Thinkling

But there is something inconsistent and possibly hypocritical about this self-assured tone of the critics. Because as long as our whole civilised existence, yes, the very economic progress for the benefit of which all that deregulation is supposed to be happening, is based on the concept of easing mankind from all drudgery and every inconvenience, of providing the ultimate security of cheap energy and cheap goods available to almost everyone, of assuring leisure as an alternative, not complement, to labour, so long it will be only natural for individual members of the society to request and expect for such security to be delivered and guaranteed by all available public resources.

In a non-trivial way, in this respect, as for the basic structure of the underlying psychology, current French protests have perhaps more in common than would appear at first sight with the U.S. administration's assertion of the right to protect American interests and American way of life by intervening in various areas all over the world in the name of assuring, obviously, not adventurous flexibility and unregulated fluid openness, but nothing else than security, predictability, and well regulated order. And it appears to make perfect sense to read, say, the Patriot Act as a result of choice between freedom with risk and restriction with security. Whether such trade-off between freedom and security concerns labour markets and international trade regulations or whether it concerns internal policing and international relations, there is still the same fundamental psychology at work.

It is difficult to decide whether in the end humans really thirst more for freedom than for safety, and for prosperity more than for security. And more often than not, our representatives from all sides of the political spectrum seeking our votes, persuade us that we are as a matter of course entitled to full security, that our ways of life and our levels of energy consumption and waste production are our inalienable right which our economies, organisations, institutions, and armies are here to deliver and protect. Why is it then cowardly, reactionary and shortsightedly improvident to seek security and protection from unregulated markets, when it is not commonly classified as cowardly, reactionary and improvident to seek by all available means the security of our energy supplies and protection of our national interests?