Beyond the atrocious and useless deaths, the greatest victim of the ravages of the present era is a sense of humour.

No matter what some minds that are too political for my taste or too hopelessly correct for me want to force us to think, there is room in our brains for different levels of values attributed to a word or an expression. It is this interplay of interactions, networks and platforms that allows us to intellectually elaborate concepts and jump from one idea to another by association. It is this "play of words" that makes the mind rich and dynamic. It is this playfulness of language, whether soliloquized or expressed, that makes us potentially creative beings.

To neglect this aspect of oneself, to fail to maintain this facetious gear, is to smooth out differences with a steamroller, to miss the turn of one's own imagination and to crash into the wall of seriousness painted in the false colours of respect for others.

To refuse to understand that insult for laughter is not insult to destroy, that it is on the contrary an open door to reflection on oneself and on the societies that bind us, is to deliberately harm the hypothetical but intoxicating utopia of world cohesion for chaotic short-term benefits. It is, contrary to the supposed concern for the well-being of future generations, to be interested only in the egocentric immediacy of the comfort of one's own life.

Identity-based positions, whether on gender, religion, ideology, ethnicity or culture, have the mission of peddling and growing simplifying movements of thought under the guise of social progress and legitimacy.

Of course, it is not the battles that are false, but the discourse that supports them, which is often fallacious.

Yes, a sense of humour is more important than life itself if it becomes devoid of it; more important than the republic, than the symbols and virtues with which moralists of all kinds have always adorned themselves.

It is not those who are deprived of it on principle - forgive them Lord, they don't know what it is - who should be blamed for being deprived of it, but rather those who have an education that is meant to be enlightened.

Today more than ever, it is vital, though also unfortunately deadly, to desperately believe in this humour, which is so fine that it can border on the most rude.

That the good citizen and institutional tone of the famous previous world We owe our present sufferings to it. Guilty of having cultivated stupidity and pedantry in all strata of its social body, the vanity of the spirit of seriousness and good taste has not, however, given more lustre to our culture. On the contrary. Imbecilely infatuated good taste has killed off much more than poor humour and necessary derision, the unfortunate victims of a world that judges before it can smile. Today, it is the absence of both that threatens to kill us at every street corner.

By making the choice of society, for it is one, of an education incapable of giving the first place to fun above all disciplines, a world has been created where the first value is to be respected. But beware, not the respect that is self-evident for any civilized and gentle being who has consideration for the integrity of the body of others. No, we're talking about the kind of respect that's heavy, the kind that a jerk looks at you with all the self-righteousness that his primitive and self-satisfied mind grants him. We naturally find a primary source of this in the famous "You insult my mother! "This is probably a reference to a mother who unconsciously represents the Virgin of the Christians. We find this formula in as many you insult my race, my origins, my country, my religion, my social background, my sexuality and many other supposed identity values to which we should restrict ourselves. Between these two considerations of respect is indeed one of those subtleties of meaning that I am talking about and which the brain of an evolved human being is supposed to be capable of. In this field, it is indeed humour which alone can grant it, by its properties made of extraordinary nuances, all the plasticity with which the mind is endowed.

In this sense, we are still primitives for a long time to come. Fortunately for us, the current terribly tense context gives us the perfect opportunity to reconsider and why not, to get out of it.

Before focusing on the place taken by the one perceived as abroad or any other scapegoat supposedly carrying the miasma of impurity, it would be good first to ask why in our society such a vast space is given to stupidity, thus ensuring that its reserve of life forces is constantly renewed and entirely devoted to its glory.

If, for example, we lift the veil of the much-used contemporary term "incivility", we find hidden therein first of all the concept of brainlessness. The fearsome predator, if he proves to be a real danger to the peaceful individual, is not necessarily mediocre, far from it, but the real rude one is a clod who boasts about it and no longer wants to be ignored since a certain social varnish has been broken. The truth is that there are some in jogging suits as well as in white collars. And the real evil is there, emerging behind a translucent absence of finesse fully valued by the times.

Thickness of thought is in vogue, and soon idiocy will appear at last naked and claim to be so, with its share of rights to freely exist. Yes, for ages it seems that we have been aspiring to value the poverty of reflection and personal imagination - not to be confused with the imaginary which bursts out in the eyes of the world but only produces works, also consumable products, and not thought. Above all, let's not tire ourselves out with take the lead by an extra intelligence that would harm the poetic aestheticism that gives us so much pleasure!

