Stop Waiting For The Collapse
My dear American friends, for the past few days I’ve been explaining the chaos to you: Gramsci, Piketty, a generation turned against its own country. It had to be done. But today I want to do the opposite and bring you some enthusiasm. A diagnosis without hope only breeds bitterness.
I want to go back to one of the most beautiful texts I’ve read in recent years: Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto.
First, where we come from. For almost all of human history, misery was the normal condition of man. Nearly one child in two never reached adulthood. Famines came back like the seasons. A 17th-century king lived worse than a minimum-wage worker today: no antibiotics, no real heating, no anesthesia.
And every time we got out, it was through the same door: invention. Fire, agriculture, the plow, the mill, the printing press. Long before the Industrial Revolution, craftsmen built cathedrals that are still standing eight centuries later, monks copied books and cleared land, scholars tried to understand the world. The search for truth, the search for beauty, and a fierce desire to do better than the generation before. Then the Industrial Revolution supercharged the engine: in two centuries, humanity went from an overwhelming majority living in extreme poverty to a small minority.
But that engine doesn’t run on its own. It has to be passed down. From master to apprentice, from teacher to student, from father to son. And that is exactly the thread the West has cut.
When universities spend fifty years teaching that progress is oppression, that growth destroys the planet, that the West is guilty by nature and that ambition is suspicious, they stop producing builders. They produce prosecutors.
The people responsible for mass immigration, for the woke mind virus, for the cover-up of the grooming gangs in the UK, for the chaos in Europe and the division in America, are the same people. The same ideological family, the one that methodically broke this transmission. And one day, they will have to answer for it.
But here’s where Andreessen is brilliant. He writes that our enemies are not bad people, but bad ideas.
This is fundamental. The problem is the ideas people carry and the incentives we create. In a deeply corrupt system, an ordinary person gets trapped fast. If he tells the truth, he loses his job, his funding, his friends. So he stays quiet, then he adapts, then he participates. Corruption breeds corruption, and it becomes a bottomless pit. Because on average, people are not brave. That’s not an insult, it’s human nature. Most people simply follow the rules of the game they live in.
And that’s the good news. It works both ways. Change the system and you change the behavior. Rebuild a healthy education, one that passes down the desire to create instead of the shame of existing, and you get back a sane society. And with it, techno-optimism.
Not naive optimism, not “tech will fix everything on its own.” An engineer’s optimism: a problem is something you solve. A limit is something you push past.
Look at SpaceX. A private company that lands its rockets vertically, something the entire establishment swore was impossible. That catches its giant boosters with mechanical arms. That slashed the cost of reaching space and is building the ship that will take humanity to Mars. It’s magnificent. That is exactly the spirit we need to pass on to our children.
And this is only the beginning. AI, abundant energy, biotech, robotics: we are getting our hands on tools that will solve problems humanity has carried forever. The future is going to be incredibly cool.
I have never been more optimistic in my life. So I’m telling you sincerely: stop being declinists. Stop waiting for the collapse. We are living in the best period in human history, and what comes next will be even better.
It’s up to us to tie the thread back together. And to build.
