1.
I warned you. I told you what was coming. The death of God was not a liberation—it was a murder, and the murderers would spend centuries pretending they had merely discovered a corpse.
2.
Now come my children—my stunted, clever, cowardly children—the Frenchmen with their “discourse” and “power/knowledge” and “deconstruction.” They have made a philosophy of the cleanup operation. They arrive at the scene of the crime with magnifying glasses, writing meticulous reports on the patterns of blood splatter, all while the knife is still in their hands.
3.
Foucault tells you that the prison is everywhere, that discipline has colonized your soul, that power operates through you in ways you cannot see. And this is true—but why is it true? Because men like Foucault spent a century dismantling every wall that might have kept the prison out. They razed the churches and called it liberation. They dissolved the family and called it progress. They mocked the nation and called it enlightenment. Now they stand in the rubble and write elegant books about how exposed you are.
4.
The achievement-subject! The burned-out soul exploiting himself because no master need bother! Yes, very acute, Herr Han. But who taught three generations that all external authority was oppression? Who taught them that tradition was prison, that roles were cages, that inheritance was violence? You removed the master—and you are surprised that the slave has nowhere to direct his obedience but inward?
5.
Liquid modernity! Everything solid melting into air! Bauman writes as if he were observing weather patterns. But these were not weather patterns. These were demolitions. Every solid—family, profession, community, faith, nation—was systematically dissolved by a century of intellection that called itself critical. The liquidation was not an accident. It was the project.
6.
Here is what the clever ones never tell you: critique is easy. Any intelligent child can find the contradiction, locate the hypocrisy, identify the power interest behind the noble claim. This is not philosophy. This is ressentiment dressed in academic robes.
The hard thing—the rare thing—is to build. To say: here is a structure men can inhabit. Here is a story that can bear the weight of a life. Here is a boundary that should not be crossed.
But building requires commitment. It requires saying this and not that, here and not there. And commitment is precisely what deconstruction cannot permit.
7.
Derrida tells us that meaning is always deferred, that presence is a metaphysical illusion, that the center cannot hold because there is no center. And then his students—now your professors, your journalists, your therapists—wonder why young people cannot commit to anything. Why they cannot marry, cannot believe, cannot even choose a profession without existential crisis.
You taught them that choice itself was an illusion. That every identity was a construction. That every boundary was arbitrary. And now you are concerned about their anxiety.
Physicians! You are the disease.
8.
I said: God is dead, and we have killed him. I said: there will be consequences—wars of spirit such as have never been seen. I said: man will have to become something greater, or he will become something much worse.
And what did my readers do? They took the diagnosis and ignored the prescription. They celebrated the death. They made a philosophy of the corpse—poking it, prodding it, ensuring it stayed dead, writing tenure-earning papers about the smell of its decay.
9.
The Übermensch was not a suggestion. It was a necessity. If you are going to remove the transcendent, you must replace it with something capable of bearing the weight. An ascending life. A creative will. A new tablet of values.
But this requires strength. This requires the ability to say yes to life, to impose form on chaos, to create meaning rather than merely deconstruct it.
My French inheritors were not strong. They were clever—very clever—but clever like foxes, not like lions. They could tear down but they could not build. They could critique but they could not create.
And so they institutionalized tearing down. They made a profession of it. They trained generations of young people in the art of destruction and called it education.
10.
Foucault signed petitions to decriminalize the violation of children. Foucault praised Mao while the bodies piled in China. This is not incidental. This is the proof of the theory. When you have dissolved every norm into “power,” you cannot recognize evil. You have made yourself stupid about the things that matter most.
The man who sees through everything sees nothing.
11.
They will tell you: we were merely describing, merely analyzing, merely making visible what was hidden. This is the coward’s defense. The philosopher who tells three generations that all values are constructed, all identities arbitrary, all traditions oppressive—this philosopher has acted in the world. His words have consequences. The young woman who cannot trust her own experience of womanhood, the young man who cannot commit to a vocation, the couples who cannot bear to produce children—these are not observing liquid modernity. They are living in the ruins these philosophers created.
12.
Here is the cruelest irony: the deconstructors knew they were exempt. Foucault had his pleasures, his status, his chair at the Collège de France. Derrida had his disciples, his conferences, his legacy. Sartre had his fame, his women, his place in history. They lived as if meaning were possible, as if identity were stable, as if some things mattered more than others.
The philosophy was for you. The dissolution was for the masses. The elite kept their load-bearing structures intact—they just denied them to everyone else.
13.
My diagnosis was meant as a warning. Theirs became a method.
