We must begin by giving our era its due: no generation before ours has been so well informed about its own demise. We have satellites that measure glacier melt to the nearest centimetre, scientific reports running to several thousand pages and updated with the punctuality of a Swiss cuckoo clock, sensors in the water table, climate models of admirable precision, and 24-hour news channels to repeat all this to us round the clock. Our ancestors died in ignorance; we, on the other hand, will die well-informed. That is a considerable step forward.
For we must face the facts, and that is the purpose of this modest inventory: the world is not going to make it. Not for lack of resources, intelligence or warnings. We have all of that in abundance. The world isn’t going to pull through because it has better things to do. It has baguettes to film in Auvergne, mussel-eating contests to organise, stories to post from Dubai, selfies to take on the cliffs and YouTubers to welcome to the Élysée. You can’t be everywhere.
The optimist will say that humanity has always overcome its crises. That is true. But humanity has never before faced a crisis whilst filming itself failing to tackle it, racking up millions of views in the process and with advertisers funding the operation. Stupidity has always existed; our era is the first to have organised it into an industry, complete with a business model, a global audience and the enthusiastic support of its elites. It is this feat that we must now examine in detail, piece by piece, just as one takes stock of a shop before a clearance sale. For that is precisely what this is: a clearance sale. Everything must go, and everything is indeed going, to a round of applause.
In the lines that follow, the reader will find a non-exhaustive catalogue of our achievements. Let them not look for solutions here: there will be none. To propose solutions would be to suggest that someone intends to implement them, and nothing—absolutely nothing—in the daily spectacle of the world justifies such a far-fetched hypothesis.
Let us begin with water, since it is through water that everything comes to an end. When summer arrives, France presents a spectacle of remarkable consistency. In the sky, Canadair aircraft perform majestic manoeuvres and dump thousands of cubic metres of water onto burning hillsides. On the ground, sometimes just a few kilometres away, entire villages wait for the water tanker to bring them something to drink, because the spring has run dry, the borehole has run dry, everything has run dry. Water falls from the sky when there’s a fire; it no longer flows from the tap when people need to live. We look for the mistake, then give up: there is no mistake, there is a system.
This system has its subtleties. The prefectural order forbids the pensioner from watering his tomatoes after eight o’clock in the morning, on pain of a fine, because every drop counts. The same order, in its great wisdom, grants the neighbouring golf course an exemption to maintain its greens, because a yellowed green is a hardship that no civilisation worthy of the name could tolerate. The pensioner watches his tomatoes die whilst gazing, over the hedge, at eighteen bright green holes. This is what is known as ‘co-ordinated resource management’.
Further up the valley, a multinational company is diligently pumping groundwater to fill plastic bottles, which will be sold, amongst others, to local residents whose taps are barely trickling. The ingenuity of the process is truly admirable: water is taken from people for free, only to be sold back to them, with the cost of packaging and transport by lorry added on to round off the profit. Elsewhere, mega-reservoirs are being dug – immense pools of water left exposed to the full sun – to store, on the surface where evaporation is at its highest, water pumped from the aquifers in winter. In this way, agriculture is protected from drought by methodically organising the drying-out process. It is bold, it is counter-intuitive, it is modern.
And let no one claim that nothing is being done about swimming pools: they have proliferated precisely in the driest departments, for nothing refreshes one’s self-image quite like a turquoise pool in the midst of a parched landscape. Water is in short supply, certainly, but it is in short supply with a distinct flavour.
Nine out of ten forest fires are caused by humans. This figure, repeated every summer by the authorities, is worth pausing to consider: lightning, a blind and irresponsible phenomenon, shows ten times more restraint than we do. Humans, on the other hand, have a whole arsenal at their disposal: the cigarette butt flung from the window of an air-conditioned car—a gesture of supreme elegance that involves refusing to use an ashtray just twenty centimetres away, only to offer an ember to ten thousand hectares of pine forest; the barbecue in the midst of a red alert, because the merguez sausages won’t wait; clearing brush in high winds, a respectable tradition that involves lighting a fire to prevent fires.
