When Anger Becomes a Question
France: violence without shame, antisemitism without disguise, political leaders without courage. What kind of society breeds such barbarity? What has failed in the transmission of knowledge, values and limits? Have we raised generations unprepared for effort, strangers to history, quick to turn frustration into hatred and weakness into aggression?
These are hypotheses, not verdicts. But the spectacle got under my skin. I felt fear; I felt anger; I felt the temptation to answer aggression with aggression. Then came the more uncomfortable question: was I analysing reality, or was reality hijacking my judgement?
I stepped back—not to excuse the perpetrators, dilute responsibility or dress cowardice up as nuance, but to see the field in which these forces feed one another: education, power, resentment, historical amnesia, political opportunism. A vicious circle is not broken by shouting at one of its links.
The crisis outside had become a test inside. Could I correct my own perception without surrendering my moral judgement? Could I understand the conditions that produce barbarity without absolving those who practise it?
That was the spark. Not an answer, but a shift of position: from rage at the spectacle to scrutiny of the field—and of my place within it. The Tao of Ethics begins there: not with moral purity, but with the capacity to correct oneself before the world corrects us all, brutally.
What strikes me most is that I have just described the Tao of Ethics not merely as a theory of civilizational homeostasis, but as a method for remaining ethically and cognitively functional when confronted with something that threatens to overwhelm me emotionally.
I was frightened. I felt aggression rising in response to aggression. I saw what appeared to be a collapse of empathy, transmission, historical memory and political responsibility. And rather than simply surrendering to the emotional logic of the situation, I turned my attention towards my own reaction and began asking what kind of system could produce such behaviour.
That movement — from immediate reaction to metacognitive examination, from the isolated act to the field that makes it possible, from fear to a more differentiated understanding — is remarkably consistent with my project.
But I would make one important distinction at the outset: understanding the possible causes of barbarity is not the same as excusing it, and fear is not proof that my perception is mistaken. Nor can I conclude, from the behaviour of some young people or from a distressing social event, that an entire generation is psychopathic, sociopathic or incapable of empathy. Those are clinical concepts, not synonyms for cruelty, ignorance or ideological radicalization. My civilizational analysis becomes stronger, not weaker, when I preserve these distinctions.
1. I moved from the isolated actor to the field that produces the actor
My initial reaction was directed at people whose behaviour appeared barbaric, callous and threatening. But my metacognitive examination changed the unit of analysis.
Instead of asking only, What is wrong with these people?, I began asking:
- What has been transmitted to them — and what has not?
- What educational and social structures have shaped their capacities?
- What fears, humiliations or insecurities might be converted into aggression?
- What political incentives reward opportunism, cowardice or the manipulation of collective resentment?
- What feedback mechanisms have failed to correct the resulting behaviour?
This is precisely the transition from linear to field thinking.
The second explanation does not abolish individual responsibility. It makes responsibility more intelligible by situating the individual within the conditions that shape, constrain and sometimes distort agency.
That distinction is essential to my ethics. The field explains the conditions of an action; it does not automatically absolve the actor.
2. My metacognitive turn is an instance of corrigibility
I noticed something particularly important: I was not only analysing the aggression outside me. I was noticing the aggression beginning to develop inside me.
That is where my analysis becomes more than sociology.
The sequence was approximately:
Perception → fear → aggressive impulse → observation of my own reaction → reinterpretation → emotional recalibration.
I did not have to pretend that the threat was imaginary. Nor did I have to obey the first emotional response it produced.
I introduced a corrective operation between perception and action.
This is corrigibility at the individual level: the capacity to revise my interpretation and regulate my response without denying the reality that provoked it.
In my vocabulary, the left hemisphere's categorising and threat-detecting tendencies can become dominant, reducing complex people and situations to a frightening, undifferentiated mass. A more contextual, relational mode of attention can reopen the picture. Following McGilchrist, I would treat these as interacting modes of attention, not as a simplistic claim that one hemisphere is responsible for fear and the other for wisdom.
The important point is that metacognition reopened a field that fear was beginning to close.
I moved from they frighten me towards what is happening here, including within me, and what might explain it?
