Strangetimes

Je viens de regarder mon passage dans Quotidien. Évidemment, je suis qualifié d’« influenceur entrepreneur d’extrême droite ». Déroulons. Je ne sais pas si vous vous rendez compte à quel point le peuple français vous méprise. Vous êtes tellement déconnectés du réel que, dans votre petit monde, vous êtes persuadés d’avoir le monopole du bon sens. Alors je vais vous dire ce que vous êtes vraiment. Mais avant, je vais vous dire d’où je parle. Je suis breton. J’ai grandi dans un système scolaire profondément cassé. La majorité de mes profs étaient de gauche, et la plupart étaient déprimés. Pas méchants. Déprimés. Ils ne transmettaient qu’une chose : la conviction que le monde est injuste, que l’effort ne paie pas, et que demain sera pire qu’hier. Ce qui m’a sauvé, c’est d’avoir appris seul. J’ai commencé à coder à 12 ans. À 15 ans, j’avais créé un jeu qui me rapportait plus que le salaire de mes profs. Personne ne m’a donné la permission. Personne ne m’a subventionné. J’ai construit, des gens ont joué, j’ai été payé. La leçon d’économie la plus honnête de ma vie. Ensuite j’ai travaillé dans la tech, j’ai vécu dans la Silicon Valley, j’ai construit pas mal de choses. Et j’ai étudié l’économie par moi-même. Pas pour un diplôme. Pour comprendre comment le monde fonctionne vraiment. Et surtout, j’ai eu une chance que vous n’aurez jamais. J’ai été connecté, et je le suis encore, aux deux extrémités de la société. D’un côté, les couches les plus modestes, celles que vous prétendez protéger et incarner sans jamais leur parler. De l’autre, les couches les plus hautes : des milliardaires, des bâtisseurs, Elon Musk. Je fais le grand écart tous les jours. Et je peux vous dire une chose : en bas comme en haut, le diagnostic est le même. Vous, vous êtes au milieu, dans le seul étage de l’immeuble qui n’a pas de fenêtre. Ce que je vais dire maintenant, n’importe quelle personne saine d’esprit qui a un contact avec le réel le comprend. Yann, tu incarnes un mouvement et des idées qui ne représentent quasiment plus que vous. Ceux qui croient encore Quotidien et ses mensonges répétés en boucle, ce sont deux populations. Les gamins endoctrinés par une école capturée par l’idéologie. Et une partie des Français issus de l’immigration, qu’on manipule en leur répétant que les Français sont racistes. Un récit construit de toutes pièces par cette gauche mortifère, qui a besoin de victimes pour exister et qui les enferme dans ce rôle pour garder leurs voix. Les idées que vous défendez sont des idées de mort. Elles culpabilisent le travail. Elles humilient ceux qui construisent. Elles transforment chaque citoyen en assisté ou en suspect. Partout où elles ont été appliquées jusqu’au bout, elles ont produit la même chose : la pauvreté, la défiance, l’effondrement. Pas une exception. Pas une. Je le dis souvent : dans votre camp, il y a les cyniques et les believers. Les cyniques savent que ça ne marche pas, mais ça leur rapporte de l’audience, du pouvoir, des subventions. Les believers, eux, y croient sincèrement. Yann, je vais te laisser le bénéfice du doute. Je te range dans la case des believers. Alors un conseil : lis Hayek. La Route de la servitude. Ça se lit en un week-end, et ça t’expliquera pourquoi chaque bonne intention que tu défends à l’antenne pave exactement la route que tu prétends combattre. Tu as sans doute l’impression d’être du bon côté de l’histoire. Ils l’avaient tous. Mais tout ce que tu représentes enverra la France dans le chaos total. Les gens que tu appelles « extrême droite », ce sont des gens normaux. Des gens qui veulent vivre en sécurité, travailler, être payés dignement pour ce qu’ils font, et élever leur