Transcript in English, (translated by Fred Andres)
You Published in 2009 "CRISIS OR COUP" on the Global Economic Crisis. Can you summarise for those who have not read it, the content of the book? Michel, you are a graduate from the Ecole de Commerce, co-founder of the internet website scriptoblog.com and a former member of Egalite & Reconciliation. You're also an essayist.
Yes, this is simply a book that explains that there are two crises: a visible crisis that has been widely relayed in the media which is the so-called sub-prime crisis and so on. And then behind it there is a another crisis which is much deeper, a crisis of the Western model faced to the rise of other poles of power at a geostrategic level.
What I explain in "Crisis or Coup", it is that in reality the sub-prime crisis and all the events that took place between mid-2007 and mid-2009 corresponded to the way the oligarchies wanted to organise through the visible crisis, their management of the real crisis that is behind and which we do not see, and that is a much broader crisis of the Western world model in its entirety and of globalisation.
Today, You're back with "ECONOMIC CRISIS OR CRISIS OF MEANING". What led you to expand your thinking and ask yourself the question of the crisis of meaning?
When I finished "Crisis or Coup", I'd finished my work from a purely macro-economic angle but I realised there was still a pending question: "Why do our oligarchies feel the need to manage things as they do?"
In other words, in "Crisis or Coup", I explained the how but didn't explained the why.
It is quite clear now that we have a ruling class that is currently organising the centralisation of power, that doesn't manage the situation in a perspective that seems logical in the long run, even in terms of its own power.
Well, we can analyse it, we can explain it, we can show that this is the case.
But the question is why do they do what they do?
Why do they behave like this?
There are quantities of possible explanations: they can be found a dime a dozen on Internet or in bookshops.
First, there are the conspiracy explanations. There's something for everyone: Jewish conspiracy, Masonic conspiracy, the Skulls and Bones, or the Jesuits -I have even read that!- etc...
This is not entirely untrue, there actually are conspiracies, for sure: History is made of conspiracies.
Obviously, there are pressure groups, lobbies, obviously there are secret interests or partially hidden interests that act out in the shadow and this explains part of the events.
But all these explanations did not satisfy me.
There is a pro-Israel lobby in the United States and Europe, that is obvious. That this lobby acts at least partially in coordination with certain forces of high finance, that too is obvious...
But we can clearly see as soon as we study this matter a little closer that said coordination is not perfect, far from it: David Rockefeller is not a Jew, Zbigniew Brzezinski is probably not a Jew, the interests of some globalists' circles are now coming into collision with those of Israel: we understand that the Jewish conspiracy and so on, all the great theories of conspiracy around the Jewish world can cover some elements of reality. But it is not a main factor for explaining.
Another theory: the conspiracy of the "rich" the plot of the super-class.
The Skulls and Bones, Yale, the circles of high finance, you combine all that, you mix it all up... It isn't wrong either, it does exist.
Skulls and Bones, that exists.
The Yale University networks, those too exist.
The hyper-class networks, they exist.
But why would those people be united while also competing in so many areas?
How could they form such a homogeneous group when in reality their interests are divergent in many theatres of operations?
Which ones for instance?
For instance, if we take the so-called hyper-class and then the actual head of this group: several thousand individuals and families who actually, in practise, own much of the world. Why should the great German upper-class and the great British upper-class necessarily make common cause?
The great British upper-class relies on the City, the great German upper-class relies on the industry. The interests of the City and the interests of German industry are not necessarily the same.
Today for example, we have a very clear case in the United States with the coexistence inside the Obama administration of people like Rahm Emanuel who are clearly in the pro-Israel lobby and on the other hand a more or less occult adviser like Brzezinski who has recently said that if Israeli warplanes flew over Iraq to bomb Iran, they should be taken down.
So we see that the supposed homogeneity of these environments does not work, it's more complicated than that.
And then, reflecting on this basis, I also thought: should we always blame these small groups that are at the top and manipulate everyone?
It is true that these groups manipulate everyone, it is true that they are driving a certain number of changes that cause disasters... But they are not the only culprits .
Just doing a little poll around yourself will show you that the average Joe too often also participates to the disaster.
How often shall we meet, let's say the typical middle-class fellow, slavishly repeating what he has read in L'Express or in Le Point?
Why does he slavishly repeat?
How come he doesn't analyse critically what he reads?
Probably, the cause of all causes behind all these developments, the mechanisms behind what I described in "Crisis or Coup ", at the end, it's a crisis of Meaning.
In reality, this is the beginning of the implosion of how to construct Meaning.
Meaning is the information processed by an autonomous subject.
The definition of the general structure of Meaning is: you look around you, you have a lot of information, you extract some of the information, you filter it, categorise the items you have filtered, place them on axles, articulate these axles and this is how you're going to create Meaning.
