Nicolas

Le Bault

A vast process of relativization, involving the fundamental, structuring notions of Western thought, has been at work in the intellectual world since the early 1960s. We have entered an era of surpassing boundaries, of emancipation, of the total questioning of everything that once ordered our relationship to the world. The cardinal dichotomies between human and animal, man and woman, normal and pathological, living or mechanical, natural or artificial, real or symbolic, public or private, citizen or foreigner, national or global, physical or digital, lawful or forbidden are all subjected to the same movement of erasure, blurring, and abstraction.
First and foremost, in the name of a well-understood materialism, the notion of life has been reduced to its taxonomic meaning—spontaneous activity of organized substance—and stripped of its spiritual content as well as its intrinsic value. That is why it no longer retains anything sacred. It is now around its preservation, conservation, and management—in the sense of a heritage—that the governance models by which developed societies organize themselves are structured. Reduced to its literal, biological definition, and thus to a mere state of matter, it can be manipulated at will, used as fuel or as a resource, hoarded, traded, or simply destroyed. These modalities take, among other forms, surrogacy, abortion, euthanasia, mass immigration, conversion therapy, cryogenics, cloning, exploitation, and war.
It is primarily human life that is concerned here, and its integration into an economic organization which, autonomously—without any external control or dependency—reduces everything it encompasses to the sphere of the useful. The human being is the last link in this chain of adaptation to the system. As an entity still endowed with a vestige of sacredness, it represents a boundary that remains intangible. It resists. The task now is to make this boundary of all possibilities capitulate, to tear it down. This ultimate stage is known as transhumanism.


As the relationships of mutual dependence that bind and shape social groups dissolve, individuals become ever more subject to the technologies produced by the new masters of the global economy. The citizen grows increasingly alone, isolated, cut off from the inexorable march of the world, in which they can no longer take part. Political power’s mediation in the face of the blind might of economy and technology is shrinking. The technological destiny of developed societies now falls into the hands of corporate leaders whose sheer size and power enable them to evade any control or regulation. The decision-making power of citizens and states is now confined to whatever perimeter remains outside the scope of privatization—a scope that relentlessly expands, even within the states themselves. From that point on, no popular sovereignty is possible.
The billions invested—across all currencies—into technologies intended to govern and administer human life outweigh the will of the people or the authority of their representatives. These representatives are now condemned to exercise a kind of “spectacle-thinking,” forced to accept whatever is put forward without being able to refute, amend, or modify it. This is the supreme stage of liberalism, and of its corollary, capitalism, by which the impersonal mechanics of the market itself becomes the normative agent of behavior.
Delegating the destiny of human societies to corporate power and then to machines represents the final outcome of a long succession of renunciations. One could enumerate the many losses of sovereignty for which the capitalist system is responsible.
First, people are no longer masters of their own labor, nor sovereign over what they produce. The capitalist form of work—salaried employment—implies a relationship of subordination between the owner of the means of production and the one who temporarily sells their labor power. The latter decides neither how they will use their time and productive capacity nor the compensation they will receive in exchange. They are compelled to sell themselves to a master they did not choose, for a price they did not set. That price is determined by the arbitrary forces of the market. Like merchandise, the individual is rented for a set period—finite or otherwise—negotiated, compared, and replaced if necessary. They have no power to alter the production conditions to which they are subject. Work is the primary means of socialization for the human being, providing meaning, structure, and direction in life. It is also the first place where, if they cannot rely on lucrative property to make a living, the individual must renounce any idea of freedom. By surrendering sovereignty over their work, they forfeit part of their dignity as a human being.
Lifetime indebtedness, another form of capitalist alienation, is encouraged by the very functioning of the financial system, which creates money in quantities that diminish its value as access to real estate becomes more restricted. Banks are the primary holders of citizens’ private homes, and owners occupy them only conditionally, as the system compels them to constantly repay multiple loans simply to maintain a minimal stability of existence. The same holds true for states through debt servicing. A person crushed by debt is no freer than a state that can no longer print its own currency.
Nor is the worker master of how they will use their wages. Mandatory expenses multiply as invasive technology continues its spread. The citizen is forced to have a bank account, a credit card, an internet connection, connected devices, means of communication, ways to be contacted and to contact others, to be made visible, identifiable, locatable, traceable. At no point can they escape the control exerted—unilaterally, in various ways—on their person and their life.
