Understand the Times

“For ten years, I have been racking my brain – despite the threats, persecutions, and risks – to come up with a sequel to Understand the Empire that is not a rehash.

For ten years, I have collected facts, ideas, and searched for the right structure. […]

In Understand the Empire, I started with the French Revolution: the transition from the Old Regime to the Republic, and the opposition between Religion and Reason, pointing out all that was reasonable in the old theocratic regime, and opposing it to all that is fanatical and unreasonable in the era of political reason, as verified by that era’s actions and events. I also explained the logical, political drivers behind power and domination.

But domination in the name of what?

It is so obvious, so in-your-face, so all-pervasive, that we have stopped seeing it.

It is a new type of domination, of one group over the others, of republican democracy over theocratic monarchy – and in fact, of the democratic Republic over republican democracy – carried out in the name of a magic word, a perfectly seductive idea: equality!

The modernist saga, the Great Idea, the concept at the heart of this cycle’s dynamic is power in the name of equality.

It is an increasingly all-pervasive equality, and therefore an increasingly abstract and formal equality, which in practice often yields absurd results and the opposite of equality.

What a paradox!

There lies the master stroke that embraces our era, its supreme and supremely devilish scam: inequality in the name of equality!”

Thus begins Understand the Times: Why Equality? – a journey from Tradition to Marxism, from formal logic to the complexity of reality, from the word of Christ to the rule of the Market and towards a future being built before our very eyes: a future built on mass surveillance, censorship, and the looming tyranny of the Great Reset.

Essayist, polemicist, filmmaker and novelist Alain Soral, in his thirteenth book, once again casts a sharp eye on the present world, its genesis, and the root causes behind the transformations it is now experiencing. Born in 1958 in the French region of Savoie, he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1978, and later the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), where he developed particular interests in the sociology of fashion, the arts, and philosophy. Following stints with the French Communist Party and the National Front, he founded Égalité & Réconciliation (E&R) in 2007, a movement calling for the reconciliation of France’s working class (the “labour Left”) with a traditionalist value system (the “moral Right”).