Democracy: the world's broad credo

The great movement of individualisation in our Western societies is bringing a radically new character to our societies: it privatises the social bond. The democratic creed is getting rid of the mass of "people", an obsolete and demonetized concept, it is getting rid of the bonds of sovereignty shared between the rulers and the governed.

Democracy will expand into a new dimension: that of the rights that protect, give the rules of the game and decide between individualities; that of private enjoyment that leads to well-being or personal success; that of the willingly militant demand for a global right to defend human beings. Politics is thus redefined according to the logic of the individual by right.

The modern liberal spirit puts the coexistence of singularities as a priority axis. This new dimension of the democratic conception transcends market interests alone. It is not constrained to the mere commodities of the exchange of goods, services or people. It has a much deeper nature, and reveals a requirement of a universal nature. The arrival of the Internet will be both the revealing and the accelerator of this change; the network of networks transposes into technological reality the need to show solidarity with shared individualities while preserving their freedom and detachment.

● Today's world, the atmosphere of the time, by deepening the internal logic of the concept of democracy to that of the individual in freedom, broadens its meaning to its most extreme contours. The concept of democracy expands and carries away any opposition that may be found within its area: reactionaries and revolutionaries alike are pulverized, religions, traditions and even history cannot serve as a pretext for any limit to the freedom of individuals. Democracy thus regains its foundations and principles, but without the need to defend them. Absolute and universal, they are undeniable and undefended.

● Having reached its zenith, democracy is struck by vertigo; deprived of contradiction and opposition, stuck on its right, it finds itself alone, struck by uncertainty. Deprived of relays and support, it must seek and invent, if necessary, the new architecture of its evolution. Democracy is no longer just a regime or a social state; it has become a way of being for humanity, an abstract anthropology, a virtual kingdom of free individualities. Unbound by any collective attachment, individualities are the free electrons of a total, global, planetary system; democracy then becomes an idea without politics, a place of dissolution of any social system, a triumphant instrument of the most radical economic liberalism. Instrumentalized by the logic of the market, conveyed by the rhizomes of hyperinformation, proclaimed as a messianic value, this democracy confusingly shapes the world.

Sung on all tunes, the Democratic melody takes, according to the continents and regions of the planet, the accents of a murmur, a triumphal march or a Requiem. Universal democracy, compulsory, imposed, aroused, preserved or delivered, is the creed of the world, a new fundamentalist religion whose followers have taken possession of themselves, individuals of the world, free, but slaves of their absolute freedom.