensure that no other organized force acting strategically will derail it. Much has been made of the "Event 201" held in October 2019 at a swanky hotel on the Avenue5e in New York. It must be said that it has all the aspects of a dress rehearsal of the treatment we are getting

since March 2020. Not only does the scenario of a coronavirus sweeping the world, giving rise to a generalized containment and a "freezing of the world economy" while waiting for a miraculous vaccine, resemble the "implacable" course of events that occurred the following year, but the actors in this staging were the same ones who then found themselves "managing the crisis". There, in this hotel opened with1930 money from Wall Street banks, under a roof inspired by the chapel of the Palace of Versailles, were the director of the American Center for Disease Control (CDC), the head of the Chinese CDC, the vice-president of Johnson & Johnson, then the largest pharmaceutical company in the world. Johnson, then the world's largest pharmaceutical company, the head of global operations at Edelman, the world's largest public relations agency, the former number one at2 the CIA, or the vice president of NBC Universal, which combines one of Hollywood's largest studios with one of America's most extensive television networks. This simulation exercise was co-organized by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos under the aegis of the Center for Health Security of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, represented for the occasion by Anita Cicero, a lawyer and former lobbyist of the pharmaceutical industry who has not forgotten to work with the European Commission, the WHO or the Pentagon. Do we need to point out that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the most powerful foundation in the world, that it intervenes on all continents and in fields as varied as agriculture, education or health with a view to the technologization of everything? Do we need to remind you that the WEF, founded by 1971Klaus Schwab, a fan of Karl Popper, with the aim of "educating countries that seem to be resistant to capitalism in the eyes of the international community", brings together the world's one thousand largest companies for its little parties? In one of the documents related to this exercise, we read: "Governments will have to work with media companies to research and develop more sophisticated approaches to countering misinformation. This will require developing the capacity to flood the

The press should be committed to ensuring that official messages are given priority and that false messages are suppressed, including through technology. [...] For their part, the press should commit to ensuring that official messages are prioritized and false messages are suppressed, including through the use of technology." Now that's friendly advice that wasn't delivered in vain. The Event201, with its crystal-clear conspiratorial brilliance, has come to overshadow the twenty-year process of which it is the culmination, and thus the logic from which it proceeds. The harmless Center for Health Security was in fact born in September 1998 under the name of Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies. Its object is not the health of the population, but the fight against bioterrorism. In February 1999, it organized its first event: a symposium to consider the response to a bioterrorist attack - nine hundred and fifty doctors, military personnel, federal officials and public health executives gathered in a hotel in Crystal City, Arlington, where the Pentagon is located, to work out a scenario for a militarized smallpox attack. At the symposium, Richard Clarke, then Bill Clinton's top counterterrorism adviser, exclaimed that "for the first time, the Department of Health and Human Services is part of the U.S. National Security Council. What was at stake then, and has not been denied since to the point of seeming self-evident, was the subordination of health issues to national security, the integration of "public health" into national security. The fantasy of bioterrorism ensures the suture between these two a priori foreign domains. National security is the conveniently fuzzy value, or rather demonology, that was used afterwards to 1945justify the American march to empire, to legitimize internally and externally all imaginable overstepping. It was also the official political doctrine of most of the South American dictatorships that the CIA put in the saddle in the years 1950-1980.

That the main damage of epidemics is the loss of control over the conduct of citizens and the social anomie they are supposed to trigger, Thucydides made it a commonplace of Western thought as early as the ecentury V before Christ. A good student, Hobbes happened to translate The Peloponnesian War and to adorn the well-known frontispiece of his Leviathan with a city emptied of its inhabitants, where only armed soldiers and plague doctors patrol. From then on2000,, a bioterrorist plague scenario was the focus of the second and largest full-scale exercise ever simulated in the U.S.: TopOff thousands of participants, employees ofentire administrationsmobilized to play their own role. 2001Then in June comes Dark Winter, co-hosted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) at Andrews AFB. This exercise brilliantly prophesied the anthrax attacks of the following September - one week after 9/11, poisoned letters were sent to various media outlets and politicians, generally hostile to the Patriot Act's state of emergency; five people were killed; an unfortunate virologist at the Fort Detrick Biodefense Laboratory was blamed, following Al Qaeda and Iraq , only to bekilled;the investigation wascarefully botched. En 2005,c’est Atlantic Storm dans un hôtel de Washington, où l’on notera la participation de Bernard Kouchner aux côtés de Madeleine Albright, alors chef du département d’État, et de l’ancien director of the CIA, James Woolsey, who will play his own role. Far from being aimed only at senior staff, these worst-case scenarios, designed on the model of the military's war games, are widely publicized; they include among their actors star journalists from the New York Times or CBS. The aim is to train the minds of the public as well as those of the entertainers. All of this is perfectly displayed, absolutely notorious. In the last two decades, these exercises have

continued and extended to other countries. In May in 2017,Berlin, for the first time in history, all the health ministers of the G20 countries are meeting. What are they doing? A large-scale pandemic simulation exercise - this time MARS (Mountain Associated Respiratory Syndrom) - "to deal with the threat of bioterrorism", once again. This little gathering is not missing the WHO representative, nor the representative of the Gates Foundation or the Wellcome Trust - one of the most influential foundations worldwide in terms of health policies -, nor Christian Drosten, the chief virologist of German TV shows since March. In 2020.May, it2018, is the Clade X exercise in Washington based on an imaginary virus that would have the lethality of SARS but the transmissibility of the flu. It would have been manufactured in laboratory by a Japanese apocalyptic sect aiming at reducing the world population. In the simulation, this The "most serious pandemic since the one of1918" killed millions900 of humans. Tara O'Toole, the writer of the Dark Winter and Atlantic Storm scripts, played the Secretary of Homeland Security this time. In summing up, she laments as always, "We're in an age of epidemics, but we're not treating them like the national security issues they are." From January to August is2019, the Crimson Contagion, a series of four simulations involving nineteen federal agencies and all sorts of private actors in twelve different states. This time, it is a respiratory virus of the type of influenza originating in China that triggers the pandemic. The exercise is coordinated by Robert Kadlec, President Trump's assistant for epidemic control. Finally, in October it2019, is the alltoo-famous Event201. All of the properly political questions posed by the choice of a certain "response" to epidemics have been posed since the end of the In1990. the exercise of 2000,governing ask themselves: "The sight of an armed military presence in American cities provokes protests against the curtailment of civil liberties [...] The question is

How and to what extent we are going to enforce these measures. How much force are we going to use to keep people in their homes?" In the June 2001 Dark Winter one, again in the workbook, "We are ill-prepared for a biological weapons attack, we don't have enough vaccines - and forced restrictions on citizens are probably the only tools available, if there are not enough vaccines yet. So we have to restrict the rights of citizens. [...] Americans can no longer take for granted basic civil liberties such as the right to assemble or the freedom to travel." Dark Winter fantasized about instituting martial law and substituting military courts for civilian justice. In 2005, in the Atlantic Storm scenario: "How should national leaders determine border closures or quarantines? If measures were taken to restrict travel, how long should they be maintained? How would they be coordinated internationally and how would the decision to lift them be made?" Naturally, in 2010, when the Rockefeller Foundation set out to write "scenarios for the future of technology and international development," the first was that of a global flu pandemic bringing the economy to a halt, emptying streets and businesses, and seeing China get away with martial containment measures and the hermetic closure of its borders. All of this sets the stage for "more authoritarian control and intensified surveillance of citizens and their activities" and miraculously leads to "the notion of a more controlled world gaining acceptability and assent...citizens voluntarily surrendering sovereignty - and privacy - to more paternalistic states in exchange for more security and stability. Citizens become more tolerant of, and even eager for, more abrupt command and control. National leaders have more latitude to impose the order that suits them."

– Bones, when will the Covid end! – Jim, I'm a doctor, not a politician!

The neoliberals have accustomed us to their "shock strategies". That any crisis, whether fabricated, simulated or exogenous, is an opportunity for them no longer surprises us. On September 11, 2001, barely an hour after the first Boeing collided with the World Trade Center, one of the Blair government's most valuable advisors wrote to certain members of the British government: "This is a very good day to get out everything we want to bury. The scandal caused by the revelation of this memo did not prevent the strategy from being applied to the letter, nor did it prevent Blair from celebrating the "professionalism" of his advisor. In June 2020, the French Secretary of State for the Digital Transition did not trigger any scandal by saying that "the crisis offers the opportunity for an even more voluntary transformation. Nor did the Minister of Foreign Affairs

We have to restructure the world, redesign it by taking pandemic-type situations as a constant. All the timely experiments with facial recognition or virtual teaching, the drones hammering out the instructions to confine themselves on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice as early as March182020, the use of geolocation data from telephone operators by the Ministry of the Interior to find out how many Parisians have gone to confine themselves elsewhere, or the judicious passage of the "global security" law excessively expanding the prerogatives of the police - none of this is out of step with the most usual governmental vileness. But there is something new in what is happening to us: what has been unfolding before our eyes and in our lives for the last two years has all the characteristics of a plan. This is shown by the inexplicable ferocity of the attacks against those who, without reference, have pretended to meddle in the healing of Covid-19 or against those who have dared to point out the gulf between the staging and reality. Global pandemic declaration / containment / senseless restriction freedoms / restructuring of habits / technological acceleration / takeover of social networks / biotechnological vaccination / "health pass" / digital identity / connected environments / general digitization / ubiquitous tracing / control society - a logical sequence is foreseen, of which at least the first half has been amply rehearsed. There are steps in the plan. No one is supposed to violate them. No one is supposed to get in the way. So that's exactly what we need to do.

2.

There is a doctrine that governs all these simulation exercises. It is the doctrine of "pandemic preparedness". Pandemic preparedness has been explicitly on the global agenda since 2002. It emerges from a much more ambitious and slightly older military strategy: "all-hazards preparedness". Preparedness is an old notion dating back to at least the First World War. It was then the hobbyhorse of all sorts of events sponsored by the most imperial fraction of American capital - the one that was eager to conquer, thanks to the entry into the war, the world markets. "Engineers saw World War I not as a disaster for civilization, but as a 'unique opportunity' to put their ideas into practice." (David F. Noble, America by Design, 1977) All-hazards preparedness is a It1970. is to view any event - a nuclear accident, an insurgency, a hurricane, a foreign military attack, an epidemic, even a financial crisis - in the same light: as a threat to the physical, political and vital structures of the country, a challenge to the control of the system. Leaders must know how to respond to any "The collective practice of worst-case scenarios responds to the strategic option of designating a tiny but devastating possibility as the enemy. The collective practice of worst-case scenarios responds to the strategic option of designating a tiny but devastating possibility as the enemy. This strategic option has many merits, not the least of which is to provide an indefinite field for the extension of the political, technological and military apparatus of surveillance and control.

By confusing risk and danger, by loading any fictitious possibility of disaster with an evil intentionality, one virtually abolishes any limit to the activities of power. All that is needed is to produce the appropriate fiction - the one that allows one to argue that the system is deliberately vulnerable, against which it is appropriate to fight by overcoming the very legal, moral or political obstacle that one wished to sweep aside. And this is never-ending, because, if we can neutralize a danger, we can never abolish a risk, whose character is statistical, virtual, impalpable. To the unreality of the world of governmental fictions in which we have entered, we have the very real progress of control. From the phantasmatic struggle against risk come encroachments and more and more intrusive of the opposing devices. The all-hazards preparedness bears the mark of its birth context: these 1990s of the "new world order", of the In the early 1990s, a whole series of studies were carried out on the "transformation of war" in which Martin van Creveld described the prevalence of low-intensity conflicts and the "clash of civilizations" in which Samuel Huntington announced the return of clashes between cultural and religious identities. In the early 1990s, a whole The "Atlantic civilization", a whole military-industrial complex, a whole secular clergy, a whole monument of coalesced interests is seized with vertigo in front of the obliteration of their best structural enemy, and of their reason for being: the USSR. "I've run out of devils, I've run out of thugs, I've only got Castro and Kim Il-sung left," lamented Colin Powell, the US president's chief military advisor, in 1991. Uncertainty must be configured so that it is no longer purely a matter of suffering. The enemy must be given form. We must structure the situation in order to justify the existing order. It will be enough, moreover, that the cold war fades away for the anti-capitalist revolt to be reborn without waiting, with the ascending riots of 1998the anti-globalization 2001,movement. The fear of the people has always prevailed over the fear of the foreigner among the rulers, the

fear of the enemy from within over that of the enemy from without. The declared struggle against the one serves first as an alibi for the effective struggle against the other. All the world's leaders are at the same table when it comes to bringing their own people to heel. Bashar al-Assad has even shown us that some of them prefer to renounce their population rather than their power; the one-armed and the eyeless of the Yellow Vests demonstrations have experienced this in their flesh. How can we call for a "block" around an unjust social order, without designating some unspeakable external threat? A terrorist, a virus, climate chaos also fulfill this function well - the biblical function of universal evil. Bill Gates opportunely pointed this out in 2017, at one of those Munich security conferences where the world's military-police elite meets annually: "We don't know the link between health security and international security at our peril. [...] A biological weapons attack is coming and it is only a matter of time. We must prepare for it. We must prepare for epidemics as the military prepares for war." Like all great scams, pandemic preparedness has given rise to a small global mafia. This mafia has been remarkably stable since the 1990s, in its methods, in its discourse, in its composition. It seems to be untouched by history. Its actors are children of the Cold War who are not resolved to its extinction. They have kept the conspiratorial reflexes, the apocalyptic representations, the natural impunity and the exorbitant credits. Their end-ofthe-world scenarios are the lever of their power. Directive 51, signed in May 2007 by George W. Bush, is a direct consequence of the Dark Winter exercise. As far as we know, since most of it is classified, it establishes the exceptional procedures to be implemented for the "continuity of government" in case of a catastrophic emergency. Our cold warriors circulate fluidly from institutions

scientists to military agencies, from government departments to multinational corporations, from start-ups to philanthropic foundations, from universities to finance. They are achieving a kind of ideal fusion of the civilian and the military. Health security is their new cover. The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security is their most famous showcase, and the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases' P4 laboratory at Fort Detrick is their historic experimentation center. They are the threat they propose to address. They are the same people who predict the most vicious biochemical attacks, and who are working to weaponize anthrax. The same people who prophesy the return of pandemics and synthesize potentiated smallpox viruses. Nothing distinguishes the experimentation of a new chemical weapon from the research of its antidotes. That's what a P4 lab is for. Unfortunately, laboratory leaks are as commonplace as radioactive leaks. Chimeric viruses can no more be contained than radio-elements. Robert Kadlec, a U.S. Air Force doctor and biological weapons specialist, is a fairly pure type of creature in this little milieu. He began his career on the eve of the Gulf War as a biological warfare assistant with the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). He was trained by one of the veterans of the American biological weapons programs. We no longer count the catastrophic scenarios that he wrote on the subject. He 1995,imagines an attack by "In 1998, he wrote in an internal Pentagon document: "If biological weapons are used under the guise of a limited, naturally occurring epidemic, their use can be credibly denied. In 1998, he wrote in an internal Pentagon document, "If biological weapons are used under the guise of a spatially limited, naturally occurring epidemic, their use can be credibly denied. [... The potential for severe economic loss and subsequent political instability, combined with the ability to credibly deny the use of this weapon, exceeds

that of any other known weapon. In he2001, appeared on the screens of the simulation Dark Winter. From to2007 he2009, is the director of the biodefense of George W. Bush. Besides his official duties, he does not shy away from small consulting missions for biodefense companies in which he sometimes invests, nor from lobbying for companies linked to the military and intelligence apparatus. He2020, is one of the main advisors of the American president for preparedness and response to the "pandemic". He personally oversees all contracts for Operation Warp Speed - the partnership with major corporations to speed up the production and logistics of Covid-19 "vaccines. It's hard not to hear a strong reference to all these preparedness exercises when Joe Biden, in November 2020, advocates the widespread wearing of masks and warns of the coming of a dark winter. One could also mention Tara O'Toole, the designer of the first doomsday pandemic simulation scenarios, who went from US delegations investigating 1990the effects of nuclear weapons exposure in Russia in the years before to the current vice-presidency of In- Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital fund, not without having directed the Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies at Johns Hopkins. Or Ken Alibek, the former head of the Soviet bioweapons program and designer of the world's most virulent strain of anthrax, who is now serving the American biodefense industry with his fear-mongering. Or Michael Callahan, the doctor and entrepreneur who, as head of the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) between 2005 and 2012, initiated the "Prophecy" program, an approach that consists of anticipating mutations in natural viruses in order to fight potential pandemics. Or Michael Osterholm, the epidemiologist who has been crying wolf about bioterrorism and epidemics for a quarter of a century, who is now advising Joe Biden in his fight against Covid-19 and who, in2002

Lancet (The Scalpel): "I never really knew whether I was a biological politician or a political biologist." Or Neil Ferguson, the British Imperial College epidemiologist, who never misses an opportunity, since 2001, to provide Dantean death predictions for each new epidemic, prognoses whose denial by the facts has never prevented him from remaining the much-listenedto advisor to the WHO, the European Union, and the British and American governments, or a regular beneficiary of the Gates Foundation. On the contrary. The case of Richard Hatchett is also instructive. Epidemiologist of the Homeland Security Council under Bush and Obama, he is the one who conceived and imposed in February to the American 2007CDC, with the support of the neoconservative administration of the time, the new medieval method of managing epidemics by confinement, closure of schools and suspension of the essential human relations. Social distancing is him. Since 2017, he has been the patron of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) - an organization created in Davos with funding from the Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust to invest in vaccination methods "innovative". This coalition provides a good opportunity for members to WHO, Big Pharma, and DARPA to get together. In March 2020, Hatchett deemed in an interview that "war is an appropriate analogy" against a virus that "is the scariest disease I've encountered in my career, which includes Ebola, MERS, SARS." Someone who can be trusted, in short.

Donald Henderson, the founder of the Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies at Johns Hopkins, dared to make this comparison: "Coughing produces aerosols in large quantities exactly like a bioterrorist attack." The obsession with bioterrorism is a reminder of how counterterrorism, which has served to politically freeze the world situation afterwards, is 2001,also the matrix for the management of the epidemics we suffer, which, by the way, performs exactly the same function. A continuum runs from the current treatment of pandemics to the anti-terrorism of the 2000s, and from security emergencies to health emergencies. This continuum also has its roots in the 1990s. More precisely: in neoconservatism and neorealism, which have continued to spread so diffusely since then that right and left have become

indistinct. The European Union has made this its ghostly political coherence, but it is becoming increasingly assertive, and has now armed itself with a commissioner for the "protection of the European way of life". In the years Robert1990, Kaplan saw "the coming anarchy" approaching. He quoted Malraux: "Fight, fight enemies who defend themselves, enemies who are awake!" - the same Malraux who saw no other way to unify Europe than to designate Islam as the structuring enemy. He also echoed Martin van Creveld: "Fighting is not a means, but an end." Kaplan argued then that "true peace can only be achieved by a form of tyranny, however subtle and gentle." He thought he was a realist, the unfortunate one. In the democratic societies of postmodernity, from the neoconservative point of view, there is a threat of anomie, a tendency to demobilization, to the depoliticization of citizens intoxicated by the vapors of narcissism and consumption. Like wars, epidemics - starting with the most absurdly restrictive, crudely infantilizing, and openly authoritarian measures - can be an opportunity to raise the civic spirits of human puppets. This idea is not new. In the United States, in 1793, when yellow fever struck Philadelphia, the debate on the political virtues of quarantine was already raging between the Jeffersonian decentralizers attached to the individual liberties proclaimed by the Constitution four years earlier and the Hamiltonian federalists who saw in this measure a formidable opportunity to forge a nation, to produce citizens. Epidemics, in the West, have always constituted events They are political rather than merely medical phenomena, and their treatment has always been aimed at something other than the remedy of a sanitary situation. The organic thinker of French public health makes no bones about it: "The purpose of restraint measures can be summed up in two words: civil security and public order. Nothing underlines better the inveterate nature of quarantines and their persistence in the architecture of public health

[...] For controlling the ubiquitous disorder remains the sole obsession, the only fodder for anti-pandemic policies." (Patrick Zylberman, Microbial Storms, 2013) The mistreatment of populations, much like hazing in the integration rites of the "elite," helps forge an esprit de corps. Thus, "preparedness is particularly conducive to this more or less spontaneous deployment of fear and civic virtue. [...] The call for a new civicmindedness, a civic-mindedness in the superlative, certainly appears to be one of the most original aspects of this new "culture of emergency" ... Summoned to bend his or her lifestyles to the recommendations of medical science, the individual himself or herself, in addition to the State, is now accountable for the collective health. Health is no longer just a right, it is also a duty to oneself and to others. (Ibid. ) Since "the populations of a modern society cannot remain insensitive to medical values" (ibid. ), it is in the name of health that the frightened social atoms are mobilized, now that the effectiveness of anti-terrorism has finally worn off. The goal being constant, there is no reason to put operations in new hands. In France, pandemic management is naturally the responsibility of the General Secretariat of National Defense. We seem to have become accustomed to being led for almost two years by a National Defense and Security Council that meets behind closed doors. General Lizurey, the triumphant winner of the NotreDame-des-Landes ZAD - the man who restored the honor of the gendarmerie after the rout of Operation Caesar in -2012 was given the privilege of evaluating the country's health management in April, all2020, political bias aside, of course. In Bush2002,, the idea of a "Citizen Corps" was launched in order to "encourage everyone in America to contribute to making this country a safer place". Whether it was out of followership after his integration in the American preparedness exercises or out of a simple geostrategic inferiority complex, a French law was quick2004 to transcribe this generous call in an article stipulating that "every person contributes by his behavior to civil security". In one2006,

The plan of the General Secretariat of National Defense against a possible flu pandemic insists on the necessity of "maintaining the civic spirit and social cohesion around institutions and public authorities". More lyrical but no less American in his provincialism, Xavier Bertrand, then Minister of Health, declared in 2007 that the constitution of a health reserve "is the concrete manifestation of the mobilization of minds and wills, of the country's adherence to its health defense system, [...] the ultimate expression of the meaning and reality of a commitment placed under the sign of the acceptance of duty and dedication. The sanitary inanity, now demonstrated, of the general containment against Covid confirms that the aim of these "non-pharmaceutical" interventions is centrally political. So much so that their intensity is less a measure of the desperate nature of the epidemic situation than of the state of discredit of the institutions - almost non-existent in Sweden, moderate in Germany, extreme in France and Italy. In November, the Belgian Minister of Health did not hide the fact that 2020,the closure of "non-essential" businesses was only intended to "provide an electric shock". The "health pass" is also anything but sanitary. It is a police pass that will allow the population to be sorted into docile and rebellious, and to ensure that it will eventually be voluntarily traced. It is a behavioral pass that can be used to force everyone to do anything and everything under the threat of having it taken away. It's a financial pass to take a big step towards individual digital identity, without which all the data produced by electronic interactions, by all the sensors and connected objects that 5G promises to saturate our daily lives, are almost worthless because they have no support. Yet the market for connected objects represents a windfall estimated in the billions1500 by 2025. In this sense, the goal of vaccination is the pass, not the other way around.

All the implausibly vexatious measures of house arrest of the entire population, curfew, banning of beaches and hiking. All the aberrant instructions to wear a mask in the open air, to respect the "barrier gestures" or the "social bubble", to forbid any contact, any party, any music. All this is not the product of an unfortunate failure of common sense. The assumed reign of absurdity is itself nothing absurd. It testifies to the fact that something else is happening, on another level. What is happening is the recomposition of a civic body, no longer on a political, but on a biopolitical basis. If everything that has to do with law, discourse, reason, logic is suddenly deactivated, it is because another plane of belonging to the "city" is affirmed. A biological level where the assent to the social pact is no longer verbal, but bodily, where the injection takes over from the injunction. The notion of "biocitizenship" was elaborated in 2002 in order to think about the way in which the survivors of the Chernobyl zone, reduced to a permanent polypathological state, have entered into osmosis with the medical system that assists them in their survival. DARPA, the agency that is generally presented as the "The Pentagon's brain," has invested tens of millions of dollars in Moderna since 2013 in good intelligence with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to develop the now famous "messenger RNA vaccines," so evanescently effective but with such promising side effects. To the question, "Why is DARPA doing this?" its director answered in,2019 "To protect the soldier on the battlefield from chemical and biological weapons by controlling his genome - by making his genome produce proteins that will automatically protect the soldier from one end to the other."

A new "city" is obviously being formed. For us, it is appropriate not to be part of it. To remove ourselves from the human park.

The counter-revolution of answers2020 to the uprisings of 2019 1. The turning point of La 2019.2.reprise en main.

1.

Let's say there is a world order. Let's say thata

set of stateandeconomicpowers geopolitical or financial - although competing in the details of their interests, have a fundamental interest in maintaining the general order, a certain regularity, a certain stability, a certain predictability, even if only apparent, of the course of things. Let's say that the point on which they are vitally coalesced is the maintenance of the universal servitude, which forms the common condition to their singular existences. Let's put ourselves, now, in the shoes of any of these powers at the end of 2019, say in October. How can we not be overcome by panic?

The peaceful, financial, consumerist Hong Kong, the city-state without history, the temple of commercial nothingness, the height of air-conditioned emptiness where, before the Occupy movement, one would have been hard pressed to find a political idea hanging in all its endless shopping malls. Hong Kong, therefore, is burning.

Week after week since February a stubborn, confident, thriving localist 2019,movement has been challenging the Chinese government. In a few months, it has reinvented the art of rioting - dazzling lasers, protective umbrellas, extinction cones and tear-gas snowshoes, the first lines of flamethrowers, barricades in a new style. The city is paralyzed on a regular basis, the airport invaded, the local parliament invested and desecrated. The French Gilets Jaunes were specifically inspired. The applications that were used to flirt are now used to compose "black blocks". The young manga readers take their street tactics as seriously as they did their engineering studies a few weeks earlier. The movement agrees on its strategies on a forum where the inhabitants are so numerous that the Chinese water army of two hundred and eighty thousand civil servants paid to occupy the cyberfield does not

can't keep up; and then, his agents are so rude that they burn themselves. Be water, that's a tactical doctrine that no western rioter had thought of borrowing from Bruce Lee. Blossom everywhere - it was necessary to think about it, and especially to do it. In November 2019, the polytechnic university is occupied and proudly defends itself at the competition arc behind flaming barricades. When finally the police assault, long repelled, seizes the buildings, they are empty of occupants: the students, guided by the plans that the architects of the faculty have provided, managed to escape through the sewers while older came to exfiltrate them in various points of the city streets at the exit of the cast iron plates agreed in advance. October 2019, Lebanon - the old Phoenicia, which is not a detail in the history of a certain civilization - rebels and extracts itself from the most devious form of government, from the most dreadful institutionalization of The "divide and conquer": the multi-faith Republic. And this is thanks to the pressure exerted on societies by the inexorable climate catastrophe. A wave of fires revealed to the population that the rulers had taken so much from the state coffers that there was not a single Canadair left in the country. Realizing that the forests had no religious affiliation, the people organized themselves to fight the fires without regard to religious affiliation. From this common experience, they drew a shared understanding of the political situation and the powers they contained within them. The announcement of a new tax on WhatsApp communications, previously free, set the Lebanese kleptocracy on fire. The different "communities" that were also cheated rose up together against the cynicism of their leaders. In October 2019, a perfectly unexpected Lebanon was revealed to the world: Hezbollah premises stormed, ministers' cars attacked, ministries and roads blocked, squares occupied. Cousin of the

the Hirak revolt in Algeria, which since February has 2019left the regime in place haggard, having run out of maneuvers by dint of seeing them foiled one by one, the Lebanese insurrection will also have found arms supplied by the French state. Even more nightmarishly, in this cursed month of October 2019, the no less industrious, modernist and peaceful Catalonia - the old Catalonia that in 1068 invented the modern notion of value, without which capital would probably not be what it is - is in turn rioting. The harmless but ubiquitous independence movement, with its local assemblies, its committees for the defense of the republic and its high-tech computer scientists, is out of control. In reaction to the verdict of the trial of its leaders on trial for organizing a referendum, it called for a general strike, for "making Catalonia a new Hong Kong", and blocked the airport using an ingenious system of encrypted messages called "Tsunami democratic". Several days of rioting, sabotage and blockades throughout Catalonia, followed by huge popular marches that converged for six hours of fierce confrontation in the Urquinaona square in the heart of Barcelona, gave a new face to the demand for secession. "We've run out of smiles," say the rioters. To add insult to injury, Chile itself, the home of Pinochet's "economic miracle" and the Chicago Boys, is affected. In October, 2019,huge protests triggered by an increase in the price of the subway against a backdrop of general misery promised that the country, which had been the cradle of it, "would be the tomb of neoliberalism. A state of emergency was declared. For the first time since the death of Pinochet, the army was deployed in the streets of Santiago under curfew. President Piñera, worthy heir of the regime, declared: "We are at war with a powerful, implacable enemy that respects nothing and no one and is ready to use violence and delinquency without limit. There are whispers in the army that we are facing a "molecular guerrilla war

In response to the repression, the identities, addresses and personal data of tens of thousands of police officers were disclosed by hackers. In response to the repression, the identity, address and personal data of tens of thousands of police officers are leaked by hackers. The riots and demonstrations are so powerful that the state of emergency has to be repealed, and it is hoped to drown them out with the concession of a new Constituent Assembly and the drafting of a new constitution - less Hayekian this time, who knows? In any case, it's hard not to feel that with Chile a cycle is ending, a figure is being tied up, an era is rushing into the abyss. An era, precisely opened and preserved with all the instruments of the most precise, discreet and ruthless of plots, the fruit of the decades-long intrigue of all the proponents of the "open society", of the most influential members of the Mont Pelerin Society, whose response to Nazi barbarism was to give birth to that of South American dictatorships, to pass from the order of the SS to that of the American secret services and surgical wars. Last detestable synchronicity: the2019, October1er Iraq of which one was justified in thinking that the soul was charred forever after the horrors inflicted by the American invasion, occupation and "surge", is awakening in its turn. Demonstrations on an unprecedented scale against corruption, poverty, mass unemployment, the lack of everything, the sectarian-mafia management of the country. Occupation of squares. The people, once again, "want the fall of the system". In November 2019, Colombia enters the fray. The largest demonstrations in the history of Colombia, a national strike, riots against labor market and pension reform, privatization projects, the questioning of the peace treaty with the defeated guerrillas, the killing of indigenous people by paramilitary groups, social inequality, environmental destruction, etc. Fighting, confrontations, curfew. The fire never stops growing. The "Western Hemisphere" is threatened, no less.

All that is missing is a communalist insurrection in Switzerland to prove that the world is changing its basis.

2.

Whoever puts himself in the shoes of any of the powers Those who have an interest in maintaining the world order will agree: in this autumn of 2019, it is time to blow the whistle on the end of the game. Such an insolent revolt against leaders and "elites" cannot be allowed to spread among the less "politicized" peoples. All this is not acceptable. All the more so since what is coming in terms of the acceleration of the climatic and ecological catastrophe, of the "disruption" of the job market by new technologies and of the migration of entire populations, does not augur any return to calm on the horizon. This is all going too far. The mice have danced too much. We have to be five steps ahead if we want to stay in control of the situation. It is time for a great reset, as Klaus Schwab, the chairman of the WEF, would say. Fortunately for us, we are not reduced to speculating about what is going on in the heads of the world's powers: just read the reports of the countless think tanks, foresight cells and other study centers that act as the brains of accumulated capital. For the fall of 2019, one can profitably refer to "The Age of Mass Events" published in March 2020 by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington. CSIS is the think tank of the US national security complex. Henry Kissinger still has an office there. Zbigniew Brzezinski held a chair there until his death in 2017."CSIS is dedicated to finding ways to sustain American preeminence and prosperity as a force for good in the world," the site says. To get a sense of the anxiety in Washington that fall,2019, open "The Age of Mass Protest": "Between and2009 the 2019,number of protests

anti-government protests around the world grew by 11.5 percent annually...On June 16, 2019, 2 million of Hong Kong's 7.4 million residents marched almost a quarter of the city's population. At the peak of the protests in Santiago, Chile, on October 25, 2019, the crowd reached 1.2 million - again almost a quarter of Santiago's millions5,1 of residents. [...] We are living in an age of global mass protests historically unprecedented in frequency, scope and size. [At the2008, height of the global financial crisis and in advance of the Arab Spring, former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski identified a "global political awakening. According to him, a new era of global activism was dawning. He wrote: "For the first time in history, almost all of humanity is politically activated, politically aware and politically interactive." [...] The world's governments are unprepared for the rising tide of citizen expectations translating into mass political protests and other less obvious forms. Responding to the growing disconnect between citizens' expectations and government's ability to meet them may be the challenge of a generation. [That said, the disturbing signature of this era of mass protests is the common link between them: being leaderless. Citizens are losing faith in their leaders, elites and institutions and taking to the streets in frustration and often disgust." This is where we were, in Washington, at the end of 2019, before the divine surprise of a new coronavirus. Let's admit that in front of the titan that was rising, with the number of anti-government demonstrations following an exponential progression, with all the youth that was starting to protest all over the planet for having to grow up in a world made of droughts, heat waves, mass unemployment, stupid start-ups, slowing down of the Gulf Stream, intoxication of everything and death of the oceans, anti-terrorism was no longer of any help, in fact of a leaden cap. What was needed was a new instrument, capable of freezing

of all these odious mass demonstrations. As we have seen, the new instrument was not so unrelated to the old one. And as Peter Daszak, president of the New York-based environmental NGO EcoHealth Alliance - a curious environmentalist who likes to quote Donald Rumsfeld in his spare time, for a quirky NGO that is not averse to collaborating extensively with the Pentagon's biodefense programs - so eloquently explained in the New York Times, "Pandemics are like terrorist attacks: we know roughly where they come from and what's responsible for them, but we don't know exactly when the next one is coming. They must be treated the same way - by identifying all possible sources and dismantling them before the next pandemic strikes. What's interesting is that this man who tracks down threats He is also the one who wrote and made twenty-seven renowned scientists sign the 2020famous letter in the Lancet of February19, martially ruling: "We stand in solidarity to strongly condemn conspiracy theories that suggest Covid-19 does not have a natural origin [...] and overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife. [...] Conspiracy theories only create fear, rumors, and damage that endanger our global collaboration to fight this virus." That's what's called taking the lead. What a disappointment it was for its co-signatories to learn shortly afterwards that Peter Daszak's NGO was in fact funded by millions from the US National Institute of Health and Dr. Fauci's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to conduct experiments on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology! Experiments as innocent as the one consisting in grafting a Spike protein onto the basic structure of an SARS-CoV virus to observe its pathogenic effect on the lungs of "humanized" mice. And such an anecdotal proximity as Peter Daszak has published over fifteen years some twenty

of studies with the scientists of the Chinese Institute. One can also imagine the frustration of these co-signatories when they discovered in September 2021, following a mysterious leak, EcoHealth Alliance's 2018 funding request to DARPA to conduct a gain-of-function experiment at Wuhan's P4 laboratory to insert a furin cleavage site on the Spike protein of a SARS-like coronavirus that would greatly increase its infectivity in humans - the same cleavage site that has intrigued researchers so much since they began studying SARS-CoV2 since none of the viruses in its family, the sarbecoviruses, have one. This research program was aptly named "Project DEFUSE". The choice of the Wuhan institute was not without reason, since its chief virologist, a good friend of Peter Daszak, is associated with one of the main advisors on bioterrorism to the Chinese People's Army. One can only regret that the latter has made the database listing all the viruses on which the Wuhan institute works disappear as of September 2019. Under these conditions, it was certainly imperative that Peter Daszak be part of the Lancet commission on the origin of SARS-CoV- 2 as well as the WHO commission sent to China to investigate the issue, which was to conclude that "the theory of a laboratory leak [is] highly unlikely". After all, Allen Dulles was eventually appointed to the commission Warren on the assassination of John Kennedy, and a Rockefeller commission was given the task 1975,of investigating the mass of "illegal activities" of the CIA in the United States in the 1960s, following a painful series of revelations. How consuming it must have been for both DARPA and Peter Daszak to have to keep quiet for two years of "pandemic" about the "project DEFUSE". And all this by pure respect of the secret-defense. Here is a man whose silences, lies and denials are worth, in the long run, the best investigations.

Peter Daszak can legitimately apply for the title of the shadiest man of that time. By the end of 2019, a massive crisis in global governmentality was underway. A historic window of opportunity was opening. In France, the bestial crushing of the Yellow Vests was still on everyone's mind and the police were about as hated as the regime they had sadistically defended. The possibility of getting off the rails of a screwed up future attracted entire peoples to it. Something had to be done. We had to take back control, whatever it took. Those whose loss would be the result of such a fork in the road have tried to replace it with a scheme to keep their profitable apocalypse on track. They declared the possibilities closed and wanted to reverse the sign of the historical rupture in progress by turning the revolutionary opening into a vertiginous intensification of their hold. With upheaval inevitable, they tried to make it their own. What the lesser power with an interest in maintaining world order could expect from the thunderous declaration of a pandemic was : – the brutal plating of a historical crescendo on a peripatetic "natural"; – a restoration of all authorities - police, science, media, business, state ; – the substitution of the distrust towards those who govern by that of each one towards all the others;

– the isolation of the beings in their "social bubble" and the subsequent impossibility of any taking in mass; – a gigantic hold-up on any faculty of projection in time, of anticipation and organization; – the legitimacy to control all human interactions "for the good of all"; – the derealization of all past history in the face of the remote-controlled anguish of the moment; – the tunnelling effect associated with fear and scarcity, where everything fades away that is not related to immediate survival - Harvard psychologists have studied this well; – the panic which changes in luxury the fact of still reasoning, and in provocation that to show a little distance; – a break in the thread of history in the making, and a break with all previous history. Despite the persistence of revolts to the heart of Washington during the George Floyd riots, it must be admitted that, at first, these effects were achieved beyond all expectations. So we had not prepared in vain. But the "open society" of the neo-liberals, even the earth does not want it anymore. The bet of stabilization by acceleration is a bluff on a weak hand.

