Among the most committed people, and within each of us, there are precise zones where commitment ceases to operate, without our seeing it. I propose to understand these zones through three mechanisms, the radical monopoly of tools, face-work in conversations, and the welding of commitment to identity, and then to draw from them a political concept, coherence as a common good, together with concrete ways of acting.
What coherence costs, what incoherence costs
The phrase “the social cost of coherence” can be read in two ways, and the gap between these two readings is the very subject I want to work on.
In the first reading, coherence has a social cost for the person who practises it. Being coherent with one’s values all the way down to one’s tools, affiliations and words exposes a person to losing clients, friends, a place in a professional world. In the article Critical Thinking Against Archetypes I analysed this price of dissent among scientists during the Covid period; it weighs on all of us, in every world, including activist ones.
In the second reading, incoherence has a social cost for society as a whole. When coherence is too expensive for individuals, incoherence becomes general, and this generalised incoherence is not a mere aesthetic flaw. It means that millions of people act every day against their own values without seeing it, that harm goes on being done by people convinced they are doing good, and that critical speech discredits itself, since those who want nothing to change find in the contradictions of committed people the perfect argument for changing nothing. A recent example seems to me to condense this second cost. The newspaper Le Monde published an alarmed report on the ecological impact of artificial intelligence, while having signed commercial agreements with artificial intelligence companies and making massive use of it. A childhood friend, sincerely worried, gave me that report photocopied in A3 format, the way one hands over a leaflet. Her sincerity deserves better than the incoherence of the institution that informs her, and this is what incoherence costs: it spends people’s sincerity on gestures that their own vehicle contradicts.
These two costs feed each other, and that is the chain I am going to follow. The more coherence costs each of us, the more incoherence becomes general; the more general it becomes, the more it costs society; and the more the systems that manufacture this price are strengthened, since they thrive on our inability to leave them. To understand how this price is manufactured, we need to look at three places, tools, conversations and identity.
Tools we never chose
The first place where the price of coherence is manufactured is our tools. A photographer committed to the climate cause, most of whose battles I share, told me in passing that she worked with Adobe software without ever having heard of free software, even though communities have been building tools that belong to no one for forty years, as I recounted in the article The last straw. What matters here is not her particular case, it is the structure of the situation: there had been no choice. One cannot choose against something whose existence one does not know. Our daily working tool, with everything it implies in terms of economics, dependency and worldview, enters our lives without ever passing through the moment of decision, and we are unaware that this non-choice is a political choice.
This unawareness is organised. I observed, in the world of video editing in the early 2000s, how Apple imposed its Final Cut Pro software, which was not the best editing software of its time, through a commercial strategy aimed at training, with agreements signed with universities and schools, official certifications, affordable machines for classrooms. A whole generation of editors was trained on that tool, to the point that some of them did not know other editing software existed. The question of the tool did not even arise, and that is the aim of such a strategy: the most complete commercial success is not the one that wins the comparison, it is the one that makes the comparison itself disappear.
In Tools for Conviviality (1973), Ivan Illich calls “radical monopoly” the situation in which a tool becomes so dominant that social life reorganises itself around it, to the point that doing without it amounts to excluding oneself. His example is the car: when people become powerless to move around without a motor, that is radical monopoly. It is not the monopoly of one brand over a market, but the monopoly of one type of tool over a human function. The photographic profession has thus reorganised itself around Instagram, which has become the place where clients look, where peers exist, where careers are made. When you suggest to a photographer that leaving it would be possible, you see the person imagine it in theory and stumble, in practice, on the unthinkable. This distance between what is theoretically conceivable and practically unthinkable is perhaps the best tangible definition of radical monopoly, and the mobile phone, whose manufacture rests on mining extractivism of great violence and which almost all of us use, belongs to it just as much. Ophélie Coelho, in Géopolitique du numérique. L’impérialisme à pas de géants (Les Éditions de l’Atelier, 2023), describes the chains of dependency that bind us to the infrastructures of the digital giants, submarine cables, data centres, cloud services, and shows that these dependencies are built through deliberate strategies of occupying the points of passage, until sovereignty is reduced to choosing one’s masters. Her conclusion meets Illich’s: one does not leave a radical monopoly through individual willpower, one leaves it collectively, by rebuilding infrastructures and common places.
