The Crowning and the Silence

Some collective celebrations carry an intensity that exceeds the very thing they celebrate. A square fills up, impromptu processions form, messages pour in from institutions that only the day before seemed hardly concerned. Screens relay the images, voices pile on top of one another, flags come out of drawers. For a few days, a single figure draws a fervor that few public events manage to stir in this country. A statement from the relevant ministry, a second in the name of the prime minister, a reception at the Foreign Ministry, sometimes an internship on offer, sometimes a scholarship, and almost always the same intensity, whatever the occasion. Then the wave subsides. It leaves behind a question one does not always dare to ask: what exactly did we celebrate, and why that rather than something else?

The question is not new. Societies have always produced their heroes of the moment, their faces of the season, their fleeting triumphs. What has shifted is the boundary between what deserves recognition and what merely deserves attention. The distinction, once upheld by mediating institutions (schools, the print press, professional bodies, academies), has worn very thin. It now plays out in a space where the speed at which an image circulates counts for more than the substance of the path it represents.

An old equilibrium, accelerated by the platforms

It would be convenient to believe that this shift is a product of social media. The dating would be wrong. Those who grew up here in the 2000s easily remember televised inter-school competitions that tested the general knowledge and quick thinking of carefully selected high school students. The winners went home with modest prizes. At the same time, on rival channels, visibility shows (beauty pageants, casting shows, talent contests) handed out cars, plane tickets, and cash prizes on an incomparably larger scale. The two formats coexisted, spoke to the same audience, and, without any coordination, sent two opposite messages about what society promised in exchange for effort. One of these messages was heard more clearly than the other. The teenagers who watched these programs are adults today, and their career choices, their fields of study, their exit strategies come as no surprise.

What digital platforms have changed is not the implicit hierarchy of role models. It is the speed at which that hierarchy is transmitted, the granularity with which it is measured, the strength of the feedback signal. Virality made visible an equilibrium that already existed; it thickened it and sped it up. It did not invent it.

What Simon saw

As early as the 1970s, Herbert Simon warned that a society rich in information would inevitably become poor in attention. The scarce resource to be managed would no longer be the knowledge available, but the collective capacity to focus on what, among all that knowledge, deserves to be retained. Half a century later, this insight has become the operating blueprint of the platforms. Value there is measured in captured viewing time, in shares, in the emotional intensity of a clip. In Bourdieu’s terms, one would say that symbolic capital has been reconfigured: what confers authority and recognition is no longer necessarily what attests to competence, but what attests to visibility.

In an advanced economy, this reconfiguration remains partial. The symbolic capital of visibility coexists with other forms of capital (academic, professional, scientific), which have their own circuits of consecration, their own journals, prizes, media coverage, and funding channels. In an economy where these parallel circuits have crumbled, the reconfiguration tends to become total. Only one grammar of recognition is left, and it is that of captured attention.

Two kinds of success that must not be confused

A clarification is needed here, because the confusion is common and it muddies the diagnosis. Not all visible victories are equal, and they do not all follow the same logic. A public-speaking contest, an oratorical performance built on years of work, an international prize won in a demanding discipline: all of these draw on real cognitive excellence. That they come with emotion, staging, and a personal story does not make them objects of pure visibility. They produce emotion because excellence, when it meets an audience, produces it.

What must be distinguished is the celebration that rewards a long process of building from the celebration that rewards nothing more than the ability to catch the eye. A triumph won through the virality of a few seconds of video, a victory awarded by the online vote of a community of fans, fame acquired by strategically occupying an algorithm: these do not belong to the same order of merit as publishing a thesis, drafting a patent, or succeeding in a demanding scientific or oratorical competition. The reader will have gathered from the foregoing that carefully prepared public-speaking contests, science olympiads, and peer-reviewed publications belong in the column of long construction, whatever legitimate emotions they stir at the moment of their consecration. The dividing line does not run between what moves us and what does not. It runs between what has been built and what has merely been seen. I will add, to be entirely honest, a point that academic reticence usually hides behind a false symmetry: these two orders of merit do not have the same value for society. A country is not governed with attention capital. It is governed with transferable knowledge, reliable engineering, well-drafted law, properly trained doctors. The reason is mechanical; it does not rest on a moral judgment. A digital audience, however massive, cannot be summoned to a boardroom to draft a call for tenders, cannot audit a public account, cannot operate on a patient, cannot design a bridge. Nor can it be handed down to the next generation in the form of textbooks, procedures, or case law. The capital it represents is, by construction, individual, perishable, and tied to the platform that hosts it. To claim that the two are of equal worth would be a diplomatic lie, and I have no intention of keeping it alive. Society can celebrate both. What it must stop doing is celebrating them as if they produced the same kind of public good for it.

