What happens when everything moves around us and we remain standing still? We end up being uprooted, dislocated, carried away by the current, scattered in floating fragments.
This is what is threatening France today: Around us, the world is changing faster and faster. Youths are freeing themselves from fear. Continents are making great strides towards unexpected riches. And we are increasingly immobile. Increasingly embedded in our certainties. Increasingly convinced that the world is watching us closely, as ideal model of their future. Increasingly focused on our tiny arguments and insignificant scandals. Increasingly convinced that the best of our history is behind us and that we have nothing better to do than preserve this way of life.
Consequently, we interpret everything with the mirror of our ego: we think the Mediterranean revolutions as the will of these peoples to imitate us, but they indicate quite the opposite, that they are beginning a march towards a world in motion, from which we are excluded by our inaction. Similarly, we are making of our model of government the ideal to which all others must aspire and we interpret the crisis of Europe as the translation of the will of other European countries to achieve our standard of living and of their inability to replicate our institutions. More generally, we interpret all the movements of the world as the will of others to copy us. While nothing is further from the mind of an inhabitant of emerging countries, from Africa, Asia or Latin America, than the self satisfied and stale comfort in which European leaders delighted in, and French people in particular.
Many other great powers before us died from the same blindness and for having forgotten that the defense of the status quo is the beginning of the end.
One would have expected from the last cabinet reshuffle, like the preceding ones, to be an opportunity to include France in this movement. But no; here it is, we keep the same people, or even some more experienced, to manage in the old way problems of an unprecedented scale, and we’re told that the only risk we face is that of being invaded by ignorant and envious peoples. This will lead us nowhere. If not increasing tensions between the world and ourselves.
And our social model, which favors inherited fortunes at the expense of created wealth, will suddenly worsen the situation of the poorest. More precisely, we are on the verge of a political, historical, economic and social uprooting.
We must understand urgently that the world will change faster and faster; that we are not the eternal holders of some annuity, which would have been paid for by our merits or the virtues of the Holy Spirit; that our ability to move is much more important than our roots; that we are neither destined to remain a great power forever, nor destined to attract for long the elite of the world.
It is urgent to look at the horizon and not the tree on the bank on which we can, even for a brief moment, attach ourselves.