Individuals are indexed, recorded, scanned as soon as they appear digitally somewhere. And this systematic gathering of personal data is no longer under the sole jurisdiction of the state but also of private companies. No normal, sane citizen would consent to showing their ID at the entrance to a store or a nightclub. Yet they are now forced to do so by signing a consent form as soon as they visit a website.
The computer user, along with their reflexes, preferences, and individual or cultural traits, is thus reduced to a body of recorded data—logged, classified, and analyzed through a lens of neutrality stripped of any ontological perspective. Each piece of data is a quantitative unit subjected to the uniform, arbitrary processing of algorithms. These resources, gleaned from users’ online behavior, feed deep-learning machines used to train artificial intelligences intended first to supplement and ultimately replace humans.
Large-scale human infrastructures—above all, states—now relegated to being mere auxiliaries of the market, themselves suffer complete dependence on the technological shifts driven by capitalist investments and capital flows. We no longer speak of building social and economic organizations to serve the people, but rather of adapting political systems to the dictates of globalization. International competition—intrinsic to globalization, with the market autonomously defining the ground and parameters of economic competition worldwide—imposes a standardization of societies and their modes of governance. This results in a retreat and regression of the political sphere, whose centrality fades into a mere matter of management.
By way of successive renunciations, contemporary states tend to strip themselves of every level at which political authority might be exercised, either relegating these to the market’s discretion or handing them over to administrative, technocratic, and supranational bodies.
Member countries of the Eurozone have relinquished their power to create currency to European central banks. They have ceded their national defense and strategic independence to an American military protectorate, their legislative power to the Brussels Commission, and their industrial production capacities to free trade and offshoring. Some countries now entrust entire segments of their sovereign domain to private management. Certain states even call on private militias, sometimes replacing professional armies in settling military conflicts or conducting external operations.
Depoliticization, driven by widespread privatization, allows the state to become autonomous—beyond the democratic control of citizens—and makes the subversion of the state itself by economic power possible. The state is thus reduced to a bureaucratic function defending vested private and supranational interests, which are then conflated with the public interest. Political decision-making—now just another domain of management—can be entrusted to private consulting firms beyond any oversight. These dispossessions pave the way for delegating critical national decisions to artificial intelligences, likely the next phase in the depersonalization of power.
This total loss of control over the course of events, brought about by the erosion of the political function in favor of privatization and financialization, virtualizes European citizens’ relationship to the world, ejecting them from the flow of their own history. The growing isolation of individuals—exacerbated by digitalization, the automation of productive tasks, and the alienation of social bonds through the dematerialization of exchanges—gradually leads to a denaturing of reality itself. A universe devoid of spatial limits, over which neither political leaders nor citizens truly have any hold, cannot absolutely exist.
A thin thread now separates our world from the metaverse, a parallel universe developed by the Meta group to relocate human activity in its entirety, once the productive economy has been obliterated. Atomized individuals, now concerned only with their personal well-being, will be able to act and move freely in a borderless virtual reality, with no real consequences for the physical environment.


Capitalism, through its axiological neutrality, recognizes no distinction among human groups—be they social, cultural, religious, or tied to identity. The solutions it proposes for political problems, which the capitalist subject regards only as technical contingencies, are identical everywhere, for everyone, in any context. That is why, within a framework defined by the axiomatic of self-interest and the primacy of the economy, strictly national issues tend to dissolve and spread into the general sphere of all humanity.
Yet if humanity does indeed exist as an absolute, inalienable fact, it is not a political notion. We only exist as human beings through the mediations we employ to discriminate and to mutually recognize ourselves as bound by historical, emotional, and psychic ties: our family, our community, our neighborhood, our province, our country.
Over the past few years, we have witnessed the erosion of all these mediations between the individual subject and power, which has grown ever more impersonal. Nation, identity, citizenship, family no longer seem tied to any solid definition; they are the target of systematic attacks, if not outright denial. Yet these entities, deemed regressive and tied to the past, remain the last obstacles standing in the way of the standardization process—that is, the reduction of the human being to its purely taxonomic dimension. Nothing must stand between the individual and global governance, because capitalism requires a neutral subject, severed from all sociocultural references and from any relationship with others, so that it may be easily adapted to any variation across the spectrum of economic possibilities. In this way, it can fulfill its shortcomings, satiate its impulses, given that the consumer-subject—reduced to a state of impatience and restlessness, cut off from essential emotional needs and basic communal ties—remains in a permanent state of frustration and self-dissatisfaction.