The Cold War never ended 1. The great awakening. 2. The long Cold War. 3. MK-Ultra for ever. 4. Containment theory.

1.

Who wakes up, is born to a world at war. Living like a sleepwalker is certainly more convenient. The present morality of the herd is therefore that of the sleepwalkers: the more it enjoins benevolence, tolerance, acceptance, openness, adaptation, moderation, modesty, skepticism, the more it allows itself the last cruelty, the most crass narrowness, the most complete dogmatism every time the opportunity to lynch the indocile is offered. Everything slides on the somnambulist consciousness. Nothing prints. The heavy rain of the day's facts flows through the gutters of the mind. Nothing makes particular sense. What's the point? Things are as they are. So nothing seems particularly absurd either. The fact checkers watch over the prescribed sleep. The national novel is worth all the lullabies. The great fog of information reigns. This fog is, in fact, the fog of war. Conspiracy theorists are the cause of great anxiety for those who are asleep. We disturb their sleep. They are now pouring out gossipy testimonies, whole reports full of insinuations and silly clichés, about our metamorphosis. It's becoming a kind of worldwide chestnut. The sleeping people don't understand. They are traumatized. Their couple is destroyed. The family doesn't get over it. The neighbors, let's not talk about it. They do not recognize us anymore. They kindly contact doctors, to "cure" us - they who only have in their mouths the words of the news. They chronicle our inexorable drift, the advice they have so laudably given us, our antics

unintelligible. All that wasted potential. They spare no effort to make themselves believe that everything is still going well in this world gone to hell. Our crime, in truth, is to try to understand the world in which we live, and to have the nerve to do so in our own terms, by our own means and, unforgivably, starting from ourselves. "We can discuss anything but numbers," the government says, advancing a misleading statistic. "In the country of the Enlightenment and Pasteur, we must stop having permanent debates about the facts or scientific truth," says an impatient president who is clearly not very interested in the anthropology of science. Anthropologists of science, who have spent forty years The people who "discuss indisputable sciences", starting with Pasteur's politics, prefer to keep silent, with an atomic silence. They look away and talk about ecology. Their personal value is measured by this. We like to mock our call to do our own research. Especially in France, where it is not good to do research "personal". Nor even dare to authorize oneself of one's own experience, except to regret it. And where, in any case, trusting oneself is a well documented social vice. Conspiracy theorists, we scoff, are content to do their research on the Internet: we don't even see them in university libraries. It must be said that, with very rare and precious exceptions, academics do not seem to be too eager to contribute to the intelligence of the various aspects of the moment. Either the spectacle of their dissident colleagues being lynched as an example has filled them with terror, or by dint of competitive specialization, by dint of knowing everything about almost nothing, their science has lost all possible use. But the funniest thing, in a way, is that the "services" are getting involved. Here are the FBI, the Verfassungsschutz, the DIGOS or the DGSI who are

Some of us would have noticed gaps in the official storytelling, others would have taken umbrage at being so blatantly taken for fools, and still others would be about to draw the practical consequences of what everyone knows, what is in all the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): that this world is going to the dogs. The kind of media hijacking and seizure of funds that used to be reserved for more subversive threats is being mounted against innocent rural housing projects. Content that is too non-conforming and too viral is quietly removed from the Web. Nothing seems to threaten public safety anymore. It has never taken so little to become a quasi-terrorist. Logic seems to be a crime now. Not to bend to the remedies of a civilization that visibly makes people sick, when it does not directly invent diseases. Refusing to swallow the ultimate scam of a "green growth" that is marketed under the same brands that have so far ruined everything. Refuse to be at peace with the existence of Monsanto, because everyone has understood that there will never be an alternative to Monsanto as long as there is Monsanto. To refuse to let ourselves be dragged along, between two aperitifs and a coke pipe, in the suicidal flow of this civilization. Not to expect anything from the snarling mass of followers of the Big Sleep. In short: to take seriously the fact of being in the world, alive, here and now, and to leave from there. This qualifies you as a conspiracy-survivalist-mystical-sectarian farright. And calls for a preliminary investigation without delay. At times, we have the suspicion that this whole enterprise of planetary fright planned around the Covid aims first of all at an immense disruption of the survival instinct at the very moment when it is awakening, and when everything indicates that there is an urgent need to leave the ship, to stop its course by all necessary means.

2.

This world is at war, but a cold war. In this, it can always be denied. The Cold War is not about the immobile confrontation of two blocs - yesterday, the Western bloc against Russia and China; today, the Western bloc against China and Russia. It has to do with the freezing of historical possibilities, the locking of the situation. The Cold War began long before Walter Lippmann popularized the notion in The1947. invention of the consumer society in America in the 1920s was 1920already a response to the political challenge of the Russian Revolution, just as Taylor's scientific management was, a generation earlier, a compelling response to rising labor insubordination. A 1920s publicist swaggered on the brink in 1929: "The great corporations are giving America what the socialists had set out to do: that everyone should be fed, housed and clothed." In March at 1944,Los Alamos, the director of the Manhattan Project made no secret of the fact to physicist Joseph Rotblat that the development of the atomic bomb was not aimed at the Germans or the Japanese, but at keeping the Soviets at bay. In 1946, Charles Wilson, president of General Electric, vice president of the Office of War Production, and future adviser to President Eisenhower, said, "The problems of the United States can be summed up in two words: outwardly, Russia; inwardly, labor." Both problems can be said to have been solved, since one has disappeared and the other is well on its way, at least in this great hospice that the West is tending to become. When the Korean War broke out, in "1950,the invasion was presented as established proof of the existence of an 'international communist conspiracy' led by Russia, which would be the watchword of the Cold War, and of the need for permanent preparedness. "Korea is

arrived and saved us,' Dean Acheson was later to recall, speaking for the hawks." (Forces of Production, David F. Noble, 1984)

"Of course I want to fight communism. But how?"

Anyone who thinks the Cold War is over need only leaf through one of the latest reports from NATO's Innovation Hub, entitled "NATO's Sixth Area of Operations," published in January. Certainly2021., with counterinsurgency doctrines, modern warfare has ceased to be strictly military and has become essentially political in purpose and essentially civilian in means. By becoming total, war has become psychological. As early as Eisenhower1945, claimed: "Psychological warfare has shown its right to a worthy place in our military arsenal." But this NATO document presents a kind of "progress": in form - the use of anticipatory fiction as a new norm in the enterprise of colonizing the imaginary by armies -, as well as in substance - proposing to adopt the "cognitive" plane not as an additional theater of operations added to land, sea, air, space and cyberspace, but as a transversal dimension that unifies all these fields. Read more. "If we accept the fact that modern warfare has become, for good, permanent / hybrid / ambiguous / under the radar, and if NATO confines itself to the "classical military defense" segment, then NATO will not be able to satisfy the expectations of its members because it will not be able to respond to the threats that are part of modern warfare [...] Military force and its use are obviously essential to ensure security. But the question of global security, which is the real question for the Nations, calls for a wide range of threats, risks, types of responses, notably institutional, which cover all the political, economic, societal, health and environmental dimensions, and these dimensions are not taken into account by any of the current fields of operations! [...] The Human Domain includes cognitive and information sciences, but also biology, psychology, sociology, economic sciences [...] The Human Domain is the one that defines us as individuals and structures our societies. [...] As

As is the case for any international organization, the foundation of NATO is trust between its members. This trust is based on the respect of explicit and concrete agreements, but also on "invisible contracts", the agreement on certain shared values, and this is really difficult when a good part of the partners have been hitting each other for centuries. The resulting scars and wounds make up a "cognitive landscape" that our opponents study very carefully. Their goal is to identify the "Cognitive Centers of Gravity" of the Alliance on which they can then aim their information and artificial intelligence driven weapons. You know what I mean: infox, undetectable tricks, deepfakes transmitted and relayed by social networks, Trojan horses, digital avatars... [...] The progress made in science, in all sciences including those associated with the Human Domain - has created a situation unprecedented in the history of the world. Never before have individuals and committed minorities had such devastating power. And while NBRC [Nuclear-Biological-Radiological-Chemical] threats remain largely the domain of great powers or entities that can still be identified today, it is the transdisciplinary capabilities offered by NBIC [Neuro-Bio-InfoCognitive] that are being used and perfected by these committed individuals and minorities who, to put it simply, wish us harm. The problem will not be solved alone: the vulnerabilities specific to the Human Domain, in particular this notion of cognitive Center of Gravity, are of course serious threats for NATO, but they also apply at the national level. [...] But, today, what is "public opinion"? How is it formed? How can it be manipulated, diverted? And how does one go about winning "the hearts and souls of men" today? [Modern warfare depends to a large extent on what is called the "information sphere", that is to say, on a domain where "influence" is exercised. It is the world of infoxes, of organized disinformation campaigns, of a work of undermining and erosion

But look at what happened with the Covid pandemic that hit the world in the early 1920s and, dare I say it, put yourself "in the shoes of the virus" and ask yourself the question it asked itself: "What human vulnerabilities should I exploit to optimize my spread?" You know the answer: human behavior. [You, as an individual, but also you as a member of a family, a community, a society, whoever you are and wherever you are. Hacking the human being, influencing his command and control capacities at the individual level, which leads to an interference capacity at the level of his community, of the society to which he belongs, has become for our enemies the most efficient and profitable method to reach their objectives. Make no mistake, the target today is human behavior, as soon as we attack human cognition itself, through the manipulation of its informational environment. [...] The adversaries we know are well-defined organizations, but we do not yet know how to identify the "committed minorities", those communities of zealots who, throughout the world, focus on our vulnerabilities, our weaknesses, target our centers of gravity with increasing precision and, therefore, threaten states and international organizations such as NATO." This is where the conspiracy of the anti-conspiracy people is at. This world is the work of great paranoids. This is not the least of its flaws.

3.

Fort

Detrick,before it became the center of theweaponsprogram and thus of experiments on viruses, was in the 1950s the seat of the MK-Ultra project. The MK-Ultra project remains, in contemporary history, the culmination of the disinhibition authorized by the Cold War. The point where an era, drunk with its cause, lets its true face be seen. Perhaps it is so only because it is also one of the few, in the midst of so many other secret CIA projects, about which some information has finally leaked. The mechanics of disinhibition are banal: it is enough, for example, to lend the enemy - in this case, "communist" - infernal methods - in this case, torture and brainwashing in order to authorize oneself to do the same, "for the good cause" of course. There is a kind of anthropological mechanism that modernity seems particularly fond of. Allen Dulles, then director of the CIA, explained the logic in an April 1953 speech to Princeton alumni: "Do we realize how grim the battle for men's minds has become? [...] It might be called the 'war of the brain.' The target of this war is the minds of men on an individual and collective basis. Its purpose is to condition the mind until it no longer reacts from its free will or from a rational basis, but as a response to impulses implanted from without. [The human mind is the most delicate of instruments. It is so finely tuned, so sensitive to outside influences, that it proves malleable in the hands of sinister men. The Soviets are now using this perversion of the brain as one of their main weapons in order to continue the Cold War. Some of these techniques are so subtle and so repugnant to our way of life that we have retreated rather than faced them."

Three days later, he gave his authorization to the ultra-sensitive research project MK-Ultra, whose object was precisely to advance on the way of mind control. All the humanist pathos of Allen Dulles is of course false. 1953,For a good decade, the American services have had interrogation and torture bases in the four corners of the world where they willingly sacrifice to their study of the "science of man" those prisoners considered expandable, that is to say, "consumable" - those who can be killed by toxic substances, deprivation or original atrocities. They went to great lengths to clear and recruit Kurt Blome and Shiro Ishii - the people responsible for experimenting in Nazi and Japanese camps on the effects of anthrax, botulism, plague, cholera, dysentery, smallpox or typhoid fever. Following them, seven hundred other scientists, engineers and Nazi agents were recruited, with visas and falsified biographies supplied as a matter of course. This was Operation Paperclip. The memorable Gehlen intelligence network in the East passed without transition from the service of the Reich to that of the United States, as did a certain Klaus Barbie. The Luftwaffe interrogation master came to teach his noble art to his American colleagues, so much so that he settled in California where he ended up making psychedelic mosaics. One owed well all that to the "national security". In 1949, just six years after Hofmann had synthesized LSD in Switzerland at the Sandoz laboratories, a U.S. Army Chemical Corps scientist suggested its offensive use in a report, "Psychochemical Warfare: A New Concept of Warfare. In 1953, at what was still Camp Detrick, CIA "Technical Service" scientists had already been working for several years on biochemical warfare and bacteriological weapons. They are experimenting with all sorts of innovative toxins and equally innovative ways of administering them. MKUltra thus follows the Artichoke project, the Bluebird project; it is next to MK-Naomi

- all programs that involve experiments in torture to the death and poisoning. If the MK-Ultra project has remained legendary, it is notably for the stubborn certainty of its boss, Sidney Gottlieb, of being able to make LSD a truth serum. He will not hesitate in front of any "He will have common prisoners given massive daily doses for weeks at a time. He would have mass doses administered daily to common prisoners for weeks at a time. Students, mental hospital patients, and even a member of the project, used as guinea pigs, never came down or died. The CIA set up brothels in New York and San Francisco where clients were given LSD without their knowledge and watched from behind a one-way mirror as they suddenly became more talkative with the ladies. MK-Ultra was also a place where patients went to see a doctor for a depression and ended up as a vegetable after being electro-shocked by fanatical psychiatrists. They wanted to see if they could erase a personality to install a new one. It was also the trial of sensory deprivation and hypnosis to make speak to the prisoners. Or the failure to poison Patrice Lumumba in Zaire, the Belgians having massacred him beforehand. The truth serum was not found. We only succeed in spreading acid in the counterculture. But the most original aspect of the MK-Ultra project is certainly to have set up a 1954foundation - the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology - to "understand human behavior". Such an ambition requires multidisciplinary research: in medicine, in anthropology, in psychology, in biology, in sociology, in group dynamics, in communication and even in computer science - a whole ecology, in short. It requires bringing together a whole puzzle of knowledge that no single mind can synthesize. And to bring together a whole group of researchers who might be reluctant to work for the CIA. It will therefore be the work of the foundation to discreetly encourage theses on the desired subjects, to discreetly

to finance and discreetly exploit them. What one should not do to contribute to the advancement of the "science of man"! With Harold Wolff, a renowned neurologist and authority on "stress, migraine and pain mechanisms" at its head - you can't make this up -, with anthropology star Margaret Mead in his advisory board and sociologist Erving Goffman or behaviorist B. F. Skinner as beneficiaries, the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology was built. F. Skinner, the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology built a solid reputation and an unsuspected legend. In all, in the early 1960s, between a third and a half of the theses not financed by the three major American foundations - Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie - were financed under cover by the CIA, even though these foundations had never had any qualms about collaborating with the CIA, to say the least. From the MK-Ultra project we have a sort of theoretical and practical synthesis, the KUBARK, the CIA's "psy" torture guide, completed in 1963 but still useful at Guantanamo. It concentrates what the CIA has understood about "human behavior" and how to control it. The progress of mind control has not stopped since then. If it was a failure, it was a failure with a future.

4.

In March we were 2020,not imposed a quarantine; we were inflicted containment. The difference is of size, and of register. Containment is, in France, the official doctrine for managing major nuclear accidents. If the radioactivity from the core of a reactor goes too far, it is up to humans to lock themselves up in their homes. Not because of "health" concerns: one suspects that the X-Mines who bring the atomic danger to bear on their fellow human beings have other concerns than the well-being of their fellow citizens. It is not surprising to learn from a 2007 report written by an expert from the Institute for Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety that "The first victim of a nuclear accident is the French economy. The purpose of containment, here again, is to prevent the effects of a general panic, to keep the population under control, to preserve the steering of the system. Nuclear power, let's agree, is one of those things that we prefer not to think about. Otherwise, we stop everything. It is the kind of subject to which it is better to remain a stranger if one wants to continue to function. The owners of this world don't have that leisure. They can't not think about it. It is their original sin, their permanent cold war and the ultimate lock they have against any political explosion, against any revolution: how are you going to manage the power plants without us, the technocrats? The spring of 2020 in France cannot be understood as a simple life-size rehearsal for the inevitable accident that the French nuclear authorities are now predicting in all caps. Containment is the project of society that the present masters have conceived to their advantage. Thus, one will not be surprised to find in a book on nuclear energy published this summer a 2019chapter entitled "The society of containment".

"Alongside the chemical and hydrocarbon industries, biology, construction and the automobile industry, the nuclear industry has largely contributed to the definition and establishment of a disciplinary regime that constitutes an advanced phase of confinement and control practices - a society of confinement. People [who live there] experience a particular kind of isolation: the "external" spaces they pass through tend to become internal spaces. [...] The formula "metro, work, sleep" was perhaps a first intuition of this new continuous interiority, because it describes a circulation between worlds that are certainly open to each other, but which together form a universe closed in on itself. Closer to us in time, the supposed open space is, as its name does not indicate, a perfect example of closed spatiality. Its closed interiority perceives itself as open, while it remains confined in a labyrinth of insulating walls and petty green plants. When leaving the open space and arriving in a parking lot, to get into a car or a bus and go home, at what point is one really "out"? [...] In other words, even the fact of moving around inside the worlds can no longer make us forget that we live in a confined space, without doors or windows. Stay at home, respect the confinement orders and wait for the instructions. [The goal of the operation is to obtain a more complete confinement, tending to abolish any relation with the exteriority, until making us forget the very existence of this elsewhere. The exteriority being neither côtée nor even represented, it tends then to become distant, blurred. This is a good thing for industrialists, because while everyone else is navigating between the different normed spheres of the Interior, industrial predators have free rein "outside" to organize attacks and looting, in other words, to carry out their projects. Military or civilian, nuclear or chemical, the great confineers have in any case come to an agreement. (La Parisienne Libérée, Le Nucléaire, c'est fini, 2019)

On April 9, 2020, in the midst of confinement, Netflix offers its French customers with dizzying apropos a "confinement reality show" inspired by an English original. It's called The Circle Game. It features a cast of "players" who each take over an apartment in the same building, but cannot leave or meet each other. They can only communicate through a social network called "The Circle" where they only have a profile. None of them knows the others, so each one is free to simulate as much as he wants, to lie at will, to invent the "profile" that will allow him to win. For the players have to keep rating each other until they have all been eliminated - except for the last one, who wins the 100,000 euro prize. Charming jackal morality. Of course, each apartment is equipped with cameras that allow the public to watch the "players". Only the viewers have a panoramic view of each other's maneuvers - what they say to each other and what they pretend to say to others. The spectators have thus all leisure to learn about the extent of human cunning, about the infamy of social relations, about the misery and the suffering in which the reign of the economy holds us plunged. The rise of the epidemic, with its wide-eyed, frightened looks on faces covered with masks, with its acidic vision of billions of suspended germs surrounding you, with its microbial aura enveloping the very bodies of loved ones - in short, this universal evil - has made it possible to realize Hobbes' old anthropology on a planetary scale: that of omnilateral distrust, of universal hostility, of the suspended war of all against all. This is what makes the State and the economy so necessary. The Circle Game promotes the real cold war in which we find ourselves engulfed every day: the universal reign of unacknowledged calculation,

where we try to make fun of each other by joking, where we use each other by flattering each other, this texture of relationships and elusive beings, attached, in the end, to nothing and to no one, dreading to be fixed on any point, fearing above all to have a too strong opinion, to make enemies, to miss opportunities, having preferences and opinions, but neither love nor hate, ignoring all loyalty, including to oneself, and fleeing from any explanation, always, with the characteristic of not having any, plotting a thousand petty strategies by way of existence, whose word is worthless, and who believe themselves to be cunning, opportunistic, clever. There is ice in this lukewarmness. How cold you must be, deep down, to aspire to be so cool! Only the most extreme inner tension can make an ideal of pure relaxation. This type of relationship to oneself, to the world and to others, this human type is a product of the Cold War, of the locking up of everything, of the impossibility of open conflict. It has been thought through from every angle. The Circle Game condenses in it all the behavioral, cognitive, economic and political sciences, all the social psychology, all the suffocating epistemology of the Cold War with its prisoner's dilemmas, its game theory, its microeconomics and its agents who only know "strategic interactions", the geopolitics of Thomas Schelling and the limited rationality of Herbert Simon. Only, what was intended to be a realistic thought of inter-state relations has become the ordinary cynicism of interpersonal relations. A few years ago, a mother

American wrote a book advocating the use of Machiavelli to "We are not out of the Cold War. We have not come out of the Cold War. We have not come out of the time when "the people at Harvard were trying to create a social science inspired by physical science, capable of explaining and predicting human behavior, just as physics had elucidated atomic phenomena. The Manhattan Project had inspired them and they were eager to try their hand at "splitting the social atom", as Parsons liked to say. (Collective, When Reason Nearly Lost its Mind, 2015) Behind Facebook and its in vivo behavioral experiments on its users, there is explicitly the "social physics" of Alex Pentland, worthy heir of the Skinner who never refused an advice to the CIA. Behind the promise of Google X, with its Selfish Ledger - its In the same way that the "selfish registry" - to make us happy, provided that we give up these silly fictions of "freedom" and "privacy", since, thanks to its infinite behavioral data about us, Google knows us better than we know ourselves, there is always the same manic fantasy of social engineering, the same war on souls that behaviorism has made its crusade. No amount of global warming will make this human ice pack habitable. The propagation of disastrous human relationships is just good for making isolation desirable. It is the best propaganda for confinement - confinement no longer as an emergency procedure, but as an idea of happiness. As a purely negative ideal of freedom from the annoyance of others. It is from the heart of the cold war that the father of cybernetics formulated the1950, utopia. "The idea would be that most people spend their lives in narrow steel boxes. The four walls would be television screens, stereoscopic images of course. People could

transfer their presence to any other cell simply by dialing a number. In the same way, they could summon a group of friends to their room. Listen - he turned sharply as if in defiance - today you already have to apologize when you touch someone. If you reproduce their neighbors at home, why would they go to the house next door? Their box will be their castle. (Norbert Wiener)

The years are generally described as1950 a time of collective psychopathology with its McCarthyism, its vogue for fallout shelters, its entropy-obsessed cyberneticians, its housewives on amphetamines in ecstasy in front of washing machines, the trauma of the first Russian satellite in space, Sputnik, in 1957.

But these kinds of phases are never an interlude. They do not fade away as they came. They form a stratum on which the world continues to be built after them. They serve their purpose until a revolution succeeds in deposing the system's owners. "New inventions and new devices serve to maintain, renew and stabilize the structure of the old order." (Lewis Mumford, Technique and Civilization, 1934) This world has not stopped spinning since the 1950s, because those who run it have not been overthrown. What is at issue here is not only that, since then, those who hold the atomic bomb hold the fate of humanity in their clutches. Nor have they succeeded in holding entire continents hostage to the tightly woven network of pending disasters that are the "civil nuclear". It is that the world itself has become a vast Manhattan project. To tear off assent to the new vaccine biotechnologies was to tear off assent to our status of powerless guinea pigs - assent, in this way, to the life-size experimentation of which we have been the toys since 1945. This world has been subjected in all its aspects to a general engineering enterprise whose endgame is war. The engigneor, the engineer, was already in the 12th century the one who designs for fortifications and machines in order to besiege. He has not finished with this origin, which must always pursue him, like any true origin. It is a sign of the times that so many engineers are now trying to defect.

This world is dual, as are its technologies 1. The climate war. 2. The domestic war. 3. The world made by DARPA. 4. The cool guycommemachinedestruction. 5. French Dualities.

1.

We speak of "dual technologies" to designate those that conceal under their civil aspect a military side. In any case, there is only "civilian" from the military's point of view. By becoming technological, it is this whole world that has become dual. This is one of the keys to understanding its own madness. Let's take the most irenic of current issues: that of "climate change". It is typically a cold war issue. And that is why it seems so intractable: because we have neglected to consider it since the 1950.

In the years that followed, climate 1950,change became a research area in its own right, making the headlines. It was widely agreed that "environmental warfare" was the future of warfare, since nuclear confrontation would mean the end of the human race. Irving Langmuir, a General Electric chemical engineer and Nobel Prize winner, said: "Climate control can be as powerful a weapon of war as nuclear weapons. He is working on bombs to be exploded in the clouds in order to produce rain or drought and starve the enemy without being able to be accused of it. In the United States, a 1953,very official Advisory Committee on Climate Control has been set up, headed, of course, by a Navy captain. He too considers that "it is conceivable that we use the climate as a weapon of war, creating storms or dissipating them as the tactical situation requires". The climatic weapon was used extensively in secret in Vietnam, during the years with 1960,two thousand six hundred cloud seeding sorties spread over five years,

in order to prolong the monsoon on the Ho Chi Minh trail and make it impassable to the opposing troops. It was the Popeye operation. In what is a kind of sardonic testament - his article "Can we survive technology? " in -1955, John Von Neumann, the chief mathematician of the Manhattan Project, the inventor of game theory, the architecture of our computers, a theorist of technological singularity and quantum mechanics, and otherwise a consultant to Standard Oil, the CIA or the Rand Corporation, writes: "The carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by the burning of coal and oil - more than half of which has occurred in the past generation - may have altered the composition of the atmosphere enough to generate a general warming of the planet by about one degree Fahrenheit. [...] A fifteen degree warming would probably melt the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps, and establish a semi-tropical climate worldwide. [...] There is little doubt that one could perform the analyses necessary to predict certain consequences, intervene on any desirable scale, and ultimately achieve quite sensational effects." When in May an 1960,earthquake of a magnitude of 9,5- the most intense earthquake ever recorded - followed by a tsunami, hit Chile, the first question NATO scientists and military asked themselves was: how to replicate this against the USSR with a hydrogen bomb ingeniously placed on the earth's crust? How to progress in "environmental warfare"? Like most of the sciences since then, environmental, and particularly climate, 1945,science owes almost everything to military funding and instruments. Ten years after the end of World War II, 80% of American climate scientists still receive military funding. The first observations of atmospheric movements were made by military spy satellites. The very fact of

giving human names to storms is of military origin - who else but someone with a pronounced obsidian complex and chronic frustration could have the idea of giving human names to hurricanes, and more precisely female names, as was the case for years 1950?1970 In the years when1990, the issue of "global warming" and the extinction of species returned to the forefront and Al Gore took it up, it was the army that he had to beg for his data, because it was the one that held the most reliable and oldest data. The Nobel 2005,Prizewinning economist, Thomas Schelling, a leading thinker on the American military-industrial complex and an eminent Cold War theorist, argued that action on climate change "will be in this century what the control of atomic weapons was in the last century". Instead of wondering why "we" did nothing for decades when "we" knew, we should go and look at the CIA documents from the 1980s. At the time, it saw global warming as a good thing because it would annoy the Russians. The oil companies' archives, on the other hand, see the disaster as a virtuous dynamic pushing for "adaptation". There is nothing like disasters to create scarcity, and therefore new markets and new economic subjects. At the very moment of the COP with21 its objective of °C1,5, the head of Total serenely shared in public, in a conference at Sciences Po, his anticipation of an increase of °C3,5 in the planetary temperature in 2050. Disaster is part of the plan. The apocalyptic angle under which the climate issue is taken today only prevails because we know since the 1960s that it allows us to neutralize it, and that the public reacts to it mostly by a renewal of cynicism and indifference. The question is not to get a grip on the climate problem, but to get rid of those who made it happen.

To turn our weapons against those who wanted to turn them into a weapon.

2.

After

the weather,which is less political,more What is it that we eat that we can't detect? Yet our diet is a pure product of the Cold War. The Lancet's thundering headline in October2020, "Covid-19 is not a pandemic", was not necessary to realize that Covid is the name given to the fortuitous encounter between a pathogen and a morbid terrain of obesity and hypertension, diabetes and deficiencies, asthma and emphysema, misery and sedentary life. For the past two years, the fiction of the virus as a hostile entity that indiscriminately attacks humanity has managed to suppress the obvious: Covid is a disease of civilization, like cancer. In view of the benign nature of the disease in most people, it must be admitted that, if there is a "cause" to it, it is not so much the virus itself as the normal pathological state of this world. If there is one case where we can say with Claude Bernard that "the microbe is nothing; it is the terrain that is everything", it is SARS-CoV-2. As Hollywood as it may be, we are not dealing with Yersinia pestis. The infectious disease that is demonized here serves to mask the chronic diseases that are endorsed. Just as Bill Gates' vaccination campaigns in Africa serve to mask the GMOs and pesticides of Bayer-Monsanto which he promotes there, next to Coca-Cola whose nutritional virtues are well known. As early as the 1950s, dieticians had established "a growing body of evidence supporting the hypothesis of those who judged the American diet to be intrinsically pathological. (Harry Marks, The Medicine of Evidence, 1999) The harmfulness of sedentary lifestyles, white flour, sugar, meat at every meal, all the banalities around arteriosclerosis, cholesterol or the Mediterranean diet - all of this goes back to American studies in the 1950s. But "any public challenge to the standard American diet was an attack on one of the earliest symbols of American prosperity [...] The conclusions drawn from comparative studies showing the harmful effects of

American regime could already appear 'anti-American,' a serious charge in a Cold War era." (ibid.). When, in the early years, a choice had 1960,to be made between two ways of dealing with the problem - one was a large-scale comparative in vivo study observing the long-term effects of different diets and the other, called the "Coronary Drug Project", was simply to test new molecules to "treat" arteriosclerosis while preserving the American diet, and the massive industrial interests attached to it - it is easy to guess which path was chosen, and which path continues to be chosen, with a few double-bind messages about the need to eat neither fat nor salt nor sugar at the end of a Nutella commercial. Even our food, we see, is dual.

It is an equally proven fact, and now documented thanks to all sorts of declassified archives, that the modern domestic ideal of the equipped, industrialized, Taylorized home served as a Trojan horse in the fight against "communism" from the Marshall Plan on, and perhaps even before. The great American exhibitions We're Building a Better Life, or America at Home, or the American National Exhibition in the 1950s traveled around the world to Moscow, with their ideal kitchens, their state-of-the-art Bakelite interiors, their model homes for model citizens, their Buckminster Fuller geodesic domes, and the historic "Kitchen Debate" that pitted Khrushchev and Nixon against each other in 1959 in Moscow amidst the stunned Russian visitors of the exhibition. The most banal, apolitical, ingenuous domesticity has been thought as a weapon of psychological warfare against the communist threat. And it has remained so. In 1951, the American sociologist David Riesman published a fictional work entitled "The Nylon War". He imagines "Operation Abundance": the Americans bombard Russia with women's stockings and then with all sorts of modern domestic utensils that they pour into the country in whole planes. He tells the story of this new episode of the Cold War in the mode of ironic reporting. "Behind the initial raid on erJune 1 there were years of secret and complicated preparation, and an idea of disarming simplicity: if the Russian people were allowed to taste America's riches, they could no longer tolerate masters who give them tanks and spies instead of vacuum cleaners and beauty salons." Like any other current political puppet, Eisenhower confided in a press conference in July 1958: "We are not descending into absolute horror", then hesitantly, "but we are not leading what we like to call a normal life either". It is then, in this "not very normal" period, that the utopia of a completely domesticated existence is forged, which one pretends to impose on us

present. A silly cold war utopia. A whole way of life. A whole idea of happiness. Which is indeed not "normal" at all.

3.

The years are1950, also the time when the Department of Defense The American government, humiliated by the launch of Sputnik, created DARPA. Through its funding, DARPA was responsible for the Internet, the computer mouse, Windows windows, hyperlinks, the first teleconference, the ancestor of Google Street View, GPS, the cloud, the Siri voice recognition system, Tor anonymizing software, and now messenger RNA "vaccines. How can anyone believe that the Cold War shaped every aspect of contemporary life? If you admit that the technologies DARPA funded fifty years ago are making the world we live in today, and if you read a little about DARPA's current research, you'll feel suicidal at the thought of tomorrow's world. The Insect Allies program which uses insects to introduce genetically modified viruses into the crops of enemy countries in order to devastate their crops. The In Vivo Nanoplatforms program, which develops implantable nanoplatforms that can detect the presence of certain molecules in the body and can be interrogated remotely. The Living Foundries program, which aims to subvert cellular metabolism in order to make the human body produce a particular protein that it does not know. The Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology program, which would like to develop "non-invasive" computer-brain interfaces in order to go beyond the digital brain implants that DARPA is already experimenting with in the claimed idea of "controlling thoughts". The most ridiculous fantasies that conspiracy theorists have will always remain below those that populate the "Pentagon brain". The current direction of his research comes down to

to the convergence of NBIC technologies "to improve human performance" whose agenda was set in December at2001 a symposium organized in Washington by the transhumanist sociologist of religion William Bainbridge under the auspices of the National Science Foundation. This program fantasizes a "new Renaissance" and a The "unification of sciences" made possible by the generalization of a nanoengineering capable of reconfiguring matter from its most minute grain. This would put an end to the division between the organic and the inorganic, and "humanity could become a single distributed and interconnected 'brain'". DARPA is developing the military side of this program, while the WEF in Davos is promoting it for civilian purposes under the name of Schwab sums up the "fourth industrial revolution" - "a fusion of technologies that blurs the boundaries between the physical, digital and biological spheres". Alongside the industrialists, academics, politicians and technocrats who spoke at the founding conference "Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance" in 2001, there were also military personnel from DARPA. It should come as no surprise that the current Director of Innovative Technology Solutions at the Gates Foundation is none other than the military geneticist who spearheaded research on messenger RNA vaccines at DARPA in the early 2010s. At the time of its birth, the transhumanist project of improving natural processes and human functionalities does not hide at any time its dual vocation of ensuring the maintenance of American geostrategic hegemony. It is thereafter, when Europe, good girl, adopts it in its turn, that it becomes fashionable to erase its civil-military nature. The European Commission's report, which 2004transcribes the NSF's report - Converging Technologies. Shaping the future of European societies - is exemplary in this respect. Subsequent reports from the Commission in view of "preparing our future" prefer to speak, to designate NBIC technologies, of "key generic technologies", but these are similes: the project remains the same. Following an OECD paper of

2009, "The Bioeconomy to: 2030Designing a Policy Agenda", it will be under the code name of "bioeconomy" that the European Commission will recycle the same content in a series of reports on "innovation for sustainable growth". All of this finally leads to the European Green Deal of December 2019 for a "new growth strategy". In the meantime, the disastrous consequences of two centuries of capitalist growth have become glaringly obvious: genetic engineering of micro-organisms, even "protein design", "high-precision" agriculture with its drones and autonomous tractors, the widespread use of big data, smart grids, 5G, the Internet of the body and connected objects will be sold as remedies for the ecological and climatic catastrophe. The convergence of NBIC technologies is now called, in the new technocratic jargon "green growth". It is about "releasing the economic value of nature". and to produce "a more intelligent population to solve the problems we have created", as the boss of a Silicon Valley start-up so aptly put it. Here again, we are proposing as a solution to an unprecedented problem a project that we have actually had for a long time, and which can only deepen it. Another example: contrary to what the official saga wants, the links between Google and American intelligence do not date back to the recruitment of its CEO Eric Schmidt to head an advisory body to the military under Obama. Nor from the day in 2004 when Google bought Keyhole, a mapping company whose main investor was In-Q-Tel, the CIA's investment fund, to make Google Earth. Nor of the day when2003 a specific search tool for the NSA was developed in Mountain View. These links are original, organic. The "intelligence community" was the good fairy above the cradle of Google, which realized its dream. In the years despite1990, the NSA's failure to have a clipper chip placed in every computer produced in the United States, a

By guaranteeing it remote access to the latter, American intelligence greedily sees the mass of data circulating in the world grow, and therefore the mass of data that it intercepts - in violation, of course, of all existing conventions thanks to the Echelon network in particular. Its stainless ideal is to record everything, to store everything, and if possible to process everything. But it lacks the tools to do this, i.e. to "organize information on a global scale in order to make it accessible and useful" - the mission that, miraculously, Google will officially set itself. The NSA's dream was formulated in by 2003its former admiral Pointdexter with his Total Information Awareness program, which he presented as the The "Manhattan Project of Counterterrorism": "The information extracted from the data must be available in large-scale repositories with enhanced semantic content to enable the analysis to do its job." What the services lack, in these years 1990, is a search engine to exploit its ocean of stolen data. 1993So the Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) project was launched, with the collaboration of all kinds of computer science academics. Here is the statement of intent: "The intelligence community meaning the CIA and NSA - is taking a proactive role in stimulating research into the efficient processing of massive databases and ensuring that the intelligence community's requirements can be incorporated or adapted into commercial products." In 1995, Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin, the future founders of Google, still students of Terry Winograd at Stanford, received two grants: one well-known from DARPA to build a mega-library using the Internet as a skeleton, and another, sadly forgotten, on user query processing, and it was funded by the MDDS. Thus, by the "intelligence community". As the text by Brin, Page and Winograd explains "What can you do with the Web in your pocket? 1998, Google's algorithm, Page Rank, is the answer to the question

the "intelligence community": how to organize all the information scattered on the Web from targeted user requests? The story goes that surveillance capitalism dates back to the day when2001 the United States, struck by the terrible events of 9/11, was willing to lower its exclusive standards of democracy by consenting to mass surveillance of its citizens. We would then have discovered, in wonder, that mass police surveillance miraculously meets the interests of GAFAM, which is eager to obtain hard data on its users in order to monetize "behavioral surpluses"! This fable is ridiculous. To rely on former CIA and NSA chief Michael Hayden's public confession that 2013the CIA "could rightly be accused of weaponizing the Internet" in the wake of 9/11 is laughable. In doing so, Hayden is simply setting a false event marker in order to attribute the origin of his own turpitude to the enemy, once it is revealed. It is in and 1997,not in or2002 that2010, the director of the CIA, George Tenet, decrees, faithful to Maoist metaphors: "The CIA must swim in the Valley." 9/11 served as an ex post facto justification for the control freakery that has been the raison d'être of the "intelligence community" since World War II. For some people, paranoia is a disease; for others, it is only a profession. The sickest people are not necessarily the ones we think they are. Much of the technology that surrounds us, including recent "vaccines", our industrial way of eating, and even the temperature of this winter - all of these are largely intentional by-products of research programs initiated by dangerous paranoids locked in their eternal cold war. We could go on endlessly about this archaeology of the present.

