Reality-based community

Extrait d’un article signé Ron Suskind, intituté « Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush », paru dans le New York Time du 17 octobre 2002.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5090&en=890a96189e162076&ex=1255665600&partner=rssuserland

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

J’imagine qu’à l’époque la Maison Blanche n’imaginait pas que la réalité la rattraperait un jour à si grand pas, comme elle semble le faire en Irak.

A quand le mythe Platonicien de la caverne comme idéal de réalisme politique?