But the masterpiece of the genre, the pinnacle, the aristocracy of the absurd, is the pyromaniac firefighter. Almost every summer, a volunteer firefighter is arrested for starting fires for the pleasure of putting them out, to earn on-call pay, or to finally be the hero who gets noticed. One must appreciate the perfection of the circle: society trains a man to fight fire, equips him, decorates him, and the man uses this training to create the demand he is about to satisfy. The private sector has never come up with anything better when it comes to creating a market.
On the other side of the world, California has added a new entry to the repertoire: the ‘gender reveal’ fire. Expectant parents, eager to announce the sex of their unborn child to the whole world, set off a pink or blue smoke bomb in a landscape as dry as tinder. The result: thousands of hectares reduced to ashes and one firefighter dead. A man died so that strangers might know that a foetus was a boy. Future historians, if any remain, will file this anecdote somewhere between Roman decadence and the end of the Cretaceous period, wondering which of the three was the most dignified.
Meanwhile, the Canadair fleet is quietly ageing, orders for new aircraft are bogged down in delays, and every summer breaks the previous one’s record with metronomic regularity. We know, we measure, we compare, we comment. Then we light the barbecue again, because, after all, the weather is so lovely.
It would be unfair to suggest that our leaders are doing nothing about climate change. They are doing a great deal. They organise, for example, global conferences. These conferences are preferably held in oil monarchies, under the wise chairmanship of oil company executives, for who knows more about the fire than the one who sells the petrol? We travel there by private jet, naturally, to negotiate with great solemnity about others’ energy conservation. Thousands of delegates, hundreds of aeroplanes, final communiqués whose main aim is to set the date for the next conference. The carbon emitted to discuss carbon now constitutes a separate category of emissions in its own right; the reports do not yet dare to quantify it, out of modesty.
Private jets, in fact – let’s talk about them. Aircraft take off for twenty-minute journeys that a train would complete in an hour, because these gentlemen’s time is precious and kerosene, it seems, is clearly not. When flight-tracking websites made these journeys public, the outrage was immediate: not against the journeys themselves, but against the websites. People aren’t cutting back on their flights; they’re asking for discretion. That’s the whole philosophy of the age: the problem is never what you do, it’s that people find out about it.
The ordinary citizen isn’t left out either, for they’ve been sold their own absolution: the two-and-a-half-tonne electric SUV. Two-and-a-half tonnes of metals mined from the four corners of the globe to transport an eighty-kilo human being to the bakery – but without an exhaust pipe, and therefore with a clear conscience. The environmentalism of our time is not about doing less; it’s about doing the same thing on a grander scale, with a government subsidy as a reward.
And to top it all off, there’s air conditioning, our favourite snake biting its own tail. It’s getting hotter, so we use the air conditioning more; we use the air conditioning more, so we consume more energy and release heat onto the street; the street heats up, so it gets even hotter. The loop is perfect, self-sustaining, elegant.
Physicists call this positive feedback. The rest of the world calls it comfort, and settles down to watch a documentary on climate collapse, in high definition, with the windows shut and the air-con set to nineteen degrees.
Every era has had its fools. Ours has innovated: it pays them. It has created an entire profession – requiring no qualifications, no verifiable skills and producing nothing but its own image – whose founding principle is to film one’s life in Dubai to sell a dream to people who can’t make ends meet. The catalogue of this industry is worth a look, just as one might visit a factory.
In the finance section: drop-shipping courses promising wealth whilst you sleep, sold by young people whose only verifiable wealth comes from selling those very courses; miracle cryptocurrencies warmly recommended to subscribers, which collapse with touching regularity as soon as subscribers have invested. In the health section: dubious supplements, fanciful diets and medical advice dispensed by people whose only connection to medicine is cosmetic surgery, itself promoted to teenage girls as a life plan. In the entertainment section: absurd challenges, some of which have killed participants – a fact that has never halted the series, as the algorithm has a strong stomach.
All of this is accompanied by a schedule of weekly long-haul flights, intended to photograph idyllic beaches under the caption ‘let’s protect our beautiful planet’. One must applaud the feat: emitting in a single week the annual carbon footprint of a household, all to remind that household of the importance of small actions. The hummingbird does its bit; the influencer does theirs, in business class.
One might object that these people represent only themselves. That was true, until the powerful got involved – and that’s when the story gets really interesting.