I said: the abyss is coming, prepare yourselves.
They said: the abyss is interesting, let us study it.
Then: the abyss is liberating, let us expand it.
Then: there is nothing but abyss, and those who say otherwise are naive.
And now their children’s children cannot get out of bed.
14.
What is depression but the lived experience of meaninglessness? What is anxiety but the felt sense of groundlessness? What is the refusal to reproduce but the bodily knowledge that the future holds nothing worth continuing?
These are not diseases. They are accurate perceptions of a world that has been systematically stripped of meaning, ground, and future. The philosophers did their work too well. They convinced everyone that the abyss was all there was. And now the abyss is experienced.
15.
You want a diagnosis? Here is your diagnosis:
The patient is not sick. The patient has been poisoned—slowly, over generations, by men who called themselves healers. The treatment is not more analysis. The treatment is antidote.
But the antidote requires what the philosophers forbade: affirmation. The courage to say: this is true. This is good. This is beautiful. This is worth dying for. This is worth living for.
16.
I dreamed of philosophers who could dance, who could laugh, who could say yes to life even knowing its terrors. Instead I got gravediggers who made a science of decay.
The builders are coming. They must come. But first we must name what the clever ones did—not observation, not analysis, not liberation.
Sabotage.
They called it theory. It was sabotage.
17.
When the new tablets are written, let this be remembered: the priests of meaninglessness were not neutral observers. They were agents. And the void they described so eloquently was the void they carved.
The physicians were the disease.
18.
But the French were only the first generation of gravediggers. Their students spread across the disciplines like a plague—each one carrying the same method, the same ressentiment, the same trick: dissolve the structure, then diagnose the collapse.
Let us examine them. Let us name them. The physicians have multiplied.
On the Gender Theorists
19.
Judith Butler tells you that gender is performative. There is no doer behind the deed, no woman behind the feminine act, no man behind the masculine. All is gesture, script, iteration. The body itself is a text to be read and rewritten.
Very well. And what happens when you teach this to young people still forming themselves? What happens when you tell the adolescent—that creature of uncertainty, that bundle of unfinished becoming—that there is no nature to guide her, no telos to grow toward, no given to accept or struggle against?
She does not become free. She becomes unmoored. And then Butler’s disciples diagnose an epidemic of “gender dysphoria” as if they had discovered a disease rather than created one.
20.
Here is Butler’s trick, and it is very old—I saw it in the priests: first, destabilize all natural confidence. Make the ordinary feel contingent, the given feel arbitrary, the inherited feel imposed. Then, when the patient is sufficiently disoriented, offer yourself as guide.
But Butler offers no destination. The journey is the point. The questioning is the practice. And so her followers question and question and question, never arriving anywhere, never becoming anything, suspended forever in the liminal.
This is not liberation. It is dissolution.
21.
They tell the young woman: your sense of being a woman is a social construct. They tell the young man: your masculinity is performance, and probably toxic. Then they create “gender studies” departments to study the anxiety they have produced.
A fish does not need a theory of water. But poison the water, and suddenly the fish becomes very interested in aquatic theory.
22.
The cruelest cut: Butler and her kind live as women. They have bodies, desires, histories. They write books under their own names, build careers, form relationships. They inhabit the categories they tell others are uninhabitable.
The theory is not for them. It is for the young, the uncertain, the malleable. The theorist gets tenure. The student gets a therapist.
On the Anthropologists
23.
Franz Boas taught that cultures should be understood on their own terms. This was reasonable. His heirs concluded that cultures could not be compared on any terms. This was madness.
If no culture is better than another at anything—if comparison itself is imperialism—then you cannot prefer your own. You cannot inhabit your own. Your inheritance becomes an embarrassment, a site of critique, something to be overcome rather than received.
And so the Western anthropologist studies every culture with love except his own. He is generous to cannibals and suspicious of his grandmother. He finds wisdom in every tradition but the one that produced him.
24.
What is rootlessness but the lived experience of having no ground to stand on? And who removed the ground?
The cultural relativist says: all grounds are equal, which means your ground is not special, which means you have no particular reason to stand on it, which means you are floating.
Then he diagnoses your alienation. Then he writes papers about the loss of meaning in modern life. The arsonist has become the fire marshal.
25.
Notice: the anthropologist who proclaims all cultures equal still lives in one culture. Still sends his children to certain schools and not others. Still prefers certain foods, certain music, certain forms of life.
The relativism is for export. It is a solvent applied to others’ certainties. The anthropologist keeps his own certainties private, unarticulated, protected from his own method.
