"The coronavirus may generate a rupture"

The pandemic of coronavirus is already having global repercussions. The FAO is alarmed by the risk of food shortages for certain countries, the French economy has officially entered into recession, the health system is experiencing shocks … Part of the population fears a collapse of the system. At the same time, nature seems to take its place. The clearer and calm waters see the return of whales, dolphins, turtles and all kinds of little ones Pisces. Animals, ordinarily, far from cities approach it. What will happen after the crisis Covid-19 ?

Vincent Mignerot, Essayist, independent researcher in human sciences and founder of the association Adrastia whose objective is "To anticipate and prepare for the decline of thermo-industrial civilization in an honest, responsible and dignified manner", gives us his analysis.

From the most optimistic environmentalists to survivalists, everyone has their own perception of the collapse. What's yours ?

To understand well, it is necessary to start from the basic conditions of existence for a living being: the capture ofenergy (for humans, food), the proper functioning of metabolism (health) and protection against assault (security). If one of the three conditions is not met, the organisms risk dying individually or no longer exist as community of individuals.

The framework in which one must maintain these conditions to stay alive exercises three types of pressure essential:

• Authoritarian: there is no alternative to the need to capture energy, have a functional metabolism and guarantee its safety.
• Arbitrary: a failure can occur without warning (illness, predation, etc.).
• Totalitarian: there is not a single living being that is not subject to the authoritarian and arbitrary aspects of existence.

Humanity is thespecies who became, by natural selection, the most efficient in the development and use of techniques. These techniques allowed him to push the pressure of competition for existence outside of his organization. Thanks to the'Agriculture, humanity has increased the number of calories that she can get. It heals more effectively and protects itself better than all other species thanks to infrastructure and high-performance weapons.

But the deployment of these techniques may be hampered by external factors. For example, if it lacks energy or resources, if the weather changes or obviously if a pathogenic reached, humanity can find itself unable to maintain the effectiveness of its tools. If in these circumstances, it still maintains its organization and it does not undergo too rapid or significant demographic decline, it may only suffer a decline without major break. Adaptation to a new context. If she loses control of the situation, she suffers a collapse.

With the pandemic, we are at a crossroads. If humanity controls the situation, it will be able to set out again on bases comparable to those which preceded the crisis. If she loses control, something will have collapsed and there will be no return to the initial state. The coronavirus may generate a rupture, in particular depending on the collective capacities to avoid or not the collapse of health systems.

Part of the population fears that the coronavirus pandemic will lead to the collapse of an entire section or the entire system. Are you making connections between collapse and coronavirus?

For the moment, I'm not doing it. In the study of the risk of collapse, the coronavirus is however a comparison of models with reality. A pandemic is sometimes seen as a trigger for global collapse.

In any event, we can only learn from this pandemic after the fact. If collapse is avoided, it is possible that our societies will readjust, that the economy will “reboot”. The coronavirus crisis may allow the economy to get rid of speculative bubbles and activities that were no longer profitable, it would then restart, as strong as the resources available would allow it.

What can already be analyzed, however, is the difference in crisis management according to historical and cultural factors. In South Korea, the first wave of contamination seems to have been relatively contained, because there was a memory of recent epidemics. In Europe, certain health strategies have been forgotten (tests, preventive stocks, daily wearing of masks), because we have hardly needed them since the influenza Spanish in 1918. The forgetting of techniques and strategies is in itself an aggravating factor in the risk of collapse.

Beyond the fears that the crisis creates, some people hope that this gives us the opportunity to build a better world, especially from an ecological point of view. Is this a possibility for you?

The Covid-19 is an external enemy. In the fight to preserve the climate and biodiversity, the enemy is us. If a collapse does not happen by itself, we would have to decide to voluntarily and considerably decrease the performance of our economies, which would greatly reduce our collective benefits, purchasing power, etc. This is obviously desirable for the long term but I am not sure that this is possible in the short term, at least not on a scale sufficient to take sufficient care of our environment.

However, one of the positive points that we could consider is that our societies understand that resilience local is required. We have the example of this with the manufacture of protective masks, part of which will have to be relocated. Without being naive about the fact that the economy will remain globalized for a long time, but at least to better cushion certain shocks and limit the health and social impacts of the next crises.

In this case, maybe the pandemic could lead to a general awareness of certain issues?

Perhaps. But paradoxically, it is possible that this awareness has counterproductive effects. On the one hand, an awareness has never changed the world, it is behaviors that do it. And there is no guarantee that they will change. On the other hand, humanity has certainly always had an ambivalent and defiant relationship with nature.

The coronavirus comes from identified animals. Symbolically, wild life has avenged itself on us. Humanity may tend to take revenge in return. Out of fear and out of betrayal.

Do you draw particular conclusions from our situation, from our reactions?

We are experiencing a Review ofecology Politics. The first point to be dealt with would be to no longer categorize in the same way what is a collapse and what is a process of decline. This makes it possible to distinguish what is inevitable from what is avoidable. A decline is inevitable for our societies, the resources necessary for their functioning are not unlimited. During this decline, we will be able to cross more or less large-scale breaks, but the loss of control during these breaks is not inevitable.

Anyway, if something changes after the pandemic, in my opinion it will not be fundamentally thermo-industrial societies, but perhaps the stories that allow us to make sense of our existence and define ideals to achieve.

Our societies will perhaps less adhere to the idea of ​​absolute freedom, of infinite growth and understand that all their choices are indexed to constraints over which they have no control. For example the climate variability, forever uncontrollable, or else the decline in agricultural yields due to the global warming and some depletion resources, or the occurrence of unexpected shocks, of which the pandemic is an example.

But if we no longer believe in infinite growth or absolute freedom tomorrow, we will not become “protectors of nature”. We never knew how to do it, and we never will. We will continue to produce and consume, arbitrating between our short-term interests and more or less coherent attempts to protect the long term.

The human species has probably self-domesticated during its evolution. It disciplines itself and cooperates on a large scale because it is the most efficient way of optimizing the exploitation of the environment. Today, we are probably partly domesticated by technologies digital, because these optimize the circulation of all the flows which satisfy our elementary needs. By increasing the ecological impact accordingly. What takes over in today's crisis, for the management of our companies, are algorithms. Among the scenarios that we can imagine for the future, we can envisage that humanity becomes even more dependent on these algorithms. This dependence poses deep existential questions.

What we may be able to aim for, as a new ideal to be attained, is what I call the " ecological singularity " A hypothetical moment when humanity would accept that it is incapable of protecting its environment and that it must integrate the limits of the planet in its adaptation. Environmental protection is a story, a construction cultural, but that is not a real possibility.

Do you have any ideas, recommendations, so that the post-coronavirus goes well?

I hope that we will be able to come to terms with what has led us to this risk. That is to say, our illusions of all power and total sovereignty in the direction of our destiny. Our existence is constrained by parameters over which we have only the illusion of having control: the thermodynamic, the natural selection and its implications for the functioning of human societies. Even if our mind includes an area for deliberation and we can make choices, these are always constrained in their applicability. In any case, we cannot self-determine, as we often believe.

The acceptance that we are not all-powerful seems to me to be a priority. We must deconstruct this illusion in order to best serve our neighbor, strictly taking into account the limits physical. This seems essential to me in order to limit suffering and tension in a world that will become more and more constrained, whatever happens.