The system must die because it is too corrupt and the intelligent are walking away. By Brivael Le Pogam.
I was talking yesterday with a friend who’s completely desperate. For him, it’s all over: France, the UK, everything’s locked down at the European level. They lie constantly, they want to put people in straitjackets with draconian laws they dress up as “child protection.” They’ve flipped every word: anti-racism has become racism, progressivism anti-progress. In short, objectively, they’ve won.
And yet I’m radically optimistic about the end of this system. For a reason you almost never hear: there’s no intelligence left in it.
Look at their elites. Glucksmann, Édouard Philippe, Attal… second-rate hacks. The last two truly impressive pieces of globalism in twenty years were Obama and Macron. Today, in the US as in France, all that’s left are third-rate hacks [e.g. Kamala Harris, AOC] — and they’re bad. Not “I disagree with them”: bad.
But there’s one rule that never fails: when intelligence leaves a system, the system stops working.
And I say this without contempt, quite the opposite. When Mitterrand came to power, there was real intelligence behind him. Attali is brilliant, sincerely. …
Today intelligence has switched sides: it’s gone over to the technology camp. And nearly all the true builders are starting to see the scam for what it is. They won the old game.
But everyone who knew how to play it has left the table. That’s exactly why it’s going to collapse: a system without intelligence can’t survive the encounter with reality.
Intelligence can make a bad system work:
People often reply to me: “But if your system is so awful, how did it win?” The answer boils down to one word: intelligence.
A system can be morally monstrous and still function — on one single condition: that there’s real intelligence in it. Hitlerism didn’t conquer Europe by magic: behind it was an industrial, scientific, logistical machine of genuine caliber. Stalinism didn’t put a man in space by luck: there were Kolmogorovs, Korolevs, a real scientific elite. Evil + intelligence works. It works damn well, even, and for a long time.
But here’s the point no one wants to see: these systems never last. And they don’t fall because they’re evil. They fall because intelligence always ends up leaving them.
A system built on lies and coercion is, by its very nature, at war with reality. And truly intelligent people are precisely the ones who track reality. So at some point, mechanically, they leave. Or they get purged — because they see too clearly, and seeing clearly becomes a crime.
Where we are now:
And that’s when the real downfall begins. Once intelligence is gone, the system turns into a container for bullshitters and players: brilliant at the internal game, useless at the real one.
And these people have one fatal trait, called negative selection: they never recruit anyone better than themselves. The As recruit As. The Bs recruit Cs, so they’re never threatened. At every level, quality drops a notch. It’s mechanical, it’s irreversible, and it’s exactly what turns an empire into a gerontocracy and a revolution into a decrepit bureaucracy.
Look at Macron. The guy was, in his time, a real stroke of genius — one of the last two smart pieces of globalism. And what did he do? He surrounded himself exclusively with people weaker than him. Not a single one who could outshine him. The perfect signature of a B recruiting Cs. The start of the clown explosion.
That’s why I’m calm. We’re not watching a system at the peak of its power. We’re watching a system that intelligence has already deserted, filling up with third-raters who recruit fourth-raters.
They won the old game. But a system without intelligence doesn’t lose in one battle — it rots from the top, slowly then all at once. Us? We just have to build what comes next.
The rewards for being in the system have shrunk so much its just for midwits and DEI:
Our elite is becoming increasingly mediocre, and that’s normal. Intelligence goes where it is rewarded.
The reward of globalism is increasingly meager: a small position, a precarious little pension, in a system that is on its deathbed.
Everyone knows that this system has no future. The elites most of all. They have all the data, all the reports: they know it won’t hold. Their illusion is tearing apart, and now everyone knows:
- That pensions are insolvent.
- That immigration does not integrate.
- That the country [France] is rapidly growing poorer.
The globalist lie rewarded them for 40 years. But the reward experienced diminishing returns. And now only the mad believe it can continue even for another 10 years.
That’s why competence always tends to follow the truth: it is truth that generates efficiency, performance, results. It is truth that generates growth and confidence.
Truth, today, is in the nationalist and technological camp. The camp of AI and innovation. The camp of free enterprises. That’s where the wealth and optimism are. That’s therefore where intelligence is going.
We know exactly what needs to be done to generate prosperity and make a country functional. It’s not a mystery, it’s not barstool opinion — it’s empirically proven on every continent and in every era: liberalize fully, cut taxes to the max, reduce the size of the state wherever possible.
Why reduce the state? Not out of ideology. Out of pure mechanics.
A bureaucrat is structurally incapable of allocating capital efficiently. It’s not a question of meanness or individual incompetence — it’s mathematical. He doesn’t have price signals, he doesn’t have real-world feedback, he doesn’t have skin in the game. He spends other people’s money, on people he doesn’t know, without ever paying the price for his mistakes. Hayek and Mises explained it all a century ago: without a market, you’re blind. You can’t calculate. You can only improvise on the scale of 68 million people.
Result: public services that collapse, a country that falls behind, people who truly struggle. And in the face of this disaster, they’re told the culprit is the neighbor who succeeded. That if the hospital closes, if the school no longer educates, if you can’t afford housing anymore, it’s because rich people exist.
That’s false. Radically false.
The problem has NEVER been that rich people exist. The wealth of some hasn’t impoverished anyone — a euro earned by creating value isn’t a euro stolen from someone else; it’s a euro that didn’t exist before.
The real problem is a state that takes half of everything you produce to burn it in a machine that doesn’t work, then comes to tell you that your feeling of injustice is the fault of the guy across the way.
Taxing more isn’t « addressing the feeling of inequality ». It’s feeding the beast that created it.
The feeling of injustice is real. But it doesn’t come from those who create wealth. It comes from those who confiscate it to squander it — and who need you to look the other way while they do.
Actually, most of the unearned inequality comes from the system of manufacturing new money out of thin air, and the resulting inflation of the asset markets. But that’s just a bit too complicated for most people to grasp, so bankers and government have been getting away with it for decades — especially since 1971, when the West finally abandoned the constraint of gold.