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The World We Cross · The age under strain · 6 min
Reading what our age puts to the test — in us and in our civilisations.

Night has almost fallen. The arid, grey plain seems devastated by fire. I do not know how I came to be here. I walk slowly, hesitantly, among the shadows — vague human shapes I sometimes feel brushing past me. Yet no face calls out to me, I who am among the living, in this place foreign to all memory.

Only a muffled murmur fills the space, telling me that I am moving through a multitude. I begin to make out a few words, like whispers around me: “Killed in Gaza,” “killed at Kibbutz Nir Oz,” “at the Nova festival,” and again: “Killed in Jabalia,” “at Kfar Aza!” then further off, slightly louder: “At Kibbutz Be’eri!” “killed in Khan Yunis…” Other voices draw closer and grow more distinct: “Killed in Mariupol,” “Mosul…,” “Aleppo…,” “Srebrenica,” “killed in Kigali.” All at once I understand: these fragments of sentences are addressed to me. This ageless crowd, in order to exist still, is calling out to me! The terrible litany continues to swell all around: “Killed in Vietnam,” “killed in Hiroshima,” “Stalingrad!” “Dresden!” until it has engulfed me entirely. “Killed at Auschwitz,” “Verdun!” “Waterloo!” — each supplication weighs heavier on my step. I stagger, overwhelmed, more and more moved. Suddenly a brief silence, full and heavy, followed by a harrowing cry: “Killed by the madness of the living!”

I wake abruptly, drenched in sweat, seized by tears, shaken to the core. I look at the time: three o’clock. Outside, the darkness is absolute, black as the history of the world. Tomorrow morning, the living will rise to slaughter one another. Some will have the glory of defending their own against murderous hatred. Others will obey resentment or indoctrination. And yet all those who have fallen, like all those who will fall, will be gathered into a single people in that other world I have glimpsed. They will swell those multitudes who weep over their lost lives, their blood mingled with the earth, crying out towards an implacable sky.

Faced with this irreversible misfortune, all certainties — those good or bad reasons to kill or to be killed — appear to me so provisional and so tragic. That terrible cry, “Killed by the madness of the living!”, still echoes in my head and obliges me, like a summons from my dead brothers, to try to reduce the customary violence of this world.

Am I my brother’s keeper?

It is truly time that human beings chose love, as Martin Luther King proclaimed, he who said that “hatred is too great a burden to bear.” We may observe this each day, both in the wars and massacres that punctuate our history and in the countless conflicts of our societies: terrible are the consequences of these hatreds with their many faces, from which none of us is entirely exempt. Some conceal themselves beneath the veil of propriety or diplomacy. Their ferocity is no less for it, as they await only a fitting occasion to set the world alight or to gnaw at the daily lives of our fellow human beings, burdening them with fears or illusions. These hatreds drape themselves in so many tawdry trappings, in arguments of common sense or vengeance; they vary in intensity, erupting explosively or living secret lives — yet all share a common matrix: they are all daughters of Cain, that first murderer in history who, when questioned by G-d about the fate of the brother he had just killed, replied with this founding abdication:

“Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Genesis 4:9)

Many hotbeds of war

When I look at the world today, civil wars and wars between nations are spread across the entire planet, though the media most often highlight only those pitting Ukraine against Russia, or Israel against Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran.

To measure the true extent of this disaster, one must accept looking squarely at figures that well-protected consciences prefer to leave in the abstraction of organisational reports. The ACLED (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data) estimated in a report of July 2024 that 50 countries are in the grip of violence: one person in seven worldwide is said to have been exposed to its consequences.

The map below, taken from their Conflict Index, shows the scale of it.

The AOAV (Action on Armed Violence) recorded approximately 34,000 civilian deaths worldwide in 2023: an increase of 130 per cent compared with 2022, with victims in Gaza accounting for 39 per cent of that total. On the military side, Media Zona estimated in November 2024 that Russian losses in the war in Ukraine exceeded 77,000.

Thus, a few hours’ flight from Paris, we watch helplessly as barbarism makes its tragic return. Yet this return is hardly surprising: cyclically, the violence of war recurs upon the earth. Is each period of peace merely the provisional rest of a humanity exhausted from having shed too much blood? It sometimes takes only a few months, at best a few decades, before human beings succumb once again to their morbid addiction to carnage and destruction.