And to imagine a world in the manner of the Gnostics. A world created by an evil demiurge, doomed to darkness, in the hands of all-powerful cosmocrats. And that would not necessarily be wrong. But it would be pointless. The fascination with the Devil's every move and his sovereignty in this world only serves to reinforce our impotence, to flatter our passivity, to absolve us of having to make history, and this at the very moment when we are beginning to apprehend its art and methods. "Any system that says: this world is pathetic, wait for the next one, give up, do nothing, succumb - is perhaps the Fundamental Lie." (Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis)

4.

As a technology can be dual, as a world can be dual, a human type can be. The one, in fact, does not go without the other. And that's where it gets interesting. Because it allows us to ethically situate the Cold War. To detect how it affects us vitally. And touching its real texture, to locate the outside, to perceive it from this outside. So get out of it. What seems to us the most neutral in a society is what must seem to us the most suspicious. What constitutes ethical normality always plays on theinvisibility of the banal. It is the best way to make yourself unquestionable than to appear without quality. Hence the interest, we hope, of the small genealogies that we deliver here. They must allow to identify the manufacturing marks of the standard and perhaps to get rid of it. Basically, the standard human type, the ideal type of democratic societies has not changed since the 1950. He is a cool, nice, empathetic, collaborative, mobile, adaptable guy, not neurotic or obsessive, free of resentment, beyond inner and outer conflicts, unassuming, unattached and unconvinced - smart, in short. It is as well the type of the ideal manager as the ideal employee as the ideal boyfriend and husband. The model also exists in female, with the same characteristics. This democratic humanity was built, and it was built in the context of a war - the Second World War and then the Cold War.

We will show it. This whole positive being was conceived as a determined negation of the Nazi and then the Communist enemy. This ideally peaceful creature is in fact a weapon of war. It is an ethical extermination machine in a blister pack. His smile hides a vocation to devastation. It carries in its heart, as if in hollow, the signature of what it must annihilate. It is dual, in short, too. As Google wears the mask of "Don't be evil" and works for the NSA. As Facebook "connects people" for advertising, but whispers "Move fast, break things" aside. As Mark Zuckerberg offers himself to "protect democracy" after thundering "Domination!" at the end of every team meeting and calling his daughter August out of fascination with Rome's first emperor. Let's see how this guy was made.

The whole story begins on the eve of the Second World War, in the United States, with a whole bunch of progressive intellectuals determined to prepare for it, despite the pacifist wait-and-see attitude of the population. Since 19141918, wars are no longer only a matter of army corps, but of the total mobilization of societies as well as of beings. The industrial organization or the agriculture of a belligerent can provide the decisive advantage, as well as its aviation or the discipline of its working class. As a last resort, the enemy, what must be broken, is the will to resist, the morale of the opposing populations - hence, more

later, the bombing of Dresden or Hiroshima. What matters to our progressive intellectuals is to equip America with a cause. A cause capable of defeating both Germany and Japan, and by far the USSR. A cause capable of mobilizing and galvanizing the country. There are psychologists like Erich Fromm, Gordon Allport or Abraham Maslow - you know, the famous Maslow pyramid from the marketing courses -, communication theorists like Harold Lasswell or Paul Lazarsfeld, journalists like Lyman Bryson, an art critic, a Rockefeller Foundation official or anthropologists like Gregory Bateson, his wife, Margaret Mead, and the latter's teacher and lover, Ruth Benedict. All of them eventually joined the American war effort - in the Office of Strategic Services, in the Office for War Information, in the Office of the Coordinator of InterAmerican Affairs, and in the Committee for National Morale. It was in this last committee, which was responsible for determining whether or not it was appropriate to set up an American Ministry of Propaganda based on the model of Dr. Goebbels, that Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson and Ruth Benedict conceived the American cause in the face of Nazism. The cause by which the war would be justified and the morale of the troops strengthened. For it is an understatement to say that in a country where 1939,the Rockefeller Foundation still finances Dr. Mengele's eugenics institute, where the German Dehomag is the largest subsidiary in the world of what will become IBM - a subsidiary which will manage, throughout the war, the punch card machines installed in the concentration camps -, where the American eugenic laws in force in a majority of American states are the model for the Nazi laws of race preservation, where Henry Ford is one of Hitler's greatest fans worldwide and vice versa, where Germany represents the main source of American investment abroad, where the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) aristocracy which, under the guise of democracy, rules the country has a secret admiration for the

German discipline, where local fascist movements march at a goose-step in Times Square and organize mass rallies, it is an understatement to define the American cause as essentially alien to Nazism and an enemy of Germany. It is even necessary to twist reality a bit to make it obvious. This cause was the defense of the American democratic personality against the authoritarian personality of fascism, and then communism. "Since all Western nations tend to think and behave according to a bipolar pattern, it would be good, in order to strengthen the "morale" of Americans, to consider our various enemies as a single hostile entity," advocated Bateson as Margaret1942. Mead set to work. The result was her book And Keep Your Powder Dry (1942). After having defined the Balinese ethos or the iatmul ethos - their way of life, we would say today - the American culturalist anthropology born in the 1920s and 1930s returns to the fold to explain what the American ethos is. In other words, to invent it as such. Soon, it will examine the Japanese or Soviet ethos on behalf of the army in order to better ruin them. Some extracts, for the record: "The essence of the Puritan personality, a personality that has reached the America its fullest development, is a mixture of practicality and faith in the power of God - or in moral purposes. "Believe in God, but keep your powder dry," Cromwell said...Winning the war is a matter of social engineering...We must clearly admit the lesson that the world is now one, that we and our enemies are caught in the same net, that we cannot carve out an escape route or eliminate the one without at the same time compromising the future of the other. When we speak of policing the world, it implies a transition from armies to police, from a world seen as a collection of warring national entities to a single civic entity [...] We must study and preserve the cultures of France and Albania, of Romania and India [...] At the same time, we must demand from all these

cultures that they eliminate certain elements that are incompatible with the order of the world as we see it. [...] We must be the instruments that give shape to a creative order, based on respect for differences, and the scalpels that must excise that which is not suited to our particular dream. [...] The platform America can offer is a skeleton, a minimal platform - the four freedoms, moral purpose, engineering methods. [... If we use the leads given to us by other great cultures, and work with members of those cultures to build a new world, we will find ways to harness human energies as amazing, as exciting as the ways of harnessing natural resources that amaze us today. [...] We must devise a formula for post-war reconstruction in which we treat those institutions that make men devoted to war, domination, and ruthless cruelty as if they were dangerous viruses, and we treat the individuals who have been deeply infected by them as the carriers of deadly social diseases. We must analyze the social organization of Prussia and Japan, in particular, and try to scientifically eliminate those elements which produce convinced fascists [...If we focus our attention on the disease - for it is a disease that systematized hatred is trying to spread over the whole world - and not on the carrier, if we fight the disease and only if we have to segregate those who are most violently infected with it, if we are as severe and inflexible with ourselves as with our enemies - we will avoid corrupting ourselves as instruments of a new order....We are the substance with which this war is waged. " Conducted from the 1920s to the 1930s by Erich Fromm, Wilhelm Reich or Abraham Maslow, the study of the authoritarian personality - armored, rigid,

in conflict with itself as well as with the world, "unable to see itself, [...] to be itself" (Adorno & Co.) - results in the definition of the democratic personality - open, integrated, complete, authentic, spontaneous, autonomous. Be yourself. Be yourself against the Nazis and Communists. The American war is therapeutic. It is at least in this language that it formulates itself. It is a question of healing this world populated by neurotics, of purging it of these people full of "hate" - this incomprehensible "hate" which will soon submerge the Internet and social networks - these people who sow the conflict that inhabits them everywhere, and of substituting positive personalities for them. Finally. To cure those who are destroyed of the hatred they feel, that they no longer feel, since they no longer exist. In all benevolence. "Be polite. Be professional. Be prepared to kill," summarized John Nagl, one of the editors of the current American counterinsurgency manual. "The task [of building democratic character] is nothing less than the drastic and continuing reconstruction of our own civilization and most of the cultures we know," wrote political scientist Harold Lasswell in his Democratic Character. It was in 1951. Mission accomplished!

5.

"While the rationality of the Cold War may have lost its coherence, and for some its credibility, its components continue to thrive within a multitude of disciplines." (Collective, When Reason Nearly Loses Its Mind, 2015) But the real problem is that it has configured, in almost all its dimensions, the world of asphyxiation in which we live, and that it is the heirs of this that continue to configure it. There are many ways to inherit. You don't have to be "family". One French example among many: a certain Gaullist cavalry captain of the Free French, dazzled by the American war communication in Casablanca in 1943 - an "information hall" doing the story for the coming victory and the ongoing fighting. Let's say his name is Michel Frois.

Michel Frois, on the right, in Port Said in 1956 with General Beaufre and Admiral Barjot.

He was in Indochina, Tunisia and Morocco, i.e. he was in charge of the communication of the armies. He climbed to the position of director, with Colonel Lacheroy - the cursed theorist of the "revolutionary war" in France who ended up joining the OAS of the Psychological Action and Information Service at the Ministry of Defense. "Things are not what they are, but what we make them appear" is the doctrine. He deploys his always smiling faconde as head of the army's communication, in the middle of a counter-insurgency. When intoxication is vital. He swears that he only delivers information, never propaganda.

It wouldn't be his style. Nothing but facts. "To serve the press, you must first serve it," he theorizes. Armies must stop keeping it at a distance, fearing it, pretending to manipulate it. Rather, saturate it with news, photos, anecdotes, scoops. The laziness and cowardice of journalists will do the rest. "Information," he says, "is a corset that helps you stand up straight." The beautiful image, so cavalier! In it 1957,passes "in the civil". He is head of communications for the Federation of Electrical and Electronic Industries. He organizes exhibitions, like the Americans. So much so that he soon found himself in charge of the "information" department of the employers' association. To organize, always so positive, always so cool, always so nice, the first meeting of the boss of the bosses and that of the CGT just after1968 - he has no enemy: he even discusses with the journalists of L'Humanité, he goes to meet Zhou Enlai. You see - he has no enemy. Very early on, he understood that the cause of the bosses would gain a lot by presenting itself as that of the "entrepreneurs" - so much more positive, the entrepreneur. In the memorable years of 1980all the denials, it holds its course. To counter the threat of socialism, he organized the "Etats généraux de l'entreprise en péril" - twenty-five thousand bosses, large and small, who whined in unison. President Mitterrand congratulated him. "Companies must be in their environment like fish in water," he dares to say, recalling the old guerrilla proverbs.

Finally, to ensure his retirement - he is still a military man, as much as a civilian can be - he created his own public relations firm, DGM. He became the "pope of corporate communication" and counted "the biggest bosses" among his clients. His heir at the head of DGM, Michel Calzaroni, is a former member of Occident, the group that called for "killing communists wherever they are". And DGM still does the com' of the CAC of the 40,governments, of Bolloré or Laeticia Hallyday. The legacy is in good hands. Locking in historical opportunities is taking its course.

The nudge is a nudge 1. Method of the world blow. 2. Efforts to drive the other person crazy. 3. Dialectic of mystification.

1.

The March coup has taken on the local color 2020everywhere: dolorousmacabre in Spain, grey-functional in Germany, pastoral-hysterical in Italy, furiously disciplinary and falsely egalitarian in France, serenely disordered in Greece, gore-assassin in the Philippines. It was inevitable. As for its methods, however, it was uniform. The same maneuvers are evident at the same dates in the various countries, for the few documents that have leaked to date. In Germany, the Secretary of the Ministry of the Interior Kerber wrote on March 18 to a group of "leading scientists", including the head of the Robert Koch Institute and our dear virologist Christian Drosten. He calls on them to draw up a document as soon as possible to justify "new measures of a preventive and repressive nature". It is a matter of "maintaining internal security and the stability of public order in Germany". Nothing less. Evil must be relentless so that regulations can be too. An "ad hoc research platform" combining scientists and the Ministry of the Interior was therefore created. Nothing that is exchanged there is to be disclosed under any circumstances: "Zero bureaucracy. Maximum courage", Kerber enthuses. Fortunately for us, someone had the courage to disclose the exchanges. Always lyrical, the secretary dares to compare his little plot with the Apollo 13 mission to the Moon in 1970. Following a series of malfunctions, NASA was close to never seeing its astronauts again

alive. "A very difficult task, but one that ends well thanks to a maximum collaboration." The researchers do it. The collaboration is, indeed, maximum. Four days later, the precious scientific study, conveniently stamped "secret-defense", fell into the hands of the press. An inexplicable indiscretion. It announced, with models to back it up, that a million deaths were to come if the most energetic measures were not taken immediately. The Robert-Koch Institute invented a lethality rate twice that observed at the time. The desired effect of the media explosion was instantaneous. The right images were finally conjured up in the minds of the Germans: "Many seriously ill patients were brought to the hospital by their relatives, but were sent home and died of asphyxiation in excruciating pain." One could argue that naive scientists have given in to a request of well-meaning authorities. This is not the case. It is one of the scientists, whose name is unfortunately blacked out in the published correspondence, who rambles on about the best ways to bring about "It is necessary to contain the widespread feeling of powerlessness by the impression of a strong state interventionism. And who advocates, "We must contain the feeling of diffuse helplessness by the impression of a muscular state interventionism." Medical power, similar in this respect to politics, is a power to worry rather than to promise. The same feeling of threat commands to rely on the allpowerful ones as far as physiological self-knowledge and the power to act are concerned. All authorities are indexed to each other. And all of them are deafly united against the same popular reluctance, the same plebeian indocility, the same centrifugal, instinctive and silent movement of subtraction, which drives them crazy. Worst-case scenarios are worth an immediate surplus of power to the medical doctor as much as to the policeman. One has an interest in the citizen being a patient, the other in the patient being a citizen. A subject properly

infantilized will not be surprised, then, to take pies. He will whine and lock himself in his room. On the same day that the German study was revealed, March 22, 2020, an advisory body to the British government, the "Independent Scientific Panel on Pandemic Influenza Behaviour" (the SPI-B), which is part of the "Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies" (SAGE), submitted a report to the authorities entitled "Options for increasing adherence to social distancing measures". With the establishment of 2010the Behavorial Insight Team (BIT), the British government is a European pioneer in the application of The ILO is the first organization to bring the "behavioral sciences" to public policy. The future Nobel Prize winner in economics Richard Thaler, author in 2008 with Cass Sunstein of the behavioral economics manifesto Nudge, personally sponsored the birth of the ILO. The SPI-B report points to a number of shortcomings and suggests corresponding remedies. First, "a significant number of people do not feel sufficiently threatened personally...The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent by using hard-hitting emotional messages. [... These messages must emphasize and explain the duty to protect others. [...] Communication strategies must provide social approval for the required behaviors and promote social approval within the community. [...] The British experience in enforcing seat belt requirements suggests that with adequate preparation rapid change can be achieved. Some countries have introduced compulsory segregation on a large scale without major public disturbance [...] Social disapproval from your community can play an important role in preventing anti-social behaviour or discouraging violations of pro-social behaviour. [...] There are nine major ways to achieve behavior change: education, persuasion, and incentive,

coercion, empowerment, training, restraint, environmental restructuring and modeling." There followed all sorts of practical advice that was so well implemented that ten days after the report was delivered, the streets of the country were covered with the suggested messages. "Stay home. Save lives", "Coronavirus, anyone can get it, anyone can spread it", etc. By mid-April a schizo "All in, all together" 2020,campaign was being launched hand-in-hand by the government and the national press. Whatever your newspaper was, it was wrapped in the same dust jacket that commanded, "Stay home for the public hospital, your family, your neighbors, your nation, the world and life itself." On March20 in 2020,France, the first remote meeting of the team takes place In addition to the "Behavioral Sciences" of the Interministerial Directorate for Public Transformation - the administration in charge of putting the administration "in start-up mode" - with the Nudge Unit of BVA, a nearly bankrupt advertising agency, led by Eric Singler - a com' guru who believes that "humans are not rational" or that "Research has proven that man naturally tends to conform to the norm. French governments, with their characteristic mixture of fatuity and anxious followership, have waited to2018 convert to "behavioral sciences". Ten years earlier, Barack Obama - a rather dual guy, in his way - had massively used them for his campaign and installed them, in the person of Cass Sunstein, in the White House in the same breath. The fine team that teleconferences four days after the pathetic The President's "Address to the French" - "We are at war. [...] The enemy is there, invisible, elusive, advancing. And that requires our general mobilization" - will pass the French nudge, according to Singler, "from an exploratory stage to an industrial stage". And indeed, nothing will be spared us: neither the government's text messages, nor the daily count of the dead "to anchor the idea of danger for oneself and one's loved ones", nor the grotesque metaphors - first, second or

third lines - nor the ubiquitous self-attestations designed to be so impenetrable that you give up filling them in and therefore going out, nor the trap neologisms such as "barrier gestures" or the distinction between It's not the "presential" and "distanciel" - which anticipates, by the equivalence it suggests, the discarding of whole professions, starting with this irritating yet so disciplined teaching staff - nor the stupid signage, worthy of kindergarten, which has suddenly invaded public space, nor the radio preachings of the public service editorialists hammering that "the contaminations result only from our individual and collective behaviors", from a "sum of imprudences" and from the "slackening of the French".

It was Ismaël Émelien, a former employee of the Havas agency, who suggested using the BVA Nudge Unit. A man, therefore, who was the He was the president's "brain" until the day he opened his mouth in public. Against the chagriners, he defends his intercession philosophically: "It's a theoretical debate. In reality, it's all manipulation."

2.

The notion of nudge, "a gentle method of inspiring the right decision", is itself a huge nudge. A trap for gogos. Those who try to persuade you that mankind is a bunch of scoundrels usually have a lot to answer for. Those who represent it as a fallen breed, incapable of making any sensible decision, drowned as it is in two hundred listed cognitive biases, are not very good at hiding their ambition to take the lead of the herd - they who have so many good reasons to subdue it. Political programs in the form of oxymorons are calls to servitude. Richard Thaler's and Cass Sunstein's claim to a "Libertarian paternalism" is no exception. "It is legitimate to influence, as the architects of choice attempt to do, people's behavior in order to help them live longer, better, and healthier lives. In other words, we want public and private institutions to make deliberate efforts to steer individuals toward decisions that can improve their quality of life." (Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Nudge, 2008) All this good will to work for the good under the aegis of The "late Milton Friedman", as our left-wing authors refer to it, only deceives journalists. It only testifies to the fact that the world The "liberal" system can only maintain itself by negating all the principles on which it was historically built: freedom of expression, individual autonomy, respect for the human person, and the rejection of paternalism. Classical political economy started from an Augustinian anthropology humanity is a prisoner of its miserable desires, of its

of its vanity and its infinite turpitudes. Then it promised to deliver humans from the arbitrariness of their earthly passions by subjecting them to their material interests and their supposed rationality. Thus perhaps the human worm would give God the external spectacle of a certain regularity, the illusion of a possible goodness. Our new economists use their knowledge of "psychology" and of They say that the "cognitive sciences" will put an end to the fiction of Homo oeconomicus. In reality, Homo sapiens is not rational. We were wrong. He does not even know how to calculate. He can only follow - others, his whims, his hormones. He is a "mere mortal", not an "econe". He never spontaneously follows his "planner self, which is forward-looking, well-intentioned and concerned about the future," but rather his "doer self, which is casual and lives in the present" (Richard Thaler, Misbehaving. Discoveries from Behavioral Economics, 2015). Thus, our new economists are reinventing hot water by reiterating the original act of political economy. Like their ancestors, they claim to make the apparent salvation of their fellow human beings by leveraging their disgusting nature. The only thing new is that our technocratic apprentices have set up their empathy-filled offices on the upper floors and have resigned themselves to seeing the human mass below - the mass that only deserves to have its cognitive biases used against its cognitive biases, to be told anything because it thinks any way, and to be manipulated, in good conscience, "for its own good. Every time they say When we say "this is the way man is", we mean "this is the way we will make him". Only the brazenness of this social engineering is new, although the neoliberals have never been free of it. It marks the accession to responsibility of a new generation of unabashed cynics. For them, "the principles will still be there, as they have been in the past, since it seems that people cannot do without them, but they will no longer exist except to be invoked in theory and violated in practice. (Marcel Bourgeois, Les Yeux pour pleurer.50

the bosses, 2019) Cass Sunstein could not help but, at the beginning of the "He went from making fun of the irrational fear that the virus caused among "mere mortals" to, six months later, heading the WHO group responsible for advising the Organization on the best ways to overcome reluctance to vaccinate while prolonging vaccination. "barrier-gestures". And that makes perfect sense from his position. Besides nudge, the "behavioral sciences" are just the umpteenth painful rehash, in a repackaged form, of the old social psychology experiments of the Cold War. We just gave them a quick veneer of neuroscience, mirror neurons and other social brain hypotheses - the hypothesis that the complexity of the human brain and its mechanisms can be explained by the gregarious nature of the species and the complexity of its social interactions. In November, the 2008,first Social Brain Conference gathered in Barcelona politicians, biologists, neurologists and other cognitive scientists. They discussed topics as varied as "From animosity to empathy: neuroimaging studies on the construction of justice blocks" or "Genetic markers of good and bad cooperators: a biological approach to justice in economic exchanges". The faith that "social neuroscience" will finally deliver the The "keys to human behavior" does not add anything, in substance, to the axiom of The social psychology that Gordon Allport borrowed from 1954,the historian Vico in an exergue: "Government must conform to the nature of the men it governs. And to do this, one must study the beast well. It is by virtue of this axiom that, from the 1940s to the 1980s, so many redundant experiments on human behavior were conducted - perhaps we should say "on American behavior," since they were almost all conducted in the United States. These are the old experiments that the "behavioral sciences" present as their brand new achievements.

Eric Singler, with his banalities on human conformism, is only mumbling the famous experiment of Solomon Asch of It1951. consisted in presenting to a group of bars appearing on a sheet of paper. They had to decide on their respective lengths. All the members of the group were in fact accomplices of the experimenter except the "naive subject" who was the real object of the experiment, but ignored it. All answered truthfully about the length of the bars, then from a certain point on started to lie in chorus. The subject, at first taken aback, usually ended up lying with them. This experiment seemed to show that the individual in a group prefers to trample on his or her own perceptions rather than contradict the group - if only outwardly, to have peace, while knowing deep down that everyone else is wrong. All the little daily gestures, so funny, by which we pretended to The purpose of the "freeze effect", theorized by 1947Kurt Lewin, was to make us show our participation in the "war against the virus", only to make us adhere to the exorbitant measures of restriction of freedom. The willingness to do what you are told, even if it means behaving in a perfectly inhumane way, as long as it is a person in a white coat who tells you to do so - this was the subject of Stanley Milgram's famous "submission to authority" experiment in 1961. Since 2020, governmental communication has taken advantage of all possible effects. The images of passers-by dropping dead from the coronavirus in the streets of Wuhan in January 2020 or those of dying patients in hospital corridors explicitly exploited the "anchoring effect" that emerged from the research of 1970psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in the years and that has been forever associated with the "neuro-linguistic programming" of Richard Bandler and John Grinder. This bias means that human subjects have the greatest difficulty in detaching themselves, in situations of uncertainty, from the first impression that they have associated, or that has been associated, with a representation.

The media coverage of celebrities recounting their vaccinations was intended to exploit the "halo effect" identified by Nisbett and Wilson in:1977 it seems that the celebrity of the person speaking to you unconsciously alters your judgement as to the validity of what he or she says. The global blanket vaccination campaign is not consistent with any medical rationale. The prevailing "vaccines" are more harmful than the virus to most people, and do not provide immunity against the disease itself. They even promote the development of more virulent variants. In short: they only satisfy the passion to experiment with new toys on a global scale, and the greed of those who sell them. It is therefore tempting to see in this a realization of the famous and crucial "theory of commitment" formulated by 1971Kiesler in his Psychology of commitment. The anthropological hypothesis of Kiesler and of all social psychology is that humans do not act on what they think and say. Their consciousness and speech only serve to justify after the fact the actions they have already taken. You will be inclined to say yes to a salesman who smiles and takes you by the arm, then rationalize your choice. For the social psychologist, the person who has irrationally consented to be injected will be inclined to justify all the propaganda that led him to it. In order to adhere to his action, he will adhere to the political order that pushed him into it. The "confirmation bias", which means that each person selects the information that makes him right, will do the rest. The irrationality of the measures imposed since March has2020 its own logic. The now established impossibility of any argumentative discussion on the course of events is itself a policy. A policy based on social psychology. Whoever submits to a norm as baseless as wearing a mask outdoors will tend to accept all the other changes in norms, which are much less trivial, in its wake. This is what we call,

in social psychology, the "foot in the door" technique - in this case, it is more like the "foot in the mouth" technique. Congratulating "the French" for their "responsibility", their "civicmindedness" and their "discipline" is practicing the technique known as "labeling", which means that people tend to conform to the flattering image that you present to them. "Changing behaviors" is the fixed idea of a world where everything indicates that it is the world that must be changed. This is nothing new. "Overcoming Resistance to Change" was the title of an article in the American "Human Relations" movement in1948 . At the time, this consisted of providing workers with the obviously illusory feeling of participating in the choice of their working conditions in order to increase their productivity. With its therapeutic connotations, this "art of change" so dear to the Palo Alto school and its "strategic approach" is the most twisted way to wage class warfare. What we are massively subjected to, since March 2020, is not a gigantic operation of social psychology without constituting at the same time a systematic speculation on our fellow men. It is certainly the most colossal attack on the joy of living to date. The owners of this company have applied to us, to an unprecedented degree of concentration, a combination of all the techniques of influence developed since the Second World War. It's a blaze of manipulation. You have to read the KUBARK - the manual We were able to use the CIA's "interrogation" system to appreciate the similarity between what we experienced and the psychological torture practices used to break down the resistance of prisoners and make them cooperate. "If maintained for a sufficiently long period of time, a fright concerning a vague or unknown element of the subject induces regression. [...] Placing the

...] the threat works like other coercive techniques: it is most effective when it is used in a way that encourages regression and when it is accompanied by the suggestion of an escape route...the threat is not only a threat, but also a means of escape. [...] threat works like other coercive techniques: it is most effective when used in a way that encourages regression and when accompanied by the suggestion of an escape route..." "As the atmosphere and cues of the outside world become more distant, their importance to the interviewee diminishes. This world is then replaced by the interview room, its two occupants and the dynamic relationship that develops between them. And, as the process progresses, the subject relies more and more on the values of the interrogation world, rather than those of the outside world." "The objective of the "Alice in Wonderland" method - also known as the method of confusion - is to upset the expectations and conditioned reactions of the interviewee. She is used to a world that makes sense, at least to her; a world of continuity and logic, predictable. And she clings to it to preserve her identity and her ability to resist. The method of confusion is designed not only to obliterate the familiar, but also to replace it with the strange. [In this confusing atmosphere, she quickly realizes that the type of speech and thought she has always considered normal has been replaced by strange and disturbing nonsense. She may begin by laughing at it or by refusing to take it seriously. But as the process continues, over several days if necessary, the source will try to make sense of a situation that has become mentally unbearable. To stop the confusing flow that assaults her, she is now likely to make meaningful confessions, or even to spout her entire story." As Harold Wolff of the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology wrote in 1956a report to the CIA on

In the "communist control techniques", "the man with whom the interrogator is dealing can be regarded as a patient who has been intentionally created". So it should come as no surprise that the "method of confusion" comes from the methods used to induce hypnotic regression by Milton Erickson. Milton Erickson, nicknamed the "Phoenix Wizard", was the chairman of the first Macy Conference from which cybernetics was born. He is the one who resurrected therapeutic hypnosis in the 20th century. He is the American antie Freud - he knows only cases and the history of their express healing, and he defies all theorization as well as all interpretation. He is the man with countless disciples, scattered in all disciplines, but who never agreed to become a school. One of his French heirs describes the said method as follows: "Another particular way of depotentiating the vigilant consciousness consists in disorienting the person by taking him out of his usual frames of reference. This is the confusion method, developed by Milton Erickson. It is a question of making reality momentarily unassimilable for the person, of making it temporarily insane, so that it is not possible to make sense of it. The result is a kind of stupefaction in which the person tries so hard to make sense of what is happening that his or her capacity to respond is saturated. Thus overwhelmed, they develop a great thirst for clarity, a need to receive a clear message at last. She will therefore be more willing to take the first suggestions that the hypnotist makes to her. (Thierry Melchior, Creating the Real, 1998) Milton Erickson was friends with Gregory Bateson until his death. They met in when1942, they were both working for the American intelligence service. This "technique of confusion" is one of the sources of Bateson's mythical theory of schizophrenia - schizophrenia as a way of finding a way out of an untenable double bind situation where the subject, subjected to contradictory injunctions, is necessarily doomed. Gregory Bateson is not only the

a friendly cybernetic grandfather in Hawaiian shirts, fueled by LSD, who lived in a community near Santa Cruz and ended his life in the therapeuticmanagerial oasis of Esalen on the Pacific. He was also an agent of the OSS, the direct ancestor of the CIA. He volunteered for service and was deployed during World War II to Thailand, China, India, Ceylon and Burma, where he served in an "advanced intelligence unit. From the Burmese mountains of Arakan, he ran underground radio stations carrying false Japanese propaganda. He thus put into practice his anthropological theorization of schismogenesis as it appears in The Raven Ceremony (1936) - the art of creating zizanie in a target population by creating rivalry or hostility, paradoxical communication situations or the impossibility of communication. The schismogenetic technique consisted in pretending to be a Japanese occupation radio station and in pushing the discourse to such extremes that the occupied population ended up splitting into pro-Japanese and anti-Japanese. The aim was to deprive the enemy of the support of the population. This strategy has meanwhile become a common feature of contemporary propaganda - from Russian troll farms to This is the "chaos engineers" at work all over the world now. This is what that we call, in the language of psychological operations, the "black propaganda". Bateson remained, moreover, a lifelong friend of Harold Abramson, the psychiatrist of the MK-Ultra project. This shows that, despite his leftist legend, Bateson was also the prototype of dual subjectivity.

New York City Subway: "Don't be that person. Stop the contamination. Put on a mask."

Who can say that, for the last two years, we have not been systematically subjected to a succession of fearful stimuli aimed at generating a state of docile regression, to a methodical narrowing of our world, to contradictory injunctions aimed at making us suggestible? Isn't everything done to place us in a situation of existential contradiction making us vulnerable to any blow? "Take care of each other / but run away from each other" "Stay home / but go to work" "Be responsible / but let us do it "The situation is under control / but it can get out of hand at any time "Get vaccinated / but the vaccine does not protect you" "The virus is terribly dangerous / but it only kills old-obese-diabeticcoronary patients" "We abuse you / It's for your own good"

"Trust us / We're manipulating you "Let's aim for collective immunity / There is no collective immunity "Drugs are very bad / but fast-my-dose!" etc. The induced state of cognitive dissonance dissociates, as expected, groups and subjects. The blind obedience of some is met by the obsessive withdrawal of others against a background of inner paralysis. The result is "the feeling that the truth is simply impossible to know, and an attitude of resignation that leads to withdrawal from political debate and paralysis. This situation can be useful to the powerful since those who want to change things have to convince others, while those who want to stay in power only have to paralyze them to prevent them from acting." (Zeynep Tufekçi, Twitter & tear gas, 2019) All the uncertainties of crisis management do not prevent it from being an experience of management by uncertainty. And even of management by paradoxical injunction such as one saw it appearing in French companies, at the time of the internal seminars of executives, at the end of the Nineties. The consummate art with which the government intended to set the vaccinated against the non-vaccinated can be raised to the rank of a textbook case of perversity in communication. It began on July 1er, 2021 with a "I fear a form of fracture between those who will have been vaccinated and those who will not have wanted to be vaccinated" from the government spokesman. This was followed by a telephone interview with Bernard Kouchner on July 11: "Those who, faced with this virus, choose to fight individually are, if not deserters, at least allies of the virus. Vaccination is not a personal matter. To refuse it is a betrayal. These very Dark Winter words came, not surprisingly, on the eve of the President of the Republic's power move: his July12 speech to "recognize civic-mindedness and place restrictions on the non-vaccinated rather than on everyone." Or, to put it in the words of one of his minister-goddesses, to "hit on

the unvaccinated [who] will pay the price. A ghostly fourth wave and arguments defying all reason, such as "the unvaccinated are threatening the vaccinated with death", served as a landscape for this pure and simple blackmail: from now on, one would have to submit to this sickening In the end, the day after a demonstration against the "health pass", the Prime Minister's remarkably devious "we mustn't make fun of people who are afraid" was heard. Finally, the day after a demonstration against the "health pass", we had the remarkably devious "we must not make fun of people who are afraid" of the Prime Minister. Step by step, each speech did the opposite of what it said.

Systematized by Putin's Russia as the regime's firewall against any criticism, theorized by the Kremlin's great illusionist Vladislav Sourkov, trolling has become the favorite government tactic of a virtually bankrupt world whose only hope is that it will never coalesce

against him the logical force that should have brought him down long ago. "Its purpose is to undermine people's perception of the world so that they never know what's really going on (...) It's a power strategy that keeps the entire opposition in permanent confusion, an unstoppable incessant change because it's indefinable." (Adam Curtis, Oh dearism, 2009) The crisis communication adopted since March 2020 goes beyond the ordinary toxicity of a society that promotes self-reliance and relies on submission, that sermonizes all day long to its stokers that they must eat healthily while taking away any means of doing so, that misses no opportunity to remind them that it is a Titanic, but chases those who try to leave the ship. All of this "crisis management" of the Covid is what psychiatrist Harold Searles calls "the effort to drive the other crazy": "The establishment of any interpersonal interaction that tends to foster emotional conflict in the other - that tends to make different areas of his personality act against each other - tends to drive him crazy (i.e., schizophrenic), [...] tends to undermine his confidence in the reliability of his own emotional reactions and his own perception of external reality." (The Effort to Drive Mad, 1977) According to Searles, this constitutes a "psychological equivalent of murder". This is what we have experienced, on a mass scale. No criminal code will ever protect us from it. So much for the "soft method", nudge and other benevolent outbursts.

3.

What is presented as the scientific management of "the most terrible pandemic since the Spanish flu of 1918" can just as easily be described as the application to citizens of entire societies of mind control techniques commonly attributed to "cults. Methodical isolation of the subject, organized rupture of his links with the world and others, deprivation of the habits that make up his own consistency, then apocalyptic description of the external world as the seat of an immense threat, as given over to Evil, then construction, in substitution of the lost world, of a phantasmatic reality not susceptible to be invalidated by experience and confinement of the subject in this fiction, denigration of any critical attitude and, finally, in order to make this new psychotic and stunted world hold, designation as enemies of the "traitors from within", of the "dissidents", cause of the persistence of the Evil and threat for the group designation which authorizes the constitution of a dynamic, heroic and mobilizing narrative of fight against the minions of the Evil. If such a thing has been possible, it is because it comes at the end of a half century of massive diffusion of influence techniques. The knowledge of manipulation has become the second nature of our time, its spontaneous social grammar. Becoming an "influencer" is the ultimate achievement for a generation. In France, the 2010,Pope of social psychology, author of Petit traité de manipulation à l'usage des honnêtes gens and La Soumission librement consentie, was employed by public television to reproduce Stanley Milgram's experiment in the form of a reality show. It was called The Game of Death, and it was shown in prime time.

Since the1984, infamous Influence and Manipulation. The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini is on its five millionth reader and its author has worked, among many other behavioural scientists, on the campaigns of Barack Obama in and2012 Hillary Clinton in 2016. Youtubers with five hundred thousand views recycle the basic techniques of neuro-linguistic programming as seduction tips. Every "successful" post on Instagram is about a science of communication that has become almost innate among digital natives. To understand how we arrived at this point, we could go back to the First World War and its Creel Committee - the Committee on Public Information which was in charge, as its name does not indicate, of war propaganda and which included Walter Lippmann as well as Edward Bernays, Freud's famous nephew to whom we owe the invention of public relations. One could exhume the fundamentally democratic, not totalitarian, matrix of propaganda - never forget the incredible opening line of Bernays' Propaganda (1928): "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the actions and opinions of the masses is an important element in a democratic society. Those who manipulate this invisible mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the real power in our country. We are governed, our minds trained, our tastes educated, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of." In fact, it is enough to understand the "natural" convergence since 1945 social psychology, the "Palo Alto school" in its army veterans' hospital, Watzlawick and Heinz von Förster's constructivism, Bateson's ecology of the mind, Wolff and Mead's Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, Edward T. Hall's "proxemics", Skinner's behaviorism, Ericksonian hypnosis, Grinder's neuro-linguistic programming, and the Hall's "proxemics", Skinner's behaviorism, Ericksonian hypnosis, Grinder's neuro-linguistic programming and

Bandler, the "human relations" of the Tavistock Institute and the "MIT Research Center on Group Dynamics", Kurt Lewin's "processes of change", the Kübler-Ross grief curve, mentalism and personal development. Convergence all the more It is "natural" that most of these currents are composed of people who have personally dated and influenced each other. All of this was done against the backdrop of an advertising science of clandestine persuasion, the maturity and ambitions of which Vance Packard was already measuring in 1958. All of this is done against a backdrop of cold, positive managerial repression of any conflict. All this on a background of generalized social engineering and permanent pacification. Pacification of morals and massification of fears. And all this following the explosion in full flight of the collective adventure of the first cybernetics.