That's how it works.
What is true for the individual brain is also true for the collective brain.
Somehow we could by analogy -even if it isn't all that accurate- represent human society like a human body with practical features: well, restaurants are like mouths, fields have a function of transformation of matter for nutritional purposes, it's like a gut in some way, and then when you climb on top, the global information system built by society, the information and Meaning-making system is like a global brain.
How does the global brain of Western society work?
When you create Meaning, if you take a book of philosophy, it'll explain that there are basically three ways to understand the process by which one creates Meaning.
If you take a classical philosophy course, they'll tell you, you can be an automist Aristotelian and consider that Meaning resides somehow in the world of Ideas and that it descends into Matter so we perceive it, in a way.
One can also be liberal, let's say, or modern, in a certain sense, modern in a rather liberal way, and consider that Meaning does not exist in the world. That Meaning is put on the world by the human eye.
Then one can also be, let's say, Hegelian -there is an issue that would be very long to develop which is in this case, whether you would definitely have to be Marxist, we won't develop this issue here- and consider that there is Meaning in Matter and that when we formulate it, we do not invent it, we discover it.
The global brain of Western societies today works the modern liberal way. It is the look of Man that gives Meaning to the world and it is the functioning of the global brain of Western society in a way, that creates the common shared Meaning.
It refers to no transcendence.
Neither is it dialectic.
It isn't really materialism in the true philosophical sense -it would seem materialistic in the common sense of the word but in the philosophical sense, it isn't really materialistic.
The global brain of Western societies spends its time encoding reality to create Meaning which is then attributed to Matter.
What is contemporary capitalism?
That and nothing else.
And this encoding process is achieved after a long evolution in history, a very complicated one -I won't detail it here- it is basically done through money, through the monetary signifier.
When studying a little history -particularly the history of empires- the modus operandi of this particular structure that is the empire, we realise that throughout history, an empire always tends to encode reality to register it in its system of representation.
And throughout history, at some point, what happens is that the empire in some way saturates its capacities of encoding reality.
So it begins to do what I called in the book over-coding. Which means that since it can no longer encode reality, no longer apply Meaning over reality, it will begin to create encoding territories beyond reality.
And this is what has been going on in the West in the last few decades.
Feminism is initially a rather understandable demand from women, mainly middle to upper class women, who have the time to ask themselves questions and express demands: they want to be able to think for themselves.
They're right as a matter of fact.
Very quickly, it's harnessed, seized upon by the system -especially in the English-speaking world- and it becomes a machine to enrol women in the process of monetary circulation.
The -somehow- funniest example is the famous case of Edward Bernays filming suffragettes lighting up cigarettes.
So the official version is that it's for the emancipation of women and so on.
The real version is not that at all.
It's: then, women are going to smoke and increase the turnover of the tobacco companies -I can't recall which one paid Bernays- and the whole story of women's lib over the last fifty years if we analyse it in terms of economics, it is essentially this: this is how we will encode this land so far unknown by the coding system -actually promoted by men- and that corresponds when properly analysed to a typical male logic: "how do we encode the unknown feminine land?"
Let's take an example, so pathetic it is both tragic and funny at the same time: the carbon tax.
Well, the carbon tax, as a matter of fact, if you push the logic to its limits, it means they'll charge you for the air you breathe .
So, pushing the logic to its limits, once a month they'll measure your lung capacity and tell you "Sir, you consume that much oxygen, so you reject that much carbon dioxide, so we'll charge you that much."
If we analyse what it means, it means we have created some GDP!
Fortunately, they won't go that far, I don't think so. But if they did, they'd tell you they've created "growth", in quotes.
What is growth?
Is it the growth of material economy?
Is it the growth of life?
Is it the growth of production?
No.
It's the growth of encoded territory.
Why all these groups they tell us about would they be pushed to work together so naturally if they are competitors?
This may be because they live by and for the encoding process.
That means there's a fraction of the global brain of Western society that has totally disconnected from the rest.
That seeks to take control of the rest.
It has a name: it's called schizophrenia.
The global brain of the West is suffering from schizophrenia, split personality, and the alter ego is trying to take control of the body, of the being in its totality.
So why is there crisis of Meaning?
Because we're coming to the moment where this process reaches its limits.
Now it is clear that the system is facing its internal contradictions, that it can no longer go beyond them.
In order to evermore uncover territories to encode, it mistreats ever so more reality.
To give things value, it will create paupers, so for the rich, things will appear to be more valuable to them.
What we must understand, it is that in order to encode, to create value, you can push people to consume, but you can also stop them from consuming, while giving them the desire of consumption.
This allows to extend the territory of symbolic encoding in a way, without having to extend the territory of actual encoding.
