The Too-Rapid Inversion of the Value System

Faced with the rise of extremisms, let us question our collective responsibility in the stigmatization of the other. I propose paths to reconnect with authentic democratic dialogue.

The Banality of Evil and the Trap of Demonization

Since Donald Trump’s second election to the presidency of the United States, intellectuals, democrats, and other “good people” have not stopped denouncing the return of fascism. They depict a post-truth world where everything would be disinformation, a shift for which far-right strongmen and digital magnates would be responsible.

And each one publicly and proudly displays their commitment against this peril, through social media posts or “engaged” conferences. For my part, I perceive above all a glaring absence of political courage and a manifest lack of responsibility from those who claim to hold the truth. These ardent defenders of “facts” position themselves as white knights of a society enamored with truth, equality, and tolerance. Unfortunately, in my opinion, it’s almost the opposite, and I take up my pen not to denounce, but to hopefully advance lucidity and democratic values in a sincere and grounded way, for a better future.

Hannah Arendt and Individual Responsibility

In my view, these postures reveal above all a deep fear and an attempt at reassurance in face of opponents who were once so easy to despise and stigmatize. The populations of working-class neighborhoods, for example, presumed uneducated and manipulable by simplistic and reactionary ideologies, would face moderate whites, white as snow, these centrists in the vein of Macronism, who stand against the far right erected as an absolute peril. Let me be clear from the outset: I do not defend the far right in any way, being myself a man of the left.

The political reflection I propose here must be understood in the idea of building together and with respect for all the world of tomorrow, by proposing concrete paths of action. Because reducing the other to a diabolical figure, to the reincarnation of Nazism, amounts to dismaying simplism. I often wonder what Hannah Arendt would say if she were among us today?

In her time, during the Eichmann trial, she evoked the banality of evil rather than its demonization, an approach then privileged to reassure oneself and establish clear moral bearings. By presenting the human in their universal fallibility, capable of the worst in the most disconcerting normality, she was ostracized, despised, and discredited. Her discourse disturbed because it referred individuals to their own responsibilities. Violence, we know, was not the exclusive preserve of the Nazis. Ordinary human beings, caught in a political system that concealed its violence and instrumentalized the scapegoat mechanism, this catharsis legitimizing the dehumanization of individuals deemed biologically dangerous for the community, accomplished the unthinkable in all good conscience. Hannah Arendt revealed that true normality resided in this propensity to be carried away by simplistic and reassuring, but terribly dangerous thoughts, because they obscured the philosophical mechanisms that could lead an entire nation to the worst atrocities.

Discordant Voices Against Dominant Discourse and Anarchism

Today, those who carry discordant voices against the dominant discourse are stigmatized. During the Covid period, they served as scapegoats, perceived as threats to global health through their mere words. Another example, anarchists, who have always been hunted, humiliated, and discredited, the very term being assimilated to disorder. Where does this almost universal hostility of established political systems toward these disruptors come from? Isabelle Attard explains it brilliantly in her work How I Became an Anarchist (2019).

Anarchists have always been persecuted for an obvious reason: the political system of anarchism works, which makes it absolutely dangerous for authoritarian regimes, even if they appear democratic. Founded on individual and collective political emancipation, it is a system of which Élisée Reclus affirmed in 1897: “Anarchy is the highest expression of order.” The rare historical anarchist experiments have been suppressed and discredited in the collective unconscious, precisely because of their remarkable social, egalitarian and peaceful effectiveness. The danger to the powers that be is there!

The Scapegoat Mechanism

I do not claim that Western democracies and dictatorships are identical. The former are totalitarian in the sense that they manage to convince the majority of citizens that they constitute the best possible system, unlike dictatorships that govern through brute force. During the Covid-19 crisis, all those who questioned the authoritarian management, particularly in France, one of the most coercive countries in its response, were immediately catalogued as “conspiracy theorists” and associated with the far right, whether they themselves were left or right. Yet, it was enough to observe the massive demonstrations against the health pass, this anti-constitutional liberticide restriction, to note the extraordinary diversity of participants, far from being predominantly far-right.

These heterogeneous gatherings shared the intuition of a serious political shift: the legitimization of the fabrication of a scapegoat on mendacious bases. The unvaccinated were designated as dangerous by a frightened majority, seeking comfort in the identification of an enemy: those who refused to obey, even the most absurd and contradictory injunctions, those who informed themselves outside the dominant media.

The issue was no longer to eradicate a highly contagious virus by learning to protect ourselves from it through solidarity, but to designate human culprits unrelated to the virus. This shift characterized the Covid doxa, the dominant discourse that still persists among some, although five years later, truths are gradually emerging, revealing the state lies of this period, which structured the political space for two years.