Radical monopoly thus manufactures the first storey of the price of coherence. It makes individual exit ruinous, and it even makes the question of exit invisible. To demand that people be coherent in a landscape of radical monopolies is to ask them to pay alone a price that the system has designed to be unpayable, and I showed in the article The Fantasy of Digital Ecology who benefits from this individual guilt-shaming.
The role assigned before the first word
The second place where the price of coherence is manufactured is conversation itself. Erving Goffman, in a 1955 text, “On Face-Work”, collected in Interaction Ritual (1967), defines face as the positive social value a person claims in interaction, through the image others form of their line of conduct. He shows that a large part of our conversations is occupied, beneath the apparent content, by face-work, that is, by everything we do so that our own face and that of others do not collapse. This framework makes it possible to understand why contradictions can almost never be looked at in an ordinary conversation, and it applies to all of us.
First there is the assignment of roles. I experienced it at a party where, before I had said a word, a mutual friend had told the person I was talking with that I had recommended the use of an artificial intelligence to others. I was therefore, for her, the promoter of artificial intelligence, and everything I said, including my silences and my unaggressive astonishments, was received from within that role. The conversation was not taking place between two people, it was taking place between two figures, the ecologist and the technophile, and those figures were speaking through us. Each of us is assigned roles that speak in our place, and assigns them to others without realising it.
Then there is the displacement of the target, which consists in directing condemnation at what one does not use oneself, another social network than one’s own, other people’s content, an idealised future of one’s practice, so that the boundary of the condemnable is continuously redrawn and one always ends up on the right side of it. And there is the mockery of the absent third party, the one who openly owns what one does oneself without saying so, and whose belittling repairs the group’s face. These gestures are not acts of dishonesty, they are ordinary techniques of social survival, and we all practise them. Their consequence, however, is that in these conversations the argument never reaches its object; there is no object, there are only faces. This is the second storey of the price of coherence. Even when accurate information circulates, the apparatus of ordinary conversation turns it into a threat to face, and therefore into an occasion for defence.
The inhabitants of Bygdaby knew, and did not talk about it
The third storey is collective. In Living in Denial (2011), the American sociologist Kari Marie Norgaard recounts the winter of 2000-2001 that she spent, as an ethnographer, in a rural village in Norway she calls Bygdaby. That winter, the snow arrived two months late, ice fishing was impossible, the ski resort had to produce artificial snow, and the newspapers explicitly linked these events to global warming. The inhabitants, highly educated and politically aware, knew all this. Yet no one wrote to the newspapers or challenged elected officials, and daily practices remained unchanged.
Norgaard names this phenomenon socially organised denial. Knowledge about the climate existed in the village, but the inhabitants kept it away from their daily lives through conversation norms, implicit rules about what one talks about and what one does not, about the emotions it is proper to show and those one must keep to oneself. The guilt, the sense of powerlessness and the fear of the future that the subject raised were collectively neutralised, not because people were ignorant or selfish, but because the group needed to go on living together. Denial, she shows, is less a matter of individual psychology than of a collective organisation of attention.
Every professional world thus has its conversation norms, which draw the map of what may be questioned and what must be held as natural. In a photographic world, one may condemn artificial intelligence and other people’s social networks, one may not question the tool that feeds everyone. In an academic world, a cultural world, an activist world, the map is different, but there is always a map, and what each of us questions or takes for granted reveals less our psychology than the boundaries of that map. No world is exempt from it, not even those whose vocation is critique, and this is why lucidity about these maps cannot come from inside a single world.
Welded commitment and articulated commitment
It remains to understand why certain questions are not merely avoided, but actively forbidden. A friend deeply committed to feminism, whose critical thinking is real and fruitful on questions of emancipation, refused to let us even broach the subject of the restrictions of freedom of the Covid period, which she had followed without questioning them. It was not weariness, it was a prohibition, laid down to prevent what she anticipated as a conflict. My hypothesis is that these prohibitions protect something deeper than opinions.
When a commitment defines the person, questioning an act ceases to be a discussion about an act and becomes a threat to existence itself. An artist committed to the climate cause had the atmospheric carbon dioxide level of her birth year tattooed on her skin, a gesture of great force, which says that the commitment is no longer something the person carries, but something she is. Leon Festinger and his team observed this mechanism as early as 1956, in When Prophecy Fails, their inquiry conducted from inside a group of believers awaiting the end of the world. When the prophecy was disproved, the members who had invested most in their belief, publicly and at great expense, did not abandon it, they intensified it. The more a conviction has cost, the more its abandonment would cost, and the less it can be contemplated. In the article The Simplifying False Nuance I described those pillars of denial that allow the liveliest minds to stay standing. Commitment can become such a pillar, and this is a fragility one rarely suspects in committed people, because it is mistaken for strength.