The lucrative industry of war

The twentieth century was that of mass slaughter on an unprecedented scale. Increasingly lethal weapons, from the great guns of Verdun to the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, produced human losses at a level never before reached in history: approximately 8.5 to 10 million soldiers killed in the First World War, to which must be added 6 to 7 million civilian victims; then, in the Second World War, 21 to 25 million soldiers and 50 to 55 million civilians, swept away by combat, bombardment, massacres, the Shoah and famines.

And yet the industry of war continues to thrive. It is here that the ledger of reality reveals its most unbearable truth. In 2023, when 200 million children were suffering from malnutrition and UNICEF was devoting 3.63 billion dollars to them, global military expenditure stood at 3,000 billion dollars, nearly 827 times more. This budgetary balance of power is not a misallocation of priorities that better policies might one day correct. It is a civilisational choice, repeated consciously or unconsciously, generation after generation, that reveals the essence of what our societies truly value, far removed from declarations of principle and charters of human rights. In this bleak picture, France accounts for 11 per cent of global arms exports, third behind Russia (16 per cent) and the United States (40 per cent).

Let us pause for a moment on this arithmetic of shame. Three thousand billion to organise death; three point six billion to try to spare children from it. If one wished to summarise in a single figure what our so-called contemporary civilisation truly offers for the future of its children, that figure would suffice.

Are we truly civilised?

Can a globalised world that allows millions of children to die of hunger while others grow rich by the billion from the commerce of death be called civilised? Personally, I do not believe it can.

The dissonance is vertiginous: on one side, surgeons transplant hearts, biologists decode living matter down to its most infinitesimal sequences; on the other, armies pound residential buildings with those same derived technologies, and financial markets flourish on this commerce of destruction. Behind the cultural and technological veneer that makes our societies appear advanced, barbarism holds sway today as it did in the Neolithic, but with a capacity for destruction our forebears could not have imagined.

What Auschwitz revealed with unmistakable clarity — and I return to it here briefly, having treated this question in its full depth on the occasion of Yom haShoah — is that technical rationality, bureaucracy and scientific thought, when severed from all ethical and spiritual compass, can become the most efficient instruments ever devised for the extermination of human beings. That danger is not past. It accompanies every technical advance we make without having simultaneously accomplished the corresponding inner work. We have manifestly still not undertaken, as a collective, to plumb our inner depths in order to eradicate there whatever carries the seed of violence and war.

Cain: an interior anatomy of violence

This tenacious incapacity to plumb our depths, precisely where violence takes root before rising to the surface as wars, hatreds or organised indifferences, has a name, a face and a history. To understand its mechanics, let us return to the oldest account humanity has transmitted on this subject, not as a religious curiosity, but as a mirror of redoubtable precision on human nature. The historical genealogy of this primal murder, from the Neolithic mass graves to the genocides of the twentieth century, I have traced elsewhere. What concerns me here is different: not the map of the massacres Cain has produced across the centuries, but the interior anatomy of Cain himself — the psychological, philosophical and spiritual mechanism that drives him to act, and that continues to act within us.

Genesis, in its fourth chapter, tells the story of Adam and Eve’s two sons in sixteen verses of quite stupefying anthropological density. Cain, the elder, is a tiller of the soil: a man of settled earth, of property, boundary and accumulation. Abel, his younger brother, is a nomadic shepherd: a man of the flock, of movement and shared space. Both make an offering to G-d. He accepts Abel’s sacrifice and not Cain’s. The Bible, in what constitutes one of its most vertiginous silences, offers no explanation for this preference. No declared fault on Cain’s part precedes the divine refusal, as though the text wished to make us grasp that the injustice Cain then feels is an original condition of human existence, an irreducible given with which every living being must learn to contend.

Cain burns with rage and shame. His face turns away. And G-d addresses him with words of troubling gravity: “If you act well, will you not hold your head high? But if you do not act well, sin is crouching at the door: it desires you, yet you must master it.” This formulation is striking in its psychological modernity: G-d does not condemn Cain a priori; he describes an interior dynamic — something waits, crouching in the shadow of his soul, ready to spring if the guardian relaxes his vigilance. Were Cain to consent to look his anger in the face, he might then learn to transform it; but Cain does not hear. He invites his brother into the fields and kills him.

