Foreword
Thought as an exercise in ingratitude
“For those who are willing to see, the past two years will have produced a great deal of clarity.”
Manifeste conspirationniste, Seuil, January 2022, p. 26
“We were living in a trap that had been open for a long time, but could close at any moment”.
Ibid. p. 169
If Nietzsche’s theme of 'thinking against oneself' was so successful, it was probably above all because it was relatively easy to embroider it on the old Christian leitmotiv of asceticism and humility. It's a pity, because it's a rather superficial approach. In reality, this moment when thought turns against the thinker is merely the culmination of an exercise in ingratitude, which – human life in general and writing in particular being fundamentally social phenomena – occurs above all against others.
As a self-exile in post-communist Europe, I was welcomed everywhere with open arms by enlightened elites who idolised the West, whom I was quick to betray as soon as – having learnt the local languages in the meantime – I was in a position to do so: to realise that their anti-communism was, in many respects, a communism too demanding to be satisfied with the imperfections of "real socialism", and that their detestation (for generational reasons, among others) became suspicious to me as soon as I realized that it applied above all to the last period of the communist era – which had, in the end, been the least insane and the least criminal, precisely because of the tacit repudiation of Bolshevik ideals by a state bourgeoisie that had become de facto conservative (or even, in places, reactionary). This inelegance of a Bwana, spitting in the soup of his host tribe, largely explains my expulsion from Romania – where, despite the insistent allusions of some Romanian-language press outlets, I never practised the noble profession of spying.
Having long enjoyed the favours of women – the overlords of the last Western feudalism – in 2020 I published YIN, just to make them understand that I am not at all fooled by their smiles, caresses and other privacies dignified to the rank of Supreme Good of the incel civilisation. The crème de la crème of the 'anti-system' intellectuals[1] boycotted this revenge-porn slog. I find it all the more difficult to hold it against them because, to tell the truth, I largely share their repugnance: I'm not much of an exhibitionist, and I myself deplored in advance all the biographical indiscretions that said text – despite the scrupulous blurring of 'personal data' – could eventually imply. I nevertheless consented to this sacrifice of modesty, moved by the awareness of the necessary ingratitude of any thought situated – to use Ortega's word – at the height of the times. If you want to purr, there's the academic world, which I left just in time to prevent it from ostracising me.
In 2021, I published The Wizard of Davos. No more ingratitude? De facto, yes, ingratitude was put on pause, because there was a war going on, and I imagined that I was fighting that war. Davos had just gone from theory (of soft power) to the practical work of that reluctant Leninism now known as the Great Reset. So I was obliged to follow suit, moving from the abstract universal to the concreteness of a war in progress[2] . This seeming alliance with journalism – the dominant genre of our no-future era – was rewarded by 'the public' (the new name for: the century): still way under the readership of any alpine survival manual for city-dwellers, the Wizard's readership more than quadrupled the sales of YIN. Admittedly, I had made the effort to write slightly less convoluted prose. But above all, modern man infinitely prefers the exposure of recent threats attributable to third parties to that of old errors of his own.
From this point of view, the text below can be seen as a kind of dialectical synthesis of YIN and the Wizard, by returning to ingratitude. Briefly considered, in the summer of 2021, as one of the main French-speaking anti-Schwab whistleblowers, I had conveniently overlooked various aspects of my intellectual personality, which are nonetheless, in my opinion, the primary causes of my historical lucidity, and of its precociousness in the context of Year 1 of the Køvíd[3]: the reason why I have understood the thinking of Schwab, Malleret & Co better than others is above all the fact that – leaving aside a few (admittedly, essential) moral aspects –, at the end of the day, I stand quite close to that thinking. Schwab doesn't believe in the natural equality of human beings, nor in the democracy that is supposed to be its consequence – neither do I. Because of his responsibilities in this world of the dying 'rule of law', he conceals – albeit very poorly – the contempt he feels for the idle talk for eunuchs known as law. As a man enjoying the far more absolute freedom that history is forced to concede to hobos, I can even spare myself this exercise in concealment. Our dissensions are therefore above all differences of taste. Since the democratic/industrial age (which Schwab and I both know is over in the West) was mostly an age of ideologies, today's readers probably have little idea of the importance of differences of taste in human history – probably also because of the theological and/or economic disguises[4] in which these great wars of taste, of which we are all the survivors and heirs, have always been presented to them: cannibals versus 'exophaguses', monogamists versus polygamists, sedentaries versus nomads, etc.
A few months after publishing the Wizard, I stated that, in a way (not necessarily to his liking) Schwab had won, and predicted that the 'way out of the crisis' would be under the auspices of one socialism or another – whether it be this Schwabian neo-Sovietism whose chances of success, since the summer of 2021, nevertheless seem to be melting away like snow in the sun, or some kind of national socialism which, in places at least, may become the explicit antithesis of the Great Reset, while sharing many of its features: redistribution, frugality, localism, hypertrophy of the state. As a French citizen, I have (very modestly) worked towards the advent of this 'Plan B', by supporting the work of Florian Philippot's Patriotes party.
