Our world is complex. We like to say it or even chant it. This observation allows us to confuse ourselves with an apology for our inability to take it head-on. We are rightly pretexting the unbridled race, the career, the family, the traffic, the schedules and the lack of leisure... avoiding getting involved elsewhere, in what really matters. We respond by blinding ourselves of everything, claiming that there is no grip on the machine in operation, that there is no pre-established order, that the path follows its course. What could be better to do in our daily life anyway? Why change something when everything goes on without our consent? or rather, by our tacit consent, because we don't understand it? We respond to the world with an excess of silence.
The only answer that man has found in acknowledging his power over the world, and the loss of meaning that accompanies it, has been to accept the reign of excess, as a response to the loss of control in calculating consequences. Unable to believe or take to task the possibility that the combination of our actions might one day have such an impact, we continued, a little more each day, in our excessive blindness. Of course, we hear the shouting of slogans and revolutions; we hear the cry of this great "indignation". We are no further ahead in building what is left of us. In fact, Camus tells us, in both cases, we completely reject it.
"We respond to the world with an excess of silence."
To act as we do is to undermine the inherent laws of the world; to fight it in the negative is to waste one's time fighting something that will never change! We mistakenly believe that everything is possible for us, that man has inherited this supremacy over the world of things, so that he can shape it to his good desire, to his needs - forgetting the natural order of things. This lost desire for control of our world is anchored in an intellectual posture proper to modern man, from which comes this fervour - that we can do anything, at any time and in any place.
Our misunderstanding of the world is rooted in what prevents us from acting humanely in the face of the challenges we face. To act in the world, we must understand it, at least in part. It is first of all an act of the hand, of the body; this is how we know what we can do.
Certainly, the physical laws of the universe have an almost natural, at least cultural aspect for us: we anticipate the absurdity of the attempts of those who seek to fly away without adapted equipment. Now, when it comes to the natural laws of ethics, what are called principles (of justice or equity), suddenly everything falters; we no longer accept in our post-post-modern world (the ridiculous does not kill) transcendence. We killed God and threw away the transcendent, believing that it was the same thing.
Camus is neither fatalistic nor cynical about the world. On the contrary, he is perhaps the only writer of the absurd to have kept the hope of the midday sun, the hope in these better days, the hope in man for what he is. According to him, the only way to make a difference is to say no to what is going on, while saying yes. A yes of refusal! It is only through this visceral consideration of the world that creation will be possible.
To say yes to the world is to know how to say that there are things that are not done, that are wrong by nature, that we will never accept no matter where we are. Ethical relativism brings in its wake, whether we like it or not, all the unimaginable atrocities that would be justifiable simply by bringing ethics back to a convention. In the play Les Justes, Camus stages revolutionaries including a bomber. The latter, who was to throw the explosive device onto the Duke's carriage, would not do so because he was accompanied by children. "We don't shoot children," the character will say. (He will launch his bomb a week later, in another context.
"We killed God and threw away the transcendent, believing that it was the same thing."
To accept the world while fighting it is also to understand that all things are not self-evident, that there are inherent prohibitions and that we must, at the very least, respect everyone just because they are human. To lose sight of this horizon is to sail through turbulent waters and believe that in response to the absurd, we can do anything.
Therefore, in spite of the complexity of the world, where the problems are such that we cannot see clearly by ourselves needing the enlightened and asked advice of many, what can we do and must we do to say yes while refusing to let it go down the drain?" Heirs of a corrupt history in which fallen revolutions, techniques that have gone mad, dead gods and outraged ideologies mingle, in which mediocre powers today can destroy everything but are no longer convincing, in which intelligence has fallen to the point of serving as a servant of hatred and oppression,"we are called upon by the world to respond to it to the extent of our own needs.
Free vote for you! Yay!