Economic Interests Against the Common Good

Why these lies? In the name of profit. This two-year period saw the doubling of the fortune of the greatest billionaires and shareholders, profiting from this “war” and the state of exception that legitimized all authoritarian excesses, aggravating social violence and inequalities that, we know, enrich some through the enslavement of others.

What link to establish between the Covid crisis and current fears about the expansion of the far right? Here it is: those who posed as heroes during the health crisis, discrediting the recalcitrant or anyone who expressed the slightest reservation, are today the same ones who present themselves as defenders of the rule of law against extremisms. But yet, during the Covid period, their sincerity was real: they were genuinely afraid, convinced that these people represented a public danger that they had to neutralize, immobilize, forcibly vaccinate, dismiss from their professional functions (like the twelve thousand unvaccinated caregivers, suspended without pay or unemployment for two years, when they were cruelly needed), exclude them from social life, refuse to treat them if they were sick, if not confine them, imprison them, and we even heard worse. In all good conscience, they had slipped into the “banality of evil,” because fear had obscured their judgment.

Those who refused could thus be dehumanized, because generalized fear had excluded them from the regime of common humanity. Their social exclusion suddenly became possible, even legitimate, their human status being called into question.

The End of the Totalitarian Shift

This shift fortunately stopped in France in March 2022, exactly two years after its beginning, to give way to a real war in Ukraine. Sensible, intelligent, cultured people, brilliant intellectuals, with the exception of a few like Barbara Stiegler, Laurent Muchielli, Giorgio Agamben, Michel Maffesoli and a few others, who resisted this dangerous imaginary, found themselves defending a totalitarianism based on bio-power, so well documented by Michel Foucault and prophesied by George Orwell in 1984.

1984 does not describe Nazism, contrary to what they would have us believe, but precisely the risk of a post-Nazi totalitarian order, the one that threatens us today. An order claiming perfection through absolute surveillance, the exact project of the health pass then vaccine pass. Let us not delude ourselves: these devices were neither harmless nor medically justified. The elites knew, it is now proven, that the vaccine did not prevent transmission at all.

Here is one of the many state lies of this period. The enrichment of capitalist groups notably operated through the massive sale of vaccines to states, which contracted loans of hundreds of billions of dollars from these same groups. The interest will be repaid in the future by citizens. This wealth construction was therefore articulated on two axes: an immediate doubling of enrichment in two years, coupled with a promise of considerable future gains spread over time.

This process perfectly illustrates the banality of evil theorized by Hannah Arendt: people convinced they were acting for good, blind to their dehumanization of others, while our foundational texts require unconditional respect for human dignity and rights. Let us not retrospectively minimize these events.

The Bad Reputation of Free Thinkers

These same self-proclaimed bearers of “good” are today protesting against the rise of the far right. Some major social networks have indeed allied with Trump in this enterprise that I also judge ignoble. I do not defend Trumpism or its ecosystem in any way.

My proposal here aims to trace concrete action paths, not against the far right, but for democracy and equality, considering mutual responsibilities. These “good people,” as Brassens sings them, who cheerfully trampled human rights during the Covid period, believing they were working for good with capitalism’s blessing, had stigmatized all dissidents as dangerous extremists.

In the village, without pretension,
I have a bad reputation;
Whether I struggle or remain quiet,
I pass for a I-don’t-know-what.
I do no harm to anyone,
Following my little man’s path;
But good people don’t like
One to follow a different route than theirs...
No, good people don’t like
One to follow a different route than theirs...

Bad Reputation (beginning – 1952)

Brassens evokes very precisely the critical spirit, that is, thinking for oneself, opposed to thinking like everyone else. And yet “critical spirit” is what the self-proclaimed defenders of democracy who stigmatize extremists and “conspiracy theorists” claim to defend.

The Stigmatization of Alternative Medicines

Another example, fasting: supposedly serious articles still affirm in 2025 that followers of fasting or alternative medicines would be far-right, conspiracy theorists, uneducated, manipulated by gurus. Why discredit fasting, present in all religious traditions, whose millennial therapeutic benefits are documented? It is neither magic nor belief, but a scientifically studied phenomenon. The answer lies in the financial interests of pharmaceutical laboratories, seriously threatened if official medicine, largely co-financed by the private pharmaceutical industry, even in the public sector, evolved toward the authentic well-being of patients. This would mechanically reduce drug consumption, which contradicts the raison d’être of private companies devoted to selling medicines, with the goal of profit for their shareholders.

The Capitalist System and Our Responsibility

And we are part of these shareholders, as soon as we have savings, because annual returns rely on the global financial system. Without knowing it, we support the imperative of growing profit of private companies. What company could justify to its shareholders a voluntary decrease in profitability? Capitalism does not function on degrowth but on perpetual growth.