When G-d then asks, “Where is your brother Abel?”, Cain utters what is perhaps the most revealing response in all of human history: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” In a few words, he enunciates the prototype of all moral abdications, all retreats into self-interest, all organised indifferences to the fate of the other. This response traverses the millennia without ageing a single day: one hears it resonate behind every politician who refuses to look at world hunger statistics, behind every investor who signs arms contracts without questioning their destination, behind every citizen who averts his eyes from the misery of his neighbour.

We are Cain’s heirs

This truth deserves to be faced without evasion or mitigation: we do not descend from Abel. Abel died without issue, he was cut off too soon, erased from the chain of generations. It is Cain who fathered the nations, who built the first cities, who developed the arts, crafts and trades. The mark that G-d set upon his brow we all bear, invisible and indelible, inscribed not only in our cultural memories but in the most archaic structures of our psyche.

Freud, in his essay Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930), named it the death drive,Thanatos, that inner force impelling us towards the destruction of self and other, in permanent tension with Eros, the drive towards life, union and creation. War, on this reading, is not an aberration external to the human being, an accident of history arising from institutional malfunction: it is the collective expression, organised and amplified by states, of what each individual carries in seed form in the least illuminated regions of himself.

René Girard deepened this intuition decisively with his theory of mimetic desire, which is worth dwelling upon, for it illuminates an aspect that neither Freud nor political scientists are quite able to grasp. Cain does not simply suffer from being refused by G-d: he suffers from seeing that Abel is desired where he is not. It is not the object of the offering that matters, but the preference — that gaze of the other that falls elsewhere than upon him. From that moment, what Cain wants is no longer merely to be accepted; it is to be Abel, to occupy his place in the divine gaze. This desire to occupy the other’s place, to possess his recognition, his status, his territory, is according to Girard the engine of all human rivalries, from marital conflict to wars between nations, by way of economic competition and identity struggles.

The brother becomes a rival precisely because he is close, because resemblance renders the difference in destiny unbearable. Fraternal mimesis then turns inexorably into sacrificial violence whenever no spiritual or symbolic authority intervenes to interrupt its fatal spiral. The scapegoat — Abel — provisionally absorbs collective violence, but does not suppress it: he merely defers it until the next explosion. The universal history of wars, persecutions and genocides is, on this reading, nothing but a long succession of scapegoats who have never sufficed to slake the mimetic thirst of their murderers.

Saint Augustine, fifteen hundred years before René Girard, had intuited something similar in seeing in Cain the figure of the Earthly City — that human organisation founded on self-love pushed to the point of contempt for G-d and for the other — and in Abel the figure of the City of G-d, whose tragic vocation is to be ceaselessly sacrificed by the logics of the world yet never to disappear entirely. These two cities coexist not only in the course of collective history but simultaneously within each human soul. What each individual carries, each society amplifies; and what each society amplifies, history inscribes in letters of fire and blood upon the dark plains I traversed in my dream.

The contemporary faces of Cain

It would be convenient — and profoundly false — to confine Cain to the trenches, the airstrikes or the gas chambers. The Cainite impulse invests all spaces of collective life with equal destructive efficacy, often without a single drop of blood being shed. The managerial violence that methodically grinds individuals down beneath the imperatives of profitability, the organised public humiliation on social networks where anonymous crowds set upon designated victims, the predatory economic competition that impoverishes entire nations to enrich a handful of shareholders, the institutionalised indifference to the slow death of millions of migrants, malnourished children or abandoned elderly people: all of this bears the same signature as the first murder in the fields.

And everywhere, the same response from Cain: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

Behind the figure of 3,000 billion devoted to armaments, there is no accounting error: there is the result of thousands of individual decisions taken by educated men and women, often cultivated, often fathers and mothers, often capable of generosity in their private lives. The financial analyst who structures an investment fund in the arms industry, the engineer who optimises the flight path of a combat drone, the lobbyist who secures the release of an export contract to an authoritarian regime: none of them thinks he is performing a murderous act. They have simply, each at his own level, answered as Cain did — their brother is not their concern, their expertise is their concern, their career is their concern, their shareholders are their concern. The growing sophistication of our technologies changes nothing in this fundamental equation: it merely increases the efficiency of destruction and the distance between killer and victim, rendering the act cleaner, more abstract, easier to delegate and therefore easier to bear without undue guilt.

