For seventy years, Western democracies were based on an implicit pact between growth, wealth, social justice and democratic stability, the material condition of which was the abundance of fossil resources. What we called the welfare state was, in fact, a carbon state.
It produced our most precious achievements of the post-war period: health for all, social protection, mass education, freedom of mobility, free time. It also provided the conditions for the effectiveness of a rule of law itself, by making fundamental rights concretely accessible. But it was based on a predation that we did not want to name.
A progressive commodification of the world
Behind each social contract, said Michel Serres, there is a natural contract. This natural contract has limits, it is not providential. Decarbonizing requires us to confront a contradiction that our societies still refuse to face: maintaining the model means destroying the material conditions of democracy; transforming it necessarily means weakening the social state that we spent a century building.
We must invent a democracy that is no longer based on a principle of unlimited abundance. This is not a comfortable program. Yet this is our task. Because it is not comfortable, we will go through degraded modes: weakened public systems, strained services, less stable institutions. Let us recognize that these degraded modes did not appear with the ecological crisis. They are already largely at work.
For several decades, an essentially instrumental and managerial rationality has tended to convert all human activity into measurable, optimizable and profitable activity. Public services themselves have not escaped this logic which has often reduced care, education or solidarity to costs to be controlled rather than to common goods to be cultivated. Part of the current fragilities comes from this progressive commodification of the world.
Do not let the transition take place on the backs of the most precarious
The ecological transition adds a second difficulty. We know that a profound transformation of our production and consumption models has become necessary, but we are still struggling to invent the economic, social and institutional forms capable of making it desirable and just.
We are in a way in the middle of the ford: incapable of sustainably maintaining the old model, but still incapable of fully inhabiting the new one. This intermediate situation reinforces tensions and multiplies vulnerabilities.
Climatic, digital, health and social flaws are already systemic and will multiply. The question is not to prevent them at all costs, which would be illusory. It is to know if these degraded modes will become degrading lifestyles for some, if collective fragilities will turn, as always preferentially, against the most vulnerable. This is the central ethical issue: not letting the transition take place on the backs of the most precarious and not responding to the limits of the world by further degrading our democratic living conditions.
How to maintain human dignity in changing systems? How can we build a social contract that is not the simple residue of the old one? This transformation involves something deeper than public policies alone: our lifestyles, our desires, our relationship with ourselves. And it is here that the essential question of the articulation between the individual and the collective arises.
Multiply the care climates
Kant was addressing a you: act in such a way that your maxim is universalizable. Jonas, in 1979, no longer addresses a you but a we: “let’s act”. The individual level is no longer enough in the face of systemic interdependence. And yet, as a clinician, I cannot simply agree with Jonas against Kant. I know this from the experience of care: when a person finds a framework for commitment, they preserve their power to act, their capacity for projection and, ultimately, their mental health. An exhausted, crushed, helpless individual will not transform anything.
This is why I defend the multiplication of care climates. Care here does not designate a therapeutic activity in the strict sense, but an institutional, relational and political environment which makes individuation possible. It constitutes an ecosystem of trust, recognition and constructive conflict where everyone can preserve their power to act with others. A climate of care is a space where individuals choose together to do differently.
The principle of individuation is not a private value opposed to the collective. It constitutes one of the anthropological conditions of a rule of law. A democracy is not just about procedures or institutions; it is based on the existence of subjects capable of discernment, consent, responsibility and participation.
Crossing degraded modes without losing our dignity
But here it is: individual action exhausts itself if it remains alone at its level. It produces what Christophe Dejours calls ethical suffering, this discouragement which wears down those who have a strong vocation. Without collective relay, commitment turns into resentment. The individual level needs the collective level to avoid suffocation.
And the opposite is just as true: the collective level needs the individual level in order not to be above ground. The major political norms remain sterile if they are not fertilized by embodied practices. The collective without the individual produces injunctions without support, reforms without consent, standards without appropriation.
The public policy that we must build must allow this double articulation: individuals who act and who are part of networks – communities, associations, mission-driven companies, care institutions – capable of producing a scale effect. One feeds the other. One, without the other, does not hold. And neither does the state.
The realistic hope of our time is therefore not that everything will be fine. It is that we are capable of maintaining a humanist social contract within more materially constrained systems, of preserving the conditions of democratic individuation despite increasing vulnerabilities, and of crossing degraded modes without losing our dignity. It is a question of inventing, as Spinoza wanted, not the sad passions of renunciation, but new desires. Not from fear, but from lucidity, desire and care.
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