This myth of permanent enrichment requires selling everything: medicines, but also bottled water for example, an ecological absurdity justified by dubious qualitative arguments. Alternative public systems for quality water distribution would be infinitely more virtuous.

The objective of a private company remains growing profit. Pharmaceutical laboratories must constantly develop new medicines before patent expiration and the loss of their royalties. Pharmaceutical executives have publicly acknowledged it: sick populations requiring treatments are more profitable than healthy populations.

The Example of the Bates Method

Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, a dystopia remarkably illuminating our present, had published in 1942 The Art of Seeing, an account of his visual re-education that allowed him to go from near-blindness to normal vision without glasses. This very simple approach, from an American ophthalmologist, Dr. Bates, considers the eye as a living organ, which can benefit for its health and proper functioning from exercises, relaxation, and gentle mobilization. Applied in three American states at the beginning of the 20^th century, it produced spectacular results, significantly reducing the wearing of glasses among children. Dr. Bates was then excluded from the order of ophthalmologists, because his method threatened the optical industry.

Today, practitioners of this method cannot claim to treat vision under penalty of illegal practice of medicine. We speak modestly of “well-being,” but the reality is the improvement of visual health through specific methods adapted to afflictions.

I testify personally: very myopic, I abandoned my glasses eight years ago. My sight improves continuously thanks to ocular re-education, to the great astonishment of children and adolescents I often encounter, impressed by my visual acuity superior to theirs. These practitioners are caricatured as charlatans anti-science claiming to heal without glasses, public dangers, conspiracy theorist sectarians probably linked to the far right. Pure defamation necessary for maintaining a functional capitalist society where the profit system must above all not be questioned.

Involuntary Rallying to the Far Right

I have taken these examples to illustrate that among the responsibilities for the dangers threatening our societies, and I share the concern about the accession to power of malevolent figures like Donald Trump, figures the involuntary rallying to these dangerous figures of people without affinity with the far right, but who find themselves associated with it by amalgamation and can unfortunately find listening and understanding there.

Take Elon Musk, today in rupture with the Democrats. Former major supporter of Barack Obama, why did he switch to Trump? And why did he then consummate the divorce from Trump? Robert Kennedy Jr., current Health Secretary under Trump, was a major environmentalist who made remarkable documentaries for the environmental cause, then very engaged against the security policies of Covid. How does he find himself in the Trump administration? What previous government would have tolerated a questioning of the dictates of the pharma-agro-food complex? It’s very troubling.

Rebuilding Democracy Through Dialogue

This complexity reveals the sterile simplism consisting of demonizing an entity to eliminate, exactly the opposite of Hannah Arendt’s teaching.

What can we do against these emerging far-right forces? Nothing directly. Our power of action resides in ourselves. If we cultivate tolerance, if we stop stigmatizing far-right voters, if we create spaces for meeting and dialogue with those who think differently, if we stop making them feel guilty and dehumanizing them, if we restore their dignity to them, then we will rebuild authentically democratic spaces in civil society. We will consolidate acting fraternities, because democracy does not rest solely on its leaders but on each citizen accepting or refusing orders from above.

During the totalitarian period of Covid, those who can today be qualified as resistants were then treated as “conspiracy theorists,” because they tried to think for themselves. During World War II, our current heroes of the Resistance were qualified as terrorists and aroused general fear. History has rehabilitated them as liberators who restored freedom. Those who resisted during the Covid crisis will also resist far-right totalitarianisms. Let us not amalgamate them with the latter.

If one doesn’t agree with the official opinion, one becomes a conspiracy theorist. It’s freedom of thought, quite simply. I don’t like the word “conspiracism,” let’s stop talking about conspiracism, let’s simply say the fact of thinking for oneself, and not only... there I’m reading a book by Alexandre Koyré, from the 30s, he talks about the era of lies. Currently, it’s lies that are dominant in the political world, the journalistic world, the world of experts of all kinds.

Michel Maffesoli interviewed on TVL on June 30, 2025.

Fighting Fear to Build a Better World

Demonization is easy, simplistic, and destructive of social bonds. Yes, individuals like Donald Trump represent public dangers. But his supporters are not him. Let us try to understand their motivations without seeking to be right. Let us identify our common ground. Let us question ourselves. Our strength will come from our fight against fear of the other, this fear that engenders stigmatization. Let us fight fear. Faced with events, let us act, listen, dialogue. Let us be democrats in our daily actions. Let us stop hasty judgments intended to reassure us, pure manifestations of fear. By fighting this fear, we will build a better world.