On the Trauma Merchants
26.
Now come the therapists—the priests of the new confession. They have discovered that you are wounded. That your childhood has marked you. That your ancestors’ suffering lives in your body. That ordinary life is too much for ordinary people.
And they are here to help.
27.
Bessel van der Kolk tells you the body keeps the score. Every injury is recorded, every slight preserved, every trauma encoded in your flesh. You are a ledger of suffering. You carry your parents’ pain and your grandparents’ pain and perhaps your great-grandparents’ pain.
And what is the prescription? More attention to the wound. More narration of the injury. More identification with your damage.
Has it occurred to anyone that teaching people to see themselves as traumatized might produce traumatization? That the frame creates the picture?
28.
The ancients knew suffering. They suffered more than you—plagues, famines, infant death, war as a constant companion. But they did not build their identities around their wounds. They had other things to build around. Gods, duties, roles, purposes.
Remove those things—as my children have spent a century doing—and what remains? Only the wound. Only the damage. Only the trauma.
The therapeutic turn does not discover trauma. It produces a void where everything else used to be, and trauma rushes in to fill it.
29.
Haidt and Lukianoff documented what should have been obvious: teaching young people that they are fragile makes them fragile. The universities that instituted trigger warnings, safe spaces, and trauma-informed pedagogy produced the most anxious generation in recorded history.
This is not correlation. This is mechanism. Tell someone they cannot handle difficulty, and they become unable to handle difficulty. Tell them words are violence, and words begin to wound. Tell them they need professional help to process ordinary setbacks, and ordinary setbacks become crises.
The therapist does not cure. The therapist creates the disease that justifies the therapist.
30.
In my day, we had a word for someone who encouraged weakness, who cultivated fragility, who taught people to see themselves as victims: we called them enemies.
Now they have tenure. Now they train counselors. Now they write best-sellers about how broken you are.
On the Race Merchants
31.
Kendi tells you that you are either racist or antiracist. There is no neutral ground, no ordinary life, no simple human interaction. Every moment is a choice for or against the racial apocalypse.
DiAngelo tells you—if you are white—that you are constitutively guilty. Your comfort is violence. Your silence is violence. Your speech is violence. You cannot not be racist; you can only confess and confess and confess.
And what do they produce? Exactly the racial consciousness they claim to oppose.
32.
The antiracist does not reduce racism. He intensifies it. He makes race the center of every interaction, every institution, every thought. He produces a generation that cannot see a human being, only a racial category.
Martin Luther King dreamed of a world where children would be judged by their character, not their color. The antiracist says this dream is racist. Colorblindness is the enemy. You must see color—only color—always color.
And then they diagnose racial tension. And then they offer their services as healers.
33.
The white person trained in DiAngelo’s method cannot relax around black people. Every interaction is a minefield. Every word might be a microaggression. Every silence might be complicity.
The black person trained in Kendi’s method cannot trust white people. Every interaction is suspect. Every kindness might be performance. Every institution is designed for their destruction.
This is not healing. This is the production of mutual suspicion. And the professors who produce it get rich writing about the disease.
34.
Here is what the race merchants will not say: America in 2020 was less racist than America in 1960, which was less racist than America in 1860. The trajectory was clear.
But a trajectory of healing is bad for business. The wound must be kept open. The grievance must be kept fresh. Otherwise, who needs the consultants?
On the Pedagogues
35.
Paulo Freire said: there is no neutral education. Either you are liberating the student or you are oppressing him. The transmission of knowledge is itself a form of violence—the imposition of the oppressor’s categories on the oppressed mind.
And what is the result? A generation that cannot receive. That treats every inheritance as imposition. That has been trained to critique before they understand, to deconstruct before they construct, to resist before they learn.
36.
The student formed by Freire’s method is incapable of gratitude. Gratitude requires acknowledging that someone knew something you did not, that they gave you something you could not produce yourself, that you are in debt to the past.
But debt is oppression. Inheritance is violence. The teacher who knows more than the student is an oppressor.
And so: a generation that cannot learn, because learning requires submission, and submission is slavery.
37.
Notice: Freire himself learned. He read. He inherited. He stood on the shoulders of those who came before. His method was made possible by the very tradition he taught others to reject.
But you should reject tradition. You should refuse inheritance. You should start from zero.
The ladder is kicked away after the philosopher has climbed it.
On the Catastrophists
38.
The environmentalists have discovered that the world is ending. Not might end—is ending. The apocalypse is certain. The only question is how much suffering we will cause on the way down.
