Against the Robots

Following the article, "Why This Hatred of Authority?" , I received numerous reactions. The first was to confuse, or ask me not to confuse, power and authority. Here, we can observe one thing: many people on social media still accept this distinction. For them, it even marks a boundary they deem insurmountable, even if few venture to explain the difference between power and authority. And, since the article was partly dedicated to highlighting this difference, perhaps not in the usual way, it caused offense and raised questions. In many discussions on X, the comments assumed that this article was defending Emmanuel Macron! That shows how much people skim on the internet! But let's understand that for many French people, the President of the Republic embodies an authoritarian form of power.

Thus, there was this intuition about obedience: "Authority constantly inaugurates something new through the mastery one can have over one's own passions." In this sentence, it's possible to replace the word "authority" with "dogma." I'm weighing up which of these two words is more frightening. The inversion of values ​​and the meaning of words allows progressives to say almost anything and turn it into… a dogma. The progressive feeds only on "airheaded ideas," to use Claude Tresmontant's formidable phrase. If I were to explain this phrase a little, I would say that the progressive is rooted in their own thinking. They evolve their thinking for the sake of evolution; the progressive acts for the sake of acting, obeying no authority, fleeing the depression and solitude produced by thinking solely inward. Therefore, they draw upon their latest whims to build new ones. Can't we see the connection between Wokism and the undermining work that has been carried out for decades in France against what has been misrepresented as the national narrative? Those who would have been the left-wing eulogists of Joan of Arc at the beginning of the 20th century are now her detractors and proclaim that she never existed! This shows how progressivism is a machine prone to self-destruction; believing it is correcting itself, it only accelerates its headlong rush. Progressives and the left in general are the true reactionaries of our time, and increasingly so, forced as they are into this flight, because they are incapable of admitting their wrongs and errors. They are mistaken, and they deceive others. They only react to events without ever practicing the slightest empiricism, because they inhabit the future (I say the future, not the future, because there is no future without a past, while the future represents a goal to be achieved that always eludes us).

Authority inaugurates something entirely different. It proposes to draw upon the past to define or redefine what we can imagine happening. This is certainly not absolutism, but rather conservatism. This is also why there are so few theses on conservatism. There is much written about how to preserve, safeguard, and promote, but less often about drawing a vision from it. The conservative has continually ceded this space to the progressive, who revels in it, even though they have no serious business there. What sensible person would have proposed transforming our aging and bankrupt democracy, living on life support, into a political system for defending minorities? I do not deny the protection of the weak; I deny that this should become the sole motive for political action. Especially since the progressive's weakness hides beneath a nauseating ideological cloak. Indeed, it contains a right to take stock of the weak. There are different kinds of weakness. However, politics and sentimentality mix very poorly, and our democracy is entangled in this. The conservative fails to detail their actions, to construct a grand plan, and to make it appealing. This is because they are scrutinized by progressive moralists who relentlessly try to confine them within a moral framework based on sentimental judgment. Suspending this dictate would force us to accept the label of authoritarian, but this time that label would no longer be bestowed by the people, as in the case of Emmanuel Macron—because the people recognize legitimate authority—but by the press and the progressive intelligentsia. Who would complain?

Heliopolis, Ernst Jünger dreamed of a kind of state beyond politics, ruled by the "Regent." There is no regent in our modern world, just two camps spying on each other without ever considering that they can offer anything to one another. This antagonism is increasingly visible at all levels of society. It indicates a loss of shared taste, a growing lack of culture, and an atrophied language reduced to its simplest expression—or at least, to its simplest utility, like American English. American English is doing to French what it did to English: it is exhausting it—no longer able to express the nuances that dialogue demands. Everyone is labeled and categorized according to what they think, believe, or vote. Discussion becomes a waste of time, and since the participants lack all meaning, dialogue cannot acquire any. There is a sense of inevitability at work, a kind of predestination.

Fate seduces and bewitches men when they no longer believe in freedom. The West no longer believes in freedom because it no longer believes in God. Our civilization has, throughout the ages, forged remarkable, now inextricable, ties with freedom; to pull on a thread that protrudes is to annihilate our world. Heritage defies inventory.