With PSG's victory, uncivilized youth

Every month, youtuber Ralph Müller delivers his scathing analysis of a phenomenon typical of the times. This month, he tackles the incivilities that occurred during Paris Saint-Germain's victory in the European Cup.

You've no doubt seen the staggering images following PSG's victory in the Champions League final on May 31. The whole world witnessed this bizarre jubilation, which ranged from euphoria to murder to arson. It was a reminder of what the individual becomes in a crowd: a primitive, disquieting being who feels exempt from all responsibility. Driven by emotional contagion, he finds it hard to resist the pleasure of indulging his impulses, which are all the stronger for lacking expression.

We caught a glimpse of a pre-civilizational stage. A youth left to the raw state of its impulses, where man's intrinsic aggression is entirely directed outwards. For Freud, access to civilization - and the reason for its inherent malaise - presupposes a kind of devious courtesy whereby the individual redirects against himself the animosity he had for the outside world.

This is one of the challenges of education and of teaching children to distinguish between right and wrong: by putting themselves to the test of punishment, which consists in seeing the love of others withdrawn, children develop their moral conscience and their superego. In the light of these hypotheses, we might suppose that where the individual grows up without limits and by taking his ease in the world without the help of a verticality, this moral conscience is bound to be lacking and the individual unscrupulously pours out his most noxious energy.

This is the result of a world in which the symbolic has been reduced to a mere sign of matter. Such a desire to destroy and harm must testify to a lack, a deficit of something essential. The general devaluation, at all levels, of language and what it enables, is no doubt not in vain. The void makes destruction the only possible language. For some, the last refuge of Meaning lies in the act by which they verify their existence. The car I smash and the woman I frighten prove that I'm here, that I'm alive, that I too can matter.

The point is not to justify these acts, but to take their brutality as a symptom of something beyond it. These scenes presuppose a dizzying nothingness. And this nothingness is aided and abetted by anything that reduces life to a vulgar succession of pointless experiences. Anything that scorns culture, language, the spirit, the gratuity of a collective project that would be that of dignity.

We have to admit that this contempt is not the exclusive work of young people, who express the consequences in spectacular fashion. In a way, they are the fireworks of ambient mediocrity. Their violence is striking because it's unvarnished, but it's the same violence that bubbles up in the folds of just about everything that makes up contemporary reality.

In the infernal incoherence of our saturated universe, there's nothing that doesn't have some solidarity with the violence that finds, as on this night of May 31st, opportunities to erupt. We can't accept madness and imbecility on a daily basis without flinching, and then be surprised that these two fertilizers don't produce flowers. Of course, there are other causes and other explanations for the events mentioned, but I believe it's only a short step from the noise of machines to that of sirens.

The trainer Ralph Müller delivers his scathing analysis of a social phenomenon in each issue. Watch his videos on the YouTube channel «La Cartouche».

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All chronicles by Ralph Müller

To its YouTube channel «The Cartridge»