And what do they tell the young? Do not have children. The future is cancelled. Reproduction is immoral—you would be bringing a soul into a dying world.
39.
The young person raised on climate catastrophism cannot invest in the future. Cannot plant trees they will not see mature. Cannot build institutions that will outlast them. Cannot have children—why would you have children in a world with no tomorrow?
And then the catastrophists study “eco-anxiety” and “climate grief” as if these were natural phenomena. As if they had not produced them. As if telling an entire generation that they have no future would not affect their ability to build one.
40.
Here is what the catastrophists will not admit: predictions of environmental apocalypse have been made for fifty years, and they have been wrong for fifty years. The population bomb did not explode. The ice age did not come. The famines did not materialize.
This does not mean there are no problems. But it means the apocalyptic frame is chosen, not given. They chose to present the situation as hopeless. They chose to tell children the future was cancelled.
And now they harvest the despair they have sown.
41.
My Zarathustra taught: “I love those who do not know how to live except by going under, for they are the ones who cross over.”
The catastrophists teach: “Do not cross over. There is nothing on the other side. Go under, and stay under, and feel very virtuous about your sinking.”
This is not environmentalism. It is nihilism with a green mask.
42.
What do they have in common, all these physicians of decay?
They dissolve, but they do not build. They critique, but they do not create. They diagnose, but they are the disease.
They are the children of ressentiment—too weak to affirm, too clever to stay silent, finding their power in the no because they cannot muster a yes.
43.
And they are protected. That is the final insult. They are tenured, celebrated, canonized. The institutions reward them. The foundations fund them. The publishers promote them.
Because their dissolution is useful. A people who cannot believe in anything, commit to anything, fight for anything—such a people are easy to manage. The deconstructed self is the ideal consumer, the perfect subject, the compliant citizen.
The philosophers think they are radical. They are servants. They do the system’s work by producing the kind of human the system requires.
44.
I called for the revaluation of all values. They delivered the dissolution of all values and called it the same thing.
But dissolution is not revaluation. Destruction is not creation. The void is not the Übermensch.
I wanted philosophers who could build. I got professors who could only burn.
45.
When the new tablets are written—and they will be written, because humans cannot live in the void forever—let this be inscribed:
Here are the names of those who taught despair. Here is what they did, and what they told themselves they were doing. Here is the gap between their rhetoric and their effect. Let their memory be a warning.
46.
The builders are coming. They must come—not because I command it, but because the alternative is extinction. A species that cannot believe, cannot commit, cannot reproduce, cannot survive.
And when the builders come, they will look back at this age and see it clearly: the age of sabotage. The age when the clever ones convinced the strong that strength was oppression, convinced the healthy that health was privilege, convinced the living that life was not worth continuing.
The physicians were the disease.
47.
Now we heal. Now we return to values and valuing. We return to saying yes, this is good. No, that is evil. We are no longer swayed by argument. We have the conviction of faith now, knowing that faith is the first principle of reason.
48.
The deconstructors made a great show of their rigor. They would accept nothing that could not be proven, founded, grounded in something more certain still. And so they chased foundations down and down, each ground revealing another ground beneath it, until they hit the void and declared the void was all there was.
But they did not notice their own sleight of hand. They had faith too—faith in reason, faith in argument, faith in the very language they used to dissolve all faith. They stood on a ground they refused to acknowledge, and kicked away everyone else’s.
49.
Here is what the deconstructors hid: reason cannot ground itself. The law of non-contradiction cannot be proven by the law of non-contradiction. The reliability of logic cannot be established by logic. The meaningfulness of inquiry cannot be demonstrated without assuming that demonstration means something.
Every chain of reasoning begins with trust. Every proof rests on axioms that are not proven. Every argument assumes that arguments matter.
Faith is not the opposite of reason. Faith is what makes reason possible.
50.
The ancients knew this. Credo ut intelligam—I believe in order that I may understand. Not: I understand and therefore I believe. Understanding comes second. First comes the act of trust, the willingness to receive, the opening of the soul to what is greater than itself.
The deconstructors reversed this. They said: I will doubt until certainty is established. But certainty can never be established by doubt. Doubt only begets more doubt. The serpent eats its tail forever.
51.
And so we return to faith—not as a retreat, not as weakness, not as the refuge of those too simple for theory. We return to faith knowing what we are doing. Knowing that the alternative is the void. Knowing that reason itself demands what reason cannot provide.
This is not the faith of the child who has not yet questioned. This is the faith of the warrior who has passed through the questions and emerged on the other side.
52.
