I want to offer my apologies, on behalf of the French, for having given birth to French Theory (which in turn gave birth to the worst of all ideological monstrosities: wokism).
We gave the world Descartes, Pascal, Tocqueville. And then, in the intellectual ruins of post-1968, we gave Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. Three brilliant men who forged, in the elegance of our language, the ideological weapon that today paralyzes the West.
We must understand what they did. Foucault taught that truth does not exist, that there are only power relations disguised as knowledge. That science, reason, justice, the medical institution, the school, the prison, sexuality—everything is just a staging of domination. Derrida taught that texts have no stable meaning, that every signifier slips away, that every reading is a betrayal, that the author is dead and the reader reigns supreme. Deleuze taught that we should prefer the rhizome to the tree, the nomad to the sedentary, desire to the law, becoming to being, difference to identity.
Taken individually, these are debatable theses. Combined, exported, and popularized, they form a system. And that system is a poison.
For here's what happened. These texts, unreadable in France, crossed the Atlantic. The departments of Yale, Berkeley, and Columbia absorbed them in the 1980s. They found fertile ground there that didn't exist among us: American Puritanism, its racial guilt, its obsession with identity. French Theory married that substrate, and the child of that union is called wokism.
Judith Butler reads Foucault and invents performative gender. Edward Said reads Foucault and invents academic postcolonialism. Kimberlé Crenshaw inherits the framework and invents intersectionality. At every step, the matrix is French: there is no truth, there is only power, so every hierarchy is suspect, every institution is oppressive, every norm is violence, every identity is constructed and thus negotiable, every majority is guilty.
That's how three Parisian philosophers, who probably never imagined their practical consequences, provided the operating software to an entire generation of activists, university bureaucrats, HR managers, journalists, and legislators. That's how we ended up with a civilization that no longer knows how to say whether a woman is a woman, whether its own history deserves to be defended, whether merit exists, whether truth can be distinguished from opinion.
It's shit for one simple reason, and it must be stated calmly. A civilization stands on three pillars: the belief that there exists a truth accessible to reason, the belief that there exists a good distinct from evil, the belief that there exists a heritage to be transmitted. French Theory set out to dynamite all three. Not out of malice. Out of intellectual play, fascination with suspicion, hatred of the bourgeoisie that had nurtured them. But the result is there. An entire generation learned to deconstruct and never learned to build. An entire generation knows how to suspect and no longer knows how to admire. An entire generation sees power everywhere and beauty nowhere.
I apologize because we French bear a particular responsibility. It's our language, our universities, our publishers, our prestige that gave this nihilism its chic packaging. Without the legitimacy of the Sorbonne and Vincennes, these ideas would never have crossed the ocean. We exported doubt like others export weapons.
What is being built now, in Silicon Valley, in AI labs, in startups, in workshops, in all the places where people still make things instead of deconstructing them—that's the response. A civilization is rebuilt by builders, not by commentators. By those who believe that truth exists and is worth devoting oneself to. By those who embrace a hierarchy of the beautiful, the true, the good, and who are not ashamed to pass it on.
So, sorry. And back to work.
https://x.com/i/status/2055411322628583488
Deconstruction claimed to throw out the colonial bathwater, but it ended up drowning the baby—and that baby was the civilization that had invented the bathtub, the soap, and the very idea that anything could be washed at all.
Derrida wanted to teach us to read between the lines; his heirs just learned how to burn the book. Foucault hunted down relations of power; they turned it into a grid to mechanically apply to anything that sticks out.
And at the end of the chain, we find ourselves defending, through cultural relativism, the planet’s most anti-woman, anti-press, anti-Jewish, anti-gay regimes, all in the name of the fight against oppression.
The worst part is that deconstruction started out as a powerful critical tool. But transformed into a mass ideology via American social science departments, it became what it claimed to combat: an ethnocentric dogma (middlebrow Western academic) that’s blind to itself, projecting its moral categories onto civilizations that couldn’t care less and that, unlike it, have no qualms about defending their own.
Western civilization is the only one in history to have made self-criticism a cardinal value. That’s its strength, and it’s become its Achilles’ heel: against opponents who don’t play that game, the asymmetry is deadly.
https://x.com/i/status/2055648802762059801
Yesterday, I destroyed three builders of ruins.
