Author: Joachim Dehais, PMP, VP Members & Volunteers
Book review of Et si l'effondrement avait déjà eu lieu? (‘What if society’s collapse has already occurred?’) by Roland Gori
This book was very difficult for me to read, and I admit that my analysis is very limited and likely tainted by my own ideas. Nonetheless, it is of great use to readers who view with pain the condition of society and the labor codes in which we operate.
In this French language book, Roland Gori considers three elements:
The evolution and decadence of Enlightenment philosophy
Where the Greek philosophers saw existence as a cycle of life and death, or in particular the Stoics “returned man's soul to Zeus” at death, Christianity brought the notion of finitude of life, and infinity after death. To this, the Enlightenment and its evolutionary theories, such as Darwin's in the sciences, brought the idea of evolution and infinite progress in man. This ideology, itself supported by an industrial revolution that took mankind out of the constant challenge of caloric survival, was promising.
A few decades later, the first symptoms of a collapse were the two World Wars, the sign that infinite progress had come up against man's nature, and demanded the destruction of property and people to enable an ideal.
The effect of this decadence on organizational management and social relations
The big problem brought directly to us by this progressive ideology is the absence of an alternative. This lack of alternatives may have led to the formation of groups believing in collapse (doomers, Extinction Rebellion, etc.), but above all, to a race. A frantic race to create, earn, contribute and become more. This famous economic growth dominates political debates and gives rise to falsehoods. With the economy and the market as our religion, there are few ways out. Most try reducing spending and getting more for less (e.g. Temu, Lean), and above all to enable this growth which claims to support our own consumption.
In this dehumanized and dehumanizing system, people are naturally transformed into resources, roles and functions, and of course into procedures. In this way, we capitalize on physical and intellectual resources, make others as well as ourselves expendable, and thus inflict on each other a painful pressure to perform.
The principle of historical review and rhetorical argument
This then brings us to consider the psychoanalyst's view, which deals with the results of the emotional and intellectual damage done by our ideologies. The very effect and evolution of our beliefs and codes is rarely made explicit on our actions and our ability to live healthily. Among other things, this effect is often integrated without being known or understood. We observe the result, of course, but since it can be pitiful, it's useful to review the causes: This is the analysis. One of the particularities of this approach is that it reveals the malleability of memory to the patient's current needs. History, though written by its victors, is also felt now, and not replayed in its exactness like a video or measurement perfectly preserved on a hard drive. We suffer from pragmatic myopia, which means that we judge the past solely by its present, and the present by our past, hence the regression analysis.
All this to make two points: before throwing ourselves wholeheartedly into our work, we need to review our prejudices and axioms, and in a more pragmatic way, we need to know how to judge rhetoric that reframes the past to avoid pitfalls.
And Artificial Intelligence in all this? You have to talk about it to be fashionable!
Well, the principle of historical review and its use in psychoanalytic transference applies strangely well to data-driven Artificial Intelligence. The principle of historical inquiry and its own ‘a posteriori’ vision, regression, allows us to extract the “source data” used in evolution. These source data can be “traumas” or simply events which, although lost from consciousness, remain influential in memory. This transforms a system from a “black box” to a “gray box” to a “white box”, enabling us to understand its future functioning, and potentially enabling the system to “reframe” its sources and thus change its behavior.
This book is a goldmine of interesting discussions, despite the difficulty of reading it. For those interested, I recommend this conference talk given by Roland Gori, in French, posted by the Université populaire du pays d’Aix.
Author: Paul Selwold, PMP
