What is the real state of the union?

A third major component of contemporary Western morality is consumerism. Much has been said about the consumption-oriented society. Control over others, through processes of possession, domination, and seduction, are the main mechanisms at work here. Wealth is supposed to be the natural aim of human action and the sole source of prestige, respect and social status. This is of course encouraged by marketing campaigns that sometimes run very deep, such as those purveyed by the automotive industry. There are people who withdraw from business and worldly preoccupations, and turn towards the wisdom of countries where spirituality is still rooted in the culture. (Gandhi had defined Indian identity as a spiritual one, opposed to Western "materialism".) This is a reaction against the excesses of possession values, for which is substituted detachment. In general, spiritual consciousness and preoccupations are progressing significantly in the Western countries, as evidenced in clothing and hairstyle fashions and musical trends expressing the fascination Westerners feel for the spiritual far East.

The TISR MODEL, elaborated by Patrick Hunout in the years 1995-1996, is an attempt to reach global understanding of the current transformations occurring in our contemporary societies. This diagrammatic model represents the consistency that exists between three dimensions: economic flexibility that produces precariousness, immigration that produces anomie, and individualism that produces a cellular, atomistic society.

These three trends contribute to further destruction of the social link. Individualism first helps develop "autonomous" and "proactive" individuals, whose behaviors adapt in a quicker, easier way to economic and technological changes in the market economy, and whose sophisticated tastes (presented as a way to "personal identity") allow some outlet for innovative, often useless, products.

By contributing to the destruction of ancestral community links, individualism then facilitates the recourse to mass immigration that emphasizes class inequalities and favors the authoritarian governance of society. In turn, multiethnicity further breaks up ancestral community links, and thus contributes to strengthening individualism that eventually tends to become the only way to survive in a society deprived of a collective project.

In the heart of the quest for the "self" that contemporary individuals believe to be a process that frees them from the weight of societal and family constraints hides a new, infinitely subtle form of slavery.

In these conditions, our societies have become very fragile. George W. Bush said in his speech that "in all these efforts, however, America's purpose is more than to follow a process - it is to achieve a result: the end of terrible threats to the civilized world". But aren't threats to civic society dangerous too?