Henceforth, the layout of the space in which existence is articulated, and the parameters of the possibilities offered by earthly life, will be circumscribed within the limits of the individual alone, with no genuine impact on the surrounding world or effect on the course of society.
By definition, an absolute individual does not exist. A human person is necessarily the product of multiple determinants—in this case, combinations of the accidents of birth, ancestral heritage, immediate environment, shared memory with others, education, socialization, emotional mechanisms, the cultural and biological legacy passed down to them, and the imprints left by their forebears in the intangible distribution of their genes. The postmodern conception of the individual recognizes none of these elements. Capitalism knows only how to count to one. And each unit must be as similar as possible to every other one, so that they can be added and combined at will, like so many lines of code stacked to execute a simple program, written in a computer language. The sum of identical individuals, taken together, creates a market—one that never emerges solely from demand, but from the impetus of a subject deeply reshaped by economic structures to be led to formulate that demand.
Such demand must be the same from one individual to another. This is why the market aims to abolish all existential boundaries between collective entities and individual subjects, so that isolated individuals, everywhere and at all times, are the same and desire the same objects. The standardized desires they express can only take the form of wants that are immediately solvable in the market. A universal equivalent, to use Nietzsche’s phrase, will be established among individuals reduced en masse to the same, serving as the matrix of a norm that applies to all.
To achieve this, the subject must progressively strip away the attributes of its essence. Compensation for these losses will come through symbolic rewards and material offerings, intended to fill the void growing within. Universal income—equal for all citizens—will address the problem of primary material needs and grant individuals the means for financial autonomy. The subject will no longer be accountable to anyone except the auxiliary of the global economy (in this case, the state, though it is probably only the transitional and temporary form of power’s architecture) that provides this bare minimum. Beyond that, they will have to fend for themselves—or else remain silent and disappear. Their existential longings will not be heard.
Capital follows its automated destiny of perpetually increasing itself. Being—and its limitations (various affiliations, cultural identity, biological parameters, local roots, spiritual aims, social bonds)—are so many obstacles that lie in its path. In order to perpetuate and survive, the system must free itself from ontological barriers just as it must abolish borders between territories and states, tearing down all instances that impede the flows and transformations fueling this autonomous machine. The transmission belt of these flows is none other than the isolated, atomized, shipwrecked, depoliticized individual left to fend for themselves—the one who depends on no one and owes everything to capital. This alienated individual (a-liéné, i.e., emancipated from all ties to others and to the world, ties all cut and disintegrated) will no longer find the key to resolving existential issues anywhere but within themselves, or indeed in the most rudimentary and diminished dimension of their being—namely, their organic life.

Today’s capitalist subject places personal fulfillment at the center of their concerns. Their physical, emotional, and sexual well-being will be taken care of by the various states of the machine. The modalities of this psychological and physiological comfort are determined by those holding the keys to the global economy—whose vision of humanity is itself entirely configured by a system that reduces everything to its material and utilitarian substratum. An organization founded on the preeminence of the economy, structurally concentrating colossal wealth in the hands of a small number of individuals, grants these individuals unlimited power. This absolute power represents a mortal danger to democracy and the sovereignty of peoples. Under a capitalist regime, those who hold capital can exercise the true power, which is primarily of an economic and private nature. The twist is that this economic power is by nature a process without a subject, accountable only to itself.
The over-determination of mentalities by capitalist infrastructures is a fact that transcends cultures and social hierarchies. The mental configurations of those possessing great technological fortunes are ultimately identical to those of the dumbed-down, homogenized consumers who, at the far end of the chain, make daily use of the artifacts produced by the GAFAMs and thus passively contribute to expanding their monopoly. This results in the assembly-line creation of an anthropological model that is identical everywhere in the world and upon which the transhumanist future of advanced societies rests.
This shared psychological matrix, which cuts across ethnic groups, nationalities, sociological categories, and religious or cultural differences, tends to standardize behavior and consciousness in order to become, on a global scale, a kind of unique frame of reference. The devaluation of knowledge has annihilated the cultivated classes, once the keepers of learning that could be disseminated to the broader population. The destruction of work has quashed any form of pride, class consciousness, or popular culture. Only a materialistic, hedonistic “subculture” remains, the latest avatar of bourgeois individualism. The result is a sort of vast global middle class, significantly degenerated—an agape of airport dwellers, hopping from flight to flight and continent to continent, all with the same cultural references, reflexes, and worldview, yet sharing nothing in common.
