Quebec : "Democracy would encourage the maintenance of “toxic climates”...

By presenting adversity and the clash of ideas as harmful to the mental health of elected officials, those in power suggest that democracy is dangerous and must therefore be restricted.

By Jérôme Blanchet-Gravel for Libre Média

Original article : https://libre-media.com/articles/la-democratie-cest-trop-dur

The Quebec government announced last week that it was releasing $2 million to help municipal officials in “distress”. This decision demonstrates the growing influence of psychology on society and the climate of victimization that the establishment knows how to take advantage of to strengthen its power.

The role of municipal elected official has become in recent years one of the most grueling in Quebec. At a time of the offensive in Gaza and the war in Ukraine, the migration crisis and the famine in Yemen, the function is even described by La Presse as “inhuman”, a new peak of ridicule in a society which is no longer at all aware of what poverty is.

Safety first

It is not a question of pretending that the role of elected official is easy, nor of encouraging the lynching of our representatives, but of taking into account the slippery slope on which Western countries are embarking, which have made security their new supreme value. In the West, Quebec is unfortunately at the forefront of this securitarianism, that is to say, this ideology which places security above all else.

It is not a question of defending the insults launched on the internet at elected officials nor the crude interventions of citizens during heated councils, but of understanding the subliminal message behind this type of decision.

Power is in the process of promoting the idea that the clash of ideas is exhausting, that proximity to citizens is sometimes harmful, that it would perhaps be better to reduce the size of the agora, if not to arbitrate more harshly among the actors. who confront each other. The peace of mind of our elected officials would in some way be more important than the hubbub of democracy, which is inherently conflictual.

The safe space against democracy

Behind the desire to protect municipal elected officials in “distress” lies a logic hostile to freedom of thought: it is basically a question of presenting it as a stressful danger to justify the strengthening of its supervision. We should protect our elected officials from adversity, in other words in a safe space.

Democracy would encourage the maintenance of “toxic climates”. With its share of agitation and its troublesome citizens, it would be a threat to its representatives and the holy “consensus”, an invention of the censors to impose a single point of view on subjects such as diversity, climate, health measures and the war in Ukraine.