October 2022
I love our breakfast conversations. We cover everything: imaginary laws of physics born from my exuberant brain, today's recipes or those for upcoming days when the children come to visit us, the analysis of the erratic behavior of an adult child who has just left their life partner yet again.
We try to understand our loved ones, or others in general (our friends, our acquaintances, our neighbors, etc.), and we seek to highlight logical relationships between the microcosm of the family, the psychology of its members, and the political macrocosm through extrapolations that are as ambitious as they are bold.
For example, should we be surprised by the relative lack of entrepreneurial spirit in France when some of the parents in this country failed to give their children a healthy educational kick in the pants while they were still in the learning phase of life?
And should we be surprised when these same adults have set up a social system whose overall result is that their children prefer to stay with mom and dad sometimes until the age of forty (rents too high, no work, it's cold outside and life is hard, etc.)?
Another example: Should we be surprised that a country like France has focused the bulk of its cognitive energies on social issues and psychology (while others choose effective risk prevention rather than the precautionary principle of doing absolutely nothing, or focus on apprenticeships, craftsmanship, research, and industry) and discover thirty years later, dismayed and horrified, that trade deficits are accumulating over time because the country no longer knows how to produce the vital goods necessary for its survival: food, medicines, medical equipment, military transport means, etc…?
I am increasingly convinced that contemporary French society (I only know this one well having worked in it all my active life) is slowly setting up difficult tomorrows through the opinions and attitudes it instills in its children.
The weaknesses and cowardice, even unconscious ones, of today's parents will be those that their descendants elevate into a system thirty years later; often without knowing it, without realizing it, and without understanding them. Or they will be the seed of the troubles that these descendants will have to face.
Fortunately, a society does not exhibit only one kind of psychology. It is a multiple, colorful, and polymorphous whole, a rainbow of temperaments. This is what saves it. And because some suffer while others purr peacefully in the quiet hearth of the family, the sleepers are sometimes awakened by the rebellious jolts of the former.
And so much the better; for at all times, it is also those who live in lack and need, or who love to discover and improve the world, that force it to progress, to evolve. And in the end, everyone benefits usefully.
So, moral of the story as our dear La Fontaine would say, it is better for all of us to think a little and modestly yet regularly question our daily lives than to sleep for thirty consecutive years and then wake up panicked in a chaotic, lost, and revolutionary universe.
It is good for the microcosm to send signals continuously to its elites and it is preferable for the latter to take them seriously if they do not want to rediscover to their dismay, dumbfounded, the well-known adage stating: No matter how high one is perched (socialically) in society, one is never sitting higher than on one's bottom!
A slow and courteous evolution is better than a bloody revolutionary flash.