Man has no reason to exist. If we all die now, the sun won't stop shining. - Luc Jouret

Jouret's act forces us to recognize the religious motifs that lurk beneath even the most materialist assessments of the unraveling environment, as if all the secular tools of activist science and politics cannot help us dodge the West's great cataclysmic story. Just as some tribal societies ritually enact the birth of the cosmos, Jouret performed civilization's end, magically expressing the ideology of those ecologists who get so deep they start lobbying for the voluntary extinction of the human race.

He said that his father had been unnecessarily strict, that he hadn't allowed him any freedom. For this reason, he was in favor of a very open education, with no constraints, so that kids could blossom. That's why, he confided to me, he loved freedom above all else. He was thinking of his own, of course.

For outsiders, Luc Jouret was definitely a charismatic, charming personality. He was a very, very impressive person, especially in his interaction with with an audience. I did some research on the group in 1987, and at that time I attended lectures given by Luc Jouret for hours in front of several hundred people.