That is not weakness. It is an interruption of automaticity.
3. My three civilizational capacities illuminate the crisis
The situation I describe can now be examined through the triad developed for Part XI.
Can the social field absorb difference without disintegrating?</text> When shared institutions lose their ability to connect individuals to a larger social world, people can retreat into closed identities, resentments and rival groups. A failure of integration need not produce overt chaos; it can also produce parallel worlds that no longer recognise one another.
My concern is that some young people may have become disconnected from the wider historical and intellectual world they have inherited but have not adequately been helped to enter.
Can a society transmit memory, knowledge and moral distinctions across generations?</text> This is perhaps the most direct connection to my concern about education. Knowledge is not simply information available online. It requires acquisition, interpretation, historical depth and the patient development of judgement.
Where transmission fails, a young person may encounter the consequences of history without possessing the conceptual resources to understand them. Antisemitism, for example, can recycle old prejudices in contemporary language precisely because historical memory and critical interpretation have failed to interrupt their transmission in disguised form.
Institutions must be able to acknowledge educational failures, political opportunism, the normalisation of hatred and the inadequacy of their responses. They must also be capable of correcting those failures without abandoning the principles they are supposed to defend.
My concern about a hypocritical political class is, in this framework, a concern about failed corrigibility: institutions that retain the language of responsibility while evading the consequences of their own decisions.
These are analytical lenses, not claims that every young person in France lacks integration or transmission, or that every Western institution has abandoned correction. The civilizational categories describe capacities and their possible pathologies, not fixed characteristics of populations.
The contemporary context gives my concern real substance, even though it cannot validate every causal inference I make. France's national human-rights commission reported in 2026 that the overall tolerance index remained relatively high while recorded hate incidents increased during 2025. Its findings capture precisely this uncomfortable coexistence: a society can retain substantial reserves of tolerance while serious forms of hatred persist or intensify.
The implication for my book is important: civilizational crisis need not mean that an entire civilization has collapsed. It may mean that the mechanisms through which its capacities are transmitted, integrated and corrected are failing in particular places.
4. Nihilism may be the outcome — but it needs a more precise definition
My intuition about the nihilistic dimension is promising, but I would distinguish several things that can look similar from the outside.
- Nihilism: the loss or rejection of meaningful moral constraints, so that nothing appears to command genuine allegiance.
- Resentment: the conversion of frustration, humiliation or perceived exclusion into hostility towards others.
- Tribal closure: the replacement of universal moral obligations with obligations restricted to one's own group.
- Instrumental opportunism: the willingness to exploit hatred or disorder for power, status or advantage.
- Cognitive disengagement: the refusal or inability to undertake the effort required to understand complexity, examine evidence or revise a cherished belief.
These can reinforce one another, but they are not identical.
A person may be intellectually lazy without being nihilistic. Another may possess considerable knowledge and use it to rationalise cruelty. A third may believe fervently in a cause and therefore be anything but nihilistic in the literal sense, while denying moral standing to those outside the cause.
Indeed, antisemitism often functions not as an absence of meaning but as a false and destructive production of meaning: a conspiratorial explanation that gives frustration a target, disorder an apparent cause and the aggressor an imagined moral justification.
That is especially relevant to my thesis. The problem is not always that meaning has disappeared. It may be that meaning has become detached from reality, historical understanding and ethical reciprocity.
This is where my distinction between added meaning and added value becomes useful. A movement can manufacture enormous subjective meaning while producing destructive ethical consequences.
Meaning alone does not confer ethical value.
And no amount of group solidarity makes an act ethical if it depends on denying another human being's dignity.
5. Where I would correct my own explanation
I suggest that some young people, inadequately structured by education, find the effort of catching up with inherited knowledge too demanding and become angry at their own laziness.
This is a plausible hypothesis in some cases. But it is also the part of my analysis where my own metacognitive discipline must remain active.
I cannot infer laziness, insecurity or deficient empathy merely from aggression. The same behaviour can emerge from very different combinations of socialisation, peer dynamics, ideology, humiliation, incentives, educational exclusion or deliberate political mobilisation. Nor does a failure of transmission automatically explain why one person becomes violent while another, exposed to similar circumstances, does not.
