For this new season, the Pop Philosophy Week in Marseille has chosen a theme that challenges: “Constellations of bullshit”. No more no less. “This time is the dumbest possible”, cowardly, a bit disillusioned, Jacques Serrano, the artistic director of this festival created in 2009, whose 13th edition is held from October 11 to 16 in various cultural places of the city. “Bullshit is as difficult to define as it is to avoid”, he continues, as a preamble to these six days which, precisely, will try to decipher “the situations and behaviors that we qualify as idiots”.
The opening night at the Auction, on the theme of bullshit in politics, sets the tone in this presidential election year. With, to debate the subject, the former minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem. “A politician has probably experienced a very massive, very daily bullshit”, argues the philosopher Maxime Rovère, who also ensures that “the experience of bullshit is gender, more heavily suffered when you are a woman that a man “.
Bullshit vs stupidity
Author of the book What to do with idiots? (subtitled “So as not to remain one yourself”), it invites you to shift your gaze to the bullshit. “Questioning bullshit makes you smile a bit at first,” he explains. The idiots are the people we get annoyed about all the time, that we meet in our family, our professional environment, and through all forms of incivism. It’s the driver who cuts you off on your bike. But, continues the philosopher, by becoming the one who treats the idiot, one puts oneself in the gear of bullshit.
“I wanted to make this term something very different from stupidity,” says Maxime Rovère. The opposite of bullshit is not only being smart, as for silliness, but also benevolent. We cannot identify bullshit in the other without, by a circular phenomenon, it is developing at home. You are not benevolent if you are judging, instead of helping. “
The “echo chamber” effect of social networks
“We designate something unique and specific to our time, namely that we are constantly pitting ourselves against each other, in a register of very intense rejection”, also says the philosopher, who points to the “bedroom effect” effect. ‘echo’ of social networks. Would we no longer have the right to satire politicians, for example?
“Take bullshit seriously, it can be done lightly with humor”, nuance Maxime Rovère. He calls for less ego and arrogance in the face of idiots and hopes that at the end of this week, “everyone will be more aware that bullshit is not the others. Or, more prosaically, that you’re still someone’s jerk.