Burrhus F. Skinner and his famous "Skinner box

It is from this constellation of points, all linked together despite their apparent fragmentation, that the techniques of mental manipulation and psychological warfare have spread over the last half century in all areas of social activity. They are taught and practiced both in politics and in

They are used as sales methods, in management as well as under the guise of design, communication sciences, psychology or coaching. For half a century, they have been used as a support and even as a subject for films and series in industrial quantities. They literally saturate the contemporary social field. They have become like its own texture, based on the constructivist principle that the division between reality and illusion, the distinction between truth and lies are now obsolete. Karl Rove, George W. Bush's diabolical mentor, drew this political consequence in an interview: "We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying, very wisely, that reality, we will act again, creating another, new reality, which you can study well. That's how things are going to work out. We are historical players... and you, all of you, will just have to study what we do." For decades now, it has been said in every chair of journalism, management, marketing, communication, postmodern philosophy and even military strategy that reality does not exist. Let reality be invented. That the human subject lives enclosed in his epistemological bubble. That everything is a matter of perception and that perceptions can be managed, constructed and manipulated at will. And the feeling that the whole society is a gigantic machination is denounced as paranoid or conspiratorial. We are disgusted by the ease with which fake news can compete with official propaganda. There is even a hopeless attempt to "certify the information". We are pushing the highscores in front of a supposed"conspiracy epidemic".

We track down the conspiracy of the conspiracists. We are scandalized by the fact that we are no longer believed, even though we have been theorizing about the necessity of lying for half a century. And indeed, governments, journalists or scientists are facing a salutary epidemic of disbelief, which is precisely the product of this saturation of our lives by their manipulation techniques. It is not the information about the world that has become false: it is the world itself. All those who have eyes to see have noticed. Never has truth been spoken so much as in this world of professional liars. One could call this the dialectic of mystification: the arts of manipulation have reached such a degree of diffusion that they no longer function. Innocence, which was the condition for the effectiveness of social prestidigitation, has been killed. Any graduate in sales techniques knows the ABCs of deception, so much so that he or she can also identify it and to defend themselves. For the knowledge of influence is also the knowledge of immunization against influence. Hence the contemporary "conspiracy". We can't help but know that they are lying, and that they themselves know it very well. More scandalously,we're returning thetechniques they taught us, which they thought they could keep for themselves, to them They played, they lost. We also produce the same. And they are so much better than theirs: they are more real. Our "communication", with its poor means, is a hundred times more effective, because we believe in it. It does not occur to them that the epistemological framework in which we live, our habits, our behaviors, our thoughts can constitute

It is something other than existential rails that we do not know how to get out of, a hermeneutic prison from which we dream of escaping, a neuro-linguistic environment that we would only need to reprogram, with a little plasticity, to finally "succeed". It doesn't occur to them that all this is the meaning we see in life - our idea of happiness, the form of life we cherish. They do not seem to understand that an attachment can be nonpathological. And this is certainly the most striking symptom of their illness.

The art of governing does not produce than monsters 1. The project of governing everything. 2. Democratic design and environmental power. 3. Architects and supernumeraries.

1.

Nowadays, when you want to force a whole population to let themselves be Injecting a "vaccine", one does not immediately proclaim a law, before sending the police force to the rebels. It would not be modern. And that would be counterproductive. Instead, young people are offered a free McDonald's or a day at the regional water park if they agree. We call them and tell them that we are waiting for them at the vaccination center, that their slot is ready. The poor are awarded a "diploma of conqueror of Covid-19" - yes, yes, it was done in Meaux! A whole inexorable "social pressure" is organized around each one, which goes from the stuffing of the television news to the psittacism of the colleagues, while passing by the bombardment of the social networks. Then, one erupts, one objurgates, one threatens of excommunication the recalcitrants and the relapses. And finally, the life of the diehards is sprinkled with a thousand petty impediments, a thousand annoyances, a thousand tiny proscriptions that do not, however, go so far as to starve them. They are imperceptibly cut off from social life. In short: they disappear. Of course, they still exist somewhere, like so many other tiny things, but it is already as if they no longer exist. Thus, we did not have to enforce the law to impose the norm. We didn't have to force the bodies directly. We made them come to us, "freely". We leveraged their needs, their habits, their fears, their desires, to bring them to resignation. We organized a whole

"This is not for one or the other, but for the population as a whole, and for all the particular populations that make up the population. And this is not for one or the other, but for the population in general, and for all the particular populations that make up the population. This is what governing is all about: strategically influencing behavior. To "drive the conduits", according to the canonical expression of Michel Foucault, where the automobile metaphor must be understood. To produce drivers. And driving the drivers. It does not enter anything, there, of verbal that to aim the non-verbal. A bit like in hypnosis. Besides, driving a car, it is well known, is a light hypnotic state. Reason does not intervene here as an intermediary. To govern, it is not to make listen to reason so that in its turn the conscience submits the body to its law. Nor to put to the reason. Only free subjects are governed. "An individual can only be effectively manipulated if he or she feels a sense of freedom." (Robert-Vincent Joule and Jean-Léon Beauvois, Petit traité de manipulation à l'usage des honnêtes gens, 1987) Not to constrain the bodies, therefore, but rather to organize the artificial environment in which a population lives, manifests itself and moves freely. As one draws an urban environment, one configures a mental space. In March, the2010, Institute for Government in England and the Prime Minister's Office published a document that formalized their conversion to "behavioural science. It is entitled "Mindspace, influencing behaviours through public policy. It begins: "Influencing people's behaviours is nothing new for government. In this, governing has long since ceased to be the exclusive business of governments, for their methods have invaded the world. Look at statistics - the science of government - as it has gained everything. In the 17th century, William Petty painstakingly counted the houses of Dublin and the dead of the Hôtel-Dieu. Today, some count their daily steps, and big data tells you in real time

the quickest route to get there. So much so that it is now possible to govern the climate as well as the city, to govern "global health" as well as "the commons. It is not that government is becoming total, but that everything must be governed. This special way of exercising power can be traced back to the birth of political economy in the 18th century. According to it, a spontaneous social order must arise from the anarchy of individual liberties, by virtue of the invisible hand of the markets - ordo ab chao. It could just as easily be the result of the way in which management has gradually replaced the old authoritarian, disciplinary and patriarchal power since the end of the nineteenth century with the exercise of a "soft", indirect power of influence, whose model is domestic and which knows much better than you what is good for you - like a big, benevolent mother. Because until the end of the 19th century, management in English first meant taking care of animals, children and, secondarily, a business. It had no connotation of violent discipline. It rather accompanies organic growth in a preventive manner. It gives fewer orders than it ensures that order reigns materially, down to the smallest detail - that everything is gently, calmly in its place. It is this semantic field that Taylor seizes upon when he writes: "Under scientific management, discipline is at a minimum [...] This is one of the characteristic features of scientific management; it is not slavery; it is kindness; it is training." What Henry Ford translated into 1922these words, "Our aim is to make orders superfluous by material organization, by equipment, and by simplification of operations." The backlash against this "spontaneous order" was the equally spontaneous beating of any worker trying to organize by the pack of thousands of thugs and goons at Ford at that time

fresh out of the penitentiary who made up the Ford Service Department. Slingshot, rebellion, confrontation, outbursts: the forms of revolt against patriarchal authority, each one has more or less mastered them. But how does one rebel in the midst of an immense matrix without an outside, which muffles everything, suffocates you and "wishes you well"? "How do you get people to do freely what you want them to do?" So goes the government question. This is the question in which all the smart guys are now sharing - the marketing manager nudging his client, the minister selling his new reform, the HRD about to introduce more "agility" into the company, the communicator, the modern parent overwhelmed by his children, the smartphone application designer, the urban planner in the midst of a crisis. "In the last few years, we've seen a new generation of women who are looking for the best price for their bike on Leboncoin, the professional stud, the one who watches the reactions of her followers on Instagram, the one who wants to get the best price for his bike on Leboncoin, or the driver who wants to be well rated by his carpoolers on Blablacar. The governmental relationship to the world has crept in everywhere, and with it its essential paradox. This paradox is made explicit with rare clarity in a dialogue in New York between 1941Mead and Bateson at a "Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life". "Is not the implementation, Mead asks, of a defined direction a call for control? And doesn't control - measured, calculated, defined control, control that actually achieves its ends - invalidate democracy by its very existence, by elevating some men to exercise control and degrading all others to the status of victims of that control? [...] By working towards defined ends, we social scientists are guilty of manipulating people, and thus of negating democracy. Bateson's honest response to this question is "to suggest that we set aside all purpose in order to

to achieve our purpose. "We do agree that some sense of individual autonomy, a habit of mind in some way related to what I have called 'free will', is essential in a democracy, but we are not perfectly clear about how this autonomy should be operationally defined. For example, what is the relationship between "autonomy" and compulsive negativism? Do gasstationsthat refuse to comply with the curfewshow a refined democratic spirit or not? [...] How would we rig the maze or the problem box so that the anthropomorphic rat gets a repeated and reinforced impression of its own freedom. [...] In the end, the current conflict is a death struggle over the role that social science should play inthe ordering of human relationships. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that this war is ideologically about this one point - the role of the social sciences. Are we going to reserve the techniques and the right to manipulate people for the privilege of a few power-hungry, purpose- and planning-oriented individuals, on whom the instrumental character of science exerts a particular attraction? Now that we have the techniques, are we going to treat people in cold blood as things? Or what are we going to do with these techniques?" The rest of history, and of Bateson's life, has provided the answers to these questions. At the other end of its historical orb, the project to govern everything is given a thrill by the mouth of Yuval Harari speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2020: "If you know enough biology and have enough computing power and enough data, you can hack my body, my brain and my life. A system that understands us better than we understand ourselves can predict our feelings and decisions, can manipulate our feelings and decisions and can ultimately make decisions for us. [...] Soon at least

some companies and governments will be able to systematically hack all people. We humans should get used to the idea that we are no longer mysterious souls. We are now hackable animals. "("How to Survive the 21st Century") The chief data scientist at a major Silicon Valley company anonymously throws out, "Large-scale conditioning is essential to the new science of mass engineering of human behavior." Larry Page tells the Financial Times in 2016, "Our primary goal is societal. [...] We need revolutionary change, not incremental change." The Microsoft CEO marveled in 2017 to a gathering of his developers, "It's crazy to see the depth and breadth of progress in our society, in our economy; to see how pervasive our digital technology is." He concludes his remarks by urging them to "change the world." And he is applauded. The CEO of the Chinese company that created the social credit system is pleased that it "ensures that bad people do not find a place in society, while good people can move freely and without obstacles. In June, the2021, French Senate raved about the Chinese governmental model in a report on the use of digital tools in view of all the appetizing crises that are coming up. Taking as a principle that the "effectiveness [of digital tools] is directly linked to their intrusiveness," the reporters suggest: "Finally, in the most extreme crisis situations, digital tools could allow for effective, exhaustive and real-time control of the population's compliance with restrictions, with dissuasive sanctions if necessary, and based on an even more derogatory exploitation of personal data."

Cybernetics was born as a "science of control and communication", as a science of control through communication. The cyberization of everything is the governmentalization of everything. The governmental project can be formulated quietly as a utopia for the world only because its human postulate has already been realized in daily existence. Its presupposition is that there are only relations of exteriority to exteriority. From strangeness to strangeness. That, therefore, everything is manipulation. That nowhere is there a consistent link, but only binders and binders. It is because it has been working long enough to make us aliens that it can now aim to colonize space. And give this for a future perspective.

2.

Once the formula of the great general spring shutdown has been used up 2020, the French government tried other expedients. A curfew was attempted. After all, it was a "war". It fit the theme of the exercise. To make the thing biting, it was introduced on an October17 evening. An October17 - like that day when 1961the Algerians who were demonstrating against the curfew aimed at them ended up by the hundreds in the Seine. The dates are all they remember from their years of preparatory classes. This one was daring. Let's agree on that. That evening, we were a few hundred people, braving the new measure of vexation, to stroll from the Place du Châtelet to the Gare de l'Est. While doing the facade of a small police station. There were a few hundred of us, out of the millions of inhabitants of Paris, who did not appreciate the irony of the date. A dizziness. But perhaps it is the very form of the "manifestation" that no longer suits the new age. Perhaps this one requires more furtive ways on one side, and more brilliant on the other. In our poor mouths, while going up the street Saint-Denis, only remained a poor word in three syllables: "li-ber-té". Certainly, one could write: "The only word of freedom is all that still exalts me. I believe it is suitable to maintain, indefinitely, the old human fanaticism. (André Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924) But finally, after the "re-vo-lution" that magically set the Champs-Élysées ablaze from so far away on March16 it2019, sounded like a return to the strict political minimum. A thing is to chant the revolution

that one fails to do. Another is to claim a notion so ethereal that it can be placed on the entrance to the Republic's prisons. What became apparent to us in the spring2020 - when our apartment was turned into a cell with daily walks, canteens at the supermarket, patrols of baton cops, and jailer pumps, but no visiting room - is that our lack of freedom does not reside in whether or not we are allowed to come and go, but in the state of boundless dependence in which this society holds us. It will have been enough that a quarteron of perverts domiciled at the Élysée declared "the war" to realize our condition: we lived in a trap, which had remained open for a long time, but could close again at any moment. The power that held us was embodied not so much in the hysterical clowns that populate the political scene for our greatest distraction, but in the very structure of the metropolis, in the supply networks to which our survival is suspended, in the urban panopticon, in all the electronic bugs that serve us and surround us, in short: in the architecture of our lives. This is an environment over which we have no real control, which others have designed for us, and where we are made like rats. A German urban planner, originally a socialist designer of the great American post-war infrastructure networks, wrote in the years:1920 "The metropolis appears above all as a creation of almighty capital, as an aspect of its anonymity, as an urban form endowed with its own collective psychic, economic, and social foundations that allow for the simultaneous isolation and the tightest amalgamation of its inhabitants. [...] The architecture of the metropolis depends essentially on the solution found between the elementary cell and the urban organism as a whole." (Ludwig Hilberseimer, The Architecture of the Metropolis, 1927) Now doubled with the virtual ecosystem that everyone carries with them, the metropolis is this total environment, this

environment of environments, where everything is possible and nothing is. The formal freedom of the human atom moves in the concrete circle of possibilities marked out by the environment that has been built around it, for it. It stops where its environment begins. The architecture of the choices offered is imperative - imperative and silent. A highway barrier, a surveillance camera or an anti-lochard bench materialize so many implicit injunctions. The only freedom that is worthwhile is the one at the source of which we find ourselves. It is the freedom to make our own environment, to alter it, to configure it, that is to say, to make it no longer an "environment", but an environment where we don't just fit in, where we exist. Needless to say, this cannot be done alone. It requires us to come out of our prescribed isolation and to recover the power to act inherent in any living human tissue, in any density of shared experiences. The solution to the aporia of man and his environment is a way to of living that makes this aporia disappear. And appear a world of our own.

We live in a fully designed world. A world conceived through and through, saturated with silent intentionalities. Every corner of the metropolis, every traffic junction, every workshop, every open space bears the unmentionable imprint of the studies of which it is the implementation and of its strategies without appearance. Already, in the International 1889,Congress of low-cost housing in Paris, it was stipulated that "the plans of apartment buildings will be designed to avoid any opportunity to meet between tenants, landings and staircases in full light must be considered as extensions of the public way. The chronic depression of the metro itself is planned. "Advertising works to keep the masses dissatisfied with their kind of life, and to make the ugliness of the things around them unbearable. Satisfied customers do not make as much

profit than the disgruntled", already quoted the advertising magazine Printers' Ink in 1938. Nothing new under the sun. Nowadays, it is every smartphone feature that has been thought to activate our dopamine reward circuit, every application that aims to hook us, and if possible engulf us. There is a designer behind each of the innocent objects we pick up, behind each detail of the urinal we urinate in, behind each light of each stall we approach. There are even some behind the terms of novlangue that we use, and that are there to make us swallow some scam. The words themselves have started to work for those who manufacture them. So much so, that a bit of existential hygiene would require repeating to oneself, every day, as an antidote: no, a cybercommunity is not a community, a cyberfriendship is not a friendship, a cyberwork is not a work and a cyberworld is not a world. Underneath every detail of our environment, there are hidden designs informal. That's not paranoia - that's marketing. "CAPTology" (Computers As Persuasive Technology) is the name that the founder of "behavioral design" gave to his science of "His advice and teachings have flooded Silicon Valley since the late 1980s. His advice and teachings have flooded Silicon Valley since the late 1980s. 1990.The art of hooking the user of interactive computer systems is to build an environment that works like a capture device. "Human behavior is programmable. You just have to know the code. Here we present Behavioral Design: a design framework for programming human behavior." So begins the book Digital Behavioral Design (2018) by T. Dalton Combs and Ramsay A. Brown.

The user's feeling of sovereign freedom is the result of the most refined programming. In computer design, this is known as "emotional design", "experience design" or "user-centered design". The ubiquity of smartphones, tablets and other connected objects in our lives was thought out, of course. It was in the late 1980s, at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, by an engineer, Mark Weiser. At that time, others were banking on the first virtual reality headsets to sell everyone their ideal fictitious environment, but Weiser preferred to computerize the existing environment. This makes him the father of "u b i q u i t o u s computing". For him, this was the "computer of the 21st century": a room with e a banal appearance, but with hundreds of sensors and controls communicating with each other under its ergonomic surfaces - screens, speakers, voice aids, programmers, alarms, integrated cameras - a whole electronic sensorium. It is logically in Weiser's words that Apple introduces in its2012 iPad: "We believe that technology reaches its peak when it becomes invisible, when you no longer think about what you are doing." It's a mistake to think of computer design and physical design as two separate fields. The two disciplines are genealogically linked: it was a student at the Ulm School of Design in Germany - a school founded under the patronage of Walter Gropius, the historic director of the Bauhaus - who designed Salvador Allende's Control Room, the futuristic room covered with screens, buttons and joysticks that was supposed to centralize in real time all the production indices sector by sector, all the indicators of worker motivation, all the information on road traffic that was fed back by the telexes of the socialist project Cybersyn. The MIT Media Lab originates from the MIT Architecture Machine Group, a group of young architects founded in But above 1967.all, one can trace a continuous historical line that leads from the socialist ambitions of the Weimar Bauhaus to the democratic demands of

Californian tech giants. The paradoxes they handle and the impossibilities that animate them are related. Designing freedom - this is the title in the form of a double bind that the chief engineer of the Cybersyn project gave to a series of radio interventions in Chile in 2002. It1973. is also the formulation of the unsurpassable contradiction in which the environmental power of contemporary technocratic societies is struggling. From 1917 to the end of the 1920s, the question that animated the Russian artistic avant-garde in all fields was that of the "socialist reconstruction of the way of life". This is the theme of "novi byt". Byt is a Russian notion as elementary as it is untranslatable. It is everyday life, the place of all redemption and damnation, hated and endearing. It is domestic life, material culture as opposed to bytie, being, spiritual existence. Byt refers inseparably to the design of familiar places and the habits one develops there. It would literally be the "form of life" if byt were not also the verb "to be" in Russian. One can say that the whole tragedy of the Russian avant-garde, precipitated in Mayakovsky's suicide, lies in the ambivalence of this notion. "The boat of love broke on the byt", these were his last words. As Google today although with diametrically opposed intentions, Russian constructivism wanted "to become the superior form of engineering the forms of the whole life". With its architecture, its advertisements, its poems, its paintings, its theater and all its realizations, posted on the "front of the way of life", it intended to upset the byt of the men, and thus the whole of their uses, their customs, their morals and their beliefs. By configuring a new environment, he intended to reform humanity itself. At the same time, Walter Gropius chaired the Workers' Council for the Arts in Berlin, where he intended to bring all the arts together "under the wing of a great architecture that would be the business of the whole people. Twenty years later, Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Hilberseimer & Co.

the trademark - the unmistakable "international style" - of postwar American architecture, which disfigured the world and designed the uniform inhumanity of the world's metropolises. As Hilberseimer so aptly wrote, "this will lead to an architecture that is direct and free of romantic reminiscence, in tune with today's everyday life: not subjective and individualistic, but objective and universal." All post-war urbanism, with its inexorable infrastructure networks of electricity, water, traffic and communication, with its geometric repetition of a supposedly democratic equality - of the same flat-roofed concrete volumes serving as "living machines", realizes in its own way the initial slogan of the Bauhaus: "Art and technology, a new unity! Needless to say, all of this does not come without a slight redefinition of democracy: "By democracy I mean the form of life which, without political identification, is slowly spreading throughout the world, standing on the foundations of increasing industrialization, increased communication and information services, and the wider admission of the masses to higher education and the right to vote." (Walter Gropius, Apollo in Democracy, 1968). Defining the new environmental power as fundamentally democratic is obviously the task of the Committee for National Morale of Gordon Allport, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, in 1940. And there too, the Bauhaus had a lot to do with it. At the Committee for National Morale, an alternative to authoritarian propaganda is sought - a form of propaganda that would be not only democratic in its content, but in its very form. One wonders which exercise of communication would not reproduce the unilateral submission of the receivers to the transmitter. How to escape from the one-way messages of a central station - whether it is at the radio microphone, behind a camera or at the editing table - that conditions passive, serial, robotic, fanaticized receiver subjects? In other words: how to make propaganda

interactive? This is a question of unprecedented descent. The answer of the Committee for National Morale is: the multi-screen art installation, the immersive exhibition offered to an "extended field of vision" where the spectator moves freely and lets himself be won over by a feeling of participation in the environment created. The first happenings are the grandchildren of this research of an alternative to the aggression of the unidirectional message of the authoritarian powers. The definition given by their inventor, Allan Kaprow, is in1957 fact affected by this: "A happening is an exalted environment in which movement and activity are intensified for a limited time and in which, as a rule, people assemble at a given moment for a dramatic action." The Committee is not inventing anything: it is in fact inspired by the first exhibitions made by exiled German Bauhaus alumni at the Museum of Modern Arts in New York, which was also founded and financed by the Rockefellers. The retrospective on the Bauhaus, but above 1938,all the propaganda exhibitions designed by Herbert Bayer in 1942, The Road to Victory or Airways to Peace, inspired the Committee for National Morale to answer the question that occupied it. Confronted with this novelty, which has become so conventional for us, the American spectators were at first disoriented by this apparently chaotic way of presenting the works, this stepped vision 360where one can barely discern, with a few hands drawn on the walls, the direction of travel, where each person has to make his own experience of the exhibition. On the contrary, the designers were very satisfied with this perfect compromise between the freedom left to the visitors - far from the stultifying demonstrative passivity of totalitarian propaganda - and the flexible directionality contained in the choice of the layout, the works and the possible routes. Here a perfect continuum between the Second World War and the Cold War, between the fight against the Nazis and the fight against the Soviets, is drawn. After the war, democratic propaganda will not cease to tour the world with its gigantic exhibitions, the model of which remains The Family of Man, the most important exhibition in the world.

From 1955 to 1963, it offered viewers in sixty-eight countries the contemplation of its five hundred photographs in no discernible order. These exhibitions were generally financed and planned, whether they were artistic or commercial, avant-garde or more consensual, by the services dedicated to the anti-communist struggle. The CIA, as we learned a few years ago, can also be legitimately held responsible for the worldwide success of abstract expressionism. For twenty years, it subsidized and promoted exhibitions of Pollock, Rothko and De Kooning, who never knew about it. This design of environments as a democratic response to totalitarian propaganda, the communication historian Fred Turner calls it the "democratic encirclement". Obviously, just as the Internet has not abolished radio and television, the democratic encirclement has only redoubled the dominant propaganda, by presenting it not as a message, but as a device. Terry Winograd, a vaguely honest theorist of computer design, who was Larry Page's Stanford professor, wrote with the former Salvador Allende's Minister of Economy and initiator of the Cybersyn project, Fernando Florès, who became a successful entrepreneur in the United States: "Design, in its essential sense, is ontological. It constitutes an intervention in the background of our cultural heritage and pushes us out of the ready-made habits of our lives, deeply affecting our ways of being. Design, from an ontological point of view, is necessarily reflexive and political, concerning both the tradition that has formed us and the transformations to come." (Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores, Artificial Intelligence in Question, 1986) Design, the success of the discipline has somewhat made us forget, means in English "project, plan, purpose, intention, objective", but also "bad intention, conspiracy". To design is to scheme, to simulate, to draft and to proceed strategically. A designer, originally in the 17th century, is a schemer

perfidious who sets traps. To have designs on a friend's husband is to have designs on him, to want to do him. A fully designed world is a fully evil world by its very process - that of always having to hide one's designs to see them succeed. The great platforms of Silicon Valley are the most successful expression of environmental power and its democratic paradoxes. They have succeeded in creating a personalized environment for each person that takes the place of a world. All they have to do is invisibly modify it to record the effect it has on users and their behavior. Behind Facebook's edifying experiments to encourage Americans to vote or to understand what makes them sad, comes Cambridge Analytica - which begins with a contract from the U.S. State Department to study ways to reduce the influence of Daech on social networks and ends up applying the miraculous micro-targeting techniques the company has developed under the guise of anti-terrorism to American voters. Each year, by virtue of design, the political policing function of the major IT platforms becomes more immoderate. Step by step, Chinese-style levels of censorship have been reached. Facebook is hunting down groups of vaccine recipients who share their stories of side effects. In a document titled "The Good Censor" and published in 2018, Google proposes to "fight bad behavior" to "have an open and inclusive internet." This makes a welcome addition to the company's offer to help the French tax authorities hunt down undeclared pool owners by applying a little artificial intelligence to Google Earth satellite images. So it is under the guise of design and engineering that the enemy is making a world behind our backs. Few claim it, but some do not hide from it. In politics, there is for example Madsen Pirie, an English, or rather Scottish, neoliberal, and his think tank, the Adam Smith Institute. The great

Margaret Thatcher's ideological confrontations and epic battles with the miners were not to his liking, even though he had advised her. To this, he opposed micropolitics. Not exactly that of Foucault, Deleuze or Guattari. Rather, the way in which, over time, the class enemy is defeated by small devices that look like nothing, but methodically steal the ground from under his feet. An example: rather than abolishing the status of railway workers and ensuring a major conflict, we can reserve it for those who already have it, and recruit new entrants on other contractual bases, thus "buying off the present generations in order to gradually set up a new system". (Madsen Pirie, Dismantling the State: Theory and Practice of Privatization, 1985) Rather than abolishing a regulated profession such as cabs, one can simply introduce a competing, perfectly precarious, abusive and inevitably much cheaper service such as Uber. One can also propose buses to the poor as a low cost alternative to trains, whose staff is far too unionized. Thus, without realizing it, by simply going for the cheapest, each customer participates in the dismantling of the regulation. By using a harmless application, he votes neoliberal and executes the appropriate policy, on his own tiny but cumulative scale. The neoliberal micro-politician "focuses not on the battle of ideas, but on matters of political engineering. [... He builds machines that work ... and change the choices people make, by altering the circumstances of those choices. [... Most of the successes of micropolitics preceded the general acceptance of the ideas on which they were based. In many cases, it was the success of these policies that led to the victory of the idea rather than the other way around." (Madsen Pirie, Micropolitics, 1988) Moreover, it is not so sure that the great spectacular conflicts cannot serve as a diversion to the simultaneous implementation of micropolitical devices that are as formidable as they are imperceptible.

To the government of all things answers therefore the exercise of an essentially environmental power. A power that disposes of the environment and leaves beings free. It "architects their choices" and intervenes on bodies only as a last resort. Which avoids disorder by avoiding giving orders. Which no longer decrees the Law, but secretes norms. Undeniably, humans have always related to what surrounds them. The Hippocratic tradition has always seen the circumfluences - the things around us - as the determining factor of health and illness. The famous "theory of climates" of the century in fact e encompassed XVII all the material aspects - air, water, places - that influence I earthly existence. Some even thought, at the time, that environments had enough plastic force to engender the animal species that populated them. The police of the Ancien Régime - this "police of everything" - applied to all aspects of urban life, from lighting to supplies, from pollution to water supply, from market prices to sanitation. It was an environmental police force. But it was necessary for capital to revolutionize and remake all the conditions of people's material existence to its own liking - it was necessary, in particular, for it to urbanize them en masse - for power itself to become environmental. And that it sees in the engineering of these conditions the essential of its task of its democratic task. This is what it has not stopped doing since 1945. The new sovereignty of the environment calls for that of the police. Democratic power is implicitly defined by the fact that it guarantees habeas corpus to citizens as long as they move without friction in the environment, material and virtual. Cyberspace is, as much as the urban space, conceived for an absolutely free and absolutely structured circulation. It is just as enveloping and just as policed. The environmental character of democratic power is matched by the direct grip of the police on the body of the offenders - those who create disturbances, those who gather, those who dare to touch the context. The sovereign savagery of the American police was bound to impose itself on the rest of the world.

world, in the course of universal democratization and metropolization. Just as it is appropriate, on a freeway, that the slightest event be cleared without delay to avoid a cascade of other events, to ensure the fluidity of general traffic and the regulation of the system, it is up to the police to intervene as quickly as possible, by all effective means, to clear the slightest anomaly in the regular functioning of the metropolitan environment. Every event here is conceived as an accident. Nothing must happen again. No one must interfere with the modification or appropriation of such a well thought-out context. In this, the automobile subject is a kind of anthropological ideal of the contemporary citizen. For if there is one thing that must run straight through the environment that has been designed for it, it is the motorist. And if there is one thing that is excluded, it is that he should alter anything, that he should do anything other than submit by honking his horn. The confinement of the motorist, incapable of communicating with his fellow human beings other than by hostile gesticulations or fearful politeness, his isolation in his bubble of metal and plastic, sets a kind of human perfection for the governmental power. For him, there is no regrouping; there are only traffic jams. It is not for nothing that, since Walter Lippmann and Louis Rougier, the road metaphor has formed a kind of topos of the neoliberal imagination, which has never stopped thinking of political action as essentially environmental. Where socialism would be a road regime in which the state tells everyone when to get out of their car, where to go and how to get there, where unbridled liberalism would let cars drive around without any traffic rules, "construction liberalism" - or neoliberalism - would let everyone go wherever they want, but would enforce the traffic rules with the utmost rigor. The neoliberals have never been to Naples, where everything is so crowded anyway, and where there are so many worlds that the city is ungovernable. In Naples, one of the places in the world with the least respect for traffic laws, accidents are as rare as

drivers are skillful. The police are kept in check. And this is not unrelated. The tone of evidence with which we are now constantly talking about "digital ecosystems" or entrepreneurial ecosystems echoes the oh-so-human ecology of Wolff-Mead's Society and the CIA torturers of the 1950s: everything points to the fact that there is no environment except where the world escapes us altogether. Where it remains obstinately hostile to us. Nothing I can know, nothing I can touch, nothing I can love or hate is part of the "environment". On contact, everything enters my world. The environment is, like the horizon, something that recedes as I move forward. This makes it a perfect cause for the prevailing strangeness - and indeed as global a cause as strangeness can be. Never have so many aliens been so concerned about this filthy nature which they flee by all means and which, deep down, disgusts them. We will let the world be devastated as long as we need the IPCC to know its state. Since 1945, the causes of the environment, the planet or the climate have not ceased to propagate more widely the impotence that they command. The outrageous denunciation of Fairfield Osborn's The Plundering Planet dates from 1948. Those who "destroyed the environment" started by building it as an insoluble problem. The environment became sacred the day power itself became environmental. In Cybernetics and Society, Norbert1950, Wiener already said: "We have so radically altered our environment that we must alter ourselves to live within the scale of this new environment."

There is another way: not to try to save the environment, but to start dismantling it now. Because underneath the environment, there is the world.

- Wow! Listen to this: "nature is complex", "intertwined", "connected" - No kidding! What will they "discover" after that?

3.

Just as there is an affinity between neoliberalism and the automobile, there is an affinity between a connection between neoliberalism and oil. Just as the Ford Foundation financed the meetings of the AmericanEuropean Bilderberg club of Atlanticist leaders in the 1950s, the multinational oil companies have supported the Mont Pelerin Society for a long time, as they have some interest in ensuring that the people do not interfere too much in their global activities. The two historical centers of neoliberalism - the London School of Economics and the University of Chicago - are not by chance creations of the Rockefellers. The connection between oil and neoliberalism is strategic in nature: for a century and a half, the architects of this world - let's call them the The "cosmocrats" have ensured that, piece by piece, every aspect of it is systematically removed from our grasp and returned to us as an inaccessible environment. As Timothy Mitchell has shown in his Carbon Democracy, the shift from coal to oil was primarily motivated by the fact that the mine remained, whatever one might say, in the hands of the workers, who were the masters of it, enslaved of course, but undisputed masters of what went on underground. Oil, with its distant installations, its complex logistics, its labour-saving and largely automatable exploitation, its staff of engineers and its armed geopolitics, made it possible to escape from the people. This was its main virtue. The transition to oil was a policy that imposed a complete economic reconstruction - of both production and consumption - in its wake. Since then, every new advance of capital has consisted in reinforcing our disenfranchisement from the world, as if it were the unavowed measure of it. It is this concern that presides over automation as well as delocalization, over the transition to the virtual as well as sterile transgenic seeds, over the construction of global markets as well as the

supranational political bodies. If the national level was already the place of our dispossession, this one is now unlimited. This organized loss of grip on the world forms the condition of contemporary man. His availability for revolt as his curse. His shabbatic existence as the abyss of his depression. "We are no longer of any use" - this can be understood as a lament or as the wondering end of all servitude. "Mankind today has so disproportionately improved its technology that it has made itself largely redundant. Modern machinery and methods of organization have made it possible for a relatively small minority of managers, technicians and skilled workers to keep the industrial apparatus running. Society has reached a state of potential mass unemployment; and mass employment is increasingly a product manipulated by the state and its related powers to channel supernumerary humanity in order to keep it both alive and under control [...] This means that large masses of workers have lost any creative relationship with the production process. They live in a social and economic vacuum. Their dilemma is the precondition for terror. It offers totalitarian forces an open path to power and an object for its exercise. For these forces, terror is the institutionalized administration of humanity that has become surplus." (Leo Löwenthal, "The Atomization of Man by Terror", 1946) The intuition that the masters of this world want to get rid of us, now that they no longer need and fear us, is not insane. It is even common sense. It is an old governmental wisdom that "it is necessary to keep the people perpetually occupied. [...] Those who have no interest in it are dangerous for the public peace. (Giovanni Botero, On the Reason of State, 1591) A Silicon Valley entrepreneur and short-lived pope of the "new economy" of the years speculated1990, in the New York Times over

Twenty years ago, it was said that "two percent of Americans are enough to feed us, and five percent to produce everything we need. All the bullshit jobs in the world would not be enough to stem the rising tide of supernumeraries. The reintroduction of slave-like working conditions - since In the words of Norbert Wiener, who warned the American automobile workers' union in 1949, "all labor, as soon as it is placed in competition with a slave, whether the slave be human or mechanical, must accept the slave's working conditions", will not change the situation, nor will the craving for universal control. This impossible situation cannot be stabilized. Such is the open secret of this era, which is revealed here and there, in fragments. The result is a curious orthogonal configuration of power, both public and private. At the head of large firms as well as States, we observe the same disposition of a handful of decision-makers, bathed in a virile gang atmosphere, and, below this small nucleus of uninhibited horizontality, a vertical not of power, but of submission. A vertiginous cascade of trembling obedience, in the administration as well as in companies, which no longer tries to understand what it is being made to do. Such a structuring, even if supported by the public force and global consulting firms, has a very weak capacity of resistance. It is without a hold of its own. This universe where a few architects secretly regulate the life of the whole of their contemporaries inevitably pushes to cynicism or to impudent boasting. By dint of treating us like a herd, they thought we were stupid. They think they can say anything, and that no one will hear anything. It's Le Lay's "available brain time". Or Warren Buffett's "We have won the class struggle". Or Laurent Alexandre haranguing the students of Polytechnique: "You, the gods, who master, control and manage the NBIC technologies, will create a gap vis-à-vis the

useless. [...] The Yellow Vests are the first manifestation of this unbearable intellectual gap. [...] The emergency is to avoid the multiplication of the Yellow Vests."

What drives them crazy, with conspiracy theorists, is to realize that their bet has failed. It is not enough to distract and terrify us to hold us. We educate ourselves. We educate ourselves. We discuss. We read. We think. Worse, we try to share what we think we understand. Our means are meager, but we are not about to give up detecting their maneuvers. And above all we know where we live. We have read the organic theorist of the European Council, Luuk van Middelaar, celebrating the successive moves, as daring as they are stealthy, by which European power has freed itself from all control. It did not escape us that he refers to the French Machiavelli of the 17th century, Gabriel

Naudé, and to his Political Considerations on coups d'état. And we have noted that he sees us as an inert audience for which the political aristocracy must play its neo-conservative staging, so that something happens. His quiet insolence did not fall on deaf ears. We have read the contempt for the people, so impervious to reason and so prone to rumors, that oozes from every line of Patrick Zylberman's The Vaccine War - a kind of advice to the Prince to crush without scruple all opposition to the current vaccine policy. This too will be paid back. We loved this interview with someone close to Jean Monnet, the man of the transatlantic elite in post-war France, the man of the Wall Street law firms more than the CIA. He recounts his amazing life at the Commissariat du Plan,1946 where 1958,he co-wrote a dozen inaugural declarations of presidents of the Council: "At the Plan, it was prodigious! There were three of us: Monnet, Hirsch and me, the rest were the commissions, the experts, but the three of us were always together to do everything, a kind of commando. We did the reconstruction, the industrialization plan, the stabilization, the social policy; we did the foreign policy and we ended up doing the military policy [...] Can you imagine the life we led? It was incredibly diverse. From my attic office in the Commissariat du Plan, I largely inspired French economic policy. It was a very efficient method; three clandestine guys who did everything! And the governments did what they were told! (Pierre Uri in François Fourquet, Les Comptes de la puissance, 1980) This little historical insight into the period was missing; it informs much more. We have seen Edward Bernays, who publicly claimed to be taking the advertising his magical age to approach his scientific age, representing himself in drawings as a melancholic magician around whom the universe turns.

