Page 212 - Quarentena_1ed_2020

ground under its feet; it starts to fall only when it looks down and
notices the abyss. When it loses its authority, the regime is like a
cat above the precipice: in order to fall, it only has to be remin-
ded to look down… But the opposite also holds: when an autho-
ritarian regime approaches its final crisis, its dissolution as a rule
follows two steps. Before its actual collapse, a mysterious rupture
takes place: all of a sudden people know that the game is over, they
are simply no longer afraid. It is not only that the regime loses its
legitimacy, its exercise of power itself is perceived as an impotent
panic reaction. In Shah of Shahs, a classic account of the Khomeini
revolution, Ryszard Kapuscinski located the precise moment of this
rupture: at a Tehran crossroad, a single demonstrator refused to
budge when a policeman shouted at him to move, and the embar-
rassed policeman simply withdrew; in a couple of hours, all Tehran
was talking about this incident, and although there were street
fights going on for weeks, everyone somehow knew the game is
over… There are indications that something similar could be going
on today: all the dictatorial powers the state apparatuses are amas-
sing just makes all the more palpable their basic impotence.
We should resist here the temptation of celebrating this disin-
tegration of our trust as an opening for the people to self-organize
locally outside the state apparatuses: an efficient state which “de-
livers” and can be at least relatively trusted is today needed more
than ever. Self-organization of local-communities will do its work
only in combination with the state apparatus… and with science.
We are now forced to admit that modern science, in spite of all its
hidden biases, is the predominant form of trans-cultural universa-
lity. The epidemics provides a welcome opportunity for science to
assert itself in this role.
Here, however, a new problem arises: in science also, there is
no big Other, no subject on whom we can fully rely, who is un-
questionably presumed to know. There are different conclusions, as
well as different proposals about what to do, advocated by serious

212