So the crisis of Meaning simply means that this process of encoding and over-coding has come to its logical conclusion, and that in order to save what constitutes their substance -ie the encoding itself- the ruling classes, in a kind of forward escape, somewhat desperate but very dangerous, put themselves in a position to impose the social body something that allows the system to live on and this is a phenomenon that has been studied by psychiatrists -particularly by psychiatrists experts in collective psychopathology- which is paraphrenia.
Roughly speaking, paraphrenia is about -now we're talking in terms of collective psychopathology- creating a declared world, a coded world, a spoken world, which is almost totally disconnected from the real world and within which the group will continue to hold fast to the image it has of itself.
So I gave an example in the book: ENRON.
ENRON is very iconic.
Well, it's a company that really, in the field of productive economy is..... ruined.
The story of ENRON is quite funny actually because virtually everything they did in the area of reality has failed!
Whether it's a power-plant in India: it fails.
They try to manage electricity in California, even before they sabotage it: it fails.
And so on and so forth.
It doesn't stop.
But the ENRON board don't want to simply admit that in the real world, their stuff implodes.
Those guys, it's their substance.
Jeffrey Skilling, the CFO, it's his substance.
If he admits that ENRON is the most mismanaged company in the U.S, he's dead.
So he just won't admit it.
They actually created a kind of ENRON mythology, when they came to congratulate themselves for shutting off the power for the greatest American State, although they're supposed to be electricity suppliers... There are recordings, audio tapes of ENRON traders conversations during major blackouts in California, it's unbelievable: the guys are overwhelmed with joy, because they bring money, in fact they bring the code -the encoding- and it doesn't matter that in reality they're destroying everything.
And I believe that ultimately what we're witnessing today, beyond the actions of all the many and varied lobbies toiling on, it's that.
Meaning that it's all of the West that is in fact becoming ENRON.
And when we see the current spectacle with States that lend to insolvent banks with rates close to nought and banks that lend to bankrupted States at rates of ten percent, what we have is an encoding system gone mad, that has transgressed from reality, which no longer refers to anything else than itself, that somehow develops its being in total schizophrenia -almost in autism- and devouring reality.
So the over-coding has reached a point where in order to continue growing, not only does it saturate reality, not only does it invent parallel worlds, but in addition, it must destroy -it must swallow up- reality.
It is a collective psychopathology, this is basically how I analyse the current crisis.
This crisis of meaning, how far can it go if it isn't in fact to the destruction of real economy as a whole?
Unfortunately, there is no reason for things to unfold in a different manner here. That is the story of the coming years, if the logic is respected. Then, I'm no prophet, I don't know for sure. But if the logic is respected, as it is the substance of those people that are part of this system of over-coding, as they can't think reality independently from that over-coding, they'll continue to save the coding and over-coding at all costs, even if it destroys reality.
For example, what we should see in my opinion is the phenomenon now happening in Greece should occur in a great State, at a date that cannot be specified -it could be in a few months, it could be in a few years.
It could be Spain, it could be England, it could even downright be the United States, and at that time, well we'll be at the crucial point: whether the system continues to race ahead to the end and it's Hitler, fascism at the scale of the Western world, or they do like the Soviet elite at the end of the Brejniev era: they consider that, fair enough, everything is collapsing and so we step in a period of anomie, where undoubtedly the implosion of the encoding and over-coding system will leave a largely impoverished society, with little ability to organise itself, and one or two very difficult decades ahead.
Societies like the Indian or Chinese societies or others, are they affected by this crisis of meaning or not?
In my opinion, and at least seen from a distance and from the books I've read, what actually happens is that China is going through its equivalent of our postwar boom.
Meaning, they're in the phase where the encoding is maximised. They have not yet reached -or at least not massively- territories of over-coding and they are not yet -that's for sure- at the stage of gobbling up reality in order to save some over-coding. So, although there is no reason why it should be different for them, as they're -let's say- half a century behind, they still have some nice decades ahead of them.
And we in the West, do we have tools to fight against this crisis of meaning?
To exit a crisis of Meaning, the only way is to rebuild Meaning.
Rebuilding Meaning means we have to admit that the way we use to build it is obsolete.
In clear, it means getting out of what I was talking about earlier: that modern vision, somewhat liberal of the construction of Meaning. So that means admitting at some point: "No, it is not the look of Man that gives Meaning to the world."
I use in my book an image that is taken from Goethe's Faust: Mephistopheles will obtain the soul of Faust if Faust asks at some point the suspension of time. So for Faust to request the suspension of time, he brings Faust to the Walpurgis Night -in short, a satanic orgy.
What will save Faust is that in the middle of the Walpurgis Night, he'll remember Margaret. Margaret, that's the feminine archetype and so on.
Right now, we live the Walpurgis Night.
We're right in the heart of it.
And I don't see many people who will remember Margaret.
Published the 3rd of May 2009.