For the most fascinating aspect of this phenomenon is no longer the influencers’ foolishness. It is the fascination they exert over those who were supposed to embody something else entirely. We have seen – and one has to pinch oneself whilst writing this – the President of the French Republic issue a challenge to two YouTubers, then receive them at the Élysée Palace to film a joke-telling contest, between two defence cabinet meetings. The palace where de Gaulle used to receive heads of state now hosts joke-telling contests, and everyone finds this perfectly natural – which is perhaps the most worrying detail of the whole affair.
It’s a widespread trend. Ministers are taking to TikTok and dancing there, awkwardly, mimicking the behaviour of twenty-year-olds in a bid to wring a little of that visibility from the algorithm that their official roles, it seems, are no longer enough to guarantee.
Heads of state are granting an hour-long, indulgent interview to a video creator rather than holding a press conference for journalists, because the video creator is friendly, their audience is young, and young people vote – or at least might vote; you never know. Influencers are invited to the Élysée Palace, to official ceremonies and to join delegations. The logic is disarmingly clear: where there are millions of subscribers, there are millions of voters, and the substance of the message carries infinitely less weight than the reach of the channel. The Republic no longer asks the clocks for the time; it asks the view counters.
The media, for their part, have chosen the same servitude, but voluntarily and by subscription. Channels that pompously lament the crisis in journalism invite reality TV stars onto their sets to comment on geopolitics. Newspapers that express alarm at conspiracy theories devote lengthy profiles to Dubai-based dream peddlers. A columnist expresses outrage at the standard of public debate, then hands the microphone to someone whose job is to film his own breakfast. Once again, the circle is complete: television creates the fame of people whose sole skill is being famous, then interviews them as experts on their own celebrity. And when one of them finally swindles their followers, the very same programmes make a big fuss about it, for the duration of a special programme, before inviting the next one. It would be a shame to break a tool that works.
There is one place where the hierarchy of news reaches its purest form: the midday news bulletin. The programme has its rules, as immutable as a liturgy. Has a conflict claimed hundreds of lives overnight? Forty seconds, agency footage, a neutral tone, and we move on. Because the day’s big story awaits, and the day’s big story is a baker from Auvergne who carries on the tradition of the authentic, old-fashioned baguette – kneaded by hand, baked in a wood-fired oven – just as in his grandfather’s day. Twelve minutes. Close-up of the crust. Interview with a loyal customer: ‘We come from far away for this.’ The war will have to wait; the crust, however, will not.
Depending on the season, the baker gives way to the mussel-eating contest, where a regional champion wolfs down four kilos to cheers; to the canton’s biggest pumpkin; to the century-old flea market; or to the chestnut tree contest over the price of the Christmas tree. The world is going up in flames, but the fougasse is safe, and that’s what really matters. Note the subtlety of the arrangement: the 1.00 pm news is timed to coincide with the French people’s lunch, and it would be inappropriate to spoil their appetite with reality. So, without saying so, a news format has been invented whose primary function is to aid digestion. Current affairs are treated like the fat on a chop: it is delicately removed so that only the tender meat remains.
Make no mistake: these reports are often charming, and the baker is no doubt a decent chap. The problem isn’t that they exist; it’s their place in the order of things – twelve minutes for the baguette, forty seconds for the dead.
An alien discovering our civilisation through the 1.00 pm news would conclude that planet Earth is a peaceful place, threatened mainly by the disappearance of sourdough bread and the rising price of oysters. He would leave reassured. We, on the other hand, remain, and we too are reassured – which is even stranger.
Between one disaster and the next, our civilisation indulges in its favourite pastime: the small gesture. The small gesture is to environmentalism what a coin tossed into a fountain is to monetary policy – a touching ritual with no measurable effect, but one that does a world of good to the person performing it. Its undisputed masterpiece remains the cardboard straw. We’ve done away with the plastic straw – that scourge of the oceans – and replaced it with a cardboard straw that dissolves in the drink after four minutes. This heroic straw is stuck in a plastic cup, sealed with a plastic lid, filled with a fizzy drink that arrived on a container ship. The sea turtle is spared the straw; the rest of the cup is delivered to it by ocean currents, just as before. But the straw, at least, is made of cardboard, and that’s what matters.