famille dans un pays qu’ils reconnaissent encore. C’est tout. Ce n’est pas une idéologie. C’est le bon sens que vous avez abandonné, puis insulté. Et je ne sais pas si vous mesurez ce qui est en train de se passer. Les peuples, dans leur intégralité, et avec eux les entrepreneurs, les créateurs de valeur, tous ceux qui font tourner ce pays, commencent à vous détester. Pas à vous critiquer. À vous détester, profondément, viscéralement. Chaque leçon de morale, chaque étiquette, chaque sketch condescendant creuse un peu plus le fossé. Alors un conseil d’ami : calmez-vous. Vraiment. Je viens d’un milieu très loin des salons feutrés parisiens et des dîners bobos où l’on décide entre soi qui a le droit de parler. Toi, tu vis dans une bulle. Une bulle confortable, chauffée, avec un public qui rit au signal. Mais le réel ne rit pas au signal. Plus personne ne vous croit. Et le réel vous jugera. Très sévèrement. Le replay a 27mn :

I think we're entering a civilizational rupture that nobody can predict. Not me, not the labs, not governments. I don't know how much people realize how fast we're moving. Look at what Anthropic's new model did during testing. It solved two open problems in theoretical physics, both on black holes. One of the calculations was laid out in 2003 and nobody had ever finished it, because it was too laborious. It formalized the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem in 30 hours, with a thousand agents that organized themselves. The first attempt took 11 days. It wrote an operating system that boots on a laptop, starting from an empty folder, in 8 days. It designed three electronic devices, boards, enclosures and software included. All three worked without a single electrical modification. It found a new method to predict the structure of viral capsids, the shells used to deliver gene therapies. And on robot control, it more than doubled the previous version's score. All of that in a single announcement, on a Monday. I think discoveries are going to stack up so fast that they'll produce an abundance we've never known: energy, health, materials, food. And with it a phase of immense joy, the joy of a civilization realizing that scarcity was never a law of nature. Except that joy is going to land in a world order that's cracking everywhere, and that was designed by Malthusians. People convinced that resources are finite, that there are too many of us, and that the job of an enlightened elite is to manage scarcity on everyone else's behalf. To me, Bill Gates is the most famous face of that worldview: a man nobody elected, who has weighed on the planet's health, agriculture and climate policies for twenty years. The degrowth crowd is the militant version. They don't even want to manage scarcity anymore, they want to organize it. Abundance is the worst possible news for that worldview. If energy becomes nearly free and diseases fall one after another, nobody needs anyone to ration anything for them. So I don't think they'll fight it. I think they'll try to capture it. In the name of safety, climate or public health, we'll be told this power is too dangerous to be left in everyone's hands. We already saw the movie during Covid: the permission slips, the passes, the QR code to go get a coffee. Now imagine the same logic with an AI that can see everything, trace everything and decide everything in real time. Orwell never imagined a tool like that. The technology is winning on its own. The question of the next ten years is who abundance will belong to. We are living through the greatest civilizational revolution in human history. It's happening right now, and most people are looking the other way.

