These are strange times, in which many things emerge: the best and the worst. And crises are sometimes salutary, even if they cause suffering and disarray. They incite us to question and challenge ourselves. They punctuate the history of humanity and punctuate its evolution.
But successive crises never occur at the same level of evolution. The current health, economic and political crisis, or rather crises, have emerged in a context of unprecedented interconnection. With the Internet and the explosion of social networks, information is circulating, making civil society both more aware and more critical. Political dictators have made no mistake. If you control the flow of information, you control people's minds. Even in the so-called "democracies" of the West, only three news agencies relay the news: Reuters and AFP. That's not much. But information is like water. It seeps in through the smallest orifice and eventually runs out.
In the meantime, divisions are being created between those who believe official information and those who doubt it, those who don't want to take a critical stance out of fear or simple personal comfort, and those who revolt in the face of freedoms that are diminishing over time under the pretext of illusory security, because in the end we'll all die one day.
I'm not going to get into a debate about who's right and who's wrong. It's a question of personal conscience and awakening. What I will focus on is the importance of critical thinking and self-expression.
You have to learn to think critically, and I'll give you an example. I feel angry and annoyed by the televised speeches of certain political figures. I have two options. Either I turn off the TV and call them 'names' (I maintain my anger), or I turn off the TV and move on (I bury my anger until the next time and do nothing : apathy), or I turn off the TV and ask myself what triggers this anger and annoyance on the part of someone I don't know (I exercise my critical thinking); In the third case, I ask myself what meaning this has for me, what it reminds me of, what personal values are not respected by this individual or rather what he represents (but what does he represent?), his speech (which I didn't listen to), his style, the means used .....
This leads us to see that, beyond the individual - sympathetic or not, but that's unimportant - there's something else going on, particularly on the political front, a conflict between the societal values he represents and my own values. And this naturally leads to the question: what do I do with this anger, knowing that anger is pure energy, a fire which, if it doesn't get out, can burn you? So what action should I take?
Everyone will come up with their own answer, depending on who they are. There are no right or wrong answers; there are only individual and intelligent (or not) answers, i.e. based on stepping back from an emotion and critically analyzing the reasons that triggered the emotion in order to act and speak out, which is one form of informed action.
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