Translated from French
Today I deconstruct deconstruction.
Deconstruction is the most effective mental virus ever devised against a civilization. It was manufactured in France between 1966 and 1980 by three men: Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. It was exported to the United States, hybridized with American racial puritanism, and returned thirty years later under the name of wokism to paralyze the entire West. Here's how it works, and why it must be destroyed.
The thesis is simple. Every truth is nothing but a disguised power relation. Every sacred text, every law, every science, every norm, every hierarchy, every identity, every institution actually conceals a domination. To deconstruct is to reveal the power dynamic beneath the veneer of truth. It's to tear off the mask. It's to "unmask."
Formulated like that, it seems harmless. Even useful. Who doesn't like a bit of critical thinking? That's the trap. Deconstruction presents itself as a method. It is in reality an ontology. It doesn't just say "let's question norms"; it says "there is *only* power relations." The difference is civilizational.
A society that questions its norms remains standing. A society that believes its norms are *nothing but* domination collapses. Because it can no longer defend anything. No more borders, no more laws, no more science, no more language, no more history, no more biology, no more family. Everything becomes suspect. Everything becomes negotiable. Everything becomes "constructed therefore deconstructible."
That's the first reason it's a virus. It self-replicates. Once inoculated, it turns everything it touches into a target. Science is patriarchal, so let's deconstruct it. Language is colonial, so let's reinvent it. Meritocracy is racist, so let's abolish it. Sex is a construction, so let's choose it. There is no more bedrock. Everything is sand.
Second reason. The virus is *non-falsifiable*. If you defend a norm, it's because you're the oppressor. If you deny being an oppressor, that's proof of your unconscious privilege. If you cite facts, your facts are contaminated by the power that produced them. If you cite reason, reason itself is white, male, Western. There is no possible exit. The system is designed to make any objection inadmissible by definition.
That's exactly the structure of a cult. And that's exactly what has taken hold in universities, HR departments, media, administrations, and corporate boards for the past twenty years.
Third reason. The virus self-refutes but does not self-destruct. If every truth is power, then the sentence "every truth is power" is itself power, therefore worthless. Logically, deconstruction bites its own tail from the first sentence. But it doesn't care. Because it has never sought coherence. It seeks political effectiveness. And its political effectiveness is immense. It disarms its enemies and arms its militants. It paralyzes the defender and frees the attacker. It's a perfect asymmetric weapon.
Fourth reason. The virus produces diminished humans. An entire generation has learned to deconstruct and never learned to build. It knows how to suspect, never to admire. It sees power everywhere and beauty nowhere. It can produce a thousand pages on the oppressive nature of Shakespeare and zero lines worth reading in a hundred years. It has confused critical intelligence with critical posturing. It is sterile by construction. A mind fed on deconstruction is a mind that no longer knows how to build anything.
Fifth reason, the gravest. A civilization stands on three pillars. The belief that a truth is accessible to reason. The belief that a good can be distinguished from an evil. The belief that an inheritance deserves to be passed on. Deconstruction has methodically dynamited all three. Not out of malice. Out of intellectual play, fascination with suspicion, hatred of the bourgeoisie that nurtured its prophets. But the result is there. A civilization that no longer believes in its truth, nor in its good, nor in its inheritance does not defend itself. It apologizes while awaiting the end.
That's what we've done. That's what must be named.
The good news is that a mental virus only survives as long as we cede it authority over discourse. It dies the moment we stop playing its game. The moment we quietly reaffirm that there exists a truth, a beauty, a good, an inheritance. The moment we stop asking permission from the deconstructors to build. The moment we remake. The moment we pass on. The moment we create.
Builders have always had the last word over commentators. Always. Because in the end, what remains is what has been built, and nothing of what has been deconstructed.
So today I deconstruct deconstruction. And tomorrow I build.
Translated from French
Deconstruction claimed to throw out the colonial bathwater, but it ended up drowning the baby—and that baby was the civilization that had invented the bathtub, the soap, and the very idea that anything could be washed at all.
Derrida wanted to teach us to read between the lines; his heirs just learned how to burn the book. Foucault hunted down relations of power; they turned it into a grid to mechanically apply to anything that sticks out.
And at the end of the chain, we find ourselves defending, through cultural relativism, the most anti-woman, anti-press, anti-Jewish, anti-gay regimes on the planet, all in the name of the fight against oppression.
The worst part is that deconstruction started out as a powerful critical tool. But transformed into a mass ideology via American social science departments, it became what it claimed to combat: an ethnocentric dogma (middlebrow Western academic) that’s blind to itself, projecting its moral categories onto civilizations that couldn’t care less—and which, in turn, have no qualms about defending their own.
Western civilization is the only one in history to have produced self-criticism as a cardinal value.
That’s its strength, and it’s become its Achilles’ heel: faced with adversaries who don’t play that game, the asymmetry is deadly.
As a post-secondary student in the 90s (in Canada) Foucault and Derrida were fixtures in essays and political correctness was a weigh station en route to wokeism. That weigh station failed to remove the bloat of overweight ideas, birthing dogmatic ideology - and here we are.
I said as much when I left graduate school in disgust after my Master's in 2013 (Sociology).
I still say there is value in the study of human groups and socialization, but that field is purely smug, postmodernist armchair activism.
You described what I saw in graduate school beautifully. You are completely right, and I lament the fact that reform is impossible. Rebuilding after the razing is all that is left.
The baby, as you said, drowned in the bath water.
