Une des grands erreurs que l'on peut commettre est de croire que les bonnes manières ne sont que l'expression d'une pensée heureuse. Les bonnes manières peuvent être l'expression d'un large éventail d'attitudes. Voici le but de la civilisation: exprimer les choses de façon élégante et non pas aggressive. Une de ces errances est le mouvement naturiste, rousseauïste des années soixante où l'on disait: "Pourquoi ne pas dire tout simplement ce que l'on pense ?" La civilisation ne peut exister sans quelques contraintes. Si nous suivions toutes nos impulsions, nous nous entretuerions.

Miss Manners (Judith Martin)

12:50:33 PM    

The Big Lie?

The victim and his killer share one common behaviour: they do what they think. The current quote on the Lijst Pim Fortuyn's website, "Ik zeg wat ik denk en ik doe wat ik zeg" (I say what I think and I do what I say), just reflects the current state of mind driving our modern society.

If you want to enter into politics in a very short time, get a populist programme. The populism is really easy to practice: you just have to say what some people think and the sum of these thoughts will meet all the expectations of the mass. But beware, populism can be dangerous too.

Some people will never recognize themselves in your programme, for example some vegans who don't appreciate your willing to authorize the creation of very large scale pork farms.

The populism is dangerous because it gives the impression that a populist is always right. If a populist loses the elections, people think that nobody care of their opinion and are revolted. If a populist is killed, people think that he was killed because he was right. If a populist is criticised in the media, people think that there's a big lie somewhere.

The populism conducts to an over simplification of the reality and people are attracted by this distortion field which makes them believe that everything can be simplified. Not happy, then act.

Fortuyn's death is a wrong thing but you can't tell there's a Big Lie behind it. The society is not driven by a big headless Thing but by some kind of a big lie, in which every one participates. The lack of participation is in fact one of the underlying themes of the Fortuyn's programme.

One of the other themes of such populist parties is to preserve the identity of their nations while being more and more integrated into the European Union, a fear of being themselves a minority. That fear is understandable: when you're a minority, you can't participate anymore. The big game out there is to put your enemy into a minority to cancel his/her effects. That's the Big Game in which almost everyone is ready to lie for staying in or reaching a majority.

The state of insecurity is not created by the minorities, and even less by the ethnic minorities, but by the willing of the majority to keep society divisions. While Fortuyn's programme is addressing the integration of minorities, the reality is other. The Gay community could be considered as a minority wanting to get attention of the majority. When Fortuyn stated that Islam culture is a "backward culture" because it doesn't accept the homosexuality, he wanted to show that the muslim minority deserves to be a minority.

The more you blame a minority, the more it will become angry against the majority or against a minority struggling to be recognised by the majority, the more likely it will participate by using violence.

The majority itself is in fact made of minorities tied together by sharing some specificities and breaking apart that coherence is very dangerous. A populist party will never try to appeal the majority but the countless minorities forming that majority. The more you divide, the more likely you get reactions, either positive or negative, which in turn create new divisions. At one point, you are elected by an endless number of competiting minorities.

The Fortuyn's death has formed a meme, just like the shooting party of Nanterres, on which minorities get connected and select populist or racist parties to represent them without taking care of the real background of the politic programmes. This meme creates the feeling that there's something rotten, a big lie, a conspiracy. The worst mistake is to give support to such ideas because one day, someone else will take advantage of the terrain prepared by the populists, someone like Le Pen or the Vlaamse Block.

11:12:52 AM