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There’s a little sentence going around that paralyzes a lot of people: “How can you buy a Tesla if you hate Elon Musk?” Or its climate version: “How can you campaign for the environment while flying on planes?” Behind the jab lies a stubborn idea: to earn the right to take a stand, you’d first have to be beyond reproach. A hundred percent consistent. Whole.
Two voices come to defuse this reflex: the journalist Salomé Saqué and the psychoanalyst Miguel Benasayag, a former resistance fighter against the Argentine dictatorship. Their conversation sketches a far more pragmatic vision of commitment — and a far more breathable one.
The first idea is counterintuitive: demanding to be perfect before acting doesn’t make you more effective, it simply stops you from acting at all. If I tell myself “I have no right to take a stand as long as I fly,” I condemn myself to powerlessness. I spend my time inspecting my own contradictions instead of doing anything.
Benasayag calls this the “narcissism of purity.” We think we’re being demanding; in reality, we’re neutralizing ourselves.
Saqué puts it another way: wanting absolute moral consistency is a dead end. She owns a smartphone, she’s been criticized for it, and so what? Nobody is a hundred percent consistent. Waiting until you are means never starting.
The argument “look, she denounces the system but she has an iPhone” doesn’t serve the debate anyway: it shifts it. We’re no longer discussing the substance, we’re disqualifying the person over their small inconsistencies.
That’s convenient, especially for anyone who does nothing: if no one has the right to act without being perfect, then inaction is justified in advance.
More often than not, the person pointing out someone else’s contradiction isn’t looking to do better — they’re looking for a good reason not to move.
The consequence is liberating: there’s no need to “purify” yourself first.
You commit with who you are, contradictions and all, in the present.
Benasayag is wary of the sacrificial activist, the one who would give everything to a distant, perfect ideal. He prefers the one who acts here, now, in the real.
The trap question “am I up to it?” helps no one.
His answer fits in a single sentence: there’s nothing to reach, you simply have to go.
But there’s a second trap, the exact opposite of the first, and just as paralyzing. Benasayag reminds us that taking a stand, today, has become more confusing than it used to be. Under the Argentine dictatorship, the enemy had a face: military men, torturers, identifiable people standing across from you. You knew what you were fighting against. It was simple — not easy, but simple.
Today, there’s no longer really anyone across from you. What holds back change is diffuse: market logics, habits, mechanisms in which we ourselves are caught; and above all an immense silent majority that, through its inaction, props up the status quo, plus all the players who have an interest in prolonging the current situation — even when it becomes untenable, even when it drives us straight into the wall.
Faced with this fog, a feeling rises that also looks like a good reason to do nothing: “It’s too complicated, everything is tied to everything else, I’m so small in all this, there’s nothing I can do.”
This feeling isn’t foolish — it’s even fairly lucid, because yes, the world is complicated. The problem is what we do with that. Saqué says it plainly: complexity mustn’t become a comfortable alibi for inaction.
And we can see, then, that the two traps meet. Impossible purity (“I’m not blameless enough to act”) and resignation before complexity (“it’s too complicated for my action to change anything”) look opposite: one believes itself very demanding, the other very lucid. But they lead to the same place, stillness. Between the two, there’s a third path: acting imperfectly.
Take artificial intelligence. I can find its ecological cost troubling and use it anyway, perhaps at the very moment I’m writing these lines. The purity reflex would say: you have no right to criticize it if you use it. The complexity reflex would say: everyone’s doing it anyway, there’s nothing I can do.
Both end in inaction. The third path consists in disciplining my use rather than dropping it wholesale or undergoing it without thinking: fighting for the uses that are worth it — where AI genuinely helps me, makes possible what wasn’t — and refusing the uses that aren’t worth it, like calling on it instead of Google for a trivial question, or handing it a role it wasn’t made for, standing in as a therapist. Neither zero AI (impossible purity), nor AI without thinking (resignation): making sure that what it costs is at least justified by what it brings.
And above all, you can take a stand without making your life miserable.