Recycling is part of the same ritual. Entire households conscientiously rinse their yoghurt pots, sorting them by colour and material with the rigour of a laboratory technician, so that the contents of the yellow bins may then, for the most part—a fact that has long gone unnoticed—make their way on cargo ships to South-East Asia, where they will end up being burnt in the open air or piled up in landfill sites that local residents never asked for. We do not eliminate waste; we simply move it elsewhere; the gesture remains small, but the distance is great.
The disposable e-cigarette also deserves its place in the pantheon: an object containing a lithium battery, plastic and electronics, designed to be thrown away after a few hundred puffs. At the very moment we were explaining to children that lithium is precious and batteries are polluting, millions of these devices – flavoured with watermelon – were being sold to teenagers who would simply toss them into the gutters. It took legislation to ban the product; in other words, parliaments had to convene to acknowledge that a disposable battery was a bad idea. The debate was, apparently, heated.
We could go on at length: ten-line emails ending with ‘think of the environment before printing this message’, sent with three attachments of twenty megabytes each; organic cotton bags that would need to be used hundreds of times to offset their carbon footprint, yet which pile up by the dozen under kitchen sinks; oil companies whose adverts now feature nothing but wind turbines, which account for a proportion of their business that one might politely describe as homeopathic. The small gesture has thus found its historical purpose: it does not lighten the planet’s burden; it lightens the conscience. And the conscience of our age, it must be acknowledged, has never been so light.
Our era has solved the age-old problem of scarcity, and has immediately come up with something better: organising scarcity within abundance. A third of the food produced worldwide is thrown away, whilst millions of people go hungry. This is no accident; it is a cycle: entire fields ploughed up for lack of a buyer willing to pay the right price; fruit graded and then rejected for minor imperfections; shelves overstocked as a matter of principle, because an empty shelf drives customers away; and then skips full every evening, sometimes doused with bleach to deter the hungry. Feeding people would be unfair competition.
The textile industry is no exception. Clothes costing two euros, produced ten thousand kilometres away by female workers paid accordingly, travel across the globe in container ships, are worn once, photographed for social media, then sent back, piled up, exported to open-air rubbish dumps in Chile or Ghana, where the Atacama Desert and the beaches of Accra are slowly being covered with our wardrobes from last season. Apps allow you to order thirty dresses on a Monday and return twenty-nine by Thursday, with planes shuttling back and forth. We call this ‘fashion’, which is accurate: it is exactly what’s in vogue.
And whilst we’re on the subject of transport, let’s pay tribute to the logistical masterpiece of the century: Fiji water. Water drawn from a Pacific archipelago, bottled in plastic, loaded onto ships, shipped fifteen thousand kilometres to be sold to consumers who have access to running, drinkable and tested water, at a price a thousand times lower. People who have water on tap are paying to drink water that has travelled round the world. No satirist would have dared to invent it; the market has done so, and is reaping comfortable profit margins from it. Add to that mobile phones designed to last three years in a world that is officially concerned about the depletion of resources, and the picture is complete: we lack nothing, except the slightest idea of what we’re doing.
Progress now has its temple: the data centre. These cathedrals of servers, cooled with vast quantities of water, are being built, preferably in regions already suffering from water stress, because that’s where the land is available — one wonders why. Their sacred mission: to host, amongst other treasures of the human mind, cat videos, influencers’ stories and millions of photos of meals that no one will ever look at twice. The neighbouring village awaits the water tanker; the server, meanwhile, is kept at the ideal temperature. Priorities must be set. And to cap it all off, users are asking an artificial intelligence, hosted in these very centres, for advice on how to save water. The machine replies politely. It is the only one not laughing.
Meanwhile, the tourism industry has invented its ultimate product: the farewell tour. It is euphemistically called ‘last-chance tourism’. Flying out to gaze at the glaciers before they melt, thereby contributing, with measurable efficiency, to their melting. Visiting Venice before it sinks, aboard a cruise liner whose wake helps the lagoon make up its mind. Queuing, yes,
queue, at the summit of Everest, in a traffic jam at an altitude of eight thousand metres, amongst abandoned oxygen cylinders and the corpses of those who went before, to bring back a selfie proving that you’ve escaped the crowds. Humanity organises queues to photograph its own demise, and complains that it’s overcrowded.