Cain decides, time and again, that his brother’s blood is of no consequence to him, and that his own immediate interest or his own fear outweighs every other consideration.

The only remedy: transformation from within

Faced with this diagnosis, the usual responses very quickly show their limits. Diplomatic solutions, disarmament treaties, Security Council resolutions, economic sanctions: all these responses are necessary given humanity’s present condition, yet none is sufficient, for they operate solely upon symptoms without ever reaching the source. The wound that has been bleeding since Abel is not institutional — it is interior, and it is there that the transformation must occur, at a level that neither politics nor technology can reach.

Three great spiritual traditions, among many others that converge upon the same reality, allow us to take its exact measure and to sketch its concrete paths.

Christian mysticism speaks of metanoia — the complete turning of one’s interior orientation, the passage from self-love to the love of G-d and of one’s neighbour — as a radical rupture accomplished not through the accumulation of knowledge nor through good intention, but through a decision of the whole being, sustained by a daily practice. What the Desert Fathers called nepsis — interior spiritual vigilance — is precisely the antidote to what G-d describes to Cain: something crouching at the door. One cannot afford to leave one’s door unguarded.

Sufism names the jihad al-akbar the great combat of the soul — not the outward war against the enemy, but the inward war against the disordered passions of the soul: jealousy, wounded pride, the resentment that settles in and festers. This combat is called great precisely because it is the most difficult, the most protracted and the most decisive: to win every outward battle without having waged it is to have won nothing at all, as the history of empires that vanquished their enemies before collapsing under the weight of their own inner contradictions bears witness.

Theravāda Buddhism proposes mettā — loving-kindness — not as a feeling, but as a deliberate and progressive practice: one begins by cultivating benevolence towards oneself, then extends it to those one loves, then to those who are indifferent, then to difficult relationships, then to enemies. This progressive, concentric deployment is not an exercise in naivety but a rigorous training of the will, comparable in its discipline to that of an athlete or a musician. Mettā does not suppress the reality of conflict; it transforms the gaze of its practitioner upon the adversary — no longer an enemy to be destroyed, but a suffering being carrying, in his own way, his share of Cain.

Martin Luther King had understood this in exemplary fashion: before taking to the streets, before mounting a platform, before facing the batons of the segregationist South, he worked each day upon his own interior Cain — the fear, the anger, the resentment, the temptation to answer violence with violence. Gandhi through his long campaigns of resistance, Mandela through his years of captivity, Etty Hillesum writing her diary in the Westerbork transit camp before boarding the train to Auschwitz: all bear witness to the same reality. Profound spiritual transformation does not anaesthetise pain nor suppress reality in its brutality; but it prevents brutality from triumphing definitively. It keeps alive, even in the most desperate circumstances, an irreducible space of inner freedom from which love may spring as act rather than as sentiment.

It is this space of love that we must develop within ourselves, then learn collectively to inhabit, to expand and to pass on.

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Learning to love — truly

“Learning to love”: the phrase may seem derisory measured against the scale of the evil described, almost naïve in the face of bulldozers, cruise missiles and armed drones. It is not, provided one understands which love is meant. Not romantic and sentimental love, as fragile as wet paper in the first contrary wind; nor the superficial benevolence that smiles at everyone without ever risking or giving anything. The love of which the mystics speak, the Stoic philosophers, the therapists of reconciliation and the builders of peace, is an active, demanding, disciplined force — a permanent labour upon one’s own structures of fear, competition and closure.

This love begins each morning, long before the bombs have had time to sound: in the way one listens or does not listen to one’s neighbour, in whether one responds or not to the distress of a stranger, in the refusal to take part in the destructive rumour, in the choice to see in the adversary not an enemy to be destroyed but a lost brother bearing, in his turn, the mark of Cain upon his brow — the same mark as our own.

This choice, repeated billions of times by billions of people in their daily lives, is the only revolution that could at last change our human condition: not by suppressing Cain, which is doubtless impossible, but by teaching him to hear the voice that has spoken to him since the dawn of time: “Sin is crouching at the door — but it is for you to master it.”

