Jean Ovide Bourdeau

Jean Ovide Bourdeau is a Canadian author and philosopher who has authored several books on topics such as ethics, history, geopolitics, culture, and existentialism. He is best known for his series “Politics of Despair” and “Politics of Integrity”, which explore the causes and consequences of human violence and terror. He challenges conventional wisdom and dogmatic morality, advocating for a radical transformation of our values and behaviors, along with a more compassionate and rational approach to life. He is also an artist whose production reflects his philosophical views.

Waking up from a long slumber.

Several years after my early retirement from an average career in human resources, having refused to work evenings and weekends throughout my employment in order to live my life fully with greater freedom, intensity, and bliss, I began to reflect on the lessons learnt in the course of my life, blindly thinking I would likely imagine a promising future for us all in spite of ongoing genocides and wars during our recorded human history, presumptuously reasoning that such barbaric historical and contemporary behavior, which as part of a brutal primeval dog-eat-dog stage imbedded into our biological response mechanism, was significantly diminishing with time.

I had until then broadly, blindly, and foolishly assumed that we, humans, were generally on an equally ascending curve of ethical development in tandem with scientific discoveries and the technologies these created in improving our everyday lives. Only to finally wake up and discover, as I began to write, and to my intense disappointment, that a great segment of us on this planet, much too large to ignore in the course of recorded history to this day along with the societies we formed along the way, were and still are far behind intellectually, politically, ethically, socially, and psychologically than both the sciences and technologies we created—and this by at least a dozen centuries if not many more in my estimate.

So, instead of embarking on a pleasant description and lovely outlooks of a much improved if not a bucolic future, I found myself writing instead about what I have now come to consider a worsening dystopian future. Not a pleasant discovery indeed. Despite this reality and awakening of mine I nevertheless undertook this thankless task for reasons I cannot yet assess properly.

Not an academician.

All thoughts contained in both these “Politics of Despair” and “Politics of Integrity” series, were written ‘off-the-top-of-my-head’ so to speak, with occasional exceptions here and there. The two reasons for this are quite simple.

First, I am not an academician.

Secondly, if I had chosen to mimic one, I would have failed, simply because I did not possess the disciplined training for such an undertaking; I never kept track of, nor recorded, all the lessons taught to me throughout my lifelong reading habit; and did not chronicle most of the experiences taught to me by life. I just simply went on and blindly enjoyed my privileged adult life here in Canada.

So, the thoughts constituting these two series of essays accumulated helter-skelter in the course of my existence and were loosely assembled in the autumn of it.

Look! I am a mere amateur. What one would presumably call; “Just an average guy, who loves life”. Happy to get up in the morning, to live my day, and go to sleep at night—reasonably expecting the same privileged opportunity the next day—yet doing so as if each was the first, and the last one in my existence, with a conscious appreciation of the present moment at all times and the many privileges available to me.

Don’t get me wrong!

In spite of the depressing, dismal, bleak, and pessimistic subjects treated in this long text, at times repetitively, I am not a dissatisfied customer. On the contrary, I have enjoyed myself probably more than the average guy, and every day I continue to feel most privileged to have lived and to continue to live as a healthy, intelligent, free, and happy human being in the midst of a peaceful territory: Canada. Extraordinarily lucky in fact to have been born in a free nation governed democratically with a reasonable application of Inalienable Individual Rights and away from those routine centers of intense lethal confrontations, extreme poverty, and raw injustice outside our present and temporarily safe North American oasis. So, do not get me wrong! I am not bitter! I simply share with you, against my expectations, a late assessment of our human situation at the end of what has been a pleasant life for me.

Several years ago.

Having read an average of two books a week or so from age twelve throughout my life to this day, I, a few years after my retirement, attempted on a quiet Sunday afternoon to sum up in the style of those popular power point presentations and on one page, what I had learnt from all this reading, combined with those firsthand experiences of a lifetime. This original attempt did not succeed at all. An unending and frustrating introspection however persisted over the years growing exponentially from then on to this day, with unending clarifications, corrections and additions to this original foolish attempt at a one-page power points presentation—evolving organically over the years into nearly 7000 separate thoughts—many accompanied with questions and notes. This is the latest and last such update, since in my 86th orbit now in progress around our sun, my end is much, much, much, closer than my beginning.

Speaking for both myself, and on your behalf.

The general use of the first person more or less throughout this long text is purposeful, as I imagined, that the more awake among us are, at least from time to time, wondering about the same issues, especially when it comes to the mission and objectives of one’s sanity, self-actualization, ethics, reason, science, purpose, and existence particularly, along with that of the human species in general.

So, put yourself in that same place in all four themes, whenever I begin with the pronoun “I” during the difficult task at hand and about to unfold.