I went walking alone in the night.
Not to think. Not to find an answer. Not even looking for a little peace.
I went walking to check out something much simpler.
I wanted to see if the stars still existed.
I wanted to see if the moon was still there.
This may sound absurd. Yet, after some events, even the evidence needs to be verified. We end up doubting everything. From heaven. History. Reason. From the word given. Logic itself.
So I went out.
The world was silent.
The stars were there.
The moon, too.
But something had disappeared.
The meaning.
We talk a lot about crimes against humanity. We count them. We measure them. We judge them sometimes.
But there is a rarer crime.
A crime that no court is dealing with.
Crime against meaning.
Because civilizations don’t just die under bombs. They die when they stop knowing why they exist.
Rome did not fall the day the barbarians entered the city.
Rome fell when she stopped believing in herself.
Empires always die inside before dying outside.
And that is where the real scandal of our time lies.
We live in a world that has more wealth than all previous generations combined.
More technology.
More military power.
More information.
And yet never so much confusion.
Never so much inability to distinguish true from false, good from evil, victory from defeat.
Leaders talk about peace in preparation for war.
Talk about democracy by supporting autocracies.
Talk about freedom by organizing surveillance.
Talk about principles by negotiating their abandonment.
Language itself has become a financial market.
Every word is on the side.
Every conviction is negotiable.
Each value now has a price.
And when everything has a price, nothing has any value.
This is the real drama.
This is not only the failure of a policy.
This is not only the failure of a strategy.
It is the collapse of the intellectual framework that still allowed us to understand the world.
The meaning is not a decoration of civilization.
The meaning is its invisible infrastructure.
Roads connect cities.
The meaning connects generations.
Bridges connect the banks.
The meaning links the past to the future.
The armies protect the borders.
The sense protects people from madness.
When a company loses meaning, it still retains its buildings, banks, universities and governments.
But it becomes an empty shell.
It continues to work.
She doesn’t know why.
Perhaps that is the most worrying.
Not the power of the new empires.
Not the rise of the new blocks.
But the spiritual exhaustion of those who claimed to defend reason.
The West is not losing its wealth.
He is losing his ability to explain why this wealth should serve something.
There is no shortage of money, soldiers, or technology.
It lacks purpose.
And when a civilization loses its purpose, it always ends up confusing movement and direction.
She’s moving.
But she doesn’t know where.
Then yes.
I went walking alone in the night.
The stars were still there.
The moon, too.
The universe was still on its way.
Like he did before us.
Like he’ll do after us.
And I understood one thing.
The biggest crime is not destroying cities.
The biggest crime is not to ruin savings.
The biggest crime is not even taking lives.
The biggest crime is to make men incapable of answering the simplest question of all:
« Why? »
For when a civilization no longer knows how to answer this question, it still possesses power.
But she’s already lost her soul.