Turn away from Jeremiah: 50,2"Announce it among the nations and publish it, and set the standard. Publish it, hide nothing."

Or Alex Pentland, the behaviorist pope of GAFAM, speaking a few years ago in Mountain View at Google's headquarters: "You've heard of rational individuals [...] That's not my thing. [...] I don't believe we are individuals ... Action is not under our skulls. The action, it's in our social networks." We read Eric Schmidt, the boss of Google, in 2013: "Almost nothing, except a biological virus, can increase so

quickly, efficiently, or aggressively than these technology platforms; such power makes the people who build, control, and use them all-powerful, too." And of course we have read Klaus Schwab, his Fourth Industrial Revolution and his COVID-19: The Great Reset. The morbid delight with which he details "the disastrous effects on our mental well-being" of the atmosphere of anxiety surrounding "one of the least deadly pandemics the world has seen in the last two thousand years," with which he weighs the "trauma, confusion and anger" engendered by containment measures in most people against the incomparable happiness with which these same circumstances fill the genuinely creative geniuses, left us speechless. How ridiculous it is for the media to pass off as a "conspiracy theory" what is written in full in books they have not bothered to read!

Klaus Schwab: "You will have nothing left, and you will be happy."

The longer the electronic control extends, the more universal reporting aggravates the illusion of omniscience of the rulers, the more influence a small number of cosmocrats gain on the lives of an ever larger number of people, and the more one hears them boasting about their Machiavellian moment. This bluster will be their undoing. We have not forgotten that behind Jeffrey Epstein's rape craving are his eugenic fantasies, his funding of the "best science" in America from Harvard to Stanford, his dinners with Nobel Prize winners, with Sergey Brin, Elon Musk, Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos, his millions offered to the MIT Media Lab. Nor that the founder of the MIT Media Lab, who saw no problem in taking Epstein's money, saw no problem in 1970,taking DARPA's money to program the Aspen Movie

Map, the ancestor of all shooting video games and military combat simulators. The use value of wealth and power comes down to this - the lavish consumption of young bodies. The art of governing produces only monsters.

Life is nothing biological 1. "Life is our life's work" (Pfizer). 2. The biopolitical metropolis. 3. The dictatorship of vulnerability. 4. The Family of Man. 5. The disease of health.

1.

Mobilize - each and every one - to flatten the curve. To stand together - all of us - against the virus. Achieving "herd immunity" - that which is so nicely called "herd immunity" in English, the immunity of the herd. Saving lives by doing nothing, especially by doing nothing. Saving our health care system, which has been so cleverly torpedoed. To be in solidarity - with all our fellow human beings, even those who poison our lives - and responsible - like the Germans with their debt, one imagines. It is curious, however, that the conduct to adopt in the face of a virus miraculously overlaps with the virtues displayed by the European Commission - solidarity, responsibility, citizenship. To be vaccinated for those who "cannot be vaccinated". The shepherd, as we know, is not afraid to abandon his flock to go and save the lost sheep; he cares for one and all, omnes et singulatim. Taking care of oneself and others - what is this strange power that tells me to "take care of myself"? And what is it that keeps me so alienated from those around me that they are for me "the others"? Monitor daily where the statistics stand. And then, of course, get your information from the right sources.

"Be a hero. Be boring."

What a surprising change! This state which has made France the most nuclearized country in the world, which authorizes all kinds of radioactive discharges "This is a state that has been methodically obstructing the slightest epidemiological study in the vicinity of power plants for decades. This State which only passes laws against glyphosates to issue as many exemptions as there are farmers from the FNSEA. This State which only ever sees individual and behavioral causes for the exponential increase of cancers. This State which still does not see any inconvenience in having let %90 of the West Indies contaminated with chlordecone and has never been too concerned about the prostate cancers that are rampant there. This State, which is so comfortable with the record consumption of antidepressants for decades in its population that it must have resigned itself to being the cause of it. This state, therefore, thanks to the spread of a virus that is barely three times more lethal than the seasonal flu, has discovered that "life" is a sacred value. So sacred that it has no value. That all costs are allowed.

It is reminiscent of Monsanto creating the "Institute for Animal Health" after causing bovine spongiform encephalitis. The "American Council on Science and Health" sponsored by Burger King. To Philip Morris founding the "California Association for Tobacco Control" or recently declaring, now disguised as a public health actor: "To our knowledge, no other company has so proactively disrupted its business to forge a better future for all of us." Geneviève Fioraso, then Socialist Minister of Higher Education and Research, Olivier Véran's political godmother and Minatec ambassador, made this2012 innocent remark: "Health is undeniable. When you are opposed to certain technologies, and you have patients' associations testify, everyone joins in. It must be said that the cause of "health" is certainly the most gaping hole in the modern individual. It touches a place where we are clearly defenseless. The pursuit of health has replaced the pursuit of salvation in a world that no longer promises any - this is because, if the Christian faith has been lost, the perception that "there are gods too, down here", as Heraclitus said, has not gained any ground. Health" inevitably attracts the same usurpers as salvation did before it. Bernays understood this so well, and so early on, that he went into advertising through it. His first job was to advise an actor who wanted to produce a play about a syphilitic husband and who was looking for an audience for it. Bernays. He had access to medical journals through a friend and came up with the idea of creating a third, obviously puppet, organization the Sociological Fund Committee - which claimed to promote public health and popular education. The latter hastened to promote the play "disinterestedly" for prophylactic purposes. It was a success, and the invention of third party endorsement, the marketing technique that consists in

solicit a third party - a star, an expert, a presenter or an influencer - to promote its products. We are so sensitive to the cause of "health" because we live in a world that must be very sick, judging by its record of planetary devastation. In a world that makes you sick, where the most adapted are obviously the craziest. In a world that is actively producing illnesses in order to market their cures - between 1945 and today the number of recognized mental illnesses in the United States has increased from twenty-six to four hundred, including the incurable "Oppositional Defiant Disorder" (ODD). As for "organic" illness, it is increasingly defined as a deviation from industry-derived standards, not from the patient's own experience. As a result, the more we medicalize, the less we treat. This is true. But if we are sensitive to the cause of health, it is first of all because, for almost three centuries now, the power has invested our bodies, because the population "is the most precious treasure of a sovereign. From a financial point of view, man is the principle of all wealth" (M. Moheau, Recherches et considérations sur la population de la France, 1778) where one realizes, in passing, that the French state demographers of the 18th century were far ahead of Stalin with his pamphlet Man, the most precious capital. Our fertility, our vigor, our longevity are of general interest. They are part of the nation's productivity equation. They constitute its competitive advantage. "It is necessary to multiply the subjects and the cattle", wrote Turmeau de La Morandière in 1763. From the point of view of the State as well as the economy, we have long ceased to belong to ourselves. This is the experience we make every time a bad doctor mistreats us. His Deafness keeps on telling us: "But finally, shut up, you don't know anything about your body, your body belongs to us, we own it

We know better than you do. Émile Littré, the positivist philosopher, comes to his support: " The disease once declared, the intervention of the doctor is necessary; the patient is unable to determine the nature of the evil, to foresee its termination and to apply the remedy. It is also necessary for hygiene [...Beware of trusting your sense, it is often deceitful; imagine that there are many things about it that you do not know and that it is good that another knows for you, in order to call your attention to them; do not resort to him only in sickness, and talk to him about your way of life, about who serves you and what harms you, about the physical and mental dispositions of children, about the necessities of your position, about the dangers that it can present and the remedies that it entails. " (Medicine and Doctors, 1872) And what do you think is meant by the fanaticism of the French state in hindering any possibility of being born anywhere other than in a hospital, in aberrant birthing conditions - the only condition, common to all mammals, for a birth to go well is for the woman to be able to isolate herself, to retreat from the world to a place that is familiar to her, where she feels comfortable and safe to give birth? Why do we have to fight, more often than not, not to die in hospital? For the State, symbolically, appropriating the two ends of life means asserting its property rights over the rest of the segment. In times when people did not hide behind their little fingers, they made no secret of it, such as the parliamentarian who declared to the Convention in:1793 "Society must never lose sight of those who contract with it. It is necessary that it takes each individual at the moment of his birth, and that it abandons him only at the tomb. In the last text of his Dits et écrits - a seminar on the police that he gave in the United States in -1984, Foucault notes this historical curiosity: the great advances in public health systems generally precede, or accompany, the great massacres: the "right to

During the French Revolution, the "health" law was barely formulated when it gave the signal for the great butcheries of the national wars. 1901: French law on work accidents. 1906 : law on weekly rest. 1910 1901 : law creating the workers' and farmers' pension. 1914-1918 : million1,4 of "French" killed. "It would be difficult to find in all of history a slaughter comparable to that of the Second World War, and it is precisely at this time that the great programs of social protection, public health and medical assistance were initiated. [...] Go and get slaughtered, we promise you a long and pleasant life. Life insurance goes hand in hand with an order to die. [...] Since the population is never more than what the state looks after in its own interest, the state can, of course, massacre it if necessary. Thanatopolitics is thus the reverse of biopolitics.

Therein lies the great equivocation that troubles the recent period. The State, society or the police basically consider that life is left to us as a It is our responsibility to take care of our "precious deposit" because it does not belong to us. And stupidly, we believe that our body belongs to us. That we are free of our gestures, of our ways of being, even of

It is a matter of "taking risks". But we are, from the point of view of society, absolutely accountable. Therein lies the misunderstanding. This is what all those who tell us that we are "social beings" are trying to remind us of, with the necessary condescension. Just as everything is done to interest the employee in his work, everything has been done to interest us in our own "health" - or at least in what we have defined as such - but without believing for a moment in such a property. Hence the incomprehension in high places towards those who are reluctant to be vaccinated. Thus Patrick Zylberman: "Obligation comes first [...], the right comes only afterwards. [...] Our definition of obligation makes it a synonym of altruism. [...] But perhaps it is not so much altruism as the government of oneself and of others. It is not so much a question of morality as of politics, in the sense of population management. Containment and vaccination are two chapters of this government. (The Vaccine War, June 2020) All these maternal constraints, all these restrictions for our own good - from mandatory seat belts to smoking bans to recent "health restrictions" - are merely ways of defending ourselves, if necessary against ourselves, that is: defending ourselves as belonging to society. There is no free gift. We have invested our bodies and we have invested in our bodies. "For the capitalist society, it is the biopolitical that was important above all, the biological, the somatic, the corporeal. The body is a biopolitical reality; medicine is a biopolitical reality", said Foucault in 1974 in Rio de Janeiro in the first conference where he used the notion of biopolitics. We owe it to our masters. A bit like the bistrotiers with the help of the confinement: if they were watered, it is not so that they refuse to control the "sanitary pass". Foucault observed it well before the birth of social networks: "[...] this integration of individuals in a community or a totality results from a permanent correlation between an always more advanced individualization and the consolidation of this totality ". Of course, it sometimes happens that the

correlation hiccups. As with this inexplicable, harmful and, to put it bluntly, ungrateful reluctance to participate in the worldwide experimentation with "new vaccines". In September Hans2021, Kluge, the WHO's European Director, left no doubt as to the logic of the operation: "If we consider that Covid will continue to mutate and stay with us like influenza, then we need to anticipate how to progressively adapt our vaccination strategy to endemic transmission, and acquire very valuable knowledge about the impact of additional doses. For France, if we don't have much information about these vaccines, we do have a lot about the vaccinator. It was in 1798 that the English physician Edward Jenner revealed the properties of vaccinia against smallpox. 1800,Vaccination was made compulsory in the British, Prussian and French armies. And as people were mobilized in the villages, they also vaccinated a lot. In 1805, four hundred thousand people were already vaccinated in France. A doctor saw it as a way to produce "a fine race of men [...] fit to make the State respected outside". As soon as the prefectural corps was created, the Minister of the Interior, Chaptal, assigned vaccination as a priority task: "No object demands your attention more strongly; it is the most important interests of the State that are at stake, and the means to increase the population. Vaccinating physicians clamored for compulsory vaccination, despite the lack of mastery of the technique and the many deaths that followed. Napoleon refused to impose it. Fouché, his Minister of the Interior, not known for his scruples, retorts 1808about the vaccinators: "The coercive measures they plan are not authorized by the laws and gentleness and persuasion are the most efficient means to make the success of the new inoculation. From then on, 1803,experiments 1800are carried out everywhere, preferably on street children or orphans, whom nobody claims when they die. The committee in charge of it is already called the Philanthropic Committee. As noted by

Furetière in 1690, "one experiments the remedies on people of little importance". Against the evidence, the committee decreed the 1804vaccine and its experimental method as perfectly benign. To end all controversy, "the Minister of the Interior ordered that any article on vaccinia, before being published, be approved by the committee. The general press, which in 1802-1803 published accounts of contamination and recurrences, was muzzled. The Philanthropic Committee became a central committee, placed under the authority of the Ministry of the Interior. Its members, the most influential Parisian doctors (Thouret, director of the Health School, Pinel, head doctor of Bicêtre, Mongenot, head doctor of the children's hospice, etc.), are paid by the administration. Committees were also founded in each department to correspond with the Central Committee. In 1804, a doctor said of vaccinia that it was "the result of the perfection that the science of the government has acquired". (Jean- Baptiste Fressoz, "Le vaccin et ses simulacres. Instaurer un être pour gérer une population, 1800-1860," 2011) Not to take anything away from the historical parallel: "Ignorance, like knowledge, is manufactured. As far as vaccine risks are concerned, it was produced by a pyramidal management of information, organized in several levels: town halls, departmental committees, Central Committee, which functioned as filters for bad news. Complications (various eruptions, sometimes dangerous) were reported in a literary manner in the "observations" columns, and were only rarely taken up by the higher echelon, which, having quantification as its goal, favored numerical information. Multiplying the steps in the transmission of information maximizes the self-censorship effects of vaccinators. Since vaccination is supposed to be perfectly benign, the health officer or doctor who encounters an accident may fear that it will be blamed on his or her bad practice. For example, in the1820, Alps, the passage of two

Vaccinators produce hundreds of eruptive diseases. Out of 600 people vaccinated, there are deaths40. The departmental vaccinator accuses the health officers of having confused or mixed the vaccine pus with the variola pus. Vaccination, being poorly paid, is generally carried out by simple health officers. They received meager bonuses from the departmental administration based on the number of vaccinations performed. Unless one was particularly stubborn, unless one risked being considered an anti-vaccinator and exposed to the reproaches of the vaccine committees and the prefects, it was much more convenient to keep one's observations under one's hat and one's scruples to oneself. Statistics also had a moral function: the responsibility to keep accidents quiet for the greater good of the nation, the work of refuting parents' complaints and exonerating vaccinia clinically was distributed throughout the vaccine system. Each level had its share of accidents, scruples and indignities. Statistics produced an extremely convenient argument: vaccinations, for the most part, as reported in plethoric tables with empty columns, are absolutely safe. The small number of reports of accidents that managed to pass the successive obstacles of self-censorship, censorship, and careful verification by the Committee, in short, the few accidents or recurrences that remained inexplicable and imposed themselves on the conscience of the Central Committee, were then weighed against the hundreds of thousands of problem-free vaccinations. And, obviously, they do not carry much weight, they do not succeed in any case in imposing a redefinition of the perfectly benign and perfectly preservative vaccine." (Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, ibid. ) The result of this policy was that while the debate raged in England which led to the appearance of far less harmful methods of vaccination - in France the skillful way of constructing the figures, the consummate art of statistics ensured that 1804this 1865debate never took place. In midSeptember 2021, the French pharmacovigilance admitted three hundred cases of menstrual disorders following the

vaccination against Covid. At the same date, its British counterpart counted 30,000, a figure that was itself logically underestimated. In the eyes of the author of the French report, "for the time being, no link could be established between vaccination and cycle disturbances. Only clinical trials could verify this". And as they will never be done... If the vaccines are not exactly the same, the vaccinator has not changed.

2.

Between the rulers and the population, the epidemic crisis can be Since the spring, it has been a matter2020 of blackmailing the hospital. Either you comply or the hospital cracks. The trickery is not lacking in flavour: the fact that a service is always on the verge of cracking is the very definition of its optimal state from the point of view of its neoliberal management. But what this situation reveals above all is the overwhelming symbolic place that the hospital occupies in the national psyche. Not that it is unimportant to be able to undergo emergency surgery after a serious accident or to benefit from bold new techniques resulting from research. Clearly, the relationship to the hospital, with its penguin-like applause from the balconies and its declarations of love in the wind, was one of deeper gratitude, of a more visceral attachment. Criticism of the hospital's quasi-monopoly of medical resources and even of the essential aberration of this institution is one of the banalities that has become inaudible. There is an Oedipal reason for this: this company is the daughter of its hospital. A quick glance at the history of the company is enough to establish this. Until the end of the 18th century, the hospital was the antechamber to the mass grave. The poor, the insane and the sick were piled up in a jumble. The1786, Academy of Sciences published a resounding project for the reconstruction of the Hôtel-Dieu, which had been destroyed by a fire in 1789.1772. Based on new statistics on morbidity and birth rates, and on a calculation of air and water circulation, the project aimed at reforming the hospital in order to reform the entire city. It is a question of turning it into a healing machine. The hospital should be no more than a node in the chain of health of this new aggregate that is the urban population. The numbering of houses under Napoleon was inspired by the numbering of beds for the sick. Here we are, in a good position. It is then that the perspective

of health replaces that of salvation. Death is transformed from a singular encounter with destiny into a statistical actualization of a mortality that must be reduced at all costs. It becomes a failure, if not a scandal. "At the end of the 18th century, the medicalization of the urban space brought about a The administrative colonization of the entire territory, which must be unified at all points, available everywhere, and legible everywhere, in order to meet the demand for cleanliness. A movement of dispossession of the traditional holders of the space is then carried out: the inhabitant chased into the reserve of the house, the merchant locked up in his store, the water carriers and private letter carriers who carried out the circulation, reduced to misery. Typical network of the three bodies linked by the technology of salubrity to each other - human body, hospital body, urban body - investment of the city by the hygienist ordered by the administration, what else is it but the erasure of the old strategy of the city and the building, politics of the emblems, in front of the advent of the modern urbanism, technology of the equipment, administration of the things? " (CERFI, Genealogy of standardization equipment, 1976) The invention of public hygiene, the ancestor of the This "public health" project coincides with the medicalization of the entire space urban. As Villermé, the founder of the Annals of Public Hygiene and Legal Medicine, wrote in 1823, "the paving, widening, and better piercing of the streets, their cleanliness, and the other public hygiene measures that are in force in Paris, contribute to reducing mortality and precisely the return of the deadly epidemics to which this city was once so often exposed. If the real city was the medieval city, its destruction was done in the name of public hygiene. And as nothing is destroyed without being rebuilt, the metropolitan project which is being completed before our very eyes - erased the last remnants. The metropolis is a biopolitical project. The great urbanists were all maniacal hygienists - starting with that great madman Le Corbusier.

The deserted streets of springtime containment are 2020the culmination of a process that began with the first destruction of the Cour des Miracles - that of the Rue des Forges by La Reynie in 1667 upon his appointment as first lieutenant of police in Paris. It took centuries for the masters of this world to take over the street. They believe they have finally succeeded. The hunt for 30,000 "unconfessed" people under Louis XIV did not get the better of Paris. It still took all the street police of the 18th century, and then all e the health councils - quickly transformed into the Superior Council of Health of the hygienists of the centurye to prepareXIthe ground for the Haussmannian X ransacking. And yet, this did not prevent some beautiful proletarian insurrections. It was only easier to crush them militarily. Destroying the city meant first destroying the street - the street-world, the street that lives because we live in it, the inhabited street, the one that spreads into the houses and is never straight enough, never lit enough, never depopulated enough to be considered as a "public space". Only the destruction of the street has made it possible to establish the fictitious distinction between "private space" and "public space", everything flowing too much until then. Since the project was formed in by 1682Alexander The Master in his Metropolite, to assign the street to the traffic, and the great axes of circulation of the capitals to the drainage of the body of the nation, proved to be the best way to finish with the city. The 1977,prefect of the Île-de-France region proposed "abandoning the term 'cities' [...] in favor of the term 'agglomerations', linked together by expressways". He was granted his wish. We only talk about metropolises now. Excessive medicalization of the news. Reasoning on the exclusive scale of the population. Vaccination war. Sovereign rule and

macabre of statistics. If there are any notions that the last two years have wrested from their purely theoretical status, it is indeed the notions of biopower and biopolitics. It is likely that we are living the culmination of their historical validity: the management of the Covid-19 epidemic marks the absolute triumph of biopolitics as a logic and at the same time its practical defeat in the open field, unable to face a virus that is not so fatal after all. It is a strange notion that of biopolitics. It was born in the home1905 of a Swedish thinker, Rudolf Kjellén, who was a professor at the faculty of Uppsala, where Foucault would teach half a century later. It is to be believed that this origin is not entirely without consequence, since Sweden seems to be the only state in Europe that, from a stupidly biopolitical point of view, has kept a cool head in the "coronavirus crisis". Rudolf Kjellén is also, and jointly, the inventor of the notion of geopolitics. He has an organic conception of States. For him, the States are born from a land and from the people who emanate from it. They are human groups fighting against each other in the framework of a civil war on a global scale. Biopolitics designates for Kjellén the internal concern of the vitality of a people, which expresses itself towards the outside as radiation, conquest, confrontation, alliance - geopolitics, therefore. In1911, the eugenicist atmosphere of the beginning of the century, "biopolitics" in England meant getting rid of the crazy, the insane, the criminals, the socially unfit, that is to say, the economically unfit: those who could not provide for themselves by working. In a 1911 article, a man named Harris wrote: "The present condition of nations is a serious cause for apprehension. There is general disorder, almost universal discontent and distrust of existing methods, and unfortunately, few honest attempts at reconstruction policies." "Biopolitics" is the name for such a policy, which for this Harris boils down to "state gas chambers" for the insane and the

criminals. This concern for a vitality of the state that begins with the liquidation of "parasites" was also the point of view of the distinguished biologist Jakob von Uexküll in his 1933 State Biology. This is more or less the notion that Hans Reiter, the spearhead of the Nazi war on tobacco, had of biopolitics in the speeches in which he referred to it. It is also that of the English eugenicist writer Morley Roberts, in 1938,his Bio-Politics. It is interesting to note that doctors were the most Nazified profession in Germany, with %50 of the members of the NSDAP. In the United States, various 1950,Nazis and paranazis, more or less geneticists, more or less biologists, more or less behaviorists, founded a vague "Institute of Biopolitics". In the years Edgar1960, Morin, in his usual confusion, uses the notion positively, while an American professor of political science, a former secret service agent deployed in Berlin, Albert Somit, takes the view that it is irresponsible to think about politics without starting from the biology of human behavior. He calls this "and is organizing an international 1975congress in Paris in January around the notion. This date coincides with the resumption of the concept by Foucault, who will use it, with some eclipses, for the rest of his life. What is curious about these notions of biopower and biopolitics as Foucault elaborates them, and as they will be taken up again everywhere afterwards, whether in good part or as critical categories, is that everyone is reveling in them as if the biological notion of "life" were self-evident. But after all, if, as Foucault said, "man is a recent invention", "life" does not go back further than 1802- when Lamarck instituted biology as "science of living beings". Before him, a distinction had been made between inanimate and animate bodies, with all the debates imaginable on the principle that animates them. Natural history had detailed a whole taxonomy of living beings and Galilean physics had established its epistemological empire of inflexible laws over the inert. But it took Lamarck to bury the harmony of the three kingdoms, mineral, vegetable and animal, to draw an impassable border between "bodies" and "animals".

This division of life into "raw" and "organized bodies", and to unify all living beings into a continuum where a unique and uniform phenomenon operates: life. Viruses are sufficient proof of the falseness of this division, and we still do not know whether or not to classify them as beings endowed with life, even though we now recognize the original debt that the cellular mechanism, especially the mitochondrial one, owes them. Are they molecules of unprecedented complexity or infra-udimentary biological creatures? Do viruses live? This is still a matter of debate. It is from this blind spot that the most promising currents in biology are currently developing. Thomas Heams, a French professor of genomics, rejects the inherited divisions and speaks of the "mineral anchorage of life" and "infravies". By dint of managing to define life only from death, as non-death, the West has ended up adopting a twilight existence and extending indefinitely the states of the living dead - lifelong patients, immunosuppressed people in cancer reprieve, comatose people in vegetative states, interminable agonies, to the great delight of a medical profession that expands its sovereign power. As for knowing whether ensuring the good order of the streets, the fluidity of traffic, the supply of markets, the supply of water, the absence of nuisances and the lighting of the streets - as the police did in the 18th century - is to take charge of "life", nothing is less certain. In spite of this, the notions of biopower and biopolitics allowed Foucault to give an account of almost three centuries of medicalization of everything and of the deepening of the reign of economics, and to give a joint account of it. The founder of the "sect of economists", François Quesnay, was not for nothing a surgeon to the king. In addition to his resounding Tableau économique, he wrote a Essai phisique sur l'œconomie animale. If the equivocation around the notion of biopolitics curiously brings Nazis and leftists into agreement, it is because it covers not the taking charge of "life," but the establishment of a certain form of life. And that, despite their political disagreements, they agree and argue within this form of life. This imperial and

imperialist, it is the metropolis. A form of life whose conveniences, hygiene and pleasures are based on a whole system of distant infrastructures, on a whole global capture of resources and products converging on a few "centers", on the construction of a whole technological environment of confusing complexity and fragile perfection. "The design of the environment is one of the primary tasks of humanity. [The metropolis is the product of the economic development of the modern era. It is the natural and necessary result of global industrialization [...] There is a tendency of the metropolis to extend to the whole country - to the whole civilized world." (Ludwig Hilberseimer, The Architecture of the Metropolis, 1927). Since a form of life is never born without affirming a new idea of happiness, the metropolis has not been left behind. Basically, the mixture of permanent cocktail atmosphere, fitness and cerebral production that was invented in New York in the years has 1920remained until today as the stainless ideal of metropolitan life. This is what that devil Rem Koolhaas calls the "Manhattanism". Here is what he wrote in 1978his manifesto retrospectively in favor of the metropolis, New York is delirious: "Manhattanism, whose program is: to exist in a totally man-made world, that is to say, to live inside the fantasy, is, as an urbanism, the only ideology that has been nourished from the start by the splendor and misery of the metropolitan condition - hyperdensity - without ever ceasing to believe in it as the only foundation of a desirable modern culture." Then he comments on a skyscraper of the years dedicated1920 to athletic, narcissistic, party-loving urbanites, metrosexuals it would have been said a few years ago, "With its first twelve floors reserved only for men, the Downtwon Athletic Club appears to be a skyscraper-sized locker room, the definitive manifestation of that metaphysics, both spiritual and carnal, that protects the American male from the corrosion of adulthood. In fact, the club has reached the point where the notion of an "optimal" condition transcends the realm

physical to become cerebral. It is not a locker room, but an incubator for adults, an instrument that allows its members, too impatient to wait for the results of evolution, to reach new stages of maturity by transforming themselves into new beings, this time according to their individual conceptions. Bastions of the antinatural, skyscrapers like the club herald the imminent segregation of humanity into two tribes: that of the Metropolitanites - literally self-made - who have been able to make full use of the potential of all the apparatus of modernity to achieve an exceptional level of perfection, and the second, composed simply of the remnants of the traditional human race. The only price the "locker room graduates" have to pay for their collective narcissism is sterility. Their self-induced mutations are not reproducible for future generations. The bewitchment of the metropolis stops at the genes; they remain the last stronghold of nature. When in its advertising the club's management points out "that with their delightful sea breezes and unobstructed views, the twenty floors reserved for members' apartments make the Downtown Club the ideal home for men free of family ties and able to enjoy the latest in luxurious living," it is openly suggesting that, for the true metropolitan, celibacy is the only desirable status." It is this idea of happiness which, having reached its peak, has already began to fade. The metropolis has only a career of decline ahead of it.

3.

How much more important is the metropolis as a form of life than its We have already felt this twice: once during the spring confinement, when2020, the confinement of the living was imposed as a condition for the reproduction of the structure of global flows, and then in the summer of 2021, when the blackmail of vaccination was formulated as a blackmail of the deprivation of all "social life", that is to say, of all metropolitan life. Our state of pure dependence on the metropolitan environment then appeared to us as a state of suicidal weakness. Since then, all our vital instincts have commanded us to free ourselves from them. To desert this position. For what marks the metropolis as a form of life is vulnerability. It was the military, of course, who first identified the problem in the 1920s. Modern societies are based on a distributed network of factories, on technical macrosystems of electricity supply, transport, water supply, food supply, workers. A few targeted air strikes are enough to disrupt them. This was the doctrine of American strategic bombing against Germany during the Second World War. The New Deal engineers used the "science of flows" that they had acquired in the organization of the national economy to determine which targets to hit first in Europe and Japan. The need to "maintain the continuity of government and essential production" gave rise to both the doctrine of critical infrastructure and the doctrine of preparedness to protect it. Thus, a society that relies on "vital systems" can only live in a state of emergency

indefinite, because the threat of their collapse never ceases. It is consubstantial with them. The invention of large electrical networks is also the invention of blackouts. The invention of the great water conveyance works is the invention of their drying up, of their dysfunction, of their poisoning. Biopolitics leads logically to a permanent state of emergency. Faced with the Great Depression, Roosevelt had already requested extensive executive powers "as if we were invaded by a foreign enemy". But it1941, was the director of the Office of Emergency Management who wrote: "National emergencies are not confined to periods of war or intense defense preparedness. They may also result from economic collapse or drought, flood, earthquake, famine, epidemic, or an emergency threatening public order or security." This is the ancestor of allhazards planning and associated preparedness, which emerged in the U.S. military in the 1970s. In 1948, a certain Clinton Rossiter theorized without the slightest provocation about constitutional dictatorship: the life of contemporary societies is so fragile that it is necessary to reserve the possibility for the constitutional government to have recourse at any time to exceptional powers, and therefore to dictatorship, to resolve urgent problems that arise. This is what the Conseil d'Etat invited the2021 French government to do in September, suggesting that it develop "a global framework, both legal and operational, designed to reinforce the effectiveness of the action of public authorities faced with major crises while preserving republican principles. Dictatorship has been a republican institution since ancient Rome. When an exceptional situation requires exceptional powers to restore the conditions of normal social functioning, a dictator is appointed for a given period of time. What characterizes the structure of metropolitan life is that this situation has become constant, and with it the need for dictatorship. So much so that, in fact, when we denounce the "sanitary dictatorship", only

Blind people who know nothing about history can say that we are exaggerating. We are rather short of the truth. The metropolis is the dictatorship of vulnerability. Biopolitics is the tyranny of weakness.

"Get the fucking vaccine. Wear a fucking mask." Comment: I love New York.

At no time in the last few years have we been allowed to forget how much our lives are connected to global infrastructures.

At no time was there a failure to make us feel what this implies in terms of political submission. The vulnerability of the system is at all times brought down to that of its subjects. Such is the genius of biopolitics. A 1977 report following the great New York blackout by a certain "Joint Committee on Defense Production" already noted that "an increasingly complex and technology-dependent industrial economy in the United States has made citizens increasingly vulnerable to the effects of disasters and emergencies over which they have little or no control and to which they cannot respond as individuals. This applies to the subjugation of individuals; it also applies to the subjugation of states. This is a general strategic indication. The European Union certainly began to be built on the basis of the old Franco-German steel and coal cartels, but it is at each crisis, each time that the European project comes up against its own aberration, that it accelerates in the direction of its infrastructural unification, sweeping aside political disagreements with biopolitical blows. Thus, in the 2015,midst of the most complete stalemate, the little Machiavellians of the Commission have doubled the failing European Union with a future-filled Energy Union, subtly playing on the identity of the anagrams. The EU cannot die, they suggested. As a promotional video then boasted: "Energy is what binds us together across borders." Two German sociologists observe with all the gloom of the day: "In their various incarnations and phases, infrastructure seems to hold a political promise. In the long history of 'infrastructural Europeanness', plans for infrastructural connectivity presuppose that roads, pipelines and cables can create a unity that is otherwise difficult to achieve given the multiplicity of traditions, languages and political history of wars that

divides the nations of Europe. More recently, the debt crisis and the refugee crisis have provided glaring examples of the conflicts and divisions that currently exist among Europe's nation-states. Despite these experiences or because of them, ongoing trans-European network initiatives intend to build a supranational unity through the physical connectivity of infrastructure. Infrastructures promise to "make solidarity operational" (European Union, 2013). [...] At first glance, the link between infrastructure, the market and the political-spatial unity of Europe seems simple. Infrastructure presents itself as the backbone of a market predefined in political and geographical terms. The European Union's regulations and communications imagine a pan-European physical network the size of the Union, ending the "isolation" of the member states and leaving no energy islands. Such a grid should allow energy to be sold and bought "from any source, anywhere in the European Union, regardless of national borders" (European Commission, 2011). We are faced with a form of infrastructural unity that resembles, to some extent, a state decree but in a larger sense: the pan-European network is thought of as a "connective tissue" (Edwards, 2003) penetrating the territories of member states. The European Commission hopes to bring about internal cohesion through the contiguous and continuous connectivity of a free flow of energy." (Sven Opitz and Ute Tellmann, "The materialism of Europe: infrastructure and political space", 2015) This policy is materialized, among other things, in our regions by all those projects of "wind farms" that nobody wants and that come to trample everywhere land, landscapes and inhabitants - all to save from bankruptcy a European project that nobody wants anymore either, by pulling very high voltage lines from Denmark to Andalusia. The most formidable of conspiracies is still that of the infrastructure.

4.

Biopolitics advances everywhere as politics disguised as fact. Its deceitfulness is commensurate with the pretension that inhabits it. The official U.S. Army counterinsurgency manual theorizes that it is through the installation of "essential services" - sewage, electricity, gasoline, schools, medical care and money - that the occupier conquers the hearts and minds of the indigenous populations, conceived as a set of basic biological needs. Behind the idea of a "biological life" that would be universally underlying all "cultures", it is the logistical form of life specific to the metropolis that is imposed everywhere. This is the real object of a war that never says its name. The claim to heal provides the best cover for the desire to destroy. Declassified documents from the Cold War attest to the age of the maneuver. For example, this document was written1959, by the United States Information Agency (USIA) and entitled "USIS Communications Research and Operations" (USIS is the foreign operational arm of the USIA). The function of such organizations is to ensure American propaganda in the world. They are the ones who run, for example, the great and inclusive exhibitions that will make known everywhere the beauties and joys of the American Way of Life. This document recommends that for each operation, a diagnosis of the feelings of the target nation towards the United States should be made in order to "treat" the public: it is a question of targeting modes of communication likely to bring "a prophylaxis that will make it possible to avoid a "disease" and a therapy that will favor the cure of this disease". The highlight of this propaganda will be the move to Moscow of the American National Exhibition, and the highlight of the American National

Exhibition will be the pavilion of the exhibition The Family of Man. The Family of Man distributed in a cleverly constructed disorder a whole set of poignant pictures where the diversity of figures and cultures of humanity, from the Zulus of the desert to the American miners through the Hungarian peasants, was resorbed in the great unity of the biological species, which must be born, grow, love, eat, work, entertain, grow old and die, all of this embellished with profound quotations from the Bible, the Bhagavad Gîtâ, Albert Einstein or the Kwakiutl wisdom. The assessment of one of its managers does not hide his feeling of triumph: "The Family of Man touches people emotionally, as human beings, to the point of transforming their image of the United States and of Americans. Indirectly, and without any 'propaganda' - in fact, because of the very absence of propaganda in the usual sense of the word - they are taken out of their usual Soviet nationalist frame of reference and offered, at least temporarily, a sense of belonging to the human race as a whole. At the same time, they cannot ignore the fact that it is the United States, their supposed enemy, that moves them to this extent." All this slimy apology for peace was therefore only intended to undermine the defenses of the Soviet opponent. The pan-inclusive humanism of the exhibition was only there to exclude the enemy from the human family. The process, to be honest, is commonplace. What is not commonplace is that it has become a universal political device. "A better world: more inclusive, more equitable and more respectful of Mother Nature", it is with this vow, of course, that Klaus Schwab summarizes his Great Transhumanist Reset. This is the same sentimental device that has been used for the past two years to bring into line those who do not subscribe to the policy of managing the epidemic - those "antivaxers" who dare to resist all the good that is being done for them.

Behind the folkloric diversity of the cultures and identities it presents, The Family of Man puts forward a perfectly dogmatic definition of the human being: a failed, imperfect, dependent and above all vulnerable creature. It is to this being that all the empathy it commands goes. Anything that refuses to submit to this definition is an offense to the species. This being does not coincide fortuitously with the metropolitan atom deprived of everything, and which must thank technology for doing everything to complement it, improve it and who knows? one day, increase it. Certainly, the loss of the world makes one weak. Relational misery mutilates. The daily experience of the chasm that separates my social profile from my sensitive existence is painful. It is understood. But it is to play the game of the one who organizes this state to set it up as a human condition. This is exactly what contemporary identity politics does, in line with The Family of Man - which has a spontaneous weakness for visible biopolitical attributes centered on birth, race, sex or bodily handicap and never on ethical singularities. We are still waiting for the constitution of the League of Defense of Delicate Beings against Assholes. With their ideal of security, their explicit calls for censorship and their congenital technophilia, identity politics merges into the current social chorus as its perfect counterpoint. The exclusive preoccupation with the attributes of beings fortunately preserves the subject that is its support: the old monad of liberalism and its exhausting "me, me, me". Wasn't it the beautiful promise of queer to finally get rid of this damned verb "to be"? It is, logically, these identity politics that have been mobilized to undermine the self-confident vigor of the George Floyd riots in the United States, to come and divide again, along agreed lines, the composite, unheard-of, formidable alloy that was formed there. That the NGOs carrying this restorative biopolitics are largely financed by the large American foundations is a good thing.

