Alain Bauer: “We pay the price for our blindness and our illusions”

After answering several questions from the public during his conference at the Nice Law School, Alain Bauer spoke of “pitiful globalization” during an interview with Petites Posters.

What is “pitiful globalization”?

Alain Bauer – Pitiful globalization is the opposite of a moment in which we all believed after the fall of the Berlin Wall, on the idea that war had disappeared, that crime had disappeared, that violence had disappeared, that confrontation had disappeared and that we were going to experience a happy globalization, a sort of giant Erasmus. We experienced a moment of illusion and we woke up one fine morning, essentially in 2001 with the attacks on the World Trade Center. But it had already started with the Yugoslav affair when Serbia was bombed for 99 days, by a NATO decision which put an end to the peaceful dialogue which existed between the West and Russia. This is what I explained in the previous work, “In the beginning was war”, and since then a structured confrontation has been building that we did not want to see, until the invasion of Ukraine. And so we pay the price for our blindness and our illusions. It’s valid at all levels, it’s very contagious.

Do we know why there is this explosion of violence?

Alain Bauer – Between what we know, what we believe and what we seek, what we know is the smallest part of the whole but we have indications.

The first: the establishment of criminal networks leads to territorial conflicts and therefore an increase in settling of scores. It is very sensitive in Marseille but it has spread throughout the territory.

Second indication: there are many intimate conflicts which today result in femicides or attempted homicide of a spouse which were not quantified before, which were not seen and which we did not want to see.

Third indication: there is a violentization of all social relations, between kids from the same high school, between lovers, ex-lovers, between groups of girls, between cyclists and motorists, between motorists themselves… which is growing today to the act and a form of disinhibition of ultimate violence, as if it were normal, not serious, and with people who do not even understand the seriousness of what they have done, especially among the most young or very young. It is all these elements, cumulatively, which are leading to a historic increase in homicides. We clearly feel that there is a mitigation mechanism in the act that has broken down.

Social mediation no longer exists, we no longer trust peers or fathers or social mediators or anything that previously allowed violence to be regulated.

And you can add the “ rageosphere », a space where confinement by the algorithm leads you to only agree with yourself and with people who agree with you and who suggest you do worse because you have to show that you are a true “believer”, whatever your belief may be. This leads to the effects of packs, ambushes, attempts at physical elimination, reinforced by this ease of taking action and the impossibility of making differences between the real and the virtual.

How to get out of this situation?

Alain Bauer – We have to redo a lot of things. We must remake society and therefore reinvest the system of authority. So it is not punitive authority nor police authority, it is a system of general authority which requires not punishing parents but rehabilitating them, considering that the punishment is not slow and long but it can be short and quick. In short, of revisit a whole series of dogmas from the 70s which completely failed.

Can artificial intelligence help, particularly with video surveillance?

Alain Bauer – I often say that AI is very artificial and not very intelligent. It is not yet generative or is only so in a closed framework. It is the charm of the human mind to invent things that did not exist. But AI can speed up a lot of things. The video is very useful afterwards. This makes it possible to identify an author, to carry out an investigation, to follow him in his wanderings. In terms of solving investigations, it is an extremely useful and effective tool. On the other hand, this does not always prevent what happens before. Because those who launch into an irresistible impulse despite the existence of the camera, which they see, clearly show that it is not there to stop them. So we need to know what to do, when and for what objective? It doesn't help but it doesn't help anything. We just have to frame it and above all ensure that there is no diversion of use and therefore useful and essential citizen control.

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by Sébastien GUINÉ