That night, in my dream, those dead asked nothing impossible of me. They simply reminded me that I am alive, and that the living still have a choice.

For Abel continues to cry out towards the sky. And the sky continues to wait for us to answer.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

To go further

In the face of the trials of our time, what ancient teaching, what new wisdom or what personal experience still helps you to hold steady, to understand, or to discern? Share your thoughts in the comments and let us benefit from your perspective.

If you wish to speak to the upheavals of our age, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and enter into dialogue with you.”

New here? The Opening page introduces the author, the project, how to take part, contact details, and the agenda.

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The World We Cross · The age under strain · 6 min
Reading what our age puts to the test — in us and in our civilisations.

The siren that fractures time

Every year, at the same hour, a siren crosses Israel from one end to the other. Cars stop in the middle of the roads. Pedestrians freeze on the pavements. Conversations die away. For two minutes, the entire country stands, not in a silence that is the absence of sound, but in its exact opposite: an absolute presence, a listening stretched towards what can no longer speak. I experience this from within a particular inheritance, which I do not need to name in full for it to be heard. Yet the singularity of such a transmitted wound finds its full meaning, I deeply believe, only when it becomes a beacon raised above the other darknesses of the world. That is why this ritual does not seem to me to belong to the Jewish people alone. It concerns humanity as a whole — or rather, it should concern it, if it finally consented to hear what the siren says to each of us, wherever we live and whatever memory we have inherited.

Yom HaShoah, the Day of Remembrance of the Shoah and of Heroism, commemorates the extermination of six million European Jews by the Nazi regime between 1941 and 1945. This reality is irreducible, named, quantified, documented with a bureaucratic precision that the executioners themselves supplied, doubtless without realising that they were compiling their own indictment file for eternity. Yet this day carries, beyond its national and religious dimension, an appeal addressed to every human conscience: why does man kill man because he is the Other? And how far can he go in that direction? The Shoah has inscribed the answer to these two questions in concrete and ash, to such an extent that the whole history of collective violence, both before and after it, must now be read in its terrifying light.

Auschwitz, or modernity turned against itself

It would be convenient, and profoundly false, to classify the Shoah among eruptions of primitive barbarity, as though the SS had been cavemen armed with clubs. The truth is exactly the reverse, and it is precisely this truth that makes the Shoah unbearable to contemplate in its full dimension: it is the most sophisticated product of modern Western civilisation. The trains that carried the deportees to the camps ran according to timetables optimised by engineers; the gas chambers were designed by qualified architects; the lists of names were kept by scrupulous civil servants; the racial ideology that legitimised the extermination was formulated by doctors of philosophy and university professors. What the Shoah revealed with inescapable clarity is that technical rationality, the bureaucracy of the modern State and scientific thought can, when severed from any ethical and spiritual compass, become the most effective instruments ever produced for the extermination of human beings.

Auschwitz is therefore not a regression to the animal. It is a perversion of the human by itself, at the most advanced stage of its organisational capacities. This distinction is not academic. It means that the danger does not come from a humanity that is insufficiently developed, but on the contrary from a highly developed humanity that has dissociated intelligence from conscience. And every age carries within itself the seeds of this dissociation, including our own, with its targeting algorithms, its real-time rhetorics of dehumanisation on social networks, and its States increasingly tempted, in their governance, by fear of the foreigner and surveillance of the average citizen.

From Cain to Auschwitz: a genealogy of massacre

Yet the story does not begin in 1933. It begins in the very first days, where the Torah itself placed the first act of violence: in a field, between two brothers, under the gaze of a God who asks Cain, the murderer of Abel: “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s bloods cries out to Me from the ground.” (Genesis 4, 10). The Hebrew text is striking in its precision: dəmê, the bloods, in the plural – as though Abel’s body contained not a single blood, but all the future bloods of all the victims that Cain and his descendants would spill over the centuries. Rashi, one of the greatest commentators on the Torah, notes that the text indeed says “the bloods” in order to teach that whoever kills a single human being is as though he had destroyed an entire world, and conversely, that every life saved is worth an entire world. In this sense, Abel is not one victim among others. He is the name borne, in sacred memory, by every victim of collective violence from prehistory to the present day.

