In my post on French Theory, I wrote that Foucault taught that truth doesn't exist, that there is only power. A lot of you asked me to go deeper. So today, we focus on him. One man. And we'll see how an idea born in a Parisian lecture hall ended up demolishing everything that was still standing. What Foucault theorized fits in one sentence: knowledge and power are inseparable. There is no pure truth on one side and power manipulating it on the other. Every truth is produced by a "regime of truth," a system of domination that decides what is allowed to count as true. From there, he unrolls everything. Madness? It isn't first and foremost an illness. It's a line society draws to exclude those who disturb it. Read History of Madness. The prison, the school, the barracks, the hospital, the factory? Disciplinary machines, all built on the same model, designed to train bodies and manufacture docile individuals. Read Discipline and Punish. Sexuality? Not a fact of nature, but an "apparatus" that power invented in the 19th century to classify, normalize and control people. Read The History of Sexuality. And man himself? A recent invention, he writes, destined to be erased like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea. You see the mechanism. Take any institution, any norm, any self-evident truth. Show that it has a history. Conclude that it's arbitrary. Then conclude that it's oppressive. Then conclude that it must be destroyed. It's a suspicion machine. And it never stops. Yet we need to remember something simple. Civilization was not perfect. It committed injustices, errors, cruelties. But over three thousand years of effort, from Athens to Jerusalem, from Rome to the cathedrals, from the Enlightenment to the laboratories, it had found something. Forms of truth. Imperfect, revisable, but real. It knew that beauty exists and that it elevates us. That the family, a father, a mother, children, is the cell where things get passed down. That a man and a woman are different, and that this difference is a gift, not an oppression. That the teacher teaches and the student learns. That the doctor heals. That the judge punishes the guilty and protects the innocent. That science discovers reality instead of inventing it. None of this was a conspiracy. It was accumulated experience. Wisdom paid for at a very high price, over centuries. Foucauldian relativism, pushed to the extreme by his heirs, tore it all down. Beauty, first. If every hierarchy is a power relation, then saying a Vermeer is worth more than a urinal is bourgeois domination. The result: a banana duct-taped to a wall sold for more than 6 million dollars. Public money poured into installations nobody looks at. Squares and roundabouts disfigured by works nobody asked for. Foucault didn't invent contemporary art, but his generation gave it its intellectual alibi: who are you to judge? The family, next. If every norm is a control apparatus, then the nuclear family is just one historical construction among others, a "heteropatriarchal norm" to be deconstructed. We taught an entire generation that the father was suspect, that passing things down was a form of violence, and that the child belonged to no one. Men and women. If sex is an apparatus of power, then the difference between a man and a woman is no longer a fact, it's a convention. And conventions can be renegotiated. We've reached the point where public officials hesitate on live television to say what a woman is. We taught boys that their masculinity was toxic and girls that their femininity was alienation. We made both of them miserable. School. If school is a training machine, then the teacher's authority is oppression. We replaced transmission with "learner-centered" education, knowledge with skills, rigor with kindness. Standards collapsed, and it's always working-class kids who pay the highest price. Justice. If prison is above all an instrument of domination, then the offender becomes a victim of the system and punishment becomes suspect. We ended up spending more time explaining crime than protecting the people who suffer from it. Science, finally. If knowledge is an effect of power, then biology can be "told differently," facts become "narratives," and activist opinion is worth as much as proof. Everywhere, the same move. Suspect. Deconstruct. Delegitimize. And never rebuild anything in its place. That's what I call the empire of lies. A system that turned doubt into a religion, and that now punishes anyone who dares to state the obvious. But this empire is falling. It's falling because reality always comes back. Because you can't deny biology, economics, beauty and human nature forever. Because an entire generation is discovering it was lied to, and it is hungry for truth. When it falls, we will have to rebuild. Restore, one by one, the truths the intellectual left spent fifty years destroying. That there is true and false. Beautiful and ugly. Men and women. Families that pass things down. Teachers who teach. A justice system that protects. And be done with its rotten fruits, starting with the subsidized contemporary art that despises the very people it claims to liberate. Foucault spent his life proving that everything was constructed. Fine. Then let's build. But this time, let's build something true.