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Today, the polarization of opinions gives rise to both the worst and the most insidious. A context fueled by the proliferation of information sources, economic and political uncertainties, prevailing individualism, the search for scapegoats, the implicit obligation to “choose a side”… which also reflects the abandonment of the ability to engage in dialogue, to nuance, to argue, and to listen.
The crystallization of positions publicly generates justifications of every kind and intensity. Attacking democratic spaces, discrediting dissenting voices, dismantling people’s rights and freedoms, stubbornly silencing opposition, declaring conflicts, legitimizing atrocities committed against civilian populations, refusing to recognize the value of human existence because of “otherness”… Resorting solely to power relations and imposing a single vision illustrate the simplification – and above all the failure – to consider other perspectives.
And yet, social peace presupposes precisely this confrontation of ideas and the practice of debate. More than ever, we need a common public culture in which the plurality of voices strengthens democracy instead of weakening it. Structures for mediation and arbitration of different interests must be protected, expanded, equipped, and even reinvented. And if the media and modern channels of information fuel polarization and its effects, it is also our daily choices – to listen or to reject, to verify or to relay, to dialogue or to attack – that determine whether the fire dies out or flares up.
Through different aspects that define our contemporary societies, this new edition of the Festival des Libertés invites us to rehabilitate dialogue and to open up fields of action in which to exercise our power to act.

“Dialogue, the relationship between people, has been replaced by propaganda or polemic, which are two kinds of monologue.” Albert Camus (1951)