InvestigationThe media hegemony of these polemicists who slaughter the time is a reaction to a triple anthropological revolution, at the same time ecological, intimate and geopolitical, which upset Western societies.
How did we get here ? A France apparently confined to its most rancid remugles. A hegemonic reactionary right in the media sphere, which imposes its themes in the public space. An atomized, fractured left, with an unreleased ideological corpus, undermined by the narcissism of small differences. Consecrated conservatism, misguided progressivism. Universalism confused with Westernism. Anti-racism assimilated to totalitarianism. Its new forms covered with opprobrium, accused of the infamous sobriquet of “Islamo-leftism” and supposedly disqualifying of “wokism”. The feminisms of our era reduced to “victim positions”. Youth mobilized for the climate compared to ayatollahs, and ecology to a new sectarian religion. The university accused of disseminating “militant knowledge” and of importing “foreign theories”. Good transformed into evil. The good for the bad. And the generous fool.
It is undoubtedly necessary to understand how the neo-reactionary rhetoric works, its mechanics, to study why it is largely carried by an endogamic social environment and a certain media class, how the evolution of the intellectual and political field led to this rise towards the extremes, not to mention the responsibilities of the left in this cultural defeat. An intellectual counter-revolution analyzed by political scientist Frédérique Matonti, who seeks to understand why, “On the eve of the 2022 presidential election, reactionary ideology now seems hegemonic” (How did we become reacts ?, Fayard, 2021).
But perhaps it is appropriate, at first, to look further for the reasons for such a discourse of restoration. Because this ideological reversal is first of all a reaction to major social transformations and to real anthropological mutations. A shift in the world that is at once ecological, intimate and geopolitical which is shaking up the West, affected by new narcissistic wounds.
In 1917 Sigmund Freud explained how “The self-esteem of humanity” had been experienced by “Three serious humiliations” inflicted by scientific research (Essays in applied psychoanalysis, Gallimard, 1933). The first humiliation, he asserted, is “Cosmological” : as the Polish astronomer Nicolas Copernicus (1473-1543) attested, the Earth is not at the center of the Universe. The second annoyance is ” organic “ : man is nothing other than an animal, as the English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-1882) demonstrated. The third wound is of order “Psychological”. It is carried by psychoanalysis and its theory of the unconscious, which Freud sums up with a formula: ” The me is not master in his own house. “
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