The list of these bloods is long. Cain is older than all our civilisations, and the question that the Torah raises is not a pious metaphor, it is an anthropology. We must find the courage to go through a brief enumeration without turning away our eyes. From the Neolithic period, the mass graves of Talheim, Asparn-Schletz or Schöneck-Kilianstädten, dated between 5000 and 7000 years before our era, bear witness that the collective and methodical massacre of an entire community is not a modern invention. The Assyrians exterminated the populations of Mesopotamia with an implacable method that already stunned their contemporaries. The Mongol conquests annihilated entire civilisations from Central Asia to Persia. The colonisation of the Americas was accompanied by a demographic collapse that some historians estimate at eighty per cent of the indigenous Amerindian populations, a proportion that exceeds anything the twentieth century produced. The transatlantic slave trade deported twelve million human beings, torn from their African lands, from their names, from their languages, from their humanity.

In the twentieth century, the Shoah was itself preceded by two tragedies. Between 1904 and 1908, the Herero and Nama peoples of Namibia were exterminated by the German colonial army with a method and an ideology that made it the first laboratory of modern genocide and a direct foreshadowing of what was to come. Then, in 1915, during the genocide of the Armenians, Turkey pushed this logic of extermination a step further, with a troubling administrative precision: the designation of a population, dispossession, deportation, extermination — a protocol that the Nazis then had only to industrialise. After 1945, the list continued, as though humanity had stubbornly refused to learn anything. Let us name the Cambodian people massacred by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979, the Bengalis of East Pakistan in 1971, the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, between five hundred thousand and eight hundred thousand dead in a hundred days, under the indifferent gaze of a world that the survivors have never been able to forgive, then the Yezidis in 2014… The list is not closed and it is still lengthening today.

Each of these massacres has followed the same fundamental architecture: someone first decided that the Other was not fully human. That his life was worth less, that his blood flowed for a reason, that his disappearance was necessary or at least tolerable. And once this decision had been taken inwardly, in the heart of an individual, in the ideology of a group, in the law of a State, the mechanism set itself in motion, with the terrifying docility that mechanisms always display. The Shoah is the moment when that mechanism reached its maximum speed and power, when the process of dehumanisation encountered industrial machinery and total political will. It is the climax, not because the other massacres matter less, but because it is the one that rendered the question absolutely impossible to evade: how far can humanity go in the destruction of its own flesh?

We are all Cain in potential

This is the disturbing claim, the one that neither moral comfort nor clear conscience can easily accept, and it is precisely for that reason that it must be voiced without trembling: there is no race, no nation, no religion, no civilisation that has demonstrated a definitive immunity against collective violence. Nazi Germany is not a monstrous exception that appeared from nowhere in the concert of nations. It is the result of an accumulation of political choices, complicit silences, stoked resentments, instrumentalised fears, and the designation of a scapegoat deemed responsible for every ill, a process that any society can undergo if it lets its spiritual and ethical guard drop sufficiently. Hannah Arendt, with her now famous phrase about the “banality of evil”, was saying nothing else: ordinary executioners are not monsters different from us in nature; they are ordinary men who consented, step by step, to monstrous acts because social, ideological and institutional pressure had rendered those acts normal.

This does not mean that we are all guilty of the Shoah, nor that all moral positions are equivalent. It means something far more demanding. We all carry, somewhere in our psychic structures and in our collective inheritances, the seeds of what Cain accomplished in the first field in history. The jealousy of what belongs to the Other. The resentment before difference. The fear of the foreigner erected into a principle of government. The contempt for the weak, dressed up in discourse about natural selection or meritocratic competition. Indifference to the suffering of a group we have not chosen to recognise as our neighbour. It is these seeds that Yom HaShoah invites us to look at directly, not in order to lash ourselves in vain, but to accomplish the work that the Jewish tradition calls teshuvah — the return, the conversion, the turning back of oneself towards what one knows to be right.

Cutting the inner roots before the violence ripens

Teshuvah does not mean regret. Regret, on its own, is a comfortable emotion that can be experienced without changing anything. Teshuvah means to return, to return to what one is at the deepest level, before the layers of fear, ideology and tribal conditioning that have covered over the original conscience. In Jewish thought, human beings are capable of teshuvah at any moment, because the divine image within them, the tselem Elokim, can never be utterly destroyed, only obscured. Yet authentic teshuvah demands an honest inventory. What have I done with the Other in my own life? Which Other have I dehumanised, even in the silence of my thoughts? To which rhetoric of rejection have I applauded because it seemed legitimate to me, because it targeted those I did not like, because it protected what I wanted to protect?

