The Great Resignation – How to Wake Up the Sleeping West.

Without fully understanding its meaning, the collapse we are experiencing announces a regeneration

The phenomenon spares no country in the Western world.

Some call it “The Big Quit”. Others have chosen a more elegant formula: “The Great Resignation”.

Whatever the case, companies are facing an unprecedented challenge. That of an epidemic of downsizing, pessimism, dropouts, resignations. All sectors of our Western economies and societies are affected, from the construction industry to the hotel industry, including banks, with high salaries and poor working conditions.

The same is true for essential professions: with the notable exception of the armed forces, in national education, hospitals, and the police, recruitment difficulties are growing. And this is worrying for the society that they are preparing for tomorrow.

“The Great Resignation”, this form of collective despondency that we are experiencing today, is affecting even the summits of our Western democracies. Faced with events and the extreme parties they thought they could contain, Boris Johnson is giving up; Joe Biden is reading his prompter ad nauseam; Mario Draghi is resigning; Justin Trudeau is pretending to govern with a minority coalition in power.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz listens a lot but decides nothing, entangled in a grand coalition with no direction or vision other than the retention of power. Detached from the presidential campaign, and absent from the legislative campaign, Emmanuel Macron is no exception to the rule in France.

His apparent fatigue or “power blues” - power, but for what exactly? - suggests that the President of the French Republic, like all his peers, and all Western democracies, is experiencing a moment of collapse, doubt, and loss of meaning.

The temptation of Venice of the metaverse: fleeing from a reality that has become too complex, where we believe we are beaten in advance. What's the point of working more if the State is there to provide for our basic needs? What's the point of saving: we'll never pay off our debts. Why have and raise children in a world that already has too many, say the statistics of birth rates in the new generations? And what can our little green arms do in the face of climate disruption, whose main sponsors are China, India, the United States, and now Germany with its coal-fired power plants? Let's cultivate our garden, concluded Voltaire's Candide. Two thousand years of history to end up in the DIY section.

How can we move from “The Big Quit” to a new start for the West, since that is what it is all about?

An economist's vision - the same one that has guided our countries for half a century - would hammer home an obvious point: increase the gap between work and welfare incomes, remunerate effort, entrepreneurship, talent in action, and the dignity that one obtains through work, and social utility. And to make the opposite more uncomfortable when it is chosen and not suffered: life at the expense of the community; passivity; a spirit of profiteer rather than a contributor. If this gap to be widened between work and welfare incomes is necessary, it will be very insufficient to produce the expected collective jump.

Like a spring, we must dig deep into the roots of our Western history and identity to hope to bounce back. There are two ways to wake up people who are so tired that they can no longer move, so afraid of losing everything that they no longer want to risk anything or win anything:

The first way is to train them. This is a good thing: this autumn and especially this winter in Europe, we are going to be put to the test with the double impact of the absence of Russian gas, and of a catapulted inflation on foodstuffs in particular.

The second way is to give it the desire to stand up, fight and move forward. To awaken its appetite by giving it a driving ambition, and accessibility.

Does the West have nothing to oppose to the voracity of Asia; the annihilation of the freedom of conscience and the freedom of women in Muslim dictatorships; the Promethean madness of the transhumanists of Silicon Valley; to the predatory violence that is expressed in the east and south of Europe, in certain regions of Africa? Is it the destiny of the West to let itself be enslaved by the new barbarians? Hasn't the time come to fight, with our words, our ideas, but also our weapons if we have to defend ourselves?

Refuse to give ground, daily, to the deadly ideologies that want the death of the West and of everything that constitutes us. Not to give an inch to this deadly fashion of repentance, of merciless judgment on our history, and so indulgent for that of others. Which country in the history of the world has risen by covering its head with ashes?

Without fully understanding its meaning, the collapse we are experiencing announces a regeneration. To succeed, it needs three things: new leadership, intellectual and political; energy, which we can draw from a multi-millennial history of collapse and recovery; and the rewriting of our social contract.