Vulnerability, Resilience and Social Darwinism

In a book devoted to the ambiguities of the term resilience1 ^,2 , Magali Reghezza-Zitt and Samuel Rufat note that this term, initially used in the fields of physics, ecology or psychology, has become popular in the field of risk and disaster management. In a chapter devoted to the "Critique of pure resilience", Samuel Rufat criticises the concept of resilience used in the field of risk and disaster, in particular due to its so-called capacity of incitement to social Darwinism. While they recognise that the authorship of the term Cindynics must be attributed to Georges-Yves Kervern, Reghezza-Zitt and Rufat attempt to widen the meaning of this term to round up all scientific approaches addressing danger issues under this umbrella, while ignoring the precise definition of resilience in the cindynical sense given by Georges-Yves Kervern, even though this definition is directly opposed to social Darwinism. This calls for some reminders or corrections:

By definition, in the cindynical sense the vulnerability of a situation (which brings together a set of actors concerned by this situation within a given spatio-temporal horizon) is its propensity to generate damage, and the resilience of a situation is the inverse of its vulnerability. Therefore, whenever there is damage, the situation was not resilient. Reghezza-Zitt and Rufat note that resilience is not what protects from threats and injuries, but what prevents collapse3 : in this view, a situation is considered resilient even if there is damage.

For example, if a village is flooded and there is one death, and then the inhabitants repair the damage and resume their activities: this situation was resilient in the sense noted by Reghezza-Zitt and Rufat. In the cindynical sense, there is one death: the situation was not resilient.

Samuel Rufat4 ^, 5 describes resilience as implying that in the event of a crisis, the weakest can disappear as long as the survivors learn from the crisis and seek to adapt to it: resilience would thus bear the seeds of social Darwinism. Cindynics are diametrically opposed to such a conception of resilience: whenever there is damage, by definition, the situation was not resilient6 , since resilience is precisely defined as the inverse of the  propensity of a situation to generate damage.

Samuel Rufat contrasts aspects of vulnerability, which would require a collective approach upstream of crisis, to aspects of resilience, which would imply an individual approach downstream. In contrast, the cindynical approach obviously draws lessons from experience feedbacks, but its primary objective is prevention, which in practice requires a relentless daily attrition of vulnerabilities which precisely enables resilience to be forged. Forging resilience is exactly synonymous with vulnerability reduction.

Regarding the individual aspect denounced by Samuel Rufat, it should be noted that resilience in the cindynical sense is the resilience of a situation, and this situation includes all the actors concerned by a danger. As a result, Cindynics notably hinder the maneuvers denounced by Sandrine Revet7 such as those which consist in trying to conceal the political responsibilities8 of a government towards a population. With regard to individualism, Georges-Yves Kervern9 pointed out "the limits of the miraculous transformation of individual vice into collective virtue", and was crystal clear: "in cindynical matters, vice does not produce collective good".

More broadly, Cindynics are precisely opposed to what Samuel Rufat denounces in his "Critique of pure resilience" about resilience as it would be conceived by some actors outside Cindynics.