2024-01-16 21:03:14
It’s not easy to come down from the December climb. From the festive ebbs and flows of flesh and figures, from Christmas (super)markets to the still hot ashes of fireworks, New Year’s Eve awakens the crowds, other animals and childhood memories. I am of the generations of abundance, eager to vomit to see the gifts under the tree and the money coming. In short, in accordance with the layout of the space and the public diction of the festivals of our late years.
Last November, a campaign to promote sobriety sparked strong reactions in France and divided the government. With Black Friday approaching, the Minister of Ecological Transition was criticized for “stigmatizing stores” in a difficult economic context. It’s a bit like the hospital which doesn’t care regarding charity, the climate which is being discussed in Dubai or the Swiss parliament which adopts the new law on CO2 by refusing to tax private jets (less effort for the strongest ·es). So many signs of the political difficulty – even impossibility – of balancing the goats and the cabbage, of mixing decreasing green and liberal blue, while climatologists see red.
This type of contradiction testifies to the addiction that we maintain with “consumer society”, of which Jean Baudrillard said in 1970 that “as the society of the Middle Ages balanced itself on God and the devil, so ours balance on consumption and its denunciation. At the same time, around fifty addictologists have not made the current French president bend, who refuses to support a sober month of January and confesses to drinking at lunch and dinner: “A meal without wine is a bit sad.” The macro-nic diet makes the yellow vests who are brooding in darkness see all the colors. The Paris of disagreement is indeed a two-speed party.
As for Santa Claus, he’s not just trash. But a fiction, a myth which tends to trivialize the assembly line work of elves chained to their exploited conditions or to normalize ever greater and rapid mobility for ever more goods. Every year, Swedish Post processes around 16,000 letters addressed to Santa Claus. The response encourages children to “brighten someone else’s day.” Perhaps this is a different benchmark, a less patriarchal and pornographic version of the bitter Christmas, or the first window of a future Advent calendar, open to more goodwill between living peers?
But, madly, humanity continues to drink the Earth to the dregs. On December 1, “ignoring the reservations expressed among others by the Federal Chancellery and alienating its own services” (writes the newspaper The weather), the head of the Federal Department of the Environment has published his order aimed at the culling of wolves, his hobby horse. If, today and 33 carcasses later, suspended packs howl in the night, it is perhaps to invite these cities to be moved, to raise their eyes for lack of opening them; to look towards the stars to head towards another common disaster. And, above all, understand that decreasing is not regressing, but the only alternative. Life is a cycle, not infinite growth, ask the moon!
Between decorations and rations, the foie gras of the geese and the serious faith of the flock, the saturated space of the auspicious time of the holidays reveals so many vast defeats; those of the capitalist life which continues to go higher, like Icarus, until it burns itself (both wings). Like an armed drone, this vi(ll)e does not do any favors. It’s difficult to get excited regarding the present, little Jesus is reborn under the bombs and it’s too late to wish each other a happy new year.
Lucien Delley is a sociologist, LaSUR EPFL.
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