All this was bound to come to a head somewhere, and it comes to a head at the edge of the cliffs. Medical studies – for there are now medical studies on the subject – have recorded hundreds of deaths caused by selfies around the world in just a few years. Dying whilst taking a photograph: now that is a cause of death that neither Hippocrates nor Darwin had anticipated, and yet one that concerns them both.
The list is dizzying, in the most literal sense. Taking one step too far back to frame the sunset. Leaning over the Grand Canyon to prove you’re not afraid, only to prove the opposite by your own absurdity. Posing on a railway track as a train approaches, which, true to form, arrives. Taking a photo with a bear which, against all expectations, behaves like a bear. In Yellowstone, the authorities issue official statements urging visitors not to approach bison for a selfie; visitors approach anyway, and the bison, conscientious professionals that they are, gore them. It took a federal government to draw up administrative documents to remind adults not to hug a one-tonne wild bovine. The document exists. So do the gored victims.
The professional variant has its martyrs: the rooftoppers, who scale skyscrapers without ropes to film themselves hanging by one hand over the void, until the day—statistically inevitable—when the hand slips—the camera, however, holds firm and films the fall, providing the algorithm with a final posthumous piece of content that will generate excellent viewing figures. Passengers jump from moving cruise ships for a video. Teenagers ride on the roofs of trains, with the results that physics—that killjoy—has been predicting since Newton. Others film themselves driving at two hundred an hour, climb over the zoo fence to stroke a wild animal, or ignore a volcanic eruption because the light is so beautiful.
Online challenges have industrialised the process: filmed choking games, washing-powder capsules swallowed because the internet had decreed it was funny, and a series of electrocutions and burns to replicate the previous day’s video. And the great off-camera classics round off the collection, worthy successors to the Darwin Awards: the skydiver who checks his parachute once he’s in the air, the diver who jumps off the bridge precisely because of the ‘No Diving’ sign, the amateur storm chaser who races towards the tornado in the belief that the tornado will recognise his exceptional status.
This chapter sums up all the others. A species capable of placing a telescope a million and a half kilometres from Earth includes members who plunge into the void every year whilst trying to prove they were there. No profit, no cause, no excuse: just the validation of strangers as their final horizon, and a question of framing as their last thought. The stupidity of our age in its chemically pure form.
Let’s recap, because an inventory always ends with the accounts. We drop water from the sky onto fires whilst villages drink from water tankers, and we keep our data cool whilst tomatoes roast. We train firefighters who start fires and parents who set forests alight to announce a baby’s name. We hold our climate summits at oil companies’ headquarters and fly there in private jets. We have entrusted the emotional, financial and health education of a generation to young people whose job is to film themselves, and our presidents, rather than being concerned about this, ask them for a selfie. Our newspapers lead with stories about baguettes and gloss over wars between adverts. We throw away a third of our food, fill Chilean rubbish tips with our dresses worn just once, transport water from Fiji to countries that have plenty of it, and die on the edge of cliffs for the sake of a good shot.
Faced with this state of affairs, reasonable hope would suggest we call for a wake-up call. But such a wake-up call would require one prerequisite: that somewhere, someone feels a twinge of unease. Yet that is precisely what is missing. The arsonist is proud of his medals, the influencer of his views, the minister of his TikTok, the TV channel of its audience, the holidaymaker of his selfie on the edge of the abyss. Each, in their own role, conscientiously plays their part in the disaster, and each is happy with it. You cannot reform a catastrophe with which all the players are satisfied.
Our ancestors had the splendid excuse of ignorance. They cleared land without realising it, set fires without measuring the consequences, and wasted resources without counting the cost – and we do not judge people who did not know any better. We, however, do know. We know with decimal places, graphs, reports and push notifications. We are the first civilisation to document our own downfall in real time, in high definition, from every angle, with replays — and to carry on exactly as before, by ‘liking’ the images. Ignorance was an excuse; we have chosen instead the comfort of inconsistency, which excuses nothing but is so much sweeter.