In Pier1968, Paolo Pasolini prophesied with his usual lucidity: "In the future, racism will increase in intensity and frequency, rather than decrease: and this, because of the pressure of a power, which being less visible and less personal, will not be less crushing: and it will be, moreover, so crushing, that it will break and pulverize the collectivity that serves as the connective tissue in the process of production and consumption; such pulverization of society into so many different forms, equally oppressed, will precisely make racism multiply, because all the small separate parts, into which the crushed world will fragment, will racially hate each other. " (Pier Paolo Pasolini, The Chaos, 1968) The biopolitical perspective of living within a continuum of the species where any distinction between friends and enemies is proscribed fatally produces a suffocation, a feeling of planetary closure and the subsequent desire to disappear. The forced reclusion within the human family, with no possible escape, has the same psychotic effects as in the traditional family. For there are many beings that harm us. There are beings that we hate, and others that disgust us. There are beings that we love, that delight us, and that we refuse to consider as "humans like the others". But as Foucault explained in Il faut défendre la société (1976), in a biopolitical regime, where all ethical singularities are grey, the only grammar that authorizes political distinctions is racism. The enemy is the one who harms my race, who sucks its blood, and whom I must exterminate in order to increase my own vitality, in order to make the population of my fellow human beings grow. Since we are united by biology, it is in biology that we must draw the profile of the enemy and the reasons for reducing him. We find this in the theme of the struggle of the Gallic nation against the Frankish nation of the blue bloods of the nobility during the French Revolution

Bateson, for example, advised in a 1944 report to the OSS a neo-colonial method that was subsequently implemented: "It is very important to create in the superior populations the disposition to take care of their own needs. Thus, in a 1944 report to the OSS, Bateson advised a neo-colonial method that was subsequently implemented extensively: "It is very important to create in the superior populations a disposition to be spectators as well as a disposition to exhibitionism in the inferiors. [...] Where the white man sees himself as a model and encourages the natives to look up to him for how things should be done, we find that this leads, in the end, to the blossoming of native cults among them. Then this system goes into overdrive until a countervailing machine develops, and then the revival of native arts and literature become weapons against the white man (this phenomenon, comparable to Gandhi's spinning wheel, can be observed in Ireland as elsewhere). If, on the other hand, the dominant people stimulate indigenous revivalism, then the system as a whole is much more stable, and indigeneity can no longer be used against the dominant people." Where we see that the ancestor of the CIA did not ignore that flattering the identity and cultural differences of subordinates remains the best way to neutralize them. Never has the order that oppresses us been better maintained than since we verbally acknowledge our suffering. What else would we do but add to the suffering of the world, if we dared to rebel against it effectively? Let's be reasonable. Because conspiracy theorists dare to designate an enemy, because we have the nerve to distinguish between an "us" and a "them", we are given a reputation of awful racists more or less assumed. This is how the reigning biopolitics wants it. And since we pretend to make this distinction within society, the media are quite happy - after having used the

same tired string against Nuit Debout and then the Yellow Vests - to give us away as anti-Semites. No paradox is shied away from for this purpose. The whole point of this maneuver is to equate any clear-cut opposition to the existing order with anti-Semitism, and to drive those who can't take it anymore into it. What is thus sought to be obliterated is that there are other "us" and other "them" than biopolitics. There are ethical "we" linked to the sharing of a certain idea of life, certain attachments, certain ways of doing things, certain techniques, in short: an experience of the world. There are also political "we" linked to a conflict situation where everyone takes sides. There are not only "we" of belonging, attributive "we", based on the external, categorical, biographical sharing of a social identity. One can hold, after careful consideration and examination of all the pieces, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Emmanuel Macron, the Rockefeller Foundation, DARPA, Bolloré, Cargill, the European Commission, WHO, the big global consulting firms, Goldman Sachs, Louis Dreyfus, Bayer- Monsanto or the multinational pharmaceutical companies as enemies without having in mind to open concentration camps. But this is an intolerable idea. For to tolerate this would be to lift the veil on the fundamental imposture of biopolitics.

5.

Biocapitalism, biocitizenship, biopolitics, bioeconomy, biosecurity or even biosociality - curious how this prefix bio- seems to be imposed everywhere, without anyone knowing what it means. Erwin Chargaff, the great melancholic researcher to whom we owe the socalled "pairing" rule of the amino acids in the DNA molecule, a Jew from Bucovina exiled in the United States, said of biology: "There is no other science whose name evokes an object that it cannot define. (Heraclitus' Fire, 1979) The history of the last two centuries offers moreover this curious spectacle, for transparent reasons of disciplinary competition, of so many physicists trying to answer from their field the question What is life? (Erwin Schrödinger, 1944) while as many biologists are trying to postulate that Life does not exist! (Ernest Kahane, 1962). Even a Nobel Prize winner as narrowminded as André Lwoff began his book L'Ordre biologique (1962) with : "Biology is, by definition, the study of life. Nothing is more difficult than to define life. The simplest thing is to decide, like so many others, that it is impossible."

However, all these proliferating bio-ids must correspond to something. We can suppose that this is a sign of the cheptelization of the human species. As capital extends its hold, both in extension and in depth, it tries to reduce us to the state of a herd. The oldest etymology of "capital" comes from the Provençal word captal, which means "herd". Since the dawn of civilization, wealth has been counted in heads of cattle, and power in number of slaves. A common historical fate seems to link the treatment of livestock and human populations. As one could

In anticipation of this, the chipping of some announced the project of chipping others. What we laugh at as a conspiracy rambling is an explicit technological project of about twenty years old that Klaus Schwab and his investor friends enjoy, that Télématin now promotes - it makes life so much easier! - and that the very biopolitical Sweden is proud to experiment already. All the fear that is distilled in order to take control of our souls, all the appeals to remain united in the face of the virus, all this mechanical invocation of Solidarity, are all part of the chepterization of the species. The "Solidarity" is such a devious notion that a major French oil company was able to call on its employees, during the lockdown, to 2020,show their It was the reactionary Joseph de Maistre who first borrowed the term "solidarity" from the lawyers. It was the reactionary Joseph de Maistre who first borrowed the term solidarity from the jurists. It was then the socialist Pierre Leroux who imported the notion into philosophy, obscuring his predecessor but not his intentions: "I was the first to borrow the term Solidarity from the legalists in order to introduce it into Philosophy, that is, according to me, into Religion; I wanted to replace the Charity of Christianity by Human Solidarity [...]." Solidarism was the secular religion of the IIIe Republic and the doctrine of crushing the class struggle. The invocation of Solidarity as an absolute value only serves to prohibit asking the vital questions: "With whom? On what basis? Against whom? In what relationships?" Forbidding us to ask ourselves these questions is to forbid ourselves to defend ourselves against what weakens us. Against what kills us. It's wanting us to be sick. And hand us over to our executioners. This happens even physiologically in all these victims of They are "Covid long" who have never actually contracted the disease. By virtue of the nocebo effect, they are literally sick with solidarity. The socialist Louis Blanc, a contemporary of Leroux, called for a regime that "considers the members of the great social family as being in solidarity

tends to organize societies, the work of man, on the model of the human body, the work of God. If there is no "great social family", it is because there are links between the beings which locate them, and not homogeneous bodies which it is enough to agglomerate. It is because we are in the world. The old Christian dream of uniting all the bodies of the elect in the bosom of Abraham is a nightmare of crushing - as is the frontispiece of Hobbes' Leviathan. It is, as a figure of salvation, a dream of annihilation. What makes a living body is precisely that it exceeds its corporeal finitude, that it participates in the world. The cheptelization of the species proceeds by reducing the beings to their carnal envelope. Slaveholders always tried to reduce their subjects to this - to which the subjects responded by asserting the power of their soul through their songs. A body that is no longer a body is less than a body. The biopolitics intends to repress us in the limits of our skin.

Paraguay "If you infect with coronavirus, it's your fault."

It aims at a world of bodies, with nothing between them but the connections it administers. Bodies surrounded by a hostile void like rats in a laboratory. For at the end of this reduction, bodies are knowable, manageable, displaceable, separable, governable, bludgeonable - harmless, therefore. As long as there is "me" and "the others", there is still nothing. All that consists, consists precisely in this that we participate in it commonly. What is ungovernable is what cannot be reduced to an atom floating in cyberspace, to a worker returning home alone at night, to a panicked figure fleeing madly into tear gas, to a motorist speeding along the ring road. It is that which stands, that which is indestructibly bound, that which is sure of its attachments and its fact. This is part of the world.

"Friendship is, by its very nature, infallible and ungovernable", wrote Baudelaire to Victor Hugo. What power must fear are the links between beings, the unassignable, uncontrollable links that make bodies more than bodies and become resistant, sometimes unalterable. This is why it is so politically vital for Facebook to capture the "social graph" of each person, the "network of real connections through which people communicate and share information," as that dirty Zuckerberg said in 2007. "The body is a biopolitical reality", dared Foucault. It is enough to enter a hospital ward, under this degrading neon light, in this icy stretcher, under these tired and professional looks, where an accompanied patient wobbles away wearing an ill-fitting gown that leaves his buttocks gaping, to experience being reduced to the state of a body, and how despicable that is. Each time one removes what links a being to the world and to others, an attempt at annihilation is at work. One wants to make of it a heap of inert, passive, inanimate flesh, deprived of its own forces, just good to be used as medium of culture for the microbes or to be beaten - as the bad doctor and the good cop jointly apprehend it. "The great lie has been to make of man an organism, ingestion assimilation, incubation excretion, [...] this still for shit, this barrel of fecal distillation, cause of plague and of all diseases. [You believe yourself to be alone, it is not true, you are a multitude, you believe yourself to be your body, it is another [...] Four thousand years ago, man had an anatomy that ceased to correspond to his nature. The anatomy in which we are stuck is an anatomy created by donkeys, doctors and scientists who have never been able to understand a simple body [...] It is however well the syllogistic functioning of the human body such as it exists at present which is the cause of all the diseases [...] the previous body was without measure, unnameable, unconditioned [...] I say that

much better than by its army, its administration, its institutions, its police force, it is by bewitchments that the society holds [...] The current human body is a gehenna that all the magics, all the religions and all the rites have worked hard to sclerotize, to tie up, to petrify, to garrote in the module of its current stratifications which are the first real impediment to any revolution [...I say to remake his anatomy / man is sick because he is badly built / for bind me if you want but there is nothing more useless than an organ / when you will have made him a body without organs then you will have delivered him from all his automatisms and given him back his true freedom. " (Antonin Artaud, Autour de la séance au Vieux-Colombier, 1947) This way that biopolitics has of reducing us to the state of a body, to the state of tenants who have an interest in taking the greatest care of it, in pampering it in view of the final inventory of fixtures by the Great Owner, this way that it has of pushing us to orbit around our navel and to fear some bad blow from our organism, are all ways of depressing us, weakening us, killing us - turning us away from the relationship with the world, which nourishes us, increases us, makes us radiate, makes us alive by making us participate in everything that lives. "What is individual is the relationship, not the self. To stop thinking as a self, to live as a flow, a set of flows, in relation with other flows, outside of oneself and in oneself. [The inalienable part of oneself is when one has ceased to be a self: one must conquer this eminently fluid, vibrant part. The problem then, is to establish, find or recover a maximum of connections. For connections (and disjunctions) are precisely the physics of relations, the cosmos. [...] Every time a physical relation is translated into logical relations, the symbol into images, the flow into segments, the exchange cut into subjects and objects, one for the other, we must say that the world is dead, and that the collective soul is in turn locked up in an Ego,

whether it be that of the people or that of the despot. (Fanny and Gilles Deleuze, preface to Apocalypse by D. H. Lawrence, 1978) Except perhaps for the injunction to accept and hybridize with everything, there is no more harmful notion than the immunity we are currently being told about. This idea of immunity as a self-defense of the assaulted body bastion dates, not surprisingly, from the end of the century XI e. With its detection systems X on alert, its threats of invasion, its foreign bodies to be repressed and its movement of antibody commandos, it smacks of the state militarism of its birth era. Mankind has never needed to live, and quite well at times, with this helmet-to-toe design. One cannot give any credit to a notion the accidental collision between an old notion of law and a "scientific" one. The first is a Roman concept - immunity - designating the fact that a subject is not subject to the common law - and the second is a political concept - that of self-defence - invented by that scabby Hobbes. It is worth recalling that this theorist of fear in politics described his birth in his Autobiography as follows: "The little worm that is me did not enter the world alone. The rumors that the Invincible Armada would lead our race to its ruin caused such fear in my mother that she gave birth to me and fear"? A perfectly sane man, we see. We should have suspected it: the notion of health propagated by biopolitics corresponds in reality to the very definition of disease. This certainty that life on earth is impossible outside the Machine. This idea of a system so vulnerable that everyone must stay in their place so as not to threaten its calibrated functioning. This relentless struggle against all events, against everything that opposes and introduces the unknown, against all becoming and against all history, as a last resort.

This desperate demand for control - "It is possible to bring living phenomena under control, which is the one and only goal of biology," boasted biologist Jacques Loeb of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research at the beginning of the 20th century. This aspiration to a deadly stabilization of all mechanisms, to the elimination of all fluctuation. This inability to not react. This obsession with safety in everything. This way of not being able to extract oneself from a certain regime of life without having to fear succumbing - this is the very definition of the pathological state. Care, precautions, "measures" are part of the disease. The disease contaminates the law when the law takes care of the patient. But pathology is still a way of life - so of the metropolis, so of biopolitics. It seems that none of the doctors who occupy the television sets have ever opened a page of one of the most famous texts of the principal French philosopher of medicine: "The pathological norms of life are those which oblige the organism to live in a "shrunken" environment, qualitatively different, in its structure, from the previous environment of life, and in this shrunken environment exclusively, by the impossibility in which the organism finds itself to confront the demands of new environments, in the form of reactions or undertakings dictated by new situations. Now, to live for the animal already, and a fortiori for the man, it is not only to vegetate and to preserve itself, it is to face risks and to triumph from them. Health is precisely, and mainly in man, a certain latitude, a certain play of the norms of life and behavior. What characterizes it is the capacity to tolerate variations of the norms to which only the stability, apparently guaranteed and in fact always necessarily precarious, of the situations and the environment confers a deceptive value of definitive normal. Man is really healthy only when he

is capable of several standards, when it is more than normal. The measure of health is a certain capacity to overcome organic crises to establish a new physiological order, different from the old one. With no intention of joking, health is the luxury of being able to fall ill and to recover from it. Any illness is, on the contrary, the reduction of the power to overcome others. [...] A living person cannot lack anything, if we are willing to admit that there are a thousand and one ways of living" (Georges Canguilhem, La vie et la vie, p. 4). (Georges Canguilhem, The Knowledge of Life, 1952) The enterprise of stunting our world, of breaking and digitally colonizing all our ties, the spread of a properly paranoid distrust of the world, of others and even of ourselves, the prescription of wearing masks and "barrier gestures" against colds, the tendency to confine everyone to a routine and domestic existence - all this marks a clear attempt to make us sick under the best biopolitical pretexts. Nothing new in this madness. Just a more methodical implementation than usual. In 1930, the novelist Georges Duhamel, back from a trip to the United States, described what he had seen there: the methodical fumigation of foreigners arriving for disinfection purposes, the horror caused by a sneeze on the train and the neighbor spraying his throat again, the number of calories contained in each dish on the restaurant menu, but also the mass distractions and the rampant industrialism. As the century promises to be American, he reports on his journey as a series of scenes of future life for a Europe condemned to ape with delay. One of these scenes is a dialogue about "conquests of science" with a modern and cultured American, Parker Pitkin. Duhamel lends him these words: "There are perhaps a hundred contagious diseases. The day when we will have, against each of the contagious diseases, an effective vaccine whose application will be rigorously compulsory, we will no longer suffer from diseases, we will

suffer from the constraints imposed by the laws, we will suffer from health." And a little further on, this line: "I propose that those individuals who have already been forbidden to drink, and who tomorrow, thank God, will be forbidden to smoke, should be prevented from procreating miserable offspring by an ingenious surveillance of their homes. - All that remains is to find," Pitkin said calmly, "the surveillance system." Here we are.

A responsible beauty salon

The present hell is only the realization of the old positivist project 1. Statistical monstrosity. 2. The Rockefeller foundation and the molecular vision of life. 3. Permanence of positivism.

1.

From the day we started to describe the city as a body, nothing has more stopped the circulation of medical metaphors in politics, and political metaphors in medicine. The crisis was the decisive moment for the patient and his doctor - the krisis, already, in Hippocrates - well before it was for the leaders. In fact, it was a doctor, Juglar, who first studied economic crises in the 19th century. For the tenth century philosopher Al-Farabi, diet refers as much to politics

as to dietetics. We studied the physical constitution of the individuals and then we put ourselves in head to write some for the countries. Alcméon de Crotone saw in the imbalance of the sick organism a case of inner sedition. Virchow's cell theory is inseparable from his republican commitment as well1848, as from his reading of Leibniz's Monadology. Ernst Haeckel, a later and highly un-Republican proponent of cell theory, wrote in 1899, "Cells are the true autonomous citizens who, assembled by the billions, constitute our body, the cellular state." The cell of monasteries, the cell of prisons, the cell of police custody here is a civilization that has seen in the cell the elementary unit of life. Nowadays, the author of Ni Dieu ni gène, the biologist Jean-Jacques Kupiec, judging that the dominant biology, with its genetic determinism, leaves no room for random variation, defends a "anarchist conception of the living". Ever since it began tracking down "terrorists", the counter-insurgency has been trying to surgically remove them from the social body like so many hotbeds

cancer - which, by the way, makes the West's understanding of cancer suspect. We are obviously governed by bad metaphors. The breathlessness of current events only imposes their obviousness by constantly moving on to something else. Anyone who takes a moment to think about it must recognize the grotesque nature of this circus, if not its criminal nature. That is why it is so urgent to speed up. The notion of "public health" is certainly the most shaky of these shaky constructions, and yet it dominates. Health, insofar as it is a quality of the relationship that a living being has with its environment, can never be public. It is always singular. There is no such thing as Global Health. There are only global companies that bet on our illness. More than ever, doctors make the sick. "From the moment that health was said of man as a participant in a social or professional community, its existential meaning was obscured by the demands of an accounting [...] The historical enlargement of the space in which the administrative control of the health of individuals is exercised has resulted, in the present, in a World Health Organization that could not delimit its field of intervention without publishing, itself, its own definition of health. Here it is: "Health is a state of complete physical, moral and social well-being and not merely the absence of infirmity or disease." [...] This discourse is that of Hygiene, a traditional medical discipline, henceforth recovered and disguised by a socio-politico-medical ambition of regulating the life of individuals [...] The hygienist applies himself to regulate a population. He does not deal with individuals. Public health is a questionable name. Salubrity would be more appropriate. What is public, published, is very often the

disease. The sick person calls for help, draws attention; he is dependent. The healthy man who silently adapts to his tasks, who lives his truth of existence in the relative freedom of his choices, is present in the society that ignores him. Health is not only life in the silence of the organs, it is also life in the discretion of social relationships" (Georges Canguilhem, La santé et la vie, p. 3). (Georges Canguilhem, La Santé. Vulgar concept and philosophical question, conference given in Strasbourg in 1988) The monstrosity of public health is that of statistics. Its laudable intentions to save mankind can do nothing about it. Statistics, originally called "political arithmetic", was born as a science of the State. By counting population and wealth, it does not aim only at measuring the power of the sovereign. It had another, more oblique aim, theorized at the end of the 16th century by Bodin in his Six Books of the Republic: to regulate the conduct of each subject by its own mechanism, by the norms it allowed to produce. Its model is the Roman institution of the censor, who had to inspect every five years the state of morals and patrimony of each citizen, from which his rank in the organization of the city was derived. The extra-political and pre-judicial power of the censor was, in particular, to award ignominia. He did not deliver judgments, but notae, notes. It is said that he did a lot for the maintenance of public morality in Rome over the centuries. The censor, according to Bodin, by making it possible "to know the state of each person, the trade in which he is engaged, and the way in which he earns his living", makes it possible "to banish vagrants, idlers, thieves, pipe cleaners, rufians [...]: they would be seen, marked, and known everywhere. [...] It is only the deceivers, the blabbers, and those who deceive others, who do not want their game to be discovered, their actions to be heard, their lives to be known: but good people, who are not afraid of the light, will always take pleasure in knowing their state, their quality, their good, their way of life. (Bodin, Six Books of the Republic, 1576) The collabos have always recognized themselves by their "I

I have nothing to hide, since I have nothing to reproach myself with". "It is a matter of developing, with the help of the acts of enumeration produced by the censor, a type of power that induces behavior in a permanent way, by means of individual internalization, much more than it sanctions in a momentary and external way as the law does." (Thomas Berns, Governing Without Governing. A Political Archaeology of Statistics, 2009) In Rome, the transition from the Republic to the Empire was marked by the extension of the census to the entire "inhabited world" and the preparation by Augustus of the breviarium totius imperii, the complete inventory of all the material and human resources of the Empire. A sort of logical thread runs from the use of the monarchy's censuses to hunt down the poor and the rebellious to big data and the various social credit systems in place or to come: that of the invasion of almost all activities - work as well as sport, business as well as family budget, nutrition as well as communication - by a growing statistical reflexivity over the decades. Sorry to remind you: the fundamental tools of modern statistics - The regression method, the correlation and correlation coefficients, the median, the deciles and the interquartile range - were invented by Francis Galton and Karl Pearson in the context of their scientific militancy in favor of eugenics, of which they were the most distinguished representatives worldwide. These methods were first used to study the "genetic value" of populations or for biometric work. They explicitly aim at going "beyond perceptions". "The alchemy that transforms free and random individual acts into determined and stable aggregates provides the debate with points of reference, objects that are transmissible because they are external to people. (Alain Desrosières, La Politique des grands nombres, 1993) This alchemy has the gift of substituting its fictitious aggregates for singular perceptions, its fabricated abstractions for situated realities. This escamotage was absolutely necessary to disinhibit the average man of the 20th century. The "normal" barbarism of this one did nothing but display

that of statistical reason. It was Stalin who said: "The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of a million men is a statistic." To aggregate data, you must first destroy their context. The monstrosity of statistics, which is also the monstrosity of the State's gaze, lies in its way of annihilating the sensible world under the pretext of making it readable. The singularity, which is however the whole of the experiment, is antistatic. This is why statistics must ravage experience everywhere. At the time when, in 2020, old people were dying of loneliness in EHPADs, we were being extorted to order feelings for daily death figures, for ghostly abstractions. We were required - and are still required - to take this statistical view of our own lives. To live and think as if we were not ourselves, that is to say to stop living and thinking. Everything is good to tear us away from ourselves. And, failing that, to set up in us the social being against the singular being. Between the statistical view of the world and the world, there is the gulf between the last breath of a loved one and the addition of a unit to the death column. This monstrosity is so insurmountable, moreover, that it was necessary, to make it acceptable, to make the experience of death itself statistical. The uniform calibration of almost all deaths in the anonymous setting of the same hospital room, with its smell of detergent, piss and cold food, has depersonalized death enough to make it look like an abstract reality, the statistic into which it will eventually be translated. These funeral homes in industrial areas, with their office carpeting and boilerplate phrases, are a kind of crowning achievement.

More than a century ago, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote ironically about the Hôtel-Dieu: "Now people die in five hundred and fifty-nine beds. In series, of course. It is obvious that, because of such an intense production, each individual death is not so well executed, but that doesn't matter. It is the number that counts. Who still values a well-executed death? No one does. Even the rich have ceased to care; the desire to have one's own death is becoming increasingly rare. A little while longer, and it will become as rare as a personal life. My God, it's all there. You arrive, you find a ready-made existence, you just have to put it on. You want to leave, or you are forced to leave: above all, no effort. Here is your death, sir. You die as best you can, you die of the death that is part of the disease from which you suffer. (For since we know all diseases, we know perfectly well that the various fatal outcomes depend on the diseases, not on the men; and the sick person has, so to speak, nothing more to do.)" (Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malta Laurids Brigge, 1910) There is an indissociable political and epistemological flaw in the fact of claiming to govern the lives of beings on the basis of statistical data. First of all, what evaporates between reality and its statistical representation are all the possibilities that surround it, all the powers that work on it. By nature, data defend the given. Then, data are always constructed, in their collection as in their organization. The choice of the object and the moment, as well as that of the denominations and the methods of construction, is their intrinsic and hidden politics. The exhibition of fanciful statistics regularly serves to influence reality in return, and to obtain the expected statistics. The fabrication of the "political landscape" by the polls is a daily proof of this. The call for a strike by the "Look, %80 of people are vaccinated! Hurry up!" works at It is also a marvel. In the two years that infection curves have been in use, we have seen the unfortunate tendency of models to replace the

reality. Imperial College's grandiose models, which were used to justify the Great Reclusion of March 2020, predicted up to 90,000 deaths in Sweden in the first year of non-confinement, but official statistics only recorded 13,500. In the end, the official statistics recorded only 13,500. Exceptionally, the Imperial College modeler - who is no stranger to assisting governmental disinhibition - exaggerated by a factor of 7, not 500,000, as he has done before. But there is a logical flaw in the empire of statistics, and that is that it reasons on a population scale. Its truths are mass truths. We cannot come down from this level, which has no relation with the one where each one, singularly, lives. This plane does not concern us. It has nothing to tell us. Statistical truths are of no use, of no advice in lived situations, where we deal directly with what is, with our own apparatus of perception and knowledge, where the sensitive meets the sensitive, where the singular relates to the singular. It is moreover the fundamental postulate of the law of large numbers: it has nothing to say about particular cases, since it rests on the fact that in it these cancel each other out. Only an empty individual, a singularity devoid of singularity, could follow the "statistical laws". As the Talmudic scholar Eric Smilevitch recently explained, "only if no specific decision or behavior prevails at the individual level can a statistical law be established. On the condition that individuals are indifferent and interchangeable. On the other hand, if the behavior of certain events is not random, if it is based on singular rules, it cannot be registered at the global level and is excluded from statistics. Logically, if truth is not an empty word, one cannot transform a decision based on a statistical law into a rule of personal conduct. One should rather say that, if I have no personal rule of conduct, I certainly fall under a statistical law of viral propagation. [...] Interchangeable individuals and random behavior is the basic assumption of any policy

based on the law of large numbers" (Eric Smilevitch, "Vivre au temps des paniques sanitaires", 2020). Anyone who relies on road mortality figures would never drive. Those who rely on the divorce rate would never get married. If you looked at the morbidity curves at birth, you would rush back to your mother's womb. Suicide statistics say nothing about the torment and fury, the despair and defiance, that inhabited the friend who ended it all at the moment of his act. The great mystification of statistics is that they only have a speculative or distracting use and meaning, and they claim to guide our behavior and make us guide ourselves. It produces all sorts of norms which incline subjects to watch each other and to conform to them. These norms are very useful to govern a country, but not to live. One can lead one's life, one can never govern it. And whatever one says, one does not manage. Statistics, in truth, is cursed. In the Chronicles, Satan induces king David to have the people of Israel counted. When the census was taken, the plague fell on Israel. Imploringly, David begged the Lord to strike him, who had ordered the census, and not his people. "What have these sheep done? To take a census of humans is to treat them like cattle. The accounting fanaticism of statistics has fallen upon health as it has fallen upon death. And everywhere it bears witness to the same sensitive amputation and the same determination to propagate this amputation. Managers, administrators of all kinds and entrepreneurs of themselves, journalists and sociologists all share this holy cause. And as they would not want to be exposed or to be allowed to use their own sensitivity, they have invented a new refrigerated pathos: the "human life". In a lecture to American Lutherans in Ivan 1989,Illich dared to call human life a "new fetish" - no small thing for a former priest.

"A life can be managed, improved and evaluated in terms of available resources, which is unthinkable when we talk about a person. [...] The daily experience of a managed existence leads us to take for granted a world of fictional entities. It makes us talk about these managed ghosts with new formulas, such as "progress" in health care, universal education, planetary consciousness, social development; with words that suggest something "better," "scientific," "modern," "advanced," "beneficial to the disadvantaged. The verbal amoeba that we use to designate the ghosts fed by management thus connote an enlightened vision, a social concern and rationality, without denoting anything that we could experience. In this semantic wasteland of blurred echoes, we need a grigri, a prestigious fetish, that allows us to pose as noble defenders of sacred values. In retrospect, social justice at home, development abroad, and world peace have been such fetishes. And the new fetish is Life. There is something apocalyptic about looking for life under the microscope. [...] The new technological society is singularly incapable of generating the kind of myths to which people have a deep and rich attachment. However, in order to secure a rudimentary hold, it needs agents who create legitimate fetishes to which epistemic sentimentality can be attached. Never before has there been such a demand for agents capable of assuming such a task." (Ivan Illich, "The Institutional Construction of a New Fetish: Human Life" in In the Mirror of the Past, 1989)

2.

The idea that life is something that is elucidated to the order of magn10itude –6

or even 10–9 - the molecular vision of life -, that the most banal mechanistic physics and chemistry are enough to exhaust biology, that at the limit we can explain life without life, that there is no limit to manipulation and engineering, that the doctor does not relate to the patient in a relationship where the truth of the latter is at stake, which the therapist must accompany, but that he must just administer examinations and molecules to what appears to be a failing machine that needs to be repaired, or the idea that every disease calls for its own pill - all this has not imposed itself naturally. All this, that is to say modern biology and medicine, research The Rockefeller Foundation is responsible for the development of medical research and for the way research is organized, without exaggeration. The historical support of the Foundation, from its creation in to 1913now, to the craziest eugenic projects is public knowledge. But it is less well known that the current structure of medical studies in France, due to the Debré reform of 1958, and with it the very existence of the University Hospitals, are the result of the import of the project of hospital reform and medical education initiated at the beginning of the 20th century in the United States by the Foundation. However, Robert Debré was honored to have visited the Rockefeller Institute in New York even before that and 1914to have remained one of its patrons throughout his life. The same historical navel-gazing does not want to know that the French National Center for Scientific Research, the illustrious CNRS, is itself only a pale copy of the National Research Council created during the First World War at the initiative of the Foundation. When, in 1930, the physicist Jean Perrin and the biologist André Mayer presented a draft bill

In establishing a "national scientific research service", they took up and invoked "the admirable organization of the Rockefeller". Throughout the 1930s, those who presided over the creation of the CNRS and led it remained in close contact with the Foundation. Not only was the CNRS born with the financial support of the Foundation, but one of its instigators, Louis Rapkine, wrote in August 1945 to Warren Weaver - the mogul of "Natural Sciences" at the Rockefeller from 1932 to 1955 and a living model of the new science manager - that he was awaited in Paris "like the Messiah by dozens of researchers [who] know that they need a scientific organization that is equal to the difficulties of the day [......], that they have a vital need for this know-how which is the glory of American scientific philanthropy. Weaver was not mistaken, moreover, when he wrote about the CNRS to one of his colleagues in 1946: "It is in the hands of scientists whom we know well from having been our Fellows for the last twenty years." In fact, it is to the point of our misunderstanding of the Foundation's role in the creation of the CNRS that it seems its intentional product - the product of an activity whose effectiveness is indexed to discretion. As a condition of his financial support, Weaver wrote to Rapkine in 1949: "I am convinced that no other action could be more effective in rejuvenating and reorienting French science. But I recommend that, knowing the self-satisfaction and chauvinistic spirit of your countrymen, you give them the impression that the idea comes from themselves." The Rockefeller Foundation has since listed among1912 its employees twenty-six Nobel Prizes in medicine and chemistry. Molecular biology owes so much to the Rockefeller that it was Warren Weaver himself, although a mathematician by training, who invented the concept in 1938. The first "public health" campaign worthy of the name in France, that against1917 tuberculosis, was the work of the Rockefeller. What is less well known is that, during the 20th century, "modern medicine

has always meant "American medicine," and that American medicine in this century has been structured by the Rockefeller Foundation. Foundations, it is well known, are used to convert money into power - into influence. But in the case of the Rockefeller Foundation, we are faced with the direct conversion of money into a paradigm, the sublimation of the dollar into knowledge. This is remarkable enough that it is worth remembering, because it helps us to see more clearly the plans of our enemies.

John D. Rockefeller

There is no need to go back over the origins of the American oil and refining industry from the1860 years 1890,that made John D. Rockefeller, an austere, methodical, rapacious and unscrupulous Baptist, head of Standard Oil, the "oil king" and the "most hated man in the United States" and his trust, the epitome of the enemy of the people - the It was said at the time that he was an "octopus". The racketeering methods of the richest man in the country gave birth to the first legislation

The U.S. antitrust law, the Sherman Act, was enacted to1890, prevent such industry domination and the cartels that made it possible. In the aftermath, Standard Oil of Ohio was convicted of criminal conspiracy. The years 18901900 are as much the time of the first American populist movement as the golden age of the diffuse, combative and singing anarcho-syndicalism of the Industrial Workers of the World, as much the time of the robber barons with their Pinkerton militias plotting against the workers, coldly executing them, always covered by the justice system, as the time when big business begins to take over the government. These are the pivotal years. These were the years when Woodrow Wilson, a progressive presidential candidate, wrote: "Government, which was designed for the people, has passed into the hands of the bosses and their affiliates, the special interests. An invisible empire has been installed over the forms of democracy." So these are the years when John D. Rockefeller rants, "I tell you, things have changed since you and I were children. The world is full of socialists and anarchists. Every time a man achieves remarkable success in some activity, they jump on him and cry haro about him." (Daniel Yergin, The Oil Men, 1991) Basically, what the Rockefeller-like robber barons realize then is that if they want to retain their economic power, they are going to have to extend their control over the entire society. Expand your positions to keep them, that is the strategic maxim of capital. This perspective is quite appropriate for the apocalyptic imperialism to which the devout Calvinist is condemned by the very anguish of his faith. Just as Bill Gates is doing now, education, medicine and agriculture are the privileged fields of this necessary enterprise of penetration of souls and bodies. In 1905, Baron Carnegie created a "foundation for the advancement of education" and a biology 1911laboratory devoted to agronomy and human eugenics - in all cases, it is a question of improving the species, isn't it? In a bulletin of this foundation we 1905,find an article by the botanist Hugo De Vries, one of the first

geneticists, which sums up the strange view of life that animates our great philanthropists: "Evolution must become an experimental science. It must first be controlled, then conducted in a chosen direction, and finally adapted to the use of Man." In 1903,Baron Rockefeller institutes a General Education Board because "the Negro must be educated to be made more sober, more industrious and more competent." It is a question of "eradicating the miasma of laziness, the cause of the proverbial lethargy of the Southern populations", urges the Reverend Gates, the principal adviser in philanthropic matters of John D. Rockefeller. In New York, the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research was 1906inaugurated, a state-of-the-art laboratory modelled on the Robert-Koch Institute in Berlin and headed by Dr Simon Flexner. The Flexner Report of 1910 marked biomedicine's declaration of war on the medical profession. Its program was to concentrate the practice of medicine around the hospital, which was at the same time a place of care, research and teaching. By controlling access to the medical profession, it is a question of purging the United States of everything that will henceforth be presented as "alternative" medicine, which was the essential part of the profession. "Installing full time in the hospital will represent a decisive gesture to establish scientific medicine in the United States, if only by reducing the desire for independence of a profession still tempted by liberal practice," strategized Reverend Gates. The calibration of education around biochemistry and the latest technological advances legitimized the constitution of a corporation with increasingly prohibitive fees, and therefore increasingly rich, and therefore increasingly powerful. The obscene corruption of Big Pharma $2.6 billion between and 1998spent2012 for the benefit of congressional candidates or elected officials, after all - has its roots in this mafia-like constitution of the contemporary medical profession. The relentless assault on vernacular remedies and traditional knowledge, on "holistic" approaches and non-mechanistic therapeutics, and even on the simple consideration of the terrain, since the Flexner report, expresses less than a simple "medical" approach.

the self-confident scientism of biomedicine than the need to repress its founding usurpation. Following the Flexner report and thanks to the support of the Rockefellers, all medical training was reformed, centralized, caporalized, on the German model. Anything that was not "modern" was purged from the profession. As Flexner said of the dwindling number of doctors, "The fewer the better. We are still there, a century later. Go get proper care, nowadays! In John1911, Rockefeller Junior founded the Bureau of Social Hygiene to advise governments on prostitution, crime and drugs. Under these conditions, Reverend Gates could not fail to attend the 1912first World Congress of Eugenics. In 1913, the Rockefeller Foundation, the most lavishly endowed foundation in the world, was created in the wake of these charitable endeavors. By inviting doctors, professors, students and researchers from all over the world to come and see their facilities and to be trained there, by financing dispensaries, equipment, health campaigns and the construction of hospitals and universities, the Foundation literally saved the name, the influence and therefore the power of the Rockefellers. Even the massacre of 1914forty striking workers in Ludlow, including women and children, by the Standard Oil militia, did not turn them into the pariahs they should never have been. Instead, it was an opportunity for the founder of modern advertising, Ivy Lee, to restore the family's spit-shined image and for the heir to the dynasty to invent "industrial relations", which later became "human relations". According to its statutes, the Foundation is established "to do good for humanity throughout the world". It is articulated into five branches: International Health, Medical Sciences, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences and Humanitarian and Arts. Between the wars, three hundred French doctors went to the Rockefellers in the United States for training. The Foundation worked hard to gather information, identify, approach and select candidates in order to create a discreet network

of global influence and build an effective knowledge "elite". "The strategy followed is always the same: to identify key places in order to carry out pilot experiments that could carry the whole system along in their wake." (Ludovic Tournès, Sciences de l'homme et politique. Les fondations philanthropiques américaines en France au XXe siècle, 2013) But one does not create a plan of reality without the instruments that make it perceived. The Rockefeller Foundation allied with Caltech (the Californian Institute of Technology) did not impose biochemistry against the medical art by a simple spell, an orgy of funding, a global co-option of scientific elites and a witch hunt of "alternative" care. It has equipped the molecular vision of life. It has equipped it with electron microscopes, ultracentrifuges, scintillographs, spectroscopes and even a cyclotron to produce radioactive isotopes. It is not the instruments that are "reified theorems" as Bachelard believed; it is the theories that are logicized instruments. In order to make the purely physicochemical interpretation of life prevail, to bring it down to a mechanism where the division between animate and inanimate does not tend to exist anymore, it was necessary to show the plan of macromolecules, proteins, bacteria, viruses and antibodies. This was necessary at least to send back to nothingness a question as elementary as "Do diseases have a meaning?" as the good doctor Robert Aronowitz innocently asked. As we can see, what is at stake here is something quite different from the tactical move of a petroleum industrialist in a monopoly situation, who is seeking to expand into what he knows best chemistry - and who, in order to do so, must annex medicine by bringing it within his field of competence. The Rockefeller Foundation is not only the ignored but undeniable ancestor of Big Pharma. Its program is much broader. It can be called political, or social, or metaphysical, depending on what one prefers. Certainly, it is total. As Lily E. Kay has shown in The Molecular Vision of Life (1993), "Rockefeller Foundation executives and their advisors

scientists sought to develop a mechanistic biology as the central element of a new science of man whose goal was social engineering. [The molecular vision of life was an optimal combination between a technocratic vision of human engineering and a representation of life based on technological intervention, a resonance between scientific imagination and social vision. It is an anthropological project, a project of civilization that unites the different branches of activity of the Foundation. A Calvinist project that speaks of "fighting vice", "raising moral standards" and "improving human behavior", not to say "building a safe world for private enterprise". As early as the 1913,president of the University of Chicago and leading candidate for the Foundation's presidency writes: "The real hope of ultimate security rests in strengthening the police powers of the state by a training of moral nature so abrupt and extensive that it will limit asocial aspirations and substitute reasonable self-control." In the atmosphere of fear of the Reds that prevailed in American ruling circles of the years in1920 view of the Soviet experience, one of the foundation's leading lights, Raymond B. Fosdick wrote with the apocalyptic pathos characteristic of Calvinism: "We see clearly the abyss on which the race stands. We see the end of time before us if we fail to establish a far greater measure of social control than we have exercised to date...[We need] the same kind of bold engineering in the social realm that in the field of physical science has pushed the limits of human understanding so far." Or, to put it practically and in less roundabout terms, as a doctor sent by the Foundation to Puerto Rico in the years to1930 research blood-borne diseases, one Cornelius Rhoads, wrote: "[Puerto Ricans] are without doubt the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thieving race of men that has ever inhabited this sphere. It makes you sick to live

on the same island as them. They are inferior to the Italians. What the island needs is not a public health job, but a tidal wave or something like that to totally wipe out the population. Then it could be habitable. I did my best to advance the extermination process by killing only eight of them and transplanting cancer cells into several others." In a report from Warren1933, Weaver's foundation he asks, "Can we establish genetics strong enough to produce men in the future who are superior to those of our generation? [Can we rationalize human behavior and create a new science of man? It must be said that in matters of eugenics, despite the vicissitudes of history, the Rockefellers have shown an admirable constancy. They did not allow seven years to pass after 1945 before establishing the Population Council, at the head of which they placed Frederick Osborn in 1957, the great philanthropist who, after describing the Nazi eugenics program as "the greatest experiment ever attempted", had to concede that "the goals of eugenics are most likely to be achieved under a name other than eugenics". The term human engineering was in common use in the United States in the 1920s. Contemporary1910. with Taylor's push for scientific management and the engineering class, it aimed to use the same "rational" techniques that had helped regain control of factories to maintain social order in general. Watson's Behaviorist Manifesto was published1913, which put forward a new psychology whose "theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior," according to its author. In the 1920s, the Rockefeller Foundation played a leading role in funding and promoting this "social science. One observer of the time notes a "important change in the scientific interest and purpose, a change from understanding to control, [...] from knowledge to research

of truth [...] to management, to direction, to improvement, to greater efficiency". A 1925 book, The Means of Social Control, defines the concept as follows: social control is "getting others to do, believe, think and feel what you want by understanding 'you' as any authority". Well, well. The Rockefeller Foundation can claim to have introduced management into the sciences by dividing work according to determined disciplinary axes on the one hand, and on the other by promoting the organization by projects of teams managed by an elite of "cooperative individualists", as it so aptly puts it. But it did so within a more ambitious program summarized in the title of one of the founding books of American sociology in 1901, Edward A. Ross' Social Control. In it, Ross studied all the means - religion, morality or science - by which the conduct of individuals could be controlled. "In an aggressive race, order is perpetually threatened by the derangement of individuals, and can be maintained only by the uncompromising operation of certain social forces." The role of Ross's sociology in shaping the Rockefeller political project is crucial. It allows us to pull the thread of the entire ball of wax of the era. Indeed, Ross is, as he claims in his memoirs, a positivist, an American disciple of Auguste Comte. The influence of Auguste Comte on American sociology and philosophy at the turn of the century cannot be underestimated. The founding father of sociology in the United States, Lester Ward, was an orthodox positivist. He declared that "his goal is a radical sociocracy, not the palliatives that pass for social reform. The first American sociology textbook, Introduction to the Study of Society, published in is1894, entirely positivist. Sociology was defined as "the science of social health". One of its two authors was so committed to the idea of "improving society" that he became director of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1917, and remained so until his retirement in 1917.1929.

