builders have such a particular relationship to truth. You can lie to a TV set. You can't lie to a rocket. What happens when you cut a civilization off from its roots? It becomes a bouquet of cut flowers: still beautiful for a few days, then it wilts.
https://x.com/brivael/status/2104212333681619243?s=20
Translated from French
I've thought long and hard about one question: why is our world so deeply sick?
I think I've figured it out. And what we saw on Saturday in Paris with the Pope makes me more optimistic than I've been in a long time.
I'm not talking about an economic crisis or bad government. I'm talking about something deeper. Mass immigration that we've refused to face for decades. Infinite tolerance for everything that contradicts reality, and none for those who dare to describe it. Obvious truths that must be denied in public to remain respectable.
All of that is just symptoms. The disease is that our relationship to truth has broken.
To understand, we have to go back to the source. At the beginning of the 20th century, the proletarian revolution fails everywhere in the West: the workers don't follow. A portion of the intellectual left draws a simple conclusion from this. If we can't take the economy, we have to take the culture.
Gramsci theorizes cultural hegemony. The Frankfurt School shifts the battle from the factory to the university, the media, the family. Horkheimer and Adorno put reason itself on trial, accusing it of being an instrument of domination. And the one-way tolerance I mentioned even has a birth date: in 1965, Marcuse writes that true tolerance would consist of being intolerant toward the right and tolerant toward the left. Two years later, Rudi Dutschke calls for the "long march through the institutions."
It wasn't a conspiracy. It was a strategy, assumed and written in black and white. And it worked.
French Theory takes over. For Foucault, truth is a product of power. Derrida deconstructs everything that stands up straight. In 1979, Lyotard defines the postmodern condition as "incredulity toward metanarratives." No more grand narratives, no more common truth. Only viewpoints, power relations, identities.
That's the genealogy of wokism. And at bottom, it rests on a single idea: human nature doesn't exist. Everything is constructed, so everything can be deconstructed. But when there's no longer any truth, all that's left is power. The one who holds the institutions decides what is real.
Look at the dates. In February 1974, Solzhenitsyn signs "Live Not by Lies," dated the very day of his arrest. A Christian out of the Gulag, who understood that the entire Soviet system rested on lies and that the only weapon of a free man was to refuse to participate in them. At the same moment, our elites decide that truth is just one narrative among others.
In the East, they discover that truth is the last thing that resists. In the West, they decide it doesn't exist.
It's no coincidence that the technological stagnation Thiel talks about, the moment when the world of atoms stops advancing, begins at the same time.
To measure what we've lost, we have to understand what made the West. And what made the West is Christianity.
The Gospel of John opens with these words: "In the beginning was the Word." In Greek, the Logos. The word, reason. If the world comes from reason, then the world is legible. It has laws. It deserves to be understood.
Jesus says: "The truth will set you free." He also says: "I am the way, the truth, and the life." Truth is not an opinion. You don't negotiate it, you don't vote on it. You seek it all your life, and it obliges you.
With Christianity, time also stops being an eternal cycle. History has a beginning, a direction, a meaning. Without that, the very idea of progress is unthinkable.
The entire Western civilization flows from this conviction: there exists a truth in all things. In the laws of nature, in justice, in beauty. Cathedrals are treatises of geometry in stone. Universities are born in the bosom of the Church, in Bologna, Paris, Oxford. Nicolas Oresme, bishop of Lisieux, shows more than a century before Copernicus that nothing forbids thinking the Earth turns. Mendel, Augustinian monk like Leo XIV, discovers the laws of heredity. Lemaître, Belgian priest, proposes what will be called the Big Bang.
These men weren't seeking truth despite their faith. They were seeking it because of it.
The Industrial Revolution is just the foam of that wave. A thousand years spent believing that reality is intelligible and that we must submit to it rather than bend it to our desires. Capitalism is its direct extension: a market is a machine for telling the truth. As Hayek showed, prices transmit information that no planner will ever possess. Losses sanction errors. Reality always ends up winning.
That's why builders have such a particular relationship to truth. You can lie to a TV set. You can't lie to a rocket.
What happens when you cut a civilization off from its roots? It becomes a bouquet of cut flowers: still beautiful for a few days, then it wilts.
Chesterton had written it as early as 1908: the modern world is full of old Christian virtues gone mad, because they've been separated from one another. Scientists who love only truth, and whose truth is pitiless. Humanitarians who love only pity, and whose pity is often dishonest.
Wokism is exactly that. Girard had seen it coming in 1999: concern for victims is the supreme Christian inheritance, and the new totalitarianism doesn't fight it—it claims it as its own, until it turns it into a permanent inquisition. It kept the victim and threw out everything else. Compassion without truth. Sin without forgiveness. Confession without absolution.
And that's precisely why I'm optimistic.
At Easter, 13,234 adults were baptized in France, more than three times as many as ten years ago. With teenagers, over 21,000: a historic record. And 42% of these adults are between 18 and 25 years old. It's not our grandparents' France going back to Mass. It's a generation that grew up in emptiness and is seeking something true.
On Saturday, between 700,000 and 800,000 people gathered at the Place de la Concorde. On the very square where the Revolution guillotined its king.
The day before, at UNESCO, before representatives from around the world, the Pope echoed the words of Christ: "only truth sets us free." He affirmed that there exists a common human nature, exactly what fifty years of theory have labored to deny. And at the Concorde, he recalled that "the human being is fundamentally a being of desire," a desire that no material good can ever fulfill. A Girardian can't read that without smiling.
Believer or not, that's not the question. The real question is whether a civilization still believes there exists a truth. A civilization that believes it starts seeking again, building, transmitting. A civilization that no longer believes it just manages its decline. It's very likely through there that everything will restart.
Cathedrals, universities, the steam engine, rockets. It all comes from the same source.
The West isn't dying. It's remembering where it came from.
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