The terrible charges against Dominique Strauss-Kahn are an opportunity to
remember that our society has become borderless, and now lives in four
simultaneous time scales. As a result contradictory rules of the game
collide, separate schedules overlap, different rhythms interpenetrate.
The first time scale is that of the law, of the police investigation and
court proceedings; its pace is at the discretion of investigators and
judges, a priori it takes precedent over all the others. The second time
scale is that of politics, and it follows a specific electoral calendar,
usually immutable. The third time scale is that of markets and media, it
obeys the requirement of immediate response, of permanent novelty,
impatience and competitiveness, especially since the advent of the Internet.
Experience shows that the fastest time scale imposes its law on the others:
thus, the markets and media impose their solutions to other spaces; they can
damage an economic, political and ethical reputation built throughout a
lifetime, in an instant: the reality of the past is worth nothing compared to
the appearance of the present.
The time scale of the media leads then to the conclusion that any character
flaw in politicians, even unproven, deserves to be denounced and excludes
them from public life, and this leads to a search for more and more perfect
men, to hold offices increasingly less important, where they are also more
easily replaceable. Markets are the ultimate beneficiaries of the bankruptcy
of politics.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn is a victim of these contradictions: the media wants
to obtain and provide immediate answers to questions that the judiciary will
take months to solve, which excludes him from the political deadlines ahead.
And even if he is exonerated one day, on judiciary grounds, of the terrible
crime of which he is charged, he will already have been irreversibly
condemned on political grounds. To the detriment of the cause for which
Dominique Strauss Kahn has always fought: a global rule of law, a democratic
and just global governance, controlling markets.
This tyranny of immediacy manifests itself in many other circumstances and
explains very well the anarchy of globalization: Thus, in financial matters,
the requirements for media answers, ceaselessly renewed, lead
politicians to neglect the underlying solutions, and to reject the
establishment of a necessary global rule of law and global judicial
institutions, for the benefit of a few pictures allowed by the G20, again,
for the financial markets’ greatest benefit.
Beyond this chaos, an ultimate time scale is always coming at the end,
pushing the other three and giving them all their meaning, derisory: that of
illness and death. The destiny of man is to forget it, to think only about
acting within other spaces, under the tyranny of urgency. Unless he has the
boldness to project himself beyond routines, to think the world outside of any
schedule, and to stick, stubbornly, to his dreams.