The postmodern subject has no memory. They are ahistorical, invertebrate, undetermined, perpetually dependent, and adaptable to the whims of market offerings. They display an unconditional acceptance of the world as it is handed to them and do not challenge any concrete conditions of their existence. This somnambulant trance-like state—sustained by an increasingly abstract and disembodied relationship to work (due to the rise of the service sector and digitalization)—has been carefully prepared by an educational system which, throughout its history, has been one of the most effective instruments for molding citizens to the expectations of the economic world.
While public education may have, a century ago, contributed (perhaps incidentally) to elevating the general level of collective awareness by transmitting foundational knowledge, it is now the indispensable and foolproof tool for programming the consumer ethos. Schools mobilize every gear of a gigantic machine aimed at acculturation and stupefaction. The psycho-social software transmitted from childhood via the national education system is a postmodern substitute for the bourgeois spirit—a kind of hybrid culture, tailor-made at first for the privileged classes, then exported to all social strata. It consists of an eschatology of novelty, an unconditional faith in science and progress, and a messianic anticipation of an idealized future, grounded in an irrationally bleak view of the past. This nomadic subculture—labeled by some as post-liberal and globalist—forms the psychological bedrock of the transhumanist revolution.
Indeed, for a human being to be willing to sacrifice their identity, physical integrity, and soon enough their brain on the altar of a technological future presented as insurmountable and inevitable, they must first have been educated to want that future. These disparate conditionings prepare the ground for an apparatus of absolute, total control.
The last man will live in an impatient, anxious anticipation of the coming era in which microscopic nano-robots will spread throughout their body, meticulously monitoring every movement of their cells, scanning the activity of their blood vessels, organs, and tissues to hunt down the first sign of any anarchic development. A time described as near and within a human lifespan’s reach, when the slightest anomaly detected in an organ could result in its immediate replacement, thanks to the miracles of partial cloning. When life is nothing but a quantity, possibly unlimited one day, to be added, accumulated, hoarded, extended. When a failing or dysfunctional body can be replaced by a new one. When inadequate cognitive abilities can be enhanced through invasive electronic chips implanted directly in the skull. When unpleasant or traumatic memories can be erased. When human consciousness—reduced to a sum of combined, assembled information, severed from any biological support—can be dematerialized and transferred to various mediums, and eventually detached entirely from physical reality, until the body and flesh disappear altogether. For that is the ultimate conclusion of the transhumanist prospect, which I have defined in one of my works as the terminal stage of the capitalist process.
Thus, on the terrain we have analyzed, without propaganda, without any particular publicity or direct dissemination, the transhumanist objective is spreading throughout the developed world, penetrating ever more deeply into collective consciousness. We have been prepared for this by a worldview, an anthropology, a conception of human beings and their relationships, known as liberalism.


From the transhumanists’ lofty perspective, human destiny is first and foremost a laboratory experiment with an uncertain outcome, in which we serve as guinea pigs. This elevated, detached view—that we are ill-suited, superfluous, useless, “too many”—has long been shared by our leaders when it came to coercing us into alignment with the imperatives of “happy globalization.” Transhumanists share many characteristic traits with those leaders. These new masters simply possess more power. Yet they encounter the same resistance.
Once again, this brutal, technical, mathematical, and indiscriminate vision of the world and social relations—found among the globalist elites, our rulers, and transhumanists alike—collides with the deeply rooted attachments and symbolic boundaries that manifest in the refusal of most working-class people. These serious classes, which uphold the principle of reality and constitute the last productive forces of our countries, are rejecting the calamitous civilizational turn undertaken in recent years throughout the Western world.
In response to the striking acceleration of the techno-liberal apparatus that seeks to regulate individuals and nations, large-scale popular movements have spontaneously and autonomously organized, often expressing with implacable and irrepressible force their existential objections to certain facets of society’s evolution. These acts of defiance concern impoverishment, the loss of dignity at work, the dispossession of one’s living environment, an unwanted civilizational shift, the demographic replacement of the historical populace, the betrayal of democracy, digital health controls, and more recently, the destruction of family farming and the traditional rural way of life.