It would, moreover, be dishonest to claim that building a digital audience of several hundred thousand or a few million people takes no effort. It takes real work, consistency, a keen reading of the algorithm, a feel for what speaks to a given audience, and perseverance in the face of fierce competition. It is a skill, it has demonstrable economic value, and it sometimes earns those who master it more than several traditional skilled professions. To play it down would be a conservative reflex, not an argument.

The problem, then, is not individual effort, which exists on both sides. It is the nature of the capital produced and the signal sent to the generations watching. An audience built on a platform belongs, in the strict economic sense, to the platform and its algorithm. It is not transferable knowledge that society can draw on tomorrow to diagnose an epidemic, negotiate a trade agreement, design a civil engineering structure, or draft a tax code. A thesis, however modest, a patent, however local, a publication in a demanding journal: these build capital that is cumulative, transmissible, and reusable by others. The social function of public recognition is not to measure the effort of whoever succeeds. It is to signal to the next generations the investments in human capital that the community considers strategic to its own functioning. When a public institution celebrates the two indiscriminately, it is not saying that they are of equal worth. It is saying that it has given up weighing their respective effects on the collective capacity to make the country work.

Why the crowd is often right

It would be easy, and lazy, to conclude that the crowd is wrong. In a context marked by prolonged collective fatigue, daily insecurity, and dwindling prospects, quick victories with a human face serve a purpose that long-term achievements cannot. They offer an outlet, a shared pride, a collective breather. They say that it is still possible, even here, to win something. That is no small thing, and it deserves neither contempt nor condescension. Social psychologists have long documented that a population in acute uncertainty rallies first to figures who embody a promise of immediate positive emotion, and only later to figures whose worth needs to be decoded.

The difficulty, then, does not come from the crowd. It comes from what happens around it. It comes from the institutions whose historical function is precisely to arbitrate, to rank, to distinguish between orders of merit, and which choose to extend the wave rather than enter into dialogue with it. An institution that applauds what everyone applauds is acting as a mirror. It is not playing its own role. The risk is not that it picks the wrong target. The risk is that it gradually ceases to be seen as a place where a hierarchy other than that of trends can still take shape.

The institution that stops arbitrating

In the theory of institutions, there is a fundamental difference between those that arbitrate and those that follow. The former impose a hierarchy on collective preferences, even at the cost of going against them, and draw their legitimacy from their ability to build a different scale of value. The latter plug into the flow of attention and draw their legitimacy from staying in sync with it. In a weakened state, the second posture almost always becomes the norm. It is less costly politically, it produces an immediate emotional return, it avoids unpopular trade-offs. Every minister, every embassy, every statement that relays the victory of the moment is doing exactly what is expected of it, and, in the narrow sense, is right to do so. What is missing is not celebration. What is missing is the parallel mechanism that makes visible the paths the flow of attention does not carry on its own.

A state that organizes an annual national prize for scientific research, that awards clearly identifiable scholarships to winners of international olympiads, that publishes a directory of the theses defended by its nationals around the world, and that has its state media systematically cover publications in demanding journals is building a second chain of consecration. This second chain does not replace the first; it complements it. It signals to families, teachers, and teenagers that another kind of success exists and that it is recognized by the public authorities. Without such a mechanism, public recognition is mechanically reduced to whatever collective attention produces on its own. And collective attention, as we have seen, selects first what can be read without translation.