And it is certainly not the charming idiocy of the refrains of the yéyé ditties of yesteryear that I will castigate, but the mediocrity which, aesthete or vulgar, feels superior, gloats in believing itself to be poetic or social and on all sides cries out for respect. Of course, this hollow pretension is not new, but it is now well known and is sometimes considered a model. It too, through its propaganda and its elites, has been able to foment its advent through atrocities less visible than murder, through a miserable creative requirement and through small antechamber arrangements. This cultureJohn Waters, as he must be called, has chosen to deny the senseless literary experiments of Sade, has rejected the bonhomie of large parts of our pornography, has spat on the power of the art of bad taste, so named to better degrade the childhood of his origins, which only asked to continue laughing. If John Waters were in the Pantheon of cinema, the world would know fewer horrors. So after all, so much for his cultured face and his exploding world. Fragile derision had to be given its place; it had to be defended and not sulked with a disdainful pout. What are you complaining about, you serious friend? Suddenly, unbelievably, you've found someone more serious than you. So serious that it's death that cuts through and not just a stroke of the pen that strikes out everything that ignores your values.

You too, by your fundamentalist judgment, have only been able to react stupidly to words and images. Have I not heard sermons on the obscenity of sex and how many more do I not hear? In blind and insane fanaticism, your prudery has found its masters. Again, but what are you complaining about? Is this not the world you dreamed of, ready to denounce the indecency of bodies and the impurity of speech?

Everything is there to understand, however, in the very seat of thought, in what makes the whole art of the actor: in the intention that precedes the word. We should have been informed and trained earlier. The decerebrate only hears and reads the words, but how many make the effort to detect the intention? Certainly not the members of a fickle and at the same time non-credible and weightless crowd, who one day will embrace the police for having saved them and the next day throw opprobrium on them for the brutalities they commit and the next day again, reduced to their individuality, will come to whine that they have been robbed. The amateur politician and claimant of Sunday and social networks has easy contempt for those on whom he is humiliatingly dependent by forced necessity. He takes his revenge through bitterness and a one-sided judgment that he mistakes for popular solidarity.  

Yes, because of their lack of love for humour, the serious missed the world and imposed their sharia on us long before others did.

The heralds of outrage, the offended spectators, the indignant deputies, the bellicose of all kinds have prepared the ground and continue to plough the terrible immensity of a field where horror now spontaneously germinates. But this seed, so generous and so full of devastating power, is not called hatred, as we so easily like to call it by this quite ordinary feeling, a commonplace inhabitant of hearts. No, this poison of all societies is defined in hollow, bordered in its perimeter by the bloated persuasion of the individual to be definitively someone No, the terror inflicted on others is not rooted in a hatred that would be there as an unfortunate piece of our unfinished constitution. No, the terror inflicted on others does not originate in a hatred that would be there as an unfortunate piece of our unstable and unfinished constitution. The cruelty in the making is already well and truly contained in the self-righteousness that pushes one to want to be the chosen one of a particular destiny. The inconsiderately correlated crime is to have the weakness of mind to believe it, without joking, for real. But the absolute, most unforgivable crime is to allow those very people to have a high and certain idea of themselves. There is no need for a religion to nourish vain hopes and encourage violence. The fatuity of thinking that one day one can "be", the fear, on the contrary, of never becoming anything in the eyes of one's own caste; both of them largely provide for this.      

It was necessary to think beforehand so as not to wake up afraid of the world. It was necessary to preserve childhood in itself in all its cleverness and ballast. It was necessary to implement the discernment that distinguishes the amusement of pretending to be important from the authentic and pernicious self-satisfaction. It was necessary to accept and understand that actors have more respect for the human being than those who blindly believe they are characters.

I have experienced contempt and humiliation. It was not then the work of evil bearded men thirsting for my unholy blood, but of good decision-makers sitting civilly behind their comfortable desks.

Shouting is an outlet, but beyond that? Are we really being asked to live with a virus or to become accustomed to accepting more and more fear regardless of the nature of the threats?

But fortunately for me, phew! On fear, at least there, I know a lot.