Articulated with a vigor befitting such vital stakes, these issues cannot be reduced merely to economic or statistical matters. By their very nature, they challenge the system’s supporting structures and its long-term goals. They go well beyond material demands, which by definition can, in one way or another, be negotiated or met. Conversely, people’s existential demands are non-negotiable. The ruling classes therefore collide with a core, indivisible bloc consisting of those who refuse to be altered, replaced, adapted, or transformed. They will not accept being chipped, robotized, or “augmented.” The system’s advances beyond the intangible boundary of the human body—exemplified in particular by the implicit imposition of mRNA vaccination, perceived by some (rightly or wrongly) as a violation, and a violation too far—seem to indicate a headlong rush toward its final stage. The sometimes convulsive expression of unconditional rejection that this measure sparked in certain quarters may foreshadow a radical opposition from a significant segment of the population against the transhumanist future of capitalist societies.
On this issue as with others, we can expect a tightening of power’s grip and a more brutal use of methods to achieve its ends, as well as a radicalization of responses from the opposing side. It is clear we are heading into troubled times, and toward potentially very violent phases. One fears that, through irresponsibility, provocation, hubris, folly, or fanaticism, those in power may reach an ontological boundary. A careless breach of that boundary could lead to an uncontrollable explosion whose consequences would be tragic.
 

If we must avoid all of this at any cost, then by definition it’s impossible for us to take on Leviathan—an entity we cannot defeat, all the more so with the scant means we possess today. We are up against a blind mechanism, an overpowering machine that uproots and standardizes, systematically constructing a “civilization of forgetting.” Yet we can only be fully roboticized if we have already succumbed to our own becoming-automaton. To regain our power to act, we must reconnect with the long memory of peoples, contained in their art and culture, so that we can once again project ourselves into a national destiny that globalization seeks to dissolve. Only in this way can we rescue the substance of being from the alienation and intrinsic dissolution inherent in the logic of capital.
An individual cannot build a personal destiny or create freedom in a world stripped of its landmarks and borders—just as a country cannot be free if the people within it are not sovereign over their way of life. A country must be sovereign in deciding its demographic, economic, military, and technological future. The nation is the sole level at which such sovereignty can be realized; beyond that lies civilization itself, which can only exist through a crucible of powerful, independent cultural entities—each formed by sovereign nations.
Certainly, transhumanism is bad for humans, insofar as it calls into question the inviolability of human nature. But it is unavoidable as long as it rests on an economic infrastructure that no nationalist or sovereigntist political movement currently dares to transcend. That is why we must rethink an alternative organizational model to capitalism as well as its monstrous, criminal offspring, communism. General de Gaulle, through his idea of participation, began to imagine different social systems, placing the people’s dignity at the core of work ethics and abolishing subordination in productive relations. Part of the plan was to return—at least in some measure—France’s destiny into the hands of its productive forces, but he was prevented from doing so by those who claimed to be his allies. We must continue the reflection that occupied him in his final years and restore the centrality of human labor in social organization, with all the sacrifices that might entail for the ruling classes. In so doing, we will be thoroughly Gaullist, succeeding in restoring national unity by banishing the poison of class struggle, which dissolves the nation and threatens civil peace.
If we are to recover our national sovereignty, it is so that we no longer concede to the powers of wealth the right to decide our societies’ destiny—nor must we obey bureaucratic or external authorities. By subjecting economic players solely to national interests governed by the popular will, we will gain the best safeguard against market excesses and billionaire delusions, whose latest embodiment is transhumanism. This is called democracy: the primacy of the people’s voice and the belief that its judgment stands above all else. As infantilized and hypnotized as it may be by technocratic management, only by regaining its decision-making power will the people recover, along with the means to exercise it, its maturity and common sense. Only thus will we be able to harness technological and scientific progress for legitimate and desirable ends—that of healing, repairing, or relieving wounded, ill, or suffering bodies. All other uses will seem superfluous to a people who have recovered consciousness of their intrinsic worth, and an understanding of who they are and what it means to exist in the world.
To drive out the demons of modernity, the solution will be neither individual nor global, but national—entailing as many exit strategies as there are cultural entities in Europe and around the world. To escape transhumanist alienation, we French must awaken from our collective slumber, rediscover an authentic culture—authentês in Greek, meaning “one who acts by their own authority”—and recreate a historical destiny that will be our common, transcendent, and immaterial horizon.

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