Since I stopped having one, I have become very curiuos about other people's daily schedules. Whatever can they be working at from the moment they wake up? How can they bear having something to do from right after breakfast? How can they spin round all day long like fluid in a washbasin, until they reach the orifice of sleep? They tap away at the touch screens of their own lives, on which is perpetually displayed a hysterical daily round, and, from time to time, the ecstatic daily round of empty time.
Those whose time is gobbled up by useless activities cannot even conceive that you have nothing to do. You have to keep up their belief in this illusion, for they then accord you the same artificial respect as they have for their own all-consuming activity. By contrast with the other hysteria -- that of slowness and boredom -- the uninterrupted dynamism of business is merely the hysteria of dead time.
Modern activities have the same subtle function as scavengers in the desert: by devouring dead time, they leave pure time at our disposal. By putting an end to free time, they deliver us from the anguish of full time.
In the same spirit, we have to be thankful to the politicians who give their all to digesting the corpse of the political sphere -- living sarcophogi who protect us from the rotting of a dead body which would otherwise invade the whole of society. All calamities protect us from something worse. Thus, the stupidity of critics must have a higher function -- that of protecting us, by the thick layer of intellectual grime they secrete, from the secret violence of judgment which, without them, we would be forced to deploy, and turn round against ourselves.
It is the same with all those who deliver us from the wearisome obligation or managing money, business, leisure and morality. These are all superfluous tasks, happily devolved to the charlatans, predators and speculators, not to mention the waxen-lipped philosophers. Whatever we do, we must not try to correct the illusory nature of their discourse, since that would expose us directly to an unequal contest with stupidity, and with the burden of our freedom.
All these enterprises developing with no other purpose than the laundering of profits. All these building sites, doomed never to come to anything, which exist only so long as the subsidies, backhanders and speculation continue. All these projects whose sole raison d'etre is enterprise and the moral imperative of performance like an artificial respiration. Whole lives devoted to facelifting activities, without even any aim of generating wealth of prestige.
Everywhere amnesties and the laundering of scandals, the laundering of fake bills. But it is not certain that the bill for this laundering, like the bill for the collective mind-bending that accompanies it, will not one day land up at the establishment's door. The media and political class will pay dearly. They are already paying for the secured loan they have drawn on our advance of expectations. The have already lost all credence, all credibility.