Having an ecological conscience shouldn’t forbid me from flying when it’s necessary. It would rather invite me to take a critical look at the choice: is this trip worth it, is there a reasonable alternative? If the answer is yes, then I fly, and no one has grounds to disqualify me for it. Because giving up that flight is, most often, just a drop in the ocean: the effort deprives me and complicates my life far more than it relieves the planet. That’s precisely the virtue of imperfection: it even allows, from time to time, choices that aren’t entirely justifiable, as long as the overall attitude stays conscious. What matters isn’t the purity of each gesture, but the lucidity of the whole approach.
The essayist Corinne Morel Darleux, in her book with the magnificent title Plutôt couler en beauté que flotter sans grâce (Better to Sink with Beauty than Float Without Grace), puts it bluntly: the idea that the world would change through the contagion of good example is a lovely story that, alas, doesn’t work. Even if we all became perfectly exemplary, we’d have accomplished only about a quarter of the necessary effort; the rest depends on decisions that far exceed us. Cutting your emissions, turning off the tap while brushing your teeth — that’s very good, provided you stay lucid. If you do it to save the world, you’ll be disappointed; you do it for dignity, without lending it a revolutionary reach it doesn’t have. That doesn’t make it a license to justify anything: doing your part keeps its meaning, in proportion to your means, because many people cannot, economically or socially, choose the virtuous option. And it would be a mistake to stop at the individual gesture: the real lever isn’t private guilt but collective action — turning the solitary effort into a shared movement, breaking out of the stupor, inventing together other ways of doing things.
This is where the three voices meet.
Rather than trying to “save the world” — a crushing ambition, and probably lost in advance — we can cultivate the dignity of contributing to nourish its beauty, and act by ceasing to do harm, even if it won’t save us.
We rediscover commitment without a promise, with an added grace: it’s not guaranteed effectiveness that gives the gesture its meaning, it’s the beauty and dignity it carries — and that’s also what makes it desirable. Because what truly drives us to act, Benasayag notes in a Spinozist vein, isn’t duty but a joy that exceeds us, the desire for something better: a joyful commitment lasts, a sad commitment fades out.
Saqué confirms it. For a long time she believed it indecent to allow herself pleasure, love, and rest in the face of the world’s gravity, before understanding that this wasn’t sustainable; to change things, you have to enjoy life, if only to remember why you’re fighting.
And it’s precisely that joy that’s contagious, far more than moral purity. A commitment owned without guilt gives others, who until then had stayed inactive, the desire and the permission to begin living this dignity. Seen this way, my few lapses — the plane taken when it’s needed — weigh little: they’re largely absorbed by what the example itself sets in motion.
There remains the concrete question: where to begin? Right where you already are. Saqué borrows a line from Édouard Glissant: “Act in your place and think with the world.”
There are a thousand ways to do it — in a school, a neighborhood, a trade. No need to wait for the great heroic cause, nor to rank things: there’s no “good fight” superior to the others. Each person commits where they can, with what they have. Do you have to be sure of winning? No. We do things for themselves, not only for a guaranteed result; I don’t need the certainty of saving the world to do my part today. That’s even a form of resistance in itself: when you’re convinced the worst is certain, you lose the desire to act. Showing that something else is possible is already fighting against “there is no alternative.”
Ultimately, these voices overturn the classic image of commitment. It isn’t first about refusing, depriving oneself, sacrificing. It’s about creating: showing concretely that other ways of living, of working, of relating to others and to nature are possible.
The phrase is Deleuze’s: “To resist is to create.”
So no, you don’t need to become a saint to earn the right to take a stand. The demand to be whole is a trap, and discouragement before complexity is its twin trap.
The real question isn’t “am I pure enough?” or “is it even possible?”, but “what am I doing, where I am, with who I am?”
And you can do it with lucidity, with dignity, and without making your life miserable. Better to sink with beauty than float without grace.
After an interview with Salomé Saqué and Miguel Benasayag by Anne-Sophie Moreau, published in the special issue “Philosophes résistants” of the magazine Philosophie Magazine, dated 13 May 2026, enriched with ideas from Corinne Morel Darleux, Plutôt couler en beauté que flotter sans grâce (Libertalia). Other references: Édouard Glissant, Gilles Deleuze, Baruch Spinoza, Chowra Makaremi (Résistances affectives).