"Infinite wealth in a finite world is not possible"

Interview with the French philosopher Dany Robert Dufour
"Infinite wealth in a finite world is not possible"

The thinker affirms that the promise of capitalism of an access to unlimited wealth is false. He also states that love is in danger. At the same time, he feels hopeful for the new forms of citizenship that seek to combat inequalities.

By Eduardo Febbro
We are children of a delirium, which in turn fertilized others. The initial was created in the West and its descendants expanded all over the world with capitalism as a flag. There is almost no sphere that has not been contaminated by that delirium that presides over the destiny of the world. The French philosopher Dany Robert Dufour, professor of Educational Sciences of the Paris VIII University, has traced the itinerary of this delirium and scanned its nefarious implications in his book El delirio Occidental and its current effects on daily life: work, love and leisure (MRA Ediciones, Barcelona). Dufour is a wise man faithful to his ideas, a kind full of kindness and humanistic lucidity. The essay is an extraordinary argument against productivism and the techno-dictatorship as well as a thorough deconstruction of the positive myths of liberalism: it does not liberate but it creates dependencies, it does not build but it destroys accumulating garbage and inequality.

Dany Robert Dufour has a very rich philosophical work consecrated to the amorality of liberalism and its consequences on the human being. In 2011, with his essay L'individu qui vient ... après le libéralisme (The individual who comes ... after liberalism) Dufour wondered about how to resist liberal oppression and what kind of individual would come later. Now, with El delirio occidental, Dany Robert Dufour, tells us about an individual bewitched by that western delirium. The reflection completes it with another essay of exquisite and hopeful title: "The desperate situation of the present fills me with hopes. Faced with three political delusions, the hypothesis of the art of living together ". In this interview with Página12 in Paris, the French philosopher unfolds the network that captures us and opens a pair of windows towards emancipation.

- His book El delirio occidental and its current effects on everyday life: work, love and leisure addresses the predatory dimension of the West and its capacity to seduce, although it is an obvious model of destruction. The philosophical origin of this delirium has led the world to the extinction phase that is being talked about so much.

-The term delirium is generally applied to the field of individual psychology. But we must not forget that delirium forms a couple with reason. Western rationality was born with the philosopher Descartes in the first part of the seventeenth century. In his famous book The Discourse on Method, Descartes announces that sciences should stop being contemplative to become active. This will have as a consequence the fact that human beings are going to become masters and owners of nature. It is there where the western reason becomes delirious. Our starting point is nature, we are part of it and not the masters. The pretension to be extracted from nature creates a kind of delirium of power and greatness. Capitalism derives from that conception when it is endowed with the means to act in the world with its promise to take the world out of the regime of penury to enter a world of abundance. Capitalism ended up producing a lot of those artifices that Descartes talked about, that is, objects manufactured for consumption. It is, in fact, a delirious promise in order to enjoy a lot of objects destined to extend life, our presence in the world and our power over it. We realize that the delirium that the world wanted to control has been destroying it. It has destroyed our relationship with nature and the main parameters of the ecosystems that regulate life on earth. That is the beginning of delirious reason. The unfulfilled and unsustainable promise of capitalism has been shaped by the capitalism of consumption, which, in turn, destroys the foundations of life. It is a western delirium because it was born in the West but ended up sweeping the whole world. The heart of modern capitalism refers to the Greek term of pleonexia, that is, the insatiable appetite for always having more. That is why the philosophers of ancient Greece recommended containing the pleonexia. It is necessary to control that dimension that is part of human life because it is very destructive. The promise of capitalism of an access to infinite wealth is false. Infinite wealth in a finite world is not possible.

Biosphere - Pollution Of The Whole World

-You rescue a contradictory feeling that affects human beings immersed in this delirium of consumption: disenchantment, impotence, what you call "the generational melancholy of the West".

 -It happens that the moment we have everything, we realize that we do not have much. We have objects, possibilities, we have fun, etc., etc. But from the point of view of being, there is something that is not fulfilled. The multiplication of possessions does not fill us. The fundamental dimension of the human being is not fulfilled, satisfied. There is then a melancholy because we perceive that we are missing something. Life does not consist in owning manufactured objects but in making them ourselves. These objects can be our books, our paintings, our networks of friends, our language. But the market offers manufactured objects without subjectivity. Making our own objects means that we need a subject to manufacture them, and that subject is me. Modern work lacks subjectivity, is industrialized, instrumentalized, parceled, is merely utilitarian. It is delirious. From this comes the melancholy of the population. There is a lot, but we have nothing.

-Work, leisure, love: the delirium of the West contaminated every space of our life. Love is almost the only revolutionary object we have left, but it is also threatened by the idea of ​​marking.