Having spent a long time watching Elon Musk, and having talked with him, I believe I understand what he understood before almost anyone else. And it's something every one of us needs to understand now. Western civilization is not one civilization among many. It is the one that gave the world freedom of thought, modern science and the dignity of the individual. And it is under attack. Not by peoples, but by ideologies that want it dead. If it dies, the world will not become more just. It will become poorer, more brutal and darker. For everyone, including those who hate it. Why? Because civilizations are not interchangeable. We were told that any culture could be blended with any other, like mixing colors, and that the result would always be harmonious. It isn't true. A society where women are equal to men cannot coexist without friction with a worldview in which a woman's testimony is worth half a man's. A society where you can criticize God, change your religion or have none cannot absorb, without fracturing, a worldview in which apostasy is paid for with your life. Every people has its own genius and moves at its own pace. But not all values are equal, and you cannot build a nation on laws that contradict each other. Saying so is not racist. Racism is about blood. I am talking about laws, customs and values. And those values belong to no race: a Japanese, a Senegalese or an Iranian can make them his own, and millions have. That is exactly why they are worth defending. Let's remember where they come from. It all begins in Greece. In Athens, for the first time, men decide that truth does not descend from a throne but is sought through reason, and that a city governs itself through debate. Socrates chooses death rather than give up thinking freely. At Salamis, a handful of free cities stops the greatest empire in the world. Then comes Rome. Rome invents law that binds everyone, the citizen who holds rights, the Republic. And one immense idea: you can become Roman without being born Roman. You become Roman by adopting its laws. Christianity adds the most revolutionary idea in history: every human being, slave and emperor alike, has infinite worth. Then France. The cathedrals, those ships of stone our ancestors built over centuries for descendants they would never see. Descartes, Pascal, Voltaire. The Declaration of the Rights of Man. And Napoleon, who gives France the Civil Code, the lycées, and one simple principle: careers open to talent. Murat, the son of an innkeeper, ends up a Marshal of the Empire and King of Naples. The Civil Code spreads across much of Europe and still shapes the law of dozens of countries today. And this civilization goes on to abolish slavery, which had been practiced on every continent since the dawn of time, to push back the plague, smallpox and the night itself, and to set foot on the Moon. Peoples of the West, be proud of this history. Proud does not mean blind. Every civilization has committed crimes: conquest, slavery, war. Ours is the one that went furthest in examining its own faults, to the point of abolishing what it had once practiced. This capacity to question itself is its greatest strength. And that is exactly the strength now being turned against it. Because for decades, this magnificent system has been getting hacked. Not by an army. By an alliance of two forces that have nothing in common except one enemy: us. The first is communism. It lost the economic war, lost the Cold War, lost history's verdict with its tens of millions of dead. But it never lost the universities. It survived by changing costumes: class struggle became the struggle of the oppressed against their oppressors, and the West was declared guilty of everything. It taught our children to be ashamed of their ancestors, their borders and their culture. It is the root cause, because before you can bring down a civilization, you have to take away its will to defend itself. The second is political Islam. I am not talking about Muslims, many of whom came here precisely to escape this ideology and are its first victims. I am talking about a political project that wants to place religious law above civil law. It has no doubts. It feels no shame. It rushes into the void the first one dug. One disarms. The other advances. And let no one on the left believe they will stay in control. History has already staged this play. In 1978, Michel Foucault was enthusing over the Iranian revolution. Iran's communist party, the Tudeh, backed Khomeini and called on Iranians to vote for his Islamic constitution. By 1983, its leaders had been arrested, the party banned, and its chiefs paraded on television to confess their “crimes.” In 1988, thousands of political prisoners were executed, communist activists among them. The second always ends up devouring the first. Useful idiots are only useful for a while. So here is my call to every Western people. To the French, the Italians, the Poles, the Germans, the Spanish, the Americans, to all of you. We are at a turning point. What we do in the next ten years will decide what our grandchildren are allowed to say, believe, write and love. I am not asking you to die for the West. I am asking you for something harder: to live for it. Learn its history and pass it on. Have children. Speak without fear, even when they call you every name in the book. Vote, get involved, run for office. Build companies, schools, factories, families. Refuse the shame they are trying to inject into you. And stop surrendering anything that makes us who we are: freedom of thought, equality before the law, the dignity of every person. The historian Arnold Toynbee understood it: civilizations are not murdered, they commit suicide. And those who think they can let the West fall without paying the price should remember the Iranian communists. They helped tear down what they despised, and then they were next. The Greeks at Salamis were outnumbered. They won because they knew what they were defending. We are the heirs of Athens, Rome, Notre-Dame and the Civil Code. It is no accident that the rockets that will carry humanity to Mars are being built in a free civilization. It is time to prove ourselves worthy of what we were given. The West is worth defending. And no one will defend it for us.