AURELIEN BARRAU - "SORTIR DE NOS ADDICTIONS" | LIMIT #BeyondGrowth

Aurélien Barrau responds to Mr. Dombrovskis, who claimed that decoupling between economic growth and ecological catastrophe is underway.

He argues instead that there is actually a super-coupling between growth and ecological catastrophe.

He chooses to speak in French as a small provocation against all hegemonies, including those of language itself.

From the outset, he announces his intention to contradict both President Von der Leyen and the prevailing consensus, setting a direct and provocative tone.

• Planetary boundaries exist that we are exceeding, which is unsustainable. • The deterioration of biosphere integrity is a threat even more extreme than climate warming. • Our survival is incompatible with the pursuit of growth.

Denying these facts today amounts to complicity in mass crime.

He judges these findings, despite their revolutionary tone, still too conventional, too timid and narrow.

• Climate warming threatening planetary habitability • Ocean acidification • Disruption of biogeochemical cycles • Introduction of invasive species • Pollution and biodiversity collapse

The crisis is profoundly systemic: the metastatic delirium of the economic-technological war machine is untenable.

Our way of inhabiting space transforms the planet into waste, in an inconsistent, irrational, and culpable manner.

The question of post-growth or degrowth thus obviously arises.

He announces his intention to go further and state things more provocatively: there would actually be no problem with growth at all.

There is no sense in calling "growth" what actually amounts to a decline in our power to be.

He compares this linguistic abuse to the use of "artificial intelligence" for algorithms that are not intelligent at all.

• Automation of recruitment • Marginalization of artists • Standardization of expectations • Atrophy of possibilities • Deployment of mass control and surveillance • Autonomization of finance

The inquiry is not scientific in nature but political, poetic, axiological, and ontological.

What destroys life also erodes meaning, so no real effort is needed to change course.

Our loves, ideas, writings, equations, symphonies, intelligences, and empathies can be tenfold multiplied.

What is improperly called "degrowth" merely refers to breaking free from our deadly addictions.

It would not be deprivation but healing, a disenchantment.

He addresses President Metsola this time to contest the notion that nearly clean and infinite energy would be desirable.

Having access to nearly infinite energy would be, in his view, the worst scenario imaginable.

The major issue is not the source of energy but what we do with it.

• Systematic destruction of life, devastation of ocean floors, and eradication of forests are called "growth" • More energy would mean only one thing: more destruction • We have not yet begun to ask the question of ends, only of means

Viewing biodiversity collapse as merely a threat is an error: it is itself the catastrophe.

• Two-thirds of insect populations already eradicated • Two-thirds of wild mammal populations • Two-thirds of tree populations

It is as if a doctor viewed the patient's death as merely a symptom among others, not the very point of his work.

This meta-confusion renders all analysis ineffective.

Planetary boundaries are welcome because creating, living, inventing, imagining always requires working within a frontier.

We are not God; finitude is our lot, and beauty always emerges through constraint.

Recognizing this is not resignation or abdication, but choosing to walk without blinders toward a richer, more dazzling, yet more fragile dream.

Our heedlessness was delinquency; our current obstinacy begins to border on self-terrorism.

We are heirs to the Logos, the sublime heart of ancient Greece, a brilliant but dangerous invention of a rationality that believes itself unique, universal, and omnipotent.

This Logos is both the jewel and the scourge of the West, now facing certain failure.

A little humility would be welcome: abandon our self-satisfaction and seek to learn rather than teach, especially toward the Global South.

Our Neolithic and Paleolithic predecessors were extremely exploratory; our specificity is not to go astray, but to persist despite the evidence.

We are the deadliest civilization of all time from the biosphere's perspective, and are becoming among the most inept and unhappy.

The question of modalities (how to emit slightly less CO2) should no longer interest us; only the question of ends matters: where do we want to go?

A completely different world, freed from our pernicious addictions and necrophilic predations, might require neither effort nor sacrifice.

He concludes with the idea of an assumed enjoyment of reinvested power, before thanking the audience.