Today, I want to celebrate a French builder who got everything right and who shaped the mind of one of the most powerful men in the world: Peter Thiel. This man is named René Girard.
He taught at Stanford while his Parisian contemporaries were teaching suspicion. And he discovered something that I consider, soberly speaking, one of the greatest anthropological insights of the 20th century: mimetic desire.
The idea can be summed up in one sentence. We desire almost nothing spontaneously. We desire what others desire. Desire is not an arrow shooting from me toward the object; it’s a triangle. Me, the other, the object. And it’s the other who teaches me what’s worth wanting.
Taken seriously, this realization changes everything.
It explains why the most violent rivalries erupt between the closest brothers, partners, neighbors, direct competitors. The more the model resembles me, the more his desire becomes mine, the more we want exactly the same thing, the more the hatred rises. Cain and Abel don’t fight despite their resemblance. They fight because of it.
Now, read Peter Thiel in light of this.
Thiel met Girard at Stanford in the late ’80s. He says himself that it’s the intellectual encounter that structured his entire investing life. And when you understand mimeticism, you understand why Zero to One is essentially a Girardian book disguised as a startup manual.
The heart of Thiel’s thesis “competition is for losers” isn’t a libertarian provocation. It’s the direct application of Girard to economics.
Here’s the argument. When you enter a competitive market, you enter a mimetic structure. All the players want the same thing, set their prices off each other, copy each other’s features, recruit from the same schools, raise from the same funds. Margins get crushed. Innovation dies. The sector converges toward homogeneous mediocrity. You’re Cain and Abel in suits, killing each other for a point of market share on a product that could have been great if someone had dared to go elsewhere.
Competition, in the sense that standard management thinking celebrates it, is a mimetic trap. It’s exactly the mechanism Girard describes: the convergence of desires produces violence, then exhaustion, then sacrifice—except here the sacrificial victim is economic value itself.
The monopoly, on the other hand, is what happens when you refuse the mimetic triangle. You stop looking at what the neighbor wants. You look at what no one sees. You build something no one else can build, on a truth no one else has noticed. Thiel calls it the “secret” question: what important truth do very few people agree with you on? It’s a purely Girardian question. It asks you to step out of collective desire to access a proper desire.
And that’s exactly why Thiel made 26 years of bets that look, from the outside, like luck, and are in reality an anti-mimetic discipline applied with near-monastic rigor.
PayPal in 1999 when everyone was building portals. Facebook in 2004 when no one believed in social networks post-Friendster. Palantir in 2003 when the idea of selling analytics software to the government made Silicon Valley laugh. SpaceX, Stripe—every major bet has the same signature: everyone in the room thinks it’s stupid, he sees the structure others don’t because he’s spent his life asking himself, what do I desire that isn’t just the reflection of what others desire?
That’s it, Girardian investing. It’s not a financial analysis thing. It’s a hygiene of desire.
And that’s why Girard is the exact opposite of Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. Where French Theory teaches that everything is power, so everything is suspicion, so nothing is worth building, Girard teaches that everything is desire, so everything depends on who you listen to, so your freedom begins the day you stop listening to the crowd. It’s not a philosophy of deconstruction. It’s a philosophy of election in the original sense: choosing, from a point not dictated by others, what deserves your life.
For an entrepreneur, the message is brutal and liberating at once.
If you’re building in a crowded market against direct competitors, optimizing the same metrics as them, raising the same rounds, repeating the same pitches, you’re up to your neck in mimeticism. And mimeticism, in startups, is a negative-sum game. You burn your capital, your time, your mental health, to win a slice of a pie that shrinks while you fight.
If, on the other hand, you identify a truth your competitors refuse to see out of laziness, conformism, or because their own mimetic desire blinds them to it, and you build from there, you access a space where competition doesn’t exist, because no one else has the same compass.
That’s it, the Girardian monopoly. It’s not a market position. It’s a state of mind.
So there you have it. France gave the world deconstructors who taught a whole generation to suspect. But it also gave Girard, who taught a man at Stanford how to build by looking elsewhere than the crowd—and that man financed a non-negligible part of the world we live in today.
The yin of French Theory is generalized suspicion. The yang is Girard. And the yang wins, because it builds. To those who build: stop looking at your competitors. Find the secret. That’s where value awaits.
https://x.com/i/status/2056134360785445217
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Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra
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