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Writer's pictureLa Petite Sirène

The unlimited promotion of individual rights, a societal cancer - An opinion by Jean-Pierre Lebrun

La Libre - 18 novembre 2024 - Trad. DeepL & Chat GPT



Striking an appropriate balance between individual demands and civilisational requirements has become very difficult in today's world. This is by no means a question of denying the legitimacy of those who support their particularities; it is a question of not accepting the claims of those who, in the name of their feelings alone, deny reality and can no longer bear to allow it to impose a limit on them.

An opinion by Jean-Pierre Lebrun, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and President of the Walloon League for Mental Health


In his book ‘Malaise in Civilisation’, published in 1929, Freud wrote this sentence, which does not require a psychoanalyst to grasp its meaning and significance: ‘A good part of the struggles of humanity are concentrated around a single task: to find an appropriate, i.e. satisfactory, balance between individual demands and the civilisational requirements of the community; to know whether a particular organisation of civilisation will succeed in establishing this balance or whether the conflict will remain insoluble is a problem in which the fate of humanity is at stake (1).


The issue is therefore crucial, but what does it mean today to find an appropriate balance between individual demands and civilisational requirements? I would first argue that, in order to do so, the dialectical opposition between these two dynamics - that of the individual and that of the collective - must be allowed to continue. And this is precisely where the problem lies today.


A troubled search for balance

Whereas in yesterday's world, this opposition was clearly identifiable at all levels - between parents and children, teachers and pupils, the powers that be and the opposition, vertical and horizontal... - what is new in our world is that the new societal demand is that space should be given first and foremost to the individuality of each person.


While the value of this advance is obvious, insofar as it seeks to recognise the specificity of everyone, the search for the balance that Freud spoke of - a problem in which the fate of humanity hangs in the balance - is disturbed if not rendered inaccessible, since the demands of civilisation end up giving the impression that all it has to do is coincide with the demands of the individual.


Legitimacy

But is this really the case? Because referring to society is not the same thing as referring to the individuals who make it up. The question clearly needs to be asked: where are the demands of the community going to find their legitimacy if it appears to want nothing more than to ratify the recognition of individualities? It's only logical that when it comes to anything and everything, we have to ask the same question over and over again: Marriage for all, the right to euthanasia, recognition of LGBTQ+, all of these are good reasons to seek recognition from the political authorities, but where is the authority that could legitimately say, on behalf of everyone, No to excess, to excess, to Ubris, the only way we have left to keep the two antagonistic forces present and to seek to establish a balance between them?


All the more so as opposition to excesses is immediately labelled unacceptable, if not phobic (gay or trans), right-wing or even extreme right-wing, if not even fascist, by those who advocate giving full rein to individual demands.


In other words, in the current context, it's as if it's very difficult to maintain the dialectic and therefore to work towards finding a new balance. This is where the image of cancer comes in: in medicine, it's the proliferation of cells that no longer accept being regulated by the body. This is why we can say that we are facing a societal cancer when, for example, we can no longer see anything other than individual demands, and reality itself comes to be denied.


Indeed, even what is based on reality is no longer authoritative. Let's imagine for a moment what the unlimited development of individual feelings and claims would be like. ‘There would be practically as many languages as there are individuals, and communication would become impossible’, as the famous linguist Emile Benveniste once put it.


Permanent violence

So this is not about denying the legitimacy of those who support their particularities; it is about not accepting the claims of those who, in the name of their feelings alone, deny reality and can no longer bear to let it impose a limit on them.

What's more, we have to recognise the effects of this unrestrained promotion of individual rights: a climate of permanent violence perceptible in today's world by those who are still willing to want to know something rather than join the pack.

In today's society, we no longer see a search for balance through antagonistic positions, but only the will of each position to win at all costs.


In short, by imagining that we are free of everything and that we are promoting this so-called freedom as a social programme, the way is open for us to continue the fight indefinitely. We can then immediately imagine where we're heading if we don't manage to rediscover the common sense at work in collective life, the very common sense that forces us to seek a balance between civilisational demands and individual claims.

The consequences are obvious and already perceptible: a climate of cultural war, a determination to hold on to one's positions as the only valid ones, a way of getting rid of any rationally articulated questioning, a way of no longer acknowledging any debt to those who have gone before us, all this in defiance of what has enabled us to take everyone's particularities into account!


However, a positive development is taking shape, as Marcel Gauchet's words make clear: we are witnessing a profound change that holds out the hope of establishing a version of the collective One that is incomparably superior to the one that resulted from religious (and I would add patriarchal) organisation. And Gauchet adds: unlike the latter, in fact, it knows itself for what it is, it is in full possession of its reasons and its means, in such a way that it cannot be regarded as anything other than the completed form of the human establishment (2).


Concern for the collective

But such a project can only come to fruition if we reintroduce into our respective journeys the work that needs to be done to ensure that each of us remains marked by a concern for the collective, for the common good.

We cannot be satisfied with allowing ourselves to believe in an identity that is merely the consequence of an individual feeling. Its link with the collective remains an irreducible requirement that everyone must make their own. If we don't, we will very quickly - if we haven't already - be faced with the societal cancer we have just described.

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