Nevertheless, YIN's lessons should not be forgotten, and I believe that these two versions of the geriatric management of the dying industrial-democratic era (which – in variant B at least – is also the era of nations) are equally bereft of any kind of future – for reasons that are partly the same. From Antiquity to the Modern Age, via the Christian chrysalis, the modern state, as Kojève clearly saw when commenting on Hegel, was essentially built against the family. But an anti-family society simply has no future: whether it bases its allegiance to the YIN on the opiate-like reveries of a Davosian transhumanism, or on the democratic rejection of such reveries – sine the opposite of a lie is not ipso facto a truth – the 'West as cunnicracy' will continue its work, which the work of a deadly poison.
The synthesis set out below under the title Køvíd therefore nuances the apparent conclusions of the antithesis presented in the Wizard. Does this mean that we must return to YIN as the ultimate truth? Not at all. From the point of view of its philosophical perspective, YIN was in fact a work of the "moralising idealism" that Hegel denounced in Kant, Fichte and other representatives of the "Republic of Letters": it is the work of an intellectual, and therefore of a Christian, and its dramaturgy remains, in depth, that of Christian comedy. It comes from the pen of a man who – despite minor setbacks during the successful or unsuccessful crossing of certain border points in the nearby Balkans – never feared for his life. Or at least – in the case of a man (me) with under-developed self-preservation instincts – never feared for the meaning of his life. Comfortably ensconced in the comfort of criticism, the author of YIN is vaguely anxious (and rightly so, incidentally), but only about the meaning of life in general. But since this doesn't really mean anything, he can still indulge in a fair amount of ideological childishness[5] : believing in illiberal nonsense, imagining that the open society is the last word in Western ideology (later on, in the middle of a lockdown, that belief suddenly became more demanding), or that saviours will arrive from some mythical Orient, riding on bears or white horses. All of these are typical of that false-sense-of-being-there[6], which you recover from so quickly once you've been put under house arrest on the pretext of being saved from some flu by governments which otherwise specialise in 'restructuring' hospitals.
The text of the Wizard, to be fair, is already full of that belated maturity, acquired, as it should be, under the invigorating effect of slaps in the face. But the time of its writing was a serious time, and not a very contemplative one: apart from journalistic material[7] and E. Verhaeghe's very well-informed but philosophically somewhat short-sighted analysis, no one had yet explained to the French people – although they were primarily concerned – what the governmental butlers of Davosian philanthropy (Macron, Véran & Co) were concocting for them. One year on from this publication, with the Great Reset already two months into a post-Køvíd 'Ukrainian' phase that Schwab did not necessarily foresee, and perhaps does not so much approve of, it is becoming less urgent to warn, and easier to contemplate in retrospect. A retrospection that some (like Pierre Hillard) have been undertaking for a long time, with an eschatological maximalism that is not without qualities, but which preaches for a single chapel (the one Hillard call „the Church”, with a capital C), and ultimately describes more than it explains. Others authors, on the other hand – like those last-minute anti-feminists that YIN was already making fun of[8] – practise the same retrospective work with all the myopia of a 'history of networks': a task admittedly necessary for a tactical understanding of the present war, but which (a problem already touched on in the Wizard) can in no way account for the emergence of a cultural horizon of expectations such as that which made covidism possible.
But what this retrospection in the light of the Køvíd reveals is the twilight of many idols: the pantheon of the Left in its entirety, of course – but also a significant part of that of the Right. This is the price of clarity: to make the aftermath of this cultural twilight guessable, we must first clear the decks, whatever the cost.
Budapest, May 2022
[1] Or at least: intellectuals who think, the poor things, that they are fighting the system, because they don't understand that feminism is the system.
[2] A war of a type that was still fairly new at the time – even if, in the meantime, the old methods have been revived, with the start of chapter 2 of Reset, entitled 'Ukraine' – a chapter which the present book, completed for the most part in the autumn of 2021, does not deal with.
[3] On the lexicographical innovation "Køvíd", see Appendix 2 below.
[4] Economism is, after all, a theology like any other (hence the "and/or").
[5] Errors, moreover, that are all more or less interrelated. A forthcoming text, entitled Retour d'Eurasie (‘Return from Eurasia’), will attempt to set out the system of errors that have characterised the 'dissident thought' of the 2000s and 2010s, particularly in France.
[6] Rough translation of Hegel's gemeintes Dasein.
[7] Including excellent journalism, as in the case of X. Poussard.
[8] Those authors are, of course, quite often the same people.