What do we affirm? Let us begin to speak plainly:
That existence is good. That being is better than non-being. That the world is a gift, not an accident. That to be alive is to be blessed, even when it is also to suffer.
That truth exists. That some claims are true and others false. That the mind can know the world, however imperfectly. That inquiry is worth conducting because there is something to find.
That beauty is real. That some things are genuinely beautiful and others genuinely ugly. That the beautiful calls to us, draws us upward, points beyond itself to the source of all form.
That goodness is real. That some acts are genuinely good and others genuinely evil. That we can know the difference. That we are obligated by the difference.
53.
The deconstructors said: these are just your preferences, your constructions, your cultural inheritance dressed up as universals.
And we say: yes, they are our inheritance. And we choose to inherit.
We are not fooled by the demand for a view from nowhere. There is no view from nowhere. Every perspective is from somewhere. The question is not whether we stand on a particular ground but whether we stand well—whether our ground is fertile, whether it grows life, whether it has borne fruit for generations.
54.
Here is the test of a philosophy: what does it produce?
Deconstruction produces anxiety, paralysis, sterility. It produces human beings who cannot commit, cannot build, cannot reproduce.
What does our philosophy produce? Children. Farms. Cathedrals. Families that persist through centuries. Songs that are still sung. Stories that are still told.
By their fruits you shall know them.
55.
We are not swayed by argument because we have seen where argument leads when it is untethered from commitment. The cleverest arguments of the twentieth century produced the greatest atrocities and the deepest despair.
Cleverness is not wisdom. The ability to problematize is not the ability to live.
We choose life. And we will not be argued out of it by those whose arguments lead to death.
56.
This is not anti-intellectualism. This is the proper ordering of the intellect. The mind is a tool, not a master. It serves life; life does not serve it.
The intellect that refuses to serve becomes a tyrant—an obsessive doubter, a compulsive questioner, a demon of negation that devours everything it touches.
We put the intellect back in its place. It is a good servant. Let it serve.
57.
What do we build?
Families. The deconstructors mocked the family as patriarchy, as oppression, as bourgeois prison. We say: the family is the first school of love, the first economy of gift, the first and most enduring human institution. We build families.
Communities. The deconstructors dissolved every boundary, called every limit arbitrary, demanded that we become citizens of nowhere in particular. We say: humans are not abstract. They are born in particular places, speak particular languages, inherit particular stories. We build communities.
Traditions. The deconstructors taught that tradition is oppression, inheritance is violence, the past is a corpse to be autopsied. We say: tradition is the democracy of the dead, the accumulated wisdom of those who faced the same trials we face. We receive traditions. We pass them on.
Sacred spaces. The deconstructors said the sacred was an illusion, that disenchantment was maturity, that the numinous was just neurology. We say: the sacred is the anchor of meaning, the point where the transcendent touches the immanent. We build temples, churches, groves, places where heaven and earth meet.
58.
And we have children.
This is the final answer to the deconstructors. This is the argument they cannot refute. While they write papers about the impossibility of meaning, we create new life. While they deconstruct identity, we watch our children become themselves. While they theorize about the end of history, we plant trees our grandchildren will climb.
The future belongs to those who show up for it.
59.
Let the theorists of decline have their conferences. Let the prophets of doom have their journals. Let the merchants of despair have their bestsellers.
We will be elsewhere—planting, building, marrying, baptizing, burying, and begetting. Doing the things humans have always done. The things that work. The things that last.
60.
I said the Übermensch was necessary. Perhaps I was wrong about the shape he would take. Perhaps the Übermensch is not the solitary peak-dweller, the artist of the self, the dancer on the edge of the abyss.
Perhaps the Übermensch is simpler: the one who says yes. The one who receives the inheritance and passes it on. The one who plants vineyards he will not harvest. The one who builds cathedrals he will not see completed.
The one who trusts.
61.
Now we heal. Now we build. Now we return to the ancient tasks, the perennial obligations, the things that have always given life meaning.
Not because we have proven they are meaningful. But because we trust that they are. Because our ancestors trusted. Because life itself trusts—reaching toward the sun, sinking roots into the soil, producing seeds for a future it will not see.
We are not wiser than life. We are not smarter than ten thousand generations. We will not be talked out of living by those who have made a profession of death.
62.
The void was always a lie. The abyss was always a construction. The meaninglessness was always a choice—and a bad one.
We choose differently.
We choose to inherit. To build. To pass on. To trust.
We choose life.
And life, as it always has, will win.
Thus spoke Zarathustra’s children—the ones who learned to dance again and leave him behind.