To think this through, I propose to distinguish two states of one and the same commitment, welded commitment and articulated commitment. In welded commitment, values, acts and identity form a single piece. Any question put to an act propagates to the whole and threatens the entire person; the emotions at stake are the fear of coming undone, and the anticipated shame of discovering that one may have been wrong precisely where one has given the most. It is this propagation that makes certain questions unthinkable, and that explains why one prefers to forbid a subject rather than risk dissolving into it. In articulated commitment, there is a joint between what I defend and what I am, and this joint allows movement. I can discover that one of my gestures contradicts my values, or that it is less useful than I believed, without that discovery threatening me, because it bears on the act and not on my right to exist. Error becomes information again, and contradiction a working material. The difference between the two states depends neither on sincerity, which can be total in both cases, nor on intelligence. It depends on what the commitment has had to hold up in the person, and on whether or not she has other supports besides it. None of us knows with certainty where our own commitment is welded, since the weld reveals itself precisely by the absence of questions.
Coherence as a common good
I can now tie together the two meanings of social cost. Radical monopolies make coherence individually ruinous. Face-work makes its contradictions undiscussable in public. The norms of each world make whole stretches of reality unquestionable. Identity welding makes the remaining questions unthinkable. At the end of this chain, incoherence is not a moral fault of individuals, it is the normal product of a society that has made coherence unaffordable. And this generalised incoherence itself has a major political cost, for it is the survival condition of the systems in place. Instagram goes on because no photographer can leave it alone. Extractivism goes on because none of us can give up our phone alone. Critique exhausts itself in distant condemnations while nearby dependencies remain intact, and every visible contradiction of committed people serves as an alibi for those who want nothing to change.
From this I draw the following political concept: coherence is not a private virtue, it is a common good. Like water or knowledge, it is produced collectively and destroyed collectively. A society produces coherence when it builds free software, public services, cooperatives, places where professional worlds can look at themselves elsewhere than on the platforms of the monopolies, spaces of speech where losing face does not cost one’s place. It destroys coherence when it lets commercial strategies make the very possibility of comparison disappear, and then shifts onto each individual, in the form of guilt, the price of the impossibility it has allowed to be built. The political question is therefore not who is coherent and who is not, it is what, in our collective organisation, makes coherence expensive or affordable. Holding this price to account, before platforms, institutions and public policies, seems to me a more fruitful move than the endless trial for contradiction that we conduct against one another.
Six concrete ways of making coherence less costly
This political shift does not exempt us from the question of concrete relationships. Here, for those who accompany people and groups, and first of all for myself, are a few ways of acting that follow from the analysis:
- Begin with recognition. A person whose commitment is welded needs all the more to have what they bring recognised, and they really do bring things. Recognition is the material condition for them to be able to stand somewhere other than on their pillar while we look at it together.
- Never touch the face in public. The most accurate question, asked in front of witnesses, will produce face-work and nothing else. Contradictions can only be looked at in spaces where one can temporarily lose face without losing one’s place, which requires time, the absence of an audience, and the guarantee that no conclusion will be turned against the person.
- Wonder rather than argue. The frontal argument threatens the face and reinforces the very pillar it would like to shake. Sincere astonishment, with no stake in convincing, leaves the other person the possibility of putting things into words themselves. It was in such a moment that a photographer once told me, in substance, the most accurate sentence I have heard on these subjects: it is hard to change, because we have our habits, and we also have our professional world.
- Take the positions into account before asking for speech. In the article Why the power to act is so often experienced as a transgression I described how, in professional training, the person who resists most is often the one whose position is at stake in front of their own team. The apparatus of positions weighs more than convictions, and it is the apparatus that must be cared for, not the convictions that must be forced.
- Multiply belongings. A person who has only one world stakes their whole existence on every contradiction. Someone who belongs to several worlds can lose a little face in one while remaining held by the others, and this security makes thinking possible.
- Get help to see one’s own zones. The weld reveals itself by the absence of questions, which means that none of us can map our own pillars alone. Offering someone a look at their blind zones, and asking them for theirs on ours, is perhaps the most concrete form of that common good which is coherence.
