Our society is collapsing... and no one realizes it?

Our daily lives are increasingly marked by intolerance, premature judgments, fake news and verbal attacks. Social networks are a daily example of this. No age group is spared. Add to that the hustle, stress and financial worries. Is our entire society slipping...and no one notices? What is the role of politics? Gaston Ternes answers this question in his Carte Blanche.

 

Today's subject is not specifically Luxembourgish, it concerns our so-called "Western" society, the way in which we live together, the way in which politics accompanies it. I am going to choose, from a panoply, 2 very extreme examples, of the way in which politics regulates in the first case, capitulates in the second!

 

Britain has just passed a law to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda. Two years ago, Charles III, then still Prince of Wales, called the bill a “terrible idea”. He signed the law as king in late April this year.

 

We are irritated that there are also voices within the European community who accept this inhumane solution. A week ago, Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer praised this British “Rwandan model”! How can people who are supposed to represent democratic values make such inhumane decisions? No proponent of this idea is interested in the situation in Rwanda itself, because that country faces its own refugee problem. Hundreds of thousands of Rwandan refugees have wanted to return to their country of origin for years. Nobody talks about the dramatic unemployment rate in Rwanda.

 

Let us cite another example very different from the first: the mental health of many children and young people in Western Europe is not good. The children's agitation reverberates throughout the classroom. At school, more and more “specific measures” are necessary to support children with inappropriate behavior. I feel these measures like band-aids, without getting into the real causes.

 

The average age at which children are first exposed to pornographic images is now 10 years old! Access to extremely violent video clips and films is unlimited. All too quickly, children are confronted with social networks, which expose them to the dictatorship of the gaze of others and to destructive criticism. The policy here is “no subscriptions”. It does not regulate.

Over the decades, governments have systematically placed human values behind economic interests. They turned a blind eye to the collateral damage. “Economic growth comes at the price of an intellectual, cultural, psychological and spiritual collapse,” writes the French author Laurent Gounelle very aptly in his recent work “The Wake”. When will we wake up, when will politicians wake up and return to their core business?

“Polis”, from ancient Greek, in the sense of shaping and regulating harmonious coexistence, collective consciousness!