-The effects of Western delirium in the work we have just addressed. And as regards leisure, the delirium of the West perverts it because the leisure space became a space for fun and not for working time for oneself and oneself. And love, which is the most amazing and beautiful thing in life, has been perverted and replaced by the contemporary pornography of satisfactions. We no longer need to find someone to build something with him. The love space is saturated by a pornographic market that begins to act since adolescence with the goal of sexual efficacy. It is forgotten that, suddenly, there is something else that can be built beyond the objects of satisfaction or pure pleasure. Love has been damaged by Western delirium. Love is in danger.

The Decadence of the Romans

-The Western conquest of the world, the invasion of the market as regulator of everything, does not seem to have a limit. It has penetrated even societies that had their own philosophy, with their own worldview. How is this extraordinary contamination of all consciences explained?

-The international bourgeoisies impose their models. I think that if the populations have been receptive to this proposal of capitalism, it is partly due to the fact that these postmodern cultures, those cultures that accede to a late capitalism and their promise of absolute liberation, also believe in the promise to leave the fence morals inherited from classical or ancient cultures. Forget everything and prove the true liberation of capitalism, where everything is authorized and allowed !. Capitalism always works like this: it promises a liberation that then leads to new alienation. Look at the history of the cigarette and the liberation of the woman. In 1929, cigarette producers were very angry because half of humanity, or women, did not smoke. They commissioned a campaign from Edward Bernays, who was a nephew of Freud. Bernays' advertising campaign consisted of saying that smoking was a women's liberation enterprise because it allowed women to seize a masculine object. Smoking became autonomous, liberated with a deadly poison! The liberation model offered by all manufactured objects only produces new addictions.

-The most eschatological thing is that, the more capitalism produces, the more garbage accumulates.

- All this super production ends up in garbage that is covering the world. Besides delirium, in capitalism there is a perverse dimension. In perversion, including Freudian perversion, the first state of perversion is the sadistic-anal state. We change shit for something, and that something becomes money and with it we enter an infinite cycle of money. But, at the end of that cycle, the only thing that exists is shit and trash. The same one that is covering the world and with which we do not know what to do. In the oceans there are entire continents of plastic that move by the sea. The objects have a programmed obsolescence. We continually renew them for others that, in turn, become garbage. The moral limit of capitalism was shattered. But from now on we face a natural limit. The world can no longer absorb the mass of production, the entire flow of garbage that disturbs each of the cycles and alters life itself. We can not continue. We are in a system that leads us to the abyss and we do not know how to stop it. At this moment we are in the frenzy phase of consumption. Soon will come the time of panic.

And yet, despite the outlook, his last rehearsal is a paradoxical song to life: "The desperate situation of the present fills me with hope. Faced with three political delusions, the hypothesis of the art of living together ".

 -Well, the first thing: it's a phrase of Marx. Indeed, we are not only in the western delirium but, above, that delirium raises other delusions. Politically there are three. One: that of pleonexia, that is, hyper consumption. two: the delirium of purity that consists in recovering the original covenant with God. That is the position of the fundamentalists, that is, the theofascism of the radical Salafist Islamists who seek original purity. But that promise of full purity is transformed into absolute filth: the crowd is shot, heads cut off, limbs mutilated, etc. Delirium is incarnated in the opposite way that created it. The third: the national delirium of identity with its idea of ​​a purity of the people. The price to pay for this delirium is the expulsion of foreigners and the manufacture of new scapegoats. That delirium of identity can not but lead to what happened in the 30s of the twentieth century: Nazism, fascism. How to get out of this and rebuild a base to exist? I am not desperate nor am I completely optimistic. But all this fills me with hope because I think we have reached the bottom and we can not go further down. Perhaps, in the conjunction of these three delusions there is a possible way out. We see it in several countries of the world, starting with France with the yellow vests where everything emanates from the people. Liberalism continued to expand in the world with its batch of de-subjectification, de-socialization, population control through psycho-powers and the growth of inequalities in the world. However, there is a lot of data that shows how the population resists. The insurrection of the yellow vests in France is proof of this. President Emmanuel Macron said in an interview that he was the "emanation of the taste of the French people for the Romanesque". Now he is discovering that it is the emanation of the disgust of the French people for inequality. There is something that is being put together that has to do with new forms of citizenship, with ways of combating inequalities and restoring the dignity of individuals, with a way of respecting the environment without returning to sailing. There are searches in progress and that prevents me from being completely desperate. The post-liberal individual is preparing to carry out very tough battles. People reflect on what they want and do not want, and act.