In the foundation, the aspiration to constitute a "science of man", it is Comte's heritage that is in the same movement claimed and hidden.

3.

Auguste Comte is not only the inventor of sociology, he is also the founder of a religion, a claimed religion, and claimed as scientific. The positivist church is still standing in Paris, although its masses are, like the others, hardly said anymore. This religion, which intended to give "the government of the world, for the spiritual, to a priesthood of scholars, [and] for the temporal, to the bankers," was condensed into three watchwords. The first two regularly appear on the cover of positivist pamphlets, just below the words The first is the "Western Republic": "order and progress" and "living for others". The third is developed at length in the Positivist Catechism, but remains less well known: it commands to "live in the open". "Order and progress" is both the most famous and the least enigmatic of the Positivist instructions; it even adorns the Brazilian flag. "Living for others", which makes Comte the inventor of the notion of altruism, does not lack resonance with the present, where you are prescribed all day long to do this or that, if possible the most absurd or the most infamous things, "for others". "The positivism, he details, never admits that duties, in all towards all. For its always social point of view cannot include any notion of right, constantly based on individuality. [...] No one has any other right than that of doing his duty. [...] All human rights are absurd as well as immoral. Comte never fails to oppose "sympathy" to the "egoism" over which altruism must always prevail. And he adds, as contemporary as ever: "The best way to be well off consists in developing benevolence." As for "living in the open", the maxim paradoxically the least known of positivism, it is like a prophecy

for our age of smartphones, video surveillance, facial recognition and social networks: "Western instinct will soon look upon the normal publicity of private acts as the necessary guarantee of true citizenship. [...] All those who refuse to live in the open will become suspected of not really wanting to live for others. [...] [Public opinion] must become the principal support of morality, not only social, but also private, and even personal, among populations where each one will be more and more pushed to live in the open, so as to allow the public the effective control of any existence. It is necessary to put an end, in particular, to "the shameful legislation which still forbids us to scrutinize the private life of public men". But in terms of utopia, Comte does not stop there. Like the first transhumanist from Davos or Silicon Valley, he takes from Francis Bacon and Descartes the promise of indefinite life - they who, according to him, are the ones who will be able to live forever, He says that "the people of the world were looking for a positive basis for our physical improvement in medicine". He thus believes that a brain can "wear out two bodies and perhaps three", provided certainly that he downloads its contents. The concern for "cerebral hygiene" has of course led him to stop drinking coffee, wine and tea and to eat less and less while keeping "the continuous hope of the obsolescence of the sexual instinct" - like Michel Houellebecq, this icon of the illness of being French who never misses an opportunity to celebrate Auguste Comte. Anticipating the accession of medicine to the rank of religion, he held that "civilization requires that the medical office be more and more merged into the priestly service". For our devoted "high priest of Humanity", the ultimate stage of evolution will have been reached when the "utopia of spontaneous fertilization" will have been realized, when we will have succeeded in "systematizing human procreation, by making it exclusively female". That is furiously modern! Then the "utopia of the Virgin Mother" will be accomplished, which goes so well with the concern of

"curb [our] gullet to curb the impulses of the flesh". Thus, "Man will become more and more a cerebral animal" - at least that is the hope of our ascetic. Last curiosity of the positivist program: the "carnivorous cows". Since the degree of perfection on the scale of beings reaches its peak in man, and man is a carnivore, it is important to aim at the "transformation of herbivores into carnivores", a It is about "organic improvement, first in plants, then among animals, and finally in man as he belongs to biology". It is a matter of building an "immense league" of the living under the leadership of Humanity, which will have to lead the struggle of "all living nature against dead nature, in order to exploit the earthly domain". To Humanity will be logically integrated the whole of the "species susceptible to serve, in some way, to our own use, or to feed the companions of our destinies". Thus the "whole living world" will finally be interested in the "social regeneration of our species [in a] vast biocracy". This gives an eminently positive meaning to the ongoing liquidation of all wild species, to the drastic reduction of biodiversity, to the melting of the poles as well as to the elimination of everything that, in The "earthly domain" is not suitable for exploitation. Such a religion of Humanity obviously does not go so far as to include in its bosom those who do not contribute to the great work - all those "unworthy human parasites" and other "producers of manure" of whom a positivist from the beginning of the 20th century said: "I see that they are aborted humans who do not count from the point of view in which I place myself. Adopting the view of the "Great Being" that together form the living and the dead who deserve it, the Master considered that "few men, without doubt, are allowed to look at themselves as really indispensable to humanity". No one will be surprised that this "biocratic" religion defines itself first as a "cult of the dead". Nothing could be more coherent.

Obviously, Auguste Comte was clinically insane. His own disciples agreed in private. A distinguished positivist such as Dr. Constant Hillemand considered him a "deranged mind" subject to "Delusional conceptions". Cabanès classified him among the "great neuropaths". He was interned at Esquirol in 1826 and recovered by his own means, according to him, by a suicide attempt as soon as he left the asylum. It is enough to read three lines of his lectures to feel that we are dealing with the very type of the great paranoid. He wrote a letter to the Jesuit general, modestly proposing to become his assistant, to settle in Paris and to proclaim himself spiritual leader of the Catholics - all this in order to "reorganize the West". His madness, unfortunately, did not take anything away from his decisive influence on the course of ideas and the world between and1850 the years 1920.Positivism imposed itself after the death of its prophet as the dominant philosophy of the IIIe Republic. Its strategy to achieve "world government" was well thought out: to form "for a generation the religion of the chiefs, before becoming that of the It was to constitute a "worthy nucleus of true sociocrats" and then "seek to seize power" without neglecting to win over "the principal conservatives of the United States of America" to its cause. It was for more than a century, and remains in a sense, the religion of the polytechnics, of which Auguste Comte was a part. The medical world was also a particularly fertile mission field for positivism. Comte boasted during his lifetime that He said that "physicians, especially French physicians, are a class where positivism has truly collective successes". Two of the founders of 1848,the French Society of Biology are his declared disciples. The Sainte-Anne Hospital remained for a long time a bastion of positivism. No one can ignore all that is naturally positivist since the 19th century in French medicine - and not only in a clinical case such as the urologist, enarque and transhumanist entrepreneur Laurent Alexandre. It is customary to present "transhumanism" as an invention, in the years of the left-wing 1950,biologist and eugenicist Julian Huxley. The term

The term "transhumanism" is in fact of French conception. It is due to a polytechnician in vein of "science of the man" - Jean Coutrot, the founder of the group X-Crise that one usually identifies as the birth of the technocratic movement in France. Coutrot presents in 1939,the framework of meetings of his Center of study of the human problems where the writer Aldous Huxley as well as the doctor Alexis Carrel cross, a "Draft of a transhumanism". Through an infusion as omnilateral as it is tacit, positivism has literally made our era, that is to say, it has made its madness. When Patrick Zylberman has to publish a plea in favor of governmental crisis management - Forgetting Wuhan - in a publishing house whose aim is obviously to bring the leftist readership back to the biopolitical fold, he cannot help quoting Comte and identifying himself with the "We sociocrats are no more democrats than aristocrats" of the positivist Catechism. The claimed cause of biocracy has never really died out, unlike that of biopolitics. It runs from Comte to Édouard Toulouse, a polygraphic physician of the first half of the twentieth century, founder of the Ligue d'hygiène mentale as well as of the Association d'études sexologiques, inventor of professional orientation and psychotechnical tests in France on the basis of a singular theory of human "biotypes" and doctor, also, of Antonin Artaud. It is customary to Not to mention that one of the first books published by Antonin Artaud, in 1923, is a collection of texts by Édouard Toulouse. But biocracy is above all the banner of Alexis Carrel, winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine and inventor1912, of the philosophico-medical bestseller in 1935 with L'Homme, cet inconnu (Man, that unknown), but above all an employee of the Rockefeller Institute from 1906 until his retirement in 1939. Faithful to the positivist "science of man" of his employer, he saw medicine as "providing modern society with engineers who know the mechanisms of the human being and his relations with the outside world". He proposes to substitute biological classes for social classes. "The establishment by eugenics of an aristocracy

Perhaps a medical examination should be imposed on candidates for marriage, since "no one should marry an individual with hereditary defects. Moreover, "perhaps a medical examination should be imposed on candidates for marriage" since "no one should marry an individual carrying hereditary defects [...] No human being has the right to bring to another human being a life of misery. [No human being has the right to bring to another human being a life of misery. This benevolence was so common, on both sides of the ideological spectrum, that Henri Sellier, the Minister of Health of the Popular Front, thundered in 1936 in his first ministerial declaration: "It is urgent to defend the race against the certainty of degeneration and destruction that the lamentable statistics of the birth rate, of disease and of death show... And when I speak of the birth rate, I mean the desirable birth rate. France has too many heredo-syphilitics, stunted people, backward people, abnormal people whose existence, as painful for them as for the others, clutters up hospitals, asylums and prisons." Adorned with all the aura of his American career with the Rockefellers, his Nobel Prize and his best-seller, Carrel was offered by the Vichy regime a foundation of which he was the "regent". This "French Foundation for the Study of Human Problems claimed for object "the study, under all its aspects, of the measures the most suitable to safeguard, improve and develop the French population in all its activities". It employed the urban planner Le Corbusier, the psycho-sociologist Jean Stoetzel, the gynecologist Cécile Goldet, who later participated in the creation of the French Movement for Family Planning, the polytechnician Jean Bourgeois-Pichat, who was to preside over the Statistical Society of Paris, and above all the economist François Perroux, He was a Rockefeller fellow and a heterodox spirit who prefaced the 1930neoliberal Von Mises, took courses in Freud, trained Raymond Barre, frequented the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and the personalist Emmanuel Mounier, and never denied his friendship with Salazar, the Portuguese dictator. Long obscured, the Carrel Foundation can legitimately be considered as one of the ancestors of post-war French social sciences. Its wealth was used in

1945 to found the National Institute of Demographic Studies. So much for statistics. The interest of going back to Comte's madness to enlighten the present lies in the fact that the forgotten programs are also those that are best realized. The present, by its fragmented, event-driven, contradictory character, masks the coherence of its driving tendencies. The Rockefeller Foundation, since the years, has 1950,elaborated and financed the model of vertical integration from farms to food factories that founded agribusiness. In the 1940s, it exported the disastrous American agricultural model to Mexico under the title of the "green revolution", before attacking the rest of South America and India. Since 2006, in association with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, it has been working to destroy what remains of food-producing agriculture in Africa by massively introducing GMOs and pesticides under the guise of a "green revolution". In July, it2021, published a report claiming to discover all the "hidden costs" in the United States of the agricultural model it has always promoted: global warming, species extinction, air, water and soil poisoning, chronic diseases - everything is covered. In the face of this emergency, it is joining forces with the Davos WEF and the United Nations to implement a new agricultural agenda based on genome editing, synthetic meat production in factories, big data and new GMOs as soon as possible. "Reset the table," she boldly displays. Without the concept of "biocracy", it is difficult to understand and to admit the coherence of this enterprise of devastation, behind the flip-flops, the denials and the fake regrets. Alex Pentland, the Silicon Valley behaviorist guru, quotes Comte on the third page of his best-selling book Social Physics - "social physics" is the name Comte originally gave to what he would later call "sociology". The boy is not afraid to tell us

to repeat the trick of Laplace's demon, with two and a half centuries of hindsight: "If we had an 'all-seeing eye,' a supreme vision, then we could achieve a true understanding of how society works and take the necessary steps to remedy our concerns [...] We can use these exchanges to generate social pressure to change behavior." In a 2014 interview titled "The Death of Individuality: What Really Governs Our Actions," the same Pentland states, "The single biggest driver of new behaviors is peer behavior. [...] Instead of individual rationality, our society seems to be governed by a collective intelligence that comes from the ambient flow of ideas and examples." Without the notion of "sociocracy", it is very difficult to grasp the trap into which they are trying to lead us. Because the smart guys at Pentland know very well that no one would accept the journey they propose if one perceived its destination. By the virtue of his systematic insanity, Comte at least has the merit of painting a picture of it. To complete the misfortune of the times, a Dutch cybernetic engineer from Philips had to push the vice to the point of reinventing a notion of "sociocracy" of his own. A version as cool as the old one is chilling, and which is currently all the rage among leftists, never short of a managerial catch-all into which to dive head first with enthusiasm. This new "sociocracy" presents itself, no joke, as a method of "shared governance that allows an organization to function effectively in a self-organized mode". William Bainbridge, the organizer of the founding rave of the NBIC convergence, has not ceased since the 1980s to look for the forms that a transhumanist religion could take, because this one seems to him to be necessary for the realization of his social, technological and metaphysical program. In New Religions, Science and Secularization (1993), he addressed his fellow sociologists of religion: "I propose that we become

religious engineers. [...] Sociologists working in other fields are not afraid to take actions that have practical consequences. [...] We must also be prepared to initiate cults of our own invention, a task which, I must say, may be perilous for the welfare of the implementer, and scandalous to those who refuse to admit that all religions are human creations. But it is far preferable that the creation of new religions be undertaken by honest religious engineers who will work for the betterment of mankind, rather than by money-hungry fools and swindlers." In a 1981 text, Religion for a Galactic Civilisation, he already observed, "Those who might wish to create a Church of the Galactic God will find more appropriate scenarios that describe new religions, cults that could actually come into being, and which, if successful, could steer public policy in the direction of science and technology." That's what's called having a mind of its own. When Ray Kurzweil, the pope of transhumanism at Google, converges with Bainbridge and declares, "Yes, indeed, we need a new religion," one understands that neither Comte nor positivism are dead, and that their agenda is being realized. We are very literally governed by the dead. We are then reminded of this letter of Comte to one of his disciple polytechnicians: "One must look at the mass of conservatives or retrogrades as the true milieu of positivism [...] Positivism will become for them the only systematic defense of order against communist or socialist subversions." Following the reading of The Man, this unknown, in Antonin1936, Artaud writes from Mexico a letter to Carrel. He says to him, or rather he expects him to say: "At the point we have reached, only a systematic, savage destruction of all the acquisitions of science can save us, I mean save the Life of Men to which we all belong.

have stopped participating. Yes, only a Great Punishment that would deprive us for a time of the benefits of civilization is capable of teaching us to live again, because the truths, the phenomena, the certainties that Science gives us are usurped truths. [...] It is not by science that we cure the abusive perversions of science. [...] Too many scientists have begun to look at diseases through a microscope and the sense of the sick face that burns like a hidden sun has descended forever into the limbo of consciousness. Forty years later, Erwin Chargaff, after a career as an increasingly disillusioned biochemist, writes an open letter to the editor of Science. The latest "progress" in molecular biology horrifies him. For him, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki massacres have forever tarnished the prestige of "science" and he warns against the "dangers of genetic tinkering": "No smoke screen, no P3 or P4 high security laboratory, can absolve a researcher if he harms one of his fellow human beings." In his autobiography, he adds, regarding the United States and contemporary research: "I am quite unable to subscribe to what is being practiced today, because I am convinced that with our methods of organizing and financing science, we are preparing to kill it for good. We are not far from totally destroying the concept of science as it has developed over many centuries. [...] This country has always had a tendency to blow up every balloon until it bursts, and that is what it has done with the sciences as well." (Erwin Chargaff, The Fire of Heraclitus, 1979) And indeed, biomedicine has finally devoured medicine. Molecular biology is no longer finished observing the material translation of processes that escape it and for which it does not even have a grammar, having blocked all access to the plane where they take place. Thanks to deep learning and its neural networks, it now boasts of

to be able to simulate in three dimensions the shape taken by proteins without having to understand anything. The emperor Tiberius said that at the age of thirty everyone should be able to be his own doctor. As they say in Tuscany: "Lascia che la morte ci trova vivente!" May death find us alive!

We will win because we are deeper 1. Society", a reactionary concept. 2. The war on souls. 3. The virus of secession and the ongoing schism. 4. Conspiracy, therefore.

1.

It's

like a humming sound,a continuous,dull and insistent, for a good fifteen years. It is a presentiment, a hint, a silent decree that decorates all public life. To all "responsible" speeches. An antiphon audible only to the sharpened ear: "Society is earned. It is not given to everyone to be part of it. Besides, are you sure yourself... " Prisons were built and filled to make those who were not in them believe that they were free, respectable and innocent. The asylums had been built and filled in order to show the passers-by that they are reasonable, healthy and normal. There were good and bad citizens, first and second class, but finally, by now, all were citizens. The "outcasts" were exhibited to show what it costs to let themselves go, but no one doubted that they were still "part of society", even if they occupied the pissoir or the barf room. Thirty years of rampant neo-conservatism have put an end to these ecumenical sweets. Values" are back. And constructivism has come and gone. A society is made, it is broken - and above all it is remade. The old one was a failure. Let's make another one. So much so that little by little, insensibly, year after year, from Kärcher to the "sans-dents", from the loss of nationality for "terrorists" to proposals of internment for those on the "S" list, the conjecture has imposed itself that there are certain attributes that do not qualify you for social membership, that even disqualify you, and that there is therefore a moral content to citizenship, to nationality, to society. That there are no bad

citizens, since, to be a citizen, one must be good. The society has its requirements, its required credo, its irrefragable obligations. We don't negotiate anymore. We put a physio at the door of the company. Not everyone can get in. It's going to be about being in. This is

what the"sanitary pass"is all about.A stopper. Electronically. Tactically. He who gives to the one who has submitted to the vaccination the title of full citizen on the terraces of the cafes. He who wears his name so well that the undesirables no longer pass. The most superficial, the most playful, the most free sociability has lost its innocence. It has been fenced in by invisible checkpoints. One was asked, in order to mingle, to leave in the checkroom all that is really intimate in life character, state of mind, disputes or destiny. This was the condition of his special lightness. This lightness has now become weighted with leaden soles. The premonition materialized. The buzzing is now yapping like a Great Dane. For the two hundred years that there have been progressives and that they claim to deal with the social question, one would almost forget that the concept of society as it is currently understood is the invention of reactionaries. Not those whom the progressives denounce as such, insinuating that it would be normal, banal, in the sense of history, to be revolutionary, and that they themselves would be revolutionaries to some extent. But the real reactionaries, those who claimed to be such, who, faced with the French Revolution which they judged to be cataclysmic, abominable, demented and, to put it bluntly, diabolical, elaborated the necessary Reaction, those who have not ceased to 1790lay the foundations of a victorious counter-revolution: Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald. They were the first to theorize the

"society". Not the "good" society, or that which is simply civil and testifies to a state of civilization whose criterion remains the organization in State. Rather, the society of "sociology", the one whose general order includes everything and from which one cannot escape. Thanks to this concept, they intend to repress the intolerable irruption of the people in history. The people, popular sovereignty, individual rights - these are concepts that drip with the blood of the king. The downfall of the Old Regime is unforgivable in that it is, with the social order, the divine order that has lost its character of natural evidence. All these insurrections, all these agitations, all these motions, all these constitutions, all these conventions, all these ideas have distorted the world. With its implicit hierarchies, the place reserved for each one, its complex mediations, its head and arms, its top and bottom, the notion of society offers itself to them to renaturalize the lost kingdom. Our reactionaries play, in short, the society against the people. The first thinker to tackle a "science of society", the first theorist of the "social link" is Bonald in 1796his Theory of political and religious power. He doesn't beat about the bush. "Not only is it not up to man to constitute society, but it is up to society to constitute man, I mean to form him by social education. Man exists only for society, and society forms him only for it. [...] One cannot speak of society without speaking of man, nor can one speak of man without going back to God. [...] There has never been a society without gods, there have never been nations without leaders, there have never been gods without priests, nor leaders without soldiers. [...] We can define constituted civil society: the whole of the relations or necessary laws which bind together God and man, intelligent beings and physical beings, for their common and necessary conservation. [...] What is the state of subject? The right to be governed. A subject has the right to be governed, like a child to be fed. [...] Governments are instituted to force [men] to be free, that is, good. Here is

Rousseau turned against himself. It is necessary to admit that he lent himself to it. Auguste Comte was a dazzled reader, in his youth, of the "philosophers of order" - Maistre and Bonald - whom he tenderly baptized "retrograde tendency". All this shaking of certainties, this questioning of natural hierarchies, these protests of everyone, all the time, these internal and external disorders which overwhelm the world since the French Revolution, desolate and revolt the polytechnician. "Social order will always remain incompatible with the permanent freedom to put every day in indefinite discussion the very foundations of society." Like his master, the Count of Saint-Simon, Comte aspired to a "rational reform of society in crisis," to "put an end to the intellectual anarchy that characterizes our present state." At the age of twentyfour, he wrote a "plan of scientific works necessary to organize society". He intends to cure the "Western disease": the "continuous insurrection of the living against the dead". It will be the task of his "social physics" to give back to society, to order and to power its basis of natural evidence: "Social physics, that truly definitive science, which takes He will not forget to include Maistre and Bonald in the positivist calendar, in the eleventh month, the one devoted to modern philosophy. He will not forget to include Maistre and Bonald in the positivist calendar, in the eleventh month, the one devoted to modern philosophy. The very name of "positivism" implicitly designates its enemy: the revolution, this monster of negation. Here too, its declared positiveness covers a fierce will to deny. Most histories of sociology and the social sciences, even when they begin with an obligatory chapter on their eccentric founder, Auguste Comte, are careful not to go back as far as Bonald - that so unpleasant origin. It took the successful work of an American scholar in the years before1980 one could no longer refer to this

genealogy to the status of a malicious rumor. As a general rule, one also prefers to underestimate the historical importance of the school of Frédéric Le Play - another polytechnician and a great reader of Bonald and Maistre - in the history of the discipline, on the grounds that he was, like Comte, conservative, an assertive paternalist, and a great defender of Napoleon III. Yet it was Le Play's epigones who founded the journal La Science sociale in 1886. And it is to one of his main disciples, Émile Cheysson, of the Musée social - still a polytechnician of the Corps des Mines - that we owe the notion of "social engineering" in a conference on 1897"the social role of the engineer". All these people are united in the terror of losing control, in the the fear of class struggle and social dislocation. The notion of "society" was shaped by reactionary thinkers in their mad war against a revolution they wanted to make sure never happened. Sociology was born to restore order - better: to establish a sociocracy. The statue of Auguste Comte is enthroned in the Place de la Sorbonne. There has never been a social science other than with a view to its application as social engineering. Everyone knows those left-wing people - cultured, progressive, cool, sympathetic, critical - who, in the last two years, have only aspired to more fatal restrictions of freedoms with only the "solidarity", "altruism" and "social inequalities". Progressivism is essentially reactionary. It has always aimed at maintaining order. Moreover, "progress is the development of order". (Auguste Comte) Altruism is the pilot fish of sociocracy. The socialism of the intellectuals is worth the conservatism of the owners. All this has never been so obvious as now.

The omnipresence of the adjective "social" among the technocrats who are ripening our enslavement, their enthusiasm for "collective intelligence" and even their new religion of the "super-collective", do not deceive us: they are all cold declarations of war. A persistent American neurosis imagines the United States as the paradise of a world whose hell would have been Stalinist Russia. This is not to understand anything. Knowledge capitalists - engineers, experts, bureaucrats or managers - have presided over the 20th century in both countries. And they continue to do so. After the brief and disastrous attempts at "subject accounting" and the abolition of money, the USSR used the market as an instrument for planning its economy. As long as anyone has been talking about it, that is, since the foundation of neoclassical economics by Walras at the end of the 19th century, there has never been an alternative between the market and planning. Stalinists and liberals have only had an interest in staging an opposition that so happily masks the real power structure of their respective societies. The owners of society have always wanted a supercomputer. Russian social engineering was only more crude, more tragic, more whimsical than American. Nowadays, China and the United States - and Europe, for that matter, which is just putting its bourgeois ways on - are obviously converging in the same direction. The WEF has been holding its annual summer meeting in China since In In 2007.Klaus1978, Schwab already invited Deng Xiao Ping to speak in Davos. The following year, he took a delegation of business leaders to Beijing. The leading edge of American capital only has eyes for China. In February 2020, Bill Gates and Xi Jinping congratulated each other in public letters on their joint efforts to defend "global public health security", since, as everyone knows, "humanity is a community that shares the future" (Xi Jinping). The model that Zuckerberg is pursuing for Facebook is none other than WeChat, the Chinese application from which one never leaves.

It wasn't a Chinese Communist Party startup that said, "I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should do now." It was Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO to the Wall Street Journal in 2010. It was not an overheated conspiracy theorist who said, "The technology will be embedded in people's brains. Eventually, you'll have an implant that, if you think of something, will simply give you the answer." That's Larry Page responding to 2012the New Republic on his "vision" of the personal assistants of the future. This fantasy of "biocontrol" concluded Vance Packard's Clandestine Persuasion, which already in 1958 found engineers caressing "this new science that allows to direct mental processes, emotional reactions, and to perceive sensations through electrical signals." In order to free ourselves from the social vision of things, we must start again from the way in which the "social question" has been constructed and imposed, and from what it has served to repress. It is Jean-Baptiste Fressoz's L'Apocalypse joyeuse which, once again, allows us to see this clearly. The social question - that of the workers' remuneration, their working conditions, the length of their days, but also their living conditions: their housing, their "promiscuity", their "hygiene", their "drunkenness", their "bad life", etc. - Louis-René Villermé, a French physician and economist of the first half of the 19th century, was a pioneer in this field. After a first work on the insalubrity of French prisons compared to the really modern penitentiaries of the United States, he was the author of the famous Tableau de l'état physique et moral des ouvriers employés dans les manufactures de coton, de laine et de soie (Table of the physical and moral state of the workers employed in the cotton, wool and silk factories), which would definitively impose, in 1840, the "social question." This progressive work crowned a fifty-year struggle led by industrialists and their allies in government. Since the end of the Ancien Régime, the industrialist mafia had been

in war against the customary state of affairs that concerns it, and that hinders it. The tradition of the Ancien Régime was that the neighbors of polluting establishments had the right to have their activities stopped if these activities intoxicated them, or spoiled their lives and health, or harmed the local natural resources. It was the construction of the first large French chemical factory in 1768 in Rouen - not yet Warren Buffett's Lubrizol factory, no, just a sulfuric acid factory at the initiative of an English businessman well introduced in the ministries - that launched the hostilities. It is definitely necessary to put an end to the power of the local notables in Rouen and their "spirit of bickering" which is detrimental to both progress and the power of the Nation. To please these "entrepreneurs" for whom, as the chemist and intendant of finance Trudaine de Montigny had already thought, "one cannot dispense with consideration", the1771. parliament of Rouen was abolished, before abolishing them all in "chemical revolution". The "utility of the Kingdom" requires that all these residents - nobles, burghers or peasants - stop complaining about these "They have even established by expertise that, whatever their senses tell them, whatever their olfaction tells them, these fumes that dissolve in the air are rather healthy. It is even established by expertise that, whatever their senses tell them, whatever their olfaction indicates, these fumes which dissolve in the air are rather salubrious. They are certainly inconvenient, but not harmful. The 1829,members of the Council of health of Paris found the Annals of public hygiene and legal medicine. It is by this means that one finally managed to crush the resistance to industrialization. In the name of public and then social hygiene, workers and inhabitants were stripped of all control over what surrounded them - the circumfuscation of the old Hippocratic medicine. Thus, "the first articles of the Annals on occupational hygiene may surprise: rather than being interested in unhealthy factories, they study the good health of workers! The goal: to demonstrate to the townspeople the harmlessness of factories. [...] The diseases of the Parisian longshoremen were not due to the insalubrity of the banks of the Seine but to "their habits and their way of life". [...] The social hygiene of

Louis-René Villermé, who made living conditions and wealth a cause (not the only one, but the most important one) of the differences in mortality, was born in this hygienist and industrialist environment. [...] His founding article of 1830, which correlates mortality in Paris neighborhoods not to the environment (narrowness of the streets, proximity of the Seine, presence of workshops, etc.), but to the income of the inhabitants, is directly in line with the program of the founding generation of the Council of Sanitation: the deeming, by statistics, of the environment as a pathological cause. [...] Villermé's social hygiene played a similar role, albeit in reverse: it was no longer work that made the worker suffer, but rather his low income. [...] The reduction of artisans' illnesses to a moral and economic question justified a tempered liberalism. [Industrialization, which was then contested in its principles [...], became an acceptable historical transformation at the price of a few amendments: moralization of workers, increase of wages to the level of "real needs", abolition of child labor and provident funds. Hygienism defined the biopolitics of liberal capitalism, i.e. the minimal social conditions that would maintain the human labor force necessary for industry. [...] The shift from medical topography to hygienic investigation, that is to say, the shift of etiologies from the environmental to the social, made it possible to link industry and sanitary progress. (Jean- Baptiste Fressoz, L'Apocalypse joyeuse, 2012) The use of the term "environment" may not be happy here. The circumfusa, by referring by their plural to what they surround and where it is located, are clearly distinguished from the generic notion of environment. We are confronted here with a poverty of vocabulary which is not by chance. That said, those who would like to correct the social question with that of the environment are only adding the plague to the cholera. If ecology has been defined as "the science of relationships", we still do not know where in the network of these relationships the one who maps them is located. We never see him anywhere, in so many environments, this divine creator.

The social question, which sounds so positive to our ears, charged as it is with so many good intentions for two centuries by so many reformers and revolutionaries who have foolishly straddled it, is a maneuver. It serves to wrap the expropriation of the beings of their world, to authorize the rape of their inscription in the places which are familiar to them.

It aims at producing aliens that can be moved at will, whose lands can be ransacked and whose living environments can be poisoned. And that we can incidentally put in factories. Thus uprooted, thus isolated, thus weakened, they offer less resistance to being treated as a

indistinct matter, without qualities or determinations of its own, a kind of modeling clay for governmental engineering. For two centuries, the social question has not ceased to render this invaluable service: to silence, with all its moral authority, those who live somewhere, in a certain way, and who insist on it. It is a machine of devastation that has been perfectly successful, and that continues to bulldoze our lives more than ever. It is a device of reflexive anaesthesia, an ice palace where one never finds the lost world. Those whom Erwin Chargaff calls the "ameliorators" - those who destroy everything under the pretext of improving it - seem terrified at the idea that we can relate to life from ourselves, from where we are, from our inscription in the world. They must by all means abstract us from what we are, from what we know, from what we feel. Nothing must be apprehended except "from the outside" - as Durkheim said, who made this the very guarantee of "science" and the ideal of a knowing subject untouched by the world. There is not even our bodily condition which should not remain opaque to us, according to them. "Beware of trusting your sense", as Littré said. The possibility of an immediate seizure of life, of a direct grip on the world, revolts them. "Intuition" is a dirty word for them. Because it implies that no one needs them to exist. This is the great political, anthropological and epistemological disagreement we have with them. We are not "social animals". At the very least, we are "relational" beings, if we must make a concession to the categories in circulation. And still we miss the essential. Because the fabric of relations which makes our own power and our inscription in the world

draws itself a place. We are this moving and unobjectifiable place. And this cannot be abstracted, modeled, spatialized, equated and then managed from afar - a place. If cosmocrats want to be everything, everywhere and invade everything, it is to be nothing, nowhere. They would be to be pitied if they were not everywhere triumphant in this world. We will only overcome the social question by the affirmation of a new geography, inseparably physical and spiritual.

2.

In an interview given on the occasion of the two-year anniversary of his taking power, Margaret Thatcher, daughter of a Methodist preacher, says: "Economics is the method; the object is to change the soul. When Gorky returned to his native land, Stalin, a former seminarian, lectured the intellectuals gathered in honor of the writer with this famous apostrophe: "It is more important to produce souls than to produce tanks. [Man is remodeled by existence; and you, here, must participate in the remodeling of his soul. That is what matters, the production of human souls. And that is why I raise my glass to you, writers, who are the engineers of the soul." This point of the soul is at least a question on which Thatcher and Stalin agreed. There are probably many more. This matter of the soul is more than ever political, and even strategic. Few questions are as misunderstood as this one. One tends to consider the soul as the very name of interiority and, therefore, as something eminently individual. It must be said that Christianity, with its last judgment, has done a lot to accuse this individual character of the soul - it is because there had to be a subject to judge. The soul, in fact, refers entirely to the relational and cosmic character of the human mammal. And for that matter, of all living things. For thousands of years, before biology came to confuse everything, what we now call "the living" was rather the animate - that which is endowed with a soul.

In Latin, in Greek, in Hebrew and in so many other languages, the notion of soul - anima, psyche, rouakh - refers to the breath, to the wind, to the respiration. What is alive is therefore what is crossed, crossed by a breath. To live is not to be a self-sustaining organic center, or even a will to power or an organizing force - it is to participate in what surrounds us. It is being in a state of cosmic participation. This is why a living body is always much more than a body. If the soul is also the place of our singularity, it is because, for each one, what is most singular is precisely his particular way of rooting himself in this common breath, the particular expressive modality that he offers to this same breath. As was said in antiquity, "everything is in everything, but for each according to his own mode". "Ah! Not to be isolated! Not to be excluded, by the slightest partitioning of the law of stars! What is the inner life? If it is not the dense sky where birds rush and where the gusts of wind bring us home", wrote Rainer Maria Rilke. It is a convention to distinguish between the different forms of participation, between the relationship to others, the relationship to the world, the relationship to oneself. This is an analytical convention. Presence to oneself, presence to others and presence to the world bear the same signature. We participate in that to which we are distinctly related, but we also participate in the whole universe. We are crossed every microsecond by particles coming from the other end of the universe, starting with the light of the stars. From the Middle Ages to the 18th century, until astrology was suppressed of the official scene, the term "influence" referred first of all to the action of the stars on human destiny.