So no, the world isn’t going to pull through. Not for lack of genius: we’ve got it in spades; you only have to look at the ingenuity displayed in selling Fijian water to people who have taps. Not for lack of information: never has a species been better informed about its own fate. The world isn’t going to pull through because nobody’s interested in it pulling through: there’s no content to be gained from it. The end of the world, at least, will make for some great footage. And you can count on us to be there, in the front row, phones raised, filming it in portrait mode — secretly hoping that it’ll wait, to begin with, until the end of the report on the baguette.
What will remain, floating above the rubble, is our true legacy: a few billion selfies, a mussel-eating contest, and twelve minutes of a baker from Auvergne explaining — quite rightly, in the end — that nothing is lost as long as the crust is good.
And yet, it must be written, for an honest assessment does not stop at the observation:
there is a way out. Just one. It will come neither from an international conference, nor from a tax, nor from an app, nor from a five-year plan for ‘happy frugality’. All these things treat the symptoms with the very instruments that caused the illness. You cannot cure the fever of materialism by reorganising material possessions. The only way out lies within: it is the evolution of human consciousness. As long as human beings do not change their perspective, they will merely be swapping one set of toys for another.
This is where our Taoist practice has something to say to the world, and it is striking to note that it has been saying it for twenty-five centuries with a patience that nothing can discourage. Let us return to water, since this entire text began with it. We have seen what our age does to it: it dumps it from the sky, bottles it, stores it in direct sunlight, and ships it all the way from Fiji.
Wu wei, or ‘non-action’, is undoubtedly the most misunderstood and yet most necessary concept of our time. It is not a question of doing nothing; indeed, our contemporaries are very poor at pretending to do nothing – they just scroll. It is a question of not acting against: against the current, against the nature of things, against the rhythm of life. Almost everything this text has listed amounts to acting against. Using air conditioning against the heat we are exacerbating, storing against the evaporation we are facilitating, fussing about against the void we are creating, taking photographs against the death we are approaching at the edge of the cliffs.
Modern man is a swimmer who exhausts himself swimming upstream and blames the river. The practitioner, on the other hand, first learns to feel the current. This is not laziness; it is intelligence taken to its simplest form.
For this is the crux of the matter: all the disasters listed here share a common root, and that root is neither technical, nor economic, nor political. It is a state of consciousness. The man who throws his cigarette butt into the pine forest, the influencer who sells a dream, the minister who dances on TikTok, the holidaymaker who climbs over the fence for a selfie – they are not monsters: they are asleep. They do not see what they are doing, because seeing requires a presence that no one has taught them and that everything around them is striving to dissolve. An entire civilisation has organised itself so that no one is ever truly present in the moment they are living: there is always a notification, a screen, a queue at the summit of Everest. Contemporary stupidity is not a lack of intelligence; we have never been more ingenious. It is a lack of presence and accountability.
Yet consciousness evolves just as a body is trained: through practice. Not through discourse, which, as we have seen, already fills entire conferences without any noticeable effect. He who, every day, sits down, breathes, slows down, and allows the silt of agitation to settle until the water becomes clear once more—this is Lao Zi again: ‘Who can, through tranquillity, gradually clarify murky water?’ That person automatically ceases to feed the machine. Not out of virtue, but out of disinterest: calm renders the clamour uninteresting.
He no longer needs four kilos of mussels, a two-and-a-half-tonne SUV, nor the validation of strangers on the edge of a cliff, because he has found on his cushion what everyone else seeks on their screens: the feeling of being alive. The man who stands quietly between heaven and earth has nothing to prove to the void as he leans into it.
Let there be no mistake: this is no escape from the world. The Taoist sage is no deserter; he is the only one who is truly present. And it is precisely in this that hope lies – the only hope that stands firm after the stock-taking that has gone before. Systems will not reform themselves, since all their participants are content; but systems are made up solely of people, and a person can wake up. This has been seen before. It is seen every day, quietly, without a hashtag. Every conscience that awakens is a cog that stops turning in the grinding machine, and no one knows how many cogs a machine can lose before it grinds to a halt.
So let us amend the title of this text, without disavowing it: the world, as it is currently behaving, will not pull through, and there is no point in deluding ourselves. But human beings, for their part, can pull through – one by one, from within – through this slow evolution of consciousness, of which our practice is the humble, daily method.
