Against the Robots

Everywhere—on the internet, in newspapers, or on television—personal experience is displayed, exhibited, and presented as the definitive reference. This indecency rests on a reversal of values. It is based, above all and everywhere, on the idea of ​​sameness. The idea of ​​sameness thinks: “I lived this; my experience reflects a universal feeling. I want to share what I experienced. I present myself as an indispensable witness.” This is to confuse the universal with the general. What is forgotten, misunderstood, is the difference that resides between each person; and each person is unique. Not unique because of their sexual orientation or quirks, but intrinsically. This is indeed an old concept that has become new at the beginning of the 21st century. Through their experience, their culture, and their nature, each person reveals a facet of humanity, and each facet is unique. To create in the image of God . Yet it is impossible for us, except by looking at people and considering them all as unique, to embrace God. Forgetting God brings us back to the same thing. Everyone has their own little rhyme which, even if it can express the tragedy of an existence, is only a rhyme because it doesn't even begin to express the tragedy of Man.

Man learns almost nothing from his personal experience. He learns only from his encounter with God. He learns nothing from his personal experience because it lowers the bar, while his relationship with God raises it. Modern man should all the less flaunt his personal experience, since his loss of relationship with God leads him to forget Evil. Forgetting Evil involves forgetting sin. Unamuno wrote in "The Tragic Sense of Life": "For Saint Paul, the most execrable sin is avarice. Because avarice consists in mistaking means for ends." And he added that the other terrible disease, born of spiritual avarice, was envy. To speak of one's personal experience is, in itself, to provoke envy; to provoke envy is to invoke it. Our era has reached such a height of folly that it desires everyone to be envied; It pushes everyone to exhibit themselves, to become objects of desire, and therefore of envy. An era founded on self-expression, on selfishness, egotism, and egocentrism; an era where it is good to lift taboos, to understand the driving forces behind everything. An era that hates what is hidden and considers secrecy a flaw. An era of stupefying psychology forcing everyone into nudity under the pretext of self-acceptance. This psychological drive, this exaltation of the self through its exposure and exhibition, has only one avowed goal: to allow everyone to better lives. Psychoanalysis always seeks to unveil and allow the expression of resentments that are often seen as obstacles to a better life. The self and the ego live in tandem. They generate envy. All those famous resentments that psychoanalysis so often harasses can stem from a Christian upbringing, since the latter has an avowed aim: to combat all feelings of envy. It is therefore possible, like two communicating antagonistic forces, that the very good intended by Christian education to regulate envy creates bitterness or resentment. Here we see two forces clashing fiercely: Christianity and its rejection of envy, which starts from the principle that "I" am wrong because I never do enough for others, and the modern world, armed with its precepts of transparency, similarity, and equality, which reduces all hierarchical or structured functioning to its ideology of sameness, which reassures and comforts it.
It is logical that the lack of intimacy, secrecy, and inner life thus leads to a desire for self-display. This is indeed a modern perversity that compels one to exhibit oneself, that creates envy in others, that leads to encountering the other and becoming enamored with their reflection and only their reflection, and that at the end of this feat—for one often goes to great lengths to succeed in creating this envy—the other is completely forgotten through an arrogant attitude. Obviously, because there is no encounter. It is indeed a diabolical and adolescent mechanism, to borrow Tony Anatrella's apt phrase. "I lack self-confidence like an adolescent—even though I am already an adult—I bolster myself by displaying my intimacy and creating the curiosity of others, I become the center of attention for others whom I quickly reject because this other person has, in a way, created me and is no longer of any use to me, reminding me of my efforts, and sometimes the humiliations I received to get where I am." “No chance of connection can arise from this attitude. It is logical that by constantly focusing on oneself, one no longer sees or values ​​others. The other even becomes an obstacle to freedom, which can only be individual. The disintegration of society also finds its source in this attitude. This self-absorbed era, where everyone displays their personal experience, is based on narcissism, hoping to gain a few seconds of glory from this exhibition. To create envy, even if it means having nothing afterward. To create envy as if to live the dream life, even if only for a few minutes. Creating envy can only lead to misery. But what wouldn't one do for a few seconds of this false glory? Where the Ancients taught us to handle all things related to envy with great discretion and discernment, not to create envy when it was possible to avoid it, to respect this rule, valid for all times and places, we have the will to become objects of envy . ^” Narcissism is always an atrophy of love. A fatal search for oneself through the other. Or perhaps, even more dubious, and closer to legend, a search for the other through oneself.

Personal experience is meant to be definitive. It brooks no contradiction. It is nothing but vanity. Everyone knows the phrase from Ecclesiastes: "Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas…" (Vanity of vanities, all is vanity). This phrase will soon lose all meaning because no one will know what the word vanity means anymore. Perhaps it will even be considered a compliment? A kind of accomplishment, a sort of fulfillment? On that day, intimacy will mean presenting oneself naked to the masses; on that day, pornography will be considered one of the Fine Arts; on that day, the world will have nothing left to learn. On that day, intimacy will have been vanquished, and with it, inner life. People will have nothing left of their own; they will have ridiculed everything in the world, and it is the Prince of this world who will rejoice, his work of demolition reaching its end. On that day, misery will reign over the world, because along with intimacy, prayer, and therefore truth, will lie in the gutter, broken, ragged, and bruised. And indecency, imposture, and lies will parade before them, spitting on them, striking them, and vilifying them. "You used to strut about, proudly representing great, immutable principles, but now you are discredited and reduced to nothing, while we are the new guardians of the Temple. Justice is served."². »