In his text on animal magnetism, Hegel spoke of a "feeling soul", very close to the ancient theme of the world soul: "The soul is that which penetrates everything, which does not simply exist in a particular individual [...], but must be grasped as the totally universal being." François Roustang, a Jesuit who left the Church to join the psychoanalytical chapel before leaving it in his turn, comments on this passage of Hegel: "There is thus a side of the human being by which the individual is able to participate without intermediary in the life of another individual, because he is already this life. [...] In other words, there is a continuity that runs under the individualized consciousness, and it is by this continuity that first of all the communication is possible. [...] If we think that individuals are first given in their isolation, the question of their reunion inevitably arises ... But if the individual is permanently noted as being part of a relational fabric, it is his existence in all its forms, biological, affective, intellectual, which implies the relations." (François Roustang, Influence, 1990) Hence the superfluous nature of all social offers of belonging, for we are always-already in a state of participation. We need no meritorious effort, no proof of allegiance, no collective rattle to be more than an individual. What is called "Selfishness" is only narrowness of the soul, weak radiation. The plane of reflexivity, of consciousness, of rationality, of verbal communication, constitutes - as all the spin doctors and other professionals of influence have understood - a derived, secondary, reduced domain, with regard to the plane of general participation on which it is erected. They have therefore decided to bypass it, to operate obliquely and play with the conscience of those they manipulate. It is at least the conclusion that these perverts draw from it when others like Roustang deduce that : "The other of rationality is not the irrational, it is the heart that has its own laws or the system of affects that have no need to be linked to representations to play a role in human relations." (Ibid. )

To be impalpable, to be subtle, this plane of cosmic participation makes us, in addition to our biological body, another body, where we are just as likely to be touched. Where we can do infinite harm. Where one is even likely to kill us, or at least make us sick. Where tons of operations take place, which are agreed to be denied. Where this company maneuvers like never before. It is this body that we want, willingly or by force, to possess, in every sense of the word. This body, our subtle body, is the measure of our participation in the world. It is none other than our soul - our soul not as the "substantial form of the body" of scholasticism, but as a place, as a place situated and which situates. It is this place that Google, Facebook and others have undertaken to invest. This is the place they seek to colonize. To control. For them also, the essence of beings is nothing that is internal to them, nothing that is hidden inside, but the whole of the relations of which they are the knot. And this knotting, they try to guess it from the communications that we maintain and from the information that transits there - to guess it and if possible to reduce us to it. Of this, they draw the graph. A miniature of our soul. A mantic much more than a semantic. "The only transcendence is the relationship between beings," wrote Robert Antelme, whom the concentration camps never succeeded in reducing to the state of a simple body. With the flattest of means and minds, GAFAMs pursue a metaphysical goal: to liquidate all transcendence. You need to have a hard drive life to imagine yourself one day "downloading your consciousness". A gigantic electronic tick, rich in billions, has planted its rostrum in our participation in the world. From the human experience, it has made the matter

of its unquenchable thirst for data. Failing to make machines capable of equaling the human, it has undertaken to circumscribe the human experience to what a machine can know. Its final perspective is to bring us back to our biological body and that we no longer have a life that is not technologically mediated. To succeed in appropriating our soul by materializing it. Our confinement offered them a dreamed field of experimentation. It was the occasion to give to the residents locked up in their cell of a retirement home the unforgettable "experience" of a trip on the Mount Fuji by virtual reality helmet. The exit, decidedly, leads inward. The latest promise from Facebook sorry, Meta! - to make us augmented vegetables - sorry, to "build for each of us the world we want" - confirms it enough. Already1975, on returning from a trip to a Germany plunged in In a state of anti-terrorist hysteria following some attacks of the Red Army Faction, Jean-Christophe Bailly wrote: "Sensory deprivation is not only the name of a specific torture, it names in fact the general tendency of technically evolved societies, it defines the axis according to which the State aims at individuals with increasing skill in countries where the hunger of the belly for a long time does not cry out anymore. Torture is only the excess that reveals the tendency; beyond that, deprivation, the consented impoverishment of sensations and data, the transformation of the mental thing into a simple balance of reflexes appear as the very content of what is organically sought by the power, I say organically because the power to which too much prestige is conceded, and for good reason, in the circles of opponents, is not even conscious most of the time of the mechanisms it uses. To be aware of this organic tendency is to know what forces the individuals have at their disposal in order not to be crushed in the course of what I call sensitive guerrilla warfare, which is life." ("Penumbra" in Fin de siècle, n o2)

The plane of the soul is the theater of operation of the time. It is on this terrain that the most savage and unnoticed war is being fought. There is nothing spiritual about this. And if one absolutely wants to see mysticism in it, it is in the sense that Hofmann, the chemist who synthesized lysergic acid, meant it when he said, "A chemist who is not a mystic is not a good chemist."

Georg Lukács

The proof of this is that a communist of the stature of Georg Lukács would not have contradicted us. Lukács is known for his book of

1923, legendary and cursed, History and class consciousness. He represents on the theoretical ground the most radical tendency of the fighting communism of the years 1917-1923, the one that held that "every communist must be convinced that he is not only in words, but in fact, a member of the party of the civil war". He was much criticized for having consented to all sorts of self-criticism, to a series of concessions and denials that disfigured his thought. He ended up writing a social ontology, that is to say. So much so that History and Class Consciousness and the articles he wrote in the journal Kommunismus in and1920 have 1921long been considered the high point of his thought trajectory. This was the case, at least, during his lifetime. For when he died, his papers contained an indication of a deposit made in a bank in 1915, in the middle of the war. In a suitcase, more than half a century later, we find the notes that Lukács had taken for a book that he never wrote. A book about Dostoyevsky, or rather about the ethics contained in Dostoyevsky's novels, according to him. With the First World War, Lukács saw his whole world collapse. Of those who surrounded him and who had been his friends, most took sides with the war, beginning with Max Weber. His teacher, the Kantian Emil Lask, dies at the front. The imperative to act according to universalizable maxims, and not according to what one perceives or by virtue of the attention paid to one's loved ones, leads the best to justify the slaughter. Society must be defended. Lukács suddenly discerns the atrocious face that the empire of the social makes to the beings. To consider oneself as another, to act according to others, by virtue of one's membership in the community, makes criminals of all, soulless killers in a storm of steel. While still working on his book on Dostoyevsky, he wrote to his friend Paul Ernst: "The power of structures seems more and more excessive, and for most people it constitutes reality even more than what really exists. But - and for me this is the ultimate lesson of the war - we cannot allow this. We must hold still that, after all, we and our souls are the only essential thing." And in

another letter: "The problem is to find the paths that lead from soul to soul. Everything else has only an instrumental value and serves as a means to that end. [...] Many conflicts would disappear if we could ... obtain that only that which places the soul before an alternative becomes a conflict. In a short text from 1911 following the suicide of a dear friend, he had already analyzed the theme of what he calls "goodness" in Dostoyevsky: "Goodness is a knowledge of men that illuminates everything and makes everything transparent, a knowledge in which the subject and the object collapse into each other. The good man does not interpret the soul of others, he reads it as if it were his own; he has become the other." (On Poverty in Spirit) In his searing notes for his book on Dostoyevsky, many of the features have a singular echo in our present, exactly as the collapse of our time makes one think of that of 1914. "The State as organized tuberculosis; if the bacilli of the plague were organized, they would found the world empire [...] Solidarity, the duty to love [...]. a) The East: the other (the others: also the enemy) is you; for I and you are illusions. Bhagavad Gîtâ. b) Europe: the abstract fraternity: the exit of the solitude. The other is my "fellow citizen", my "comrade", my "compatriot" (which does not exclude race or class hatred, but rather calls for it). c) Russia: the other is my brother. When I find myself, to the extent that I have found myself, I have found him." What happens then for Lukács, in the face of the apocalypse of war, in the face of the accomplished disfigurement of European humanity, is that he can no longer tolerate the monstrous maw of the social, even in its most charming guise. And in front of that, he sees no other recourse than to make finally real, finally shining, finally indisputable the plan of reality of the soul. He sees well that it is the opportune denial of this plan that authorizes all the miseries that mutilate life, little by little and then suddenly in a shattering wreck. Lukács will not write his book on Dostoyevsky. Instead, he will leave us his Theory of the Novel, which will be published in It1916. is certainly his best book - the true highlight of his work.

He will take care to dissociate himself from it afterwards, speaking as if the author were a complete stranger to him. He exposes the growing divorce, since ancient Greece, between the social world - the "world of convention" and the interiorities, and how the novel will have tried to remake, in various ways, their lost unity. The last chapter is entitled "Tolstoy and the overcoming of the social forms of life". The chapter ends with Dostoyevsky, whom he does not regard as a novelist, but as the chronicler of a utopia, of a new world whose central characteristic is Seelenwirklichkeit - the actual reality of souls. A world in which it is not subjects with a psychology who clash and manipulate each other without ever really making contact, all this in the middle of a deserted nature. A world, rather, where different ways, shifting but legible, of being on the same level with the world and others play in a universe where everything makes sense again because it is inhabited. "It is the sphere of a reality of the souls in which the man appears as man and not as social being, nor more as pure interiority, by this very fact abstract, isolated and incomparable, in which, if it happens one day that it is present as thing naively lived and spontaneous, as the only really effective reality, a new and perfect totality will be able to be built, made of all the substances and relations that are possible in them and, using our reality only as a background, will leave it as far behind as our dualistic, social and "interior" world has left the one of nature behind. " Lukács' rallying to Bolshevism, to a purely social and allegedly scientific definition of revolution, is the first denial of the one who will have, for a moment, in the midst of the thunder of shells, the resignation of all and the false mists of chemical warfare, glimpsed the overcoming of this world that holds us more than ever in its clutches. All his later abjurations follow from it. History and class consciousness, in any case, already belongs to the itinerary of continuous devaluations that will be the crossing of the century of Georg Lukács.

At the same time that Lukács was writing some of the studies that make up History and Class Consciousness, in Pyotr1921, Arshinov was finishing his book on the revolution of the Ukrainian workers and peasants whom the Bolsheviks massacred, judging them to be too free for their taste - too "anarchist. He refused to let their history be erased as their army had been swept away. "The bloody tragedy of the Russian peasants and workers cannot pass without leaving a trace. More than anything else, the practice of socialism in Russia has shown that the working classes have no friends, that they have only enemies who seek to seize the fruits of their labor. Socialism has fully demonstrated that it, too, belongs among their enemies. This idea will become more firmly established year by year in the consciousness of the masses of the people. Proletarians of the whole world, go down into your own depths, seek the truth there, create it: you will not find it anywhere else. These are the current watchwords of the Russian Revolution." (Pyotr Arshinov, The Mahnovist Movement, 1921)

3.

The Catalans don't want Spain, its moldy Bourbons, its Guardia Civil and its inquisitorial passion. They have set up a clandestine organization that has branched out to the last mountain village in order to illegally organize the referendum on independence that they are being denied. They do not want either, besides, the thousands of wind mills of which one intends to massacre their hinterland to better enslave them to the European electric network. Hong Kong is reluctant to be annexed by the Chinese Empire, while the latter has made separatism its number one domestic enemy, which 1,justifies the internment of a million Uighurs. In the United States, in the fall of 2021, the fashion is for Big Quit: since the beginning of spring, millions2021,20 of Americans have resigned and 4.3 million in August alone. This is the highest number of resignations since statistics have been kept. The desire to serve is being lost. Everyone is tired of being so poorly paid, so poorly treated, so poorly regarded. I'd rather leave. In France, the countryside and small towns see an influx of deserters from the metropolis who had been suffocating there for a long time. Sometimes alone, sometimes in couples, sometimes in bunches. It is that by dint of promising a society of abundance where work will have become an "aberrant" memory, as Larry Page does, and where everyone will be an artist, by dint of "making people become first-class objects of research", people may end up considering themselves worthy of attention, as being better than their servitude. Jobs have become bullshit, jobs have become toxic since the average level of refinement of subjectivities has definitely diverged from the mass of remaining, generally debased, parasitic and even harmful salaried tasks. Internet and social networks awaken in anyone who discovers in adolescence a singular sensitivity - and God

It's not hard to imagine that adolescence lasts for most of one's life nowadays the feeling that it's worthwhile and the means to cultivate it. The one who would have languished in a narrow environment finds accomplices, or at least similar ones. He is not alone. He has the right to exist. With Internet and social networks, the social order is confronted with the threat, not of an excessive freedom of expression or of an avalanche of untruths, but of a pluralization of the norms of life, of a multiplication of the regimes of truth. And that is far more serious. It deserts, it flees, therefore, in all directions, and from everywhere. It is necessary, urgently, to spread nets to retain the deserters. Wage nets, police nets, media nets, legal nets, discursive nets, institutional nets, cyber nets. In France, a law is passed against separatism. Islamist terrorism is being brandished against all likelihood in order to attack a more diffuse disposition to secession. Hoover and his FBI had already done this in the 1930s: staging a great hunt for outlaws in the midst of an economic crisis to mask the repression of any embryonic popular revolt. They take advantage of this to eradicate the margins that had always been allowed to remain, such as home schooling - not without simultaneously destroying public education. It is thought that a dumbed-down youth will be less inclined to rebellion, or less armed for it. The associations are being targeted as never before - those poor associations, which never had the idea that any power could ever look at them with suspicion, so congenital did their legalism seem to be as their republicanism. But at a time when the social order is tightening its blackmail and wants to reinitialize everything, the slightest outing, even if harmless, the slightest alterity, even if moderate, represents a rival threat. Simple niches such as the popular AMAPs, safety valves such as

the social and solidarity economy or informal self-help networks suddenly become suspect. All loopholes must be closed as soon as possible. This is the cult structure of this society. The essential oils of lavender, for example, which have been distilled since antiquity, have been declared to be suddenly unheard of, in case some people were looking for an alternative to the pharmaceutical empire. So much so that even the debonair founder of permaculture worries about the "demonization of those who resist the plan." (David Holmgren, "Pandemic Ruminations," September 2021) So much so that associations of all citizens for the preservation of traditional seeds are calling for a "fertile insurrection". Democracies no longer know how to announce that they do not intend to keep their promise that everyone can choose the form of life that suits him or her and flourish in it. Everywhere, the powers that be are stiffening. Chinese governmentality is their North Star. Where all innocence evaporates, only pure obedience remains, i.e. terror. And the more the powers stiffen, the more the democracies become "The more they strut with their biopolitical absolutism, the more they provoke desertions. The society, by closing its doors, has constituted itself as a separate reality, as a foreign entity. It has freed us, internally, from its heaviness. Never since has the 1944,disposition to falsify documents spread so far, and even in the least It is only since PCR tests are required for everything that we have been able to "marginalize" the disease. The best citizens have discovered the soul of a quasi-Maquisard as the authorities have refined to the point of absurdity the rules of a confinement that is itself aberrant.

Not that we have not also discovered, around us, vocations of collabos. It is a whole new unsuspected landscape that the last two years have drawn: the walking paths where no gendarmerie patrol will flush you out, the disused "petite ceinture", all around Paris, where those who did not intend to give up living because of sanitary dementia, the friendly bars that do not ask for the "pass", those that open clando, the suburbs where all these new norms make you laugh softly, the cities and rural areas where they don't take, the villages where they support the firemen and the employees who refuse to be vaccinated, the doctors who deliver the reprobate treatments and the nurses who give shots in the air. Even in the national education system, although so disciplined, there are Rectors of the academy who burst into tears about the fate of children in classrooms, courtyards and hallways.

Portugal, school gate. "Kisses and hugs? Put that off until your next life. In real life, we maintain social distancing."

While some are becoming more impervious and bitchy than ever, others seem to be becoming as brittle as the global supply chains. Subjective shortages are looming, in addition to shortages of wood, toys, bicycles or computer chips. A certain marranism wins the social roles. It is a whole non-social life that is invented and experienced. It is a schism that is at work, and is deepening. A division that does not follow any externally recognized or recognizable line. Knowing from experience who they are dealing with, the poor, the formerly colonized and those who have been spared by culture, tend to be conspiratorial. But no social category is spared. There is no

There is no external criterion, character trait or visible attribute that can predict who will join which camp. Those who seemed to be the most alienated suddenly turn out to be the most free. Those who were thought to be the most legal are willing to commit the most reprehensible offences. The historical break follows the most intimate lines of fracture inside the beings. It is with the utmost caution that we probe the unknown or the colleague. It is by an intonation, by the use of a word, by a fleeting pout that we can guess who we can still talk to. The one to whom we can still confide our "doubts". It reminds us of the beginnings of the Resistance, when the camps were not codified, when the great official narrative had not covered with its caricatures the sfumato of human sensibilities. When, returning to Paris in July 1940, after the German invasion, a future Resistance fighter from the Musée de l'Homme network, Agnès Humbert, notes that the people around her "are no longer the same. They have acquired a discreet, scowling air, a je-ne-sais-quoi of petty satisfaction at still being alive" - a nothing, therefore, but a decisive nothing. When the head of a small company provided the underground communists with tubes to stuff their time-delayed explosives. "The life of the new humanity is in the revolution, the revolution is born from the schism", wrote Amadeo Bordiga, the founder of the Italian Communist Party before becoming its most eloquent critic, at the end of his life in his article "The time of the abjurors of schism". This is the great repressed of the history of revolutions, their great scandal. Revolutions have never wanted to do "the good of humanity" whatever their great declarations may have been, instrumentally.

Whoever wants to do "the good of mankind", does a sanatorium, not a revolution. Revolutions have always wanted to put an end to a form of existence, to a type of humanity that has become a stranglehold. There is no nice revolution. The barkers of the existing order claim that there are "altruists" on one side and "selfish" on the other. It may be that things are a bit more subtle, and that these categories are not the most accurate. Rather, it may be that two ways of relating to the world and to others are being divorced. An article by the eminent linguist Émile Benvéniste entitled "Two linguistic models of the city" clarifies this distinction. He starts with this elementary remark: we admit that the Latin civitas (city) is the abstract derivative of civis, which is generally translated as "citizen". But, he says, how can civis be translated by "citizen", "who is part of the city", if in reality "city" derives from civis? The citizen cannot, in good logic, precede the city. He then takes up all the classical occurrences of the word civis and notices that it is always preceded by a possessive pronoun. One designates a civis only from a situated point of view, from a singular experience, from a shared plan of participation. "We are the civis of another civis before we are the civis of a certain city." At a stretch, we could translate civis as "fellow citizen," if it didn't bring back civitas in the process. "Thus the Roman civitas is first of all the distinctive quality of the cives and the additive totality constituted by the cives. This "city" realizes a vast mutuality; it exists only as a summation. Quite the opposite of the Greek model: in Greek, politès (citizen) comes without doubt possible from polis (city). It proceeds logically, linguistically and politically from it. "In the Greek model, the first data is an entity, the polis. This one, abstract body, State, source and center of the authority, exists by itself. It does not

is not embodied in a building, nor in an institution, nor in an assembly. It is independent of men. [In the Latin model, the primary term is that which qualifies man in a certain mutual relationship, civis. It gave rise to the abstract derivative civitas, the name of a community. In the Greek model, the primary term is that of the abstract entity polis. It gave rise to the derivative politès, denoting the human participant. These two notions, civitas and polis, so close, so similar and so to speak interchangeable in the representation given by traditional humanism, are in reality constructed in reverse of each other. [The whole lexical and conceptual history of political thought is still to be discovered. (Émile Benvéniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale, 1974) The society of Comte and sociology, the society of all our engineers, all our politicians and all our philanthropists, is the Greek polis - the abstract entity from which we are all supposed to proceed - which has primacy over everyone and to which we have an interest in yielding. It is the society that feeds on all our interactions and then stands up to us, confronts us and dominates us. It is the society that is governed, indeed, and more and more, by the dead. But there is another way of composing the collective realities, which does not put the individual in front of the social totality to better subject him, which starts from the links that nourish the beings and builds from there. The schism in progress has to do exactly with this: on the one hand, there are those who want to be, on the other hand there are those who are there. On the one hand, there is the offer of belonging to all sorts of abstract entities and all the identities that flow from that - you are French because you belong to France, you are male because you belong to the male gender, you are military because you belong to the army. On the other hand, there is participation in the world and the experience in which this participation is forged. Today, the one who starts from his singular experience, the one who dares to say "I" from there, and not to ventriloquize the monologue of identities, is seen as an eccentric, a provocateur or even a troublemaker. The

freedom of expression is conditioned on speaking "as" this or that, i.e. in compliance with the social police of identities. This is the best way to silence. Rare are those who, like the Black Panthers succeeded for a time, know how to subvert, use as a shield and then offensively turn around the identity to which they are assigned. The general slope is this infernal need to lean one's existence to a Great Being to feel authorized to manifest oneself. The reign of screens, digital profiles and social networks gives this powerlessness to be there the opportunity of a sovereign affirmation. Belonging then functions as a substitute for participation and identity as a substitute for experience. They are the junk that falsely fills and finally accuses the real need. The schism is thus between two types of "us". The representative "we" of those who share an attribute - being Swiss, police, hunter, LGBTQIA+, etc. by virtue of which they can have representatives, deputies, spokespersons, icons, rights or unions, and the experiential "we" of those who share a life experience and find themselves in the same situation. - The representative "we" of those who share an attribute - being Swiss, a policeman, a hunter, LGBTQIA+, etc. - by virtue of which they can have representatives, MPs, spokespersons, icons, rights or unions, and the experiential "we" of those who share a life experience and find themselves in someone's speech, action or story. Everywhere, in this era, the representative "we" are overwhelmed by the experiential "we", so plastic, so unstable, but so powerful. The Yellow Vests movement, typically, started with a few videos that went viral of individuals expressing themselves alone in front of their camera, but whose words echoed the common experience. It has nonetheless built an experiential "we" of a rare intensity that demanded that it mercilessly devour all those who wanted to be its representatives, at one time or another. The representative "we" on which this society was built do not understand the They are literally terrified, traumatized and revolted by it. They are literally terrified, traumatized, revolted by it. A study by Harvard 2013researchers on Chinese censorship has shown that even scathing criticism of the state or the Party is not particularly

censored. What is systematically censored, however, are publications that present the slightest risk of encouraging collective action, especially if this desire for action and the corresponding IP addresses are concentrated in the same geographical area. "The censorship apparatus seems to value the passivity of the population above all else - and, surprisingly, even when it seems that the people concerned want to organize pro-government action. The government's concern might be phrased as follows: "When the population learns to mobilize, even if they do so with the aim of supporting us, who knows what they will try next?" (Zeynep Tufekçi, Twitter & Tear Gas, 2019) In recent years in France, the government has been experimenting with new mechanisms for collaboration between the police and the population in order to broaden the basis of its territorial control - these are the In addition to the "Neighbors' Watch", "Citizen Participation", the DEMETER cell with the FNSEA or the hunters recruited as auxiliary gendarmerie. Separatism, primacy of experience, territorial concentration - the deep scares of power are our best strategic indications. The procedure to follow is easily deduced.

4.

We want revenge. Revenge for these two years of white torture. For being made Twisting our arms to vaccinate ourselves. Dead people we couldn't bury. Of the lost friends, banged up or on anxiolytics. Of the growing desert. Of the forced silence. Of the galactic snakes that we were made to swallow. Insults to logic. Of the gashes to the sensitivity. For the old, abandoned without notice, and the children, mistreated without reason. Revenge for the ruined earth and the dying oceans. For the admirable beings that the machine of progress has crushed and the saints who ended up in the asylum. For the murdered cities and the vitrified countryside. For the offense done to this world and for all the worlds that did not happen. For all the defeated of History whose name will never be celebrated. To take revenge on the arrogance of the powerful and the unfathomable stupidity of managers. From the certainty they all have of their right to crush others. From the impudence with which they pretend to continue on their brigandish way. Of the vacillation, the doubt and the impotence that they have awakened in us. You can recognize the bastards in this age by the fact that they never say what they want, that they even pretend not to want anything, and that no one ever wants anything. And this is the condition for all their incessant little shenanigans. We want revenge, and we have a serene, reasoned, not frothing hatred. Besides, we are already taking our revenge. A good revenge is always healthy. It is the best antidote to resentment. Resentment is only the revenge that has been postponed.

Revolutionaries, said Walter Benjamin, "feed on the image of enslaved ancestors, not on the ideal of emancipated descendants. Cosmocrats keep pointing to the future, apocalyptic or enchanting, to distract us from their past crimes, on which their present power rests. We know who they are. We've seen them do it for thousands of years. We are the accumulated knowledge of generations, possibly of the entire species. The trick they are playing on us with their NBIC convergence program is one that they have done a hundred times before. In the 17th century, "improving the land" was the great project and the moral justification for the colonization of the Americas and the massacre of the Indians. The "Indians" may have been beautiful, and wise, and fascinating, but they were not efficient enough to merit such sweet lands. Looking at the result of the said land, one can imagine what devastation "human improvement" promises. It is no paradox that the most evil beings always claim to act "for the good of humanity". It is that they need at least that much disinhibition to commit all the horrors they plan. The cosmocrats now claim to have all the solutions to the problems they have created. We know that they are the problem. We have no objection to the Business for Nature coalition, the This is a global "Green New Deal" or "Great Reset". There will be no debate with them. What they have already done says enough about how much more they cannot be allowed to do. If we let them, they will eventually patent photosynthesis. We just have to get rid of them. The question is not one of transition, but of their disappearance.

That the motor of every revolution is first of all revenge has always appeared scandalous to social democracy. This is how the left has always pissed off its best forces. And it has always pushed them into the arms of fascism. And this is the mistake of all those who thought they had been commissioned by Humanity, during the confinement of to 2020,establish ridiculous plans for the "world after". Those who think that in order to make a revolution one must have the program of the future world in one's pocket are grossly mistaken. All history shows that they have always been wrong. The cathedral of Chartres was built without a plan. What we are facing has good reasons to make us recoil: we are facing the result of a whole civilization. The anthropological and planetary devastation that is now being exposed everywhere is the result of a process that perhaps began with the birth of civilization, or even with our separation from "nature". Even if, in us, all continuity with what is beyond us has never been lost, the task of going back on a mistake several thousand years old, and which has made us what we are - our ways of thinking, feeling, doing, and even the anxieties that structure us - is so considerable that most of us prefer to give up, and let ourselves go to what is already there, and so enticing. And of course, you get a little languid the day you realize that you will have to reverse the process of the world for ten thousand years. Taking this big turn, at whatever speed, is however the the only non-morbid way. Our eyes turned towards the past, it is thus also, in the present, the conflict between two futures which is played. It is a struggle of titans on the scale of our singular and tiny existences. On the one hand, there is the project of universal control, of mastering the unmanageable, and on the other hand there is the acceptance of the random, processual and proliferating character of life.

The opposing project is hopeless, but it is armed with proven strategies, colossal resources and a fanatical will. Faced with this, deserting is not enough. It is a war. A war requires strategies, a distribution of roles, the deployment of material and subjective resources. However, it is the paradox of active strategic statements that their public formulation contradicts their practical realization. So here we are, at the end of this modest manifesto, faced with what looks like a logical aporia. To make public a revolutionary strategy and not be able to implement it, or not to formulate one and to resign oneself to exposing observations, analyses, stories. If we are serious, we cannot conclude on anything other than considerations of method, of method in the construction of the forces susceptible to elaborate, to carry and to handle the necessary strategies.

The first consideration relates to the question of public space and publicity. There is an old idea that to act, to act "politically" - since this is how the confrontation between two incompatible world projects is called - is synonymous with acting publicly. This idea is defunct. The same person who triggered the Egyptian revolution of Wael2011, Ghonim by telling the story of his torture sessions on TV in tears, agreed on this already in 2015. He, the Google computer engineer whose Facebook page is supposed to have been the origin of the Arab Spring, recognizes that such a thing could not happen now. In ten years, the powers that be have caught up. They have largely neutralized this threat. They have even turned it into an instrument of control, of filing, of steering and of oppression. As an Egyptian blogger wrote in 2016: "Social media is always highlighted for its role in the Arab Spring, especially in the Egyptian revolution. Well, I think it's time to tell the world that social media is also killing the Arab Spring." (Zeinobia, "Egyptian chronicles: Egypt's Internet Trolls: The Union") Coupled with the recent revelations about Israeli firm NSO's Pegasus software, it is all too clear that smartphone-based political activism is in trouble. Yet it is precisely on social networks that the bulk of the political and pre-political arena has moved. It is there that actions and words become, or not, events. It is there that the wars of influence are waged. The mistake would be to think that you can build an active force from there. Social media are now a simple theater of operations where brief incursions can be made, where momentary breaches can be opened, by forces constituted elsewhere and otherwise. And where, more than ever, everything is known. The light of the current publicity obscures everything. To expose oneself to it is to signal one's position for nothing. No truth can come to light there anymore. It is hardly possible to smash the lie. Criticism is reduced, in a cybernetic regime, to a simple feedback loop, to a function of

stabilization of the system. It may be that the traditional physical demonstration itself, which postulates that marching in numbers in public space would constitute a political gesture by its mere appearance, is a bygone form. This is what the impotence, beyond the fact of feeling less alone than at home, of the demonstrations against the "health pass", or the repetition of the Saturday processions of the Gilets jaunes, after the initial insurrectionary moment, suggests. Other bad news: the belief that there would be to build a "movement" is probably also outdated. This is, in any case, what the American-Iranian sociologist Asef Bayat argues when he analyzes the Arab revolutions as "non-movements" expressing a "politics of presence" where it is life itself that is political, where there is no need to rise to some discursive and demonstrative height in order to acquire who knows what political dignity from which would emanate a prestige that is always doubtful. Movements are based on a common wrenching, non-movements on a common presence. If there is something undeniably political in the fact of refusing, for this or that establishment, to control the "health pass", the putting into action of this refusal is often contradictory with the fact of displaying it, except for the risk of finding one's bar destroyed by a police raid coming to take revenge for such audacity - as it was able to be seen, in the autumn, in 2021the Paris district20e. Divorce, therefore, of politics and the public. Given the amount of falsehoods their equation had led to over the centuries, this is actually rather good news. We are in those historical circumstances where those who want to act revolutionary must be careful not to show it, and where those who claim to be revolutionary only prove that they have renounced being revolutionary. The second consideration, which follows from the previous one, is the need to reappropriate the art of conspiracy. The first forms of workers' organization in the 19th century were conspiratorial. But the ideological victory of the

Marxism, all to its strategy of electoral conquest of the power and to its work of scientific edification of the consciences, had for consequence to repress the necessarily conspiratorial dimension of any consequent subversive activity. In reality, this dimension never disappeared, but it had to be denied. Lenin received in ignorance and disapproval of the central committee of his own party the money from the robberies that served to finance him. It is enough to look at the decisive role of the clandestine Jean Jérôme in the history of the French Communist Party after 1945 to realize that public hierarchies rarely correspond to real power. In truth, Marx himself could not have officially assumed what he wrote to Engels in 1851: "This authentic, public isolation in which we live, you and I, pleases me greatly. It corresponds completely to our positions and principles. The whole system of mutual concessions and halfmeasures tolerated in the name of propriety, the duty to assume in the eyes of the public its share of ridicule in the party in the company of all those asses, all that is now over." Even Rosa Luxemburg confessed in May 1917 from her prison: "You know, I hope in spite of everything that I will die at my post, in a street fight or in prison. But my deepest self belongs more to my coal tits than to the 'comrades'." It may be that all the great revolutionary organizations in history have always come down, from the bottom to the top, to a few great and beautiful friendships. And that, as Baudelaire wrote to Flaubert: "The blind faith of friendship [...] implies true politics." More than ever, in this age, one is either part of the problem or part of the solution. And more than ever, conspiracy is part of the solution. The conspiracy, not as a pretense and insider's air of those who want to tell the others that they are part of it, but as an ethical continuity inherent to the true relations between beings, as an absolute limit to the cybernetic capture of them. It is only from this background that courage and determination can arise to no longer respect the external norms and regulations of the world of the cosmocrats. The

"It was this great shared soul. [...] There were about twenty of us who lived with an open soul" (Jacques Lusseyran, Et la lumière fut, 1953). The "good" of the Yellow Vests was the traffic circles ostensibly occupied during the day and the speed cameras discreetly smashed at night. The only known historical limit to conspiratorial activity is the flank it lends to infiltration. The remedy for this is the multiplication of conspiracies, that there are so many of them, and that they are so varied and widespread, that none of them can be so decisive that its infiltration leads to the loss of all. Victor Serge remarked, in his time, that "there is no force in the world that can stem the revolutionary tide when it rises, and that all the police forces, whatever their Machiavellianism, their science and their crimes, are more or less powerless. (Les Coulisses d'une sûreté générale. What every revolutionary should know about repression, 1925) Such a way of considering the conspiratorial dimension of our existences entails a relationship to time that is foreign to pure political eventfulness. Whatever one thinks of what the Zapatistas of Chiapas have become, the ten years they spent before 1994, under the radar, molecularly, artisanally, building the human complicities, the common understanding and the military force capable of taking San Cristobal de Las Casas and the main towns of their districts when the day came, remain an example of a method to be meditated upon. Third consideration: if conspiring means sharing the same spirit, then we cannot stick to the police rule of established identities. For the masters of this world, the main technique for dispersing opposing forces, and thus for maintaining order, is obviously to ensure their watertight separation. "Women" against "men", Europeans" versus "Muslims", "farmers" versus "urban bobos", "intersectionals" versus "cisgender", radicals versus moderates, and why not "anti-corporate" versus "anti-corporate"? "a tireless work of methodical zizanie is delivered in order to

that everyone stays in his place. A system devoid of any principles never ceases to accuse those who meet each other of betraying themselves. This blackmail is laughable. We live in a time when Capuchin monks of a reputedly "fundamentalist" brotherhood in Beaujolais sabotage cell phone antennas and when they are arrested, the superior of the order defends the "youthful error" the monks are forty years old - and that in any case "the waves are very harmful to health". We cannot give in to the kind of media and militant pressure that will have consisted in isolating a few fascist groupuscules in the first demonstrations of the Yellow Vests to dissuade all those who were burning them from joining the uprising. There is no need to fear contact, even if it is done with fists and consists in putting the said groupuscules to flight. "Beautiful as an impure insurrection," said a Saturday, November 24, 2018 tag on the Champs-Élysées. Purity preaching has always been the signature of the great corrupt. All the unions of historical bad conscience that draw their militant credit from speaking on behalf of the oppressed that they have long since ceased to be and from leveraging on the fund of Christian guilt that lies at the heart of every leftist are to be counted among the agents of policing. They make substantial symbolic profits from it. The joy of conspiracy is the joy of encounter, of discovering brothers and sisters even where one least expects it. Social categories are not real. Only the obstinacy to make them prevail, and to conform to them, is real. To use them to deny the singularity of beings, to trample on their own way of accommodating themselves, is infamy, or rudeness, or both. The world is made of processes and relations, not of subjects and predicates. In Paris, on the second Saturday of the Gilets jaunes, we are massing down the Champs-Élysées. We want to march on the Élysée, of course. A line of mobile gendarmes prevents us. A Marseillaise resounds. It is addressed to the helmets. It says to them, ingenuously: "Come on, guys, come with us. Let us pass. Change sides. We are on the same side. It is of course a

childish illusion, to which answers a cumulonimbus of tear gas. We disperse. Some vomit. Everyone cries. A quarter of an hour later, once the toxic cloud has disappeared, the same crowd masses again against the same line of gendarmes. A second Marseillaise is raised, except this one means: "It is with your blood that we will water our furrows. You are mangy dogs. We will eat you." A subtle chasm separates these two songs. Everything is in the way. A Marseillaise is not necessarily a Marseillaise. Just as a Bella Ciao is not necessarily a Bella Ciao. Even a mining engineer is not necessarily a mining engineer. Nothing is the same. If, at the beginning of the Resistance, we had stuck to who is Catholic and who is Protestant, who is a communist and who is an anarchist, who is French and who is Armenian, who is a republican and who is a monarchist, who is a worker and who is an academic, we would not have had the audacity to do anything. In fact, the precarious barriers of the ego hardly resist the risks taken in common. It is in practice, in the test, that one knows with whom one can get along and who must be kept away. The trick is not to let a De Gaulle surreptitiously appear and pretend to represent the whole conspiracy. Our era is particularly rich in these immobile deserters who lodge themselves in the heart of the opposing apparatus. Nothing holds anymore. There are potential Snowdens everywhere. But the hidden righteous do not wear badges. We must take the risk of meeting them, of being disappointed or amazed. It is useless to oppose maquisards and marranos. There are spirit deserters everywhere. The point is to break the social ice. To create the conditions for the possibility of soul-to-soul communication. To manage to organize the meeting, in short. And thus, to weave a conspiratorial plan that will extend, branch out, become more complex, deepen. To resist, above all, the temptation to close in a group, in an entity which is apprehended in its turn from the outside. Groups are only good at betraying what they were formed for.

Maquis, therefore. High places. Beautiful meetings. Method, tenacity and prudence. Reliable allies. A state that is both diasporic and concentrated. Bold attacks against logical targets. And the certainty that we are life finally victorious.

"You are a novice paranoid... Of course, a "They" system is necessary, but that's only half the story. For every "They", there should be a "We". In our case, there is one. A creative paranoia involves developing a system of 'We' at least as deep as the system of 'They'." (Thomas Pynchon, The Rainbow of Gravity, 1973)

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