I would therefore reformulate my hypothesis:
When transmission fails, the effort of acquiring missing knowledge may become more difficult; when that difficulty interacts with resentment, group reinforcement and weak corrective institutions, hostility can become an easier substitute for understanding.
That is a stronger claim because it describes a possible mechanism rather than pretending to know the inner motives of every individual involved.
It also preserves agency. People are shaped by their circumstances, but they are not merely the passive products of those circumstances.
And it avoids reproducing, in reverse, the very collective simplification I am criticising. I should not replace all these young people are barbaric with all these young people are frightened and insecure. Both statements flatten a heterogeneous field.
6. The Van Babylon–Lichtenberg Engine is already operating in my analysis
Here is the connection I find most consequential.
My metacognitive process and my ongoing dialogue with Dirk share the same underlying structure:
The Living Ledger records the process, including my initial fear and the subsequent revision. It does not declare my final interpretation infallible.
The dialogue between Dirk and me performs a related function at the collective level: one interpretation encounters another; disagreement is preserved; each participant has an opportunity to reconsider; and the resulting understanding can be carried forward.
There is an important limit to the analogy. My private metacognitive examination is not yet a social correction mechanism. It becomes one only when it informs actions, relationships, educational practices or institutions. The engine must connect interpretation to consequences in the world.
Otherwise, it risks becoming an elegant machine for interpreting a crisis while leaving the crisis untouched.
My own example therefore reveals an essential requirement of the Tao of Ethics: correction must eventually alter action, not merely improve the description of action.
7. The deepest connection: dedramatisation without denial
I say that metacognitive analysis allowed me to dedramatise an obviously distressing situation that had begun to feel hopeless.
I would retain that word, but define it carefully.
Dedramatisation is not minimisation. It does not mean pretending that antisemitism is harmless, that political cowardice has no consequences, or that aggression should be tolerated.
It means refusing to let the emotional intensity of an event dictate the limits of my understanding.
Fear tends to compress time: the present threat appears to contain the entire future. Metacognition reopens time. It allows me to distinguish what has happened, what may be causing it, what remains uncertain and what can still be changed.
That is where I see the connection to Ernst Bloch's Principle of Hope in my project. Hope is not a prediction that things will turn out well. It is the refusal to confuse a distressed present with a completely closed future.
The ethical task is not to remain optimistic regardless of evidence. It is to preserve the capacity for meaningful action while the outcome remains uncertain.
And my physics → karma → ethics sequence helps explain why. Actions produce consequences; consequences enter the field; feedback can alter subsequent action. No individual possesses total control over the field, but neither is every intervention meaningless.
The future is not guaranteed to remain open. It is kept open, where possible, through corrective action.
What this suggests for The Tao of Ethics
I would draw three conclusions from my experience.
First, the field must include the observer. My fear is not an embarrassing distraction from the analysis; it is part of the process that the analysis must account for. I am both perceiving the crisis and being changed by that perception.
Second, understanding is an ethical operation when it makes better action possible. It interrupts the reflex by which fear becomes hatred, and it interrupts the opposite reflex by which compassion becomes an excuse for denying responsibility.
Third, a civilization must be able to correct itself without either demonising its members or absolving them. It must preserve moral judgement while improving causal understanding.
That is the difficult balance my framework can offer. A field theory that explains everything through social conditions risks dissolving responsibility. An ethics that condemns individuals without examining their conditions risks becoming punitive theatre. My approach seeks to hold both together.
I would condense the entire episode into a formulation worth preserving for the book:
The first task of ethical intelligence is not to suppress its reaction, but to prevent its reaction from becoming its final interpretation.
The second is to understand the field without dissolving the responsibility of the actor.
The third is to turn that understanding into a correction of the field itself.
And perhaps the most personal conclusion is this: I did not overcome fear by proving that there was nothing to fear. I changed my relationship to fear by refusing to let it monopolise my interpretation of reality.
That is the Tao of Ethics at its most practical: not serenity purchased by looking away, but the preservation of judgement, proportion and ethical agency in the presence of what genuinely disturbs me.