In Haiti, the observation requires no statistical apparatus. One need only compare, over a given period, the treatment given to two types of events. On one side, media victories generate, within a few days, several official statements, ministerial receptions, sometimes the award of an internship or a scholarship, and a prolonged presence in editorials and television news bulletins. On the other, cognitive achievements built over the long term (national winners of science olympiads, young researchers published in peer-reviewed journals, engineers honored abroad) pass through the public space as a scrap of a news dispatch, with no structured institutional relay and no parallel mechanism of consecration. This gap is not a perception. It is an observable constant, case after case, month after month, for at least a decade.

What young people observe

Teenagers observe, with an acuity that is underestimated, what their society makes visible, what it rewards, and what it leaves in the shadows. If intellectual effort, methodical patience, and the discipline of long study earn less social recognition than successful exposure, the rational conclusion is quickly drawn. Not that the aspiration to knowledge disappears. It simply moves into a private, almost intimate zone, cut off from any promise of public reward. People still study, but they no longer really hope it will be seen. That is precisely the moment when a knowledge economy begins, silently, to empty out.

International comparisons offer no consolation. Reality television, visibility contests, and influencer platforms now shape entire careers in economies far more stable than ours. But those economies also have intellectual ecosystems dense enough to absorb the competition from noise. Well-funded universities, prestigious journals, scientific prizes covered by the national press, private philanthropy devoted to research. Virality exists there, but it does not hold the field of recognition alone. Where these counterweights are fragile or intermittent, the attention economy tends to fill all the available space, for lack of adversaries equal to it.

The question that remains

It would be tempting, at this point, to prescribe. To say what should be celebrated more and what should be celebrated less. Such injunctions miss the mark, because they confuse the symptom with the structure. It is not the crowds that need re-educating. It is the mechanisms of mediation that we must learn to inhabit again. A society that wishes to keep a plurality of merits alive must be willing to fund, protect, and make visible the paths that do not spontaneously generate viral emotion. That requires choices, sometimes unpopular ones, from institutions that have grown used to falling in line rather than drawing distinctions.

One question remains, which I raise without answering it. When visibility becomes the main criterion of value, what do we do with the forms of success that, by their nature, cannot be photographed? A mathematical proof, a clinical advance, a patient piece of historical research do not produce spectacular images. In time, they produce effects that the societies that knew how to welcome them have learned to recognize, sometimes with regret, often too late. It is not certain that we still have the long stretch of time this deferred recognition requires. Nor is it certain that we have truly measured what we would lose by ceasing to grant it altogether.

Between crowning and silence, there is less a choice to be made than a balance to be rebuilt. The question is not who deserves the crowd. It is which institutions, which voices, which spaces will still be willing, tomorrow, to carry what draws no crowd.

I know that some readers will give this text a turn it does not seek. They will read it as a criticism of this or that recent victory, even though it names none and very explicitly places genuine cognitive excellence on the side it defends. I will no doubt be reproached for writing, at the wrong moment, what is thought in private but not said in public. I hesitated, I confess. It is more comfortable to hail the victory of the moment, to rejoice in it with everyone else, to leave the question for another week, another month, a time when it will no longer bother anyone. But that other time has never come in this country, and there is something, part professional duty and part personal weariness, in watching, year after year, the best of our young people leave for societies that, for their part, know how to recognize what they are worth. I do not write to seek the approval of a readership, nor to spare myself the unpleasantness of displeasing. I write because it seems to me that prolonged silence on this question costs the nation more than the words that name it. Those who wish to see in this article an attack on the figures they admire will see one. The text itself is about something else.

Between crowning and silence, there is no choice to settle. There is a balance to be rebuilt from its foundations. A nation that can no longer distinguish what it owes to those who build it in the shadows from what it owes to those who light it up for an evening gradually ceases to be a nation. It becomes an audience. And history has rarely seen an audience govern its own destiny for long.

The real question, the one we will pass on to the coming generation, whether or not we have resolved it, is not who deserves the crowd. It is which institutions, which voices, which spaces will still be willing, tomorrow, to carry what draws no crowd. We have little time left to answer it. We no longer have the luxury of not asking it.