This question is not abstract. In our contemporary societies, crossed by migratory crises, surges of identitarian nationalisms, and algorithms that confine each group within its own reality facing its own enemy, it is burning in its relevance. To remember the Shoah without carrying out this inner inventory is to honour the dead with our lips while reconstituting in our hearts the conditions of their murder. It is spiritual complacency in its most dangerous form: the form that wraps itself in the cloak of commemoration in order to avoid transformation.

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Reciting names: a liturgy for all the Abels

That is why, on this day, I would like to suggest a symbolic gesture that goes beyond the sole framework of Yom HaShoah, without in any way denying it. Imagine a silent liturgy in which, after the six torches lit for the six million murdered Jews, other flames would be kindled: one for the one and a half million Armenians of 1915, one for the eight hundred thousand Tutsis of 1994, one for the two million Cambodians under Pol Pot, one for the millions of enslaved people drowned in the Atlantic whose names are engraved on no memorial, one for the indigenous peoples of the Americas whose civilisations have been reduced to legends in their own lands, one for the Yezidis, for the Uyghurs, for all those whose collective suffering has not yet found an official name in the calendar of world memory.

This gesture is not a dilution. It is an amplification, the recognition that the bloods of Abel cry out from all lands, in all languages, that God hears all these cries with the same shattering attention, and that our responsibility as living human beings is to become the bearers of these names that no one else can any longer pronounce. To recite the names in full awareness is the most radical act of resistance against forgetfulness, which is itself the second death of the victims. And it is at the same time an act of collective teshuvah: in naming our victims, those of our nation, our civilisation, our group, we acknowledge the share of Cain that produced them, we choose to remain silent no longer and truly to change.

What all these martyrs of inhumanity still demand of us

In a few moments, the siren will fall silent. The cars will start up again. Conversations will resume. And if nothing has been transformed within us during those two minutes, if we have simply endured the ritual as one endures a shower before coming back into the dry, then we will have betrayed both the dead and the living. For the dead of the Shoah, like all the Abels of history, are not asking us for tears. They ask something more difficult and more costly: they ask us to become men and women who refuse, in their daily lives and in their collective choices, to allow the roots of rejection, contempt and dehumanisation to germinate within and around them, whose outcome, carried through to its extreme conclusion, always bears, in the end, the same name: Auschwitz.

Zakhor — remember. But remember in order to change.

— On the occasion of Yom HaShoah 5786 / 2026.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

To go further

In the face of the trials of our time, what ancient teaching, what new wisdom or what personal experience still helps you to hold steady, to understand, or to discern? Share your thoughts in the comments and let us benefit from your perspective.

If you wish to speak to the upheavals of our age, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and enter into dialogue with you.”

New here? The Opening page introduces the author, the project, how to take part, contact details, and the agenda.

Article disponible en français
The World We Cross · The age under strain · 9 min
Reading what our age puts to the test — in us and in our civilisations.

On February 14, 2026, while many were exchanging Valentine’s Day declarations of love, a 23-year-old man was lynched and died in Lyon. His name was Quentin Deranque. He was a mathematics student and a philosophy enthusiast who sang in his parish choir.

Two days earlier, on February 12, he was near Sciences Po Lyon, the city’s prestigious political science institute, where the Némésis collective held a counter-demonstration against a conference by Rima Hassan, a member of the European Parliament for the far-left La France Insoumise party. Quentin held nationalist convictions and moved in Lyon’s Catholic traditionalist circles. Némésis presented him as a member of its security detail. However, his family and their lawyer formally contested this characterization. They stated that Quentin was “neither a security agent nor a member of any protection service,” had no criminal record, and defended his convictions in a nonviolent manner.

What is certain is what followed: the confrontation between the two groups of militants turned into a bloody battle. Pursued by a group of several dozen far-left activists for more than two kilometers, he was knocked to the ground and struck repeatedly on the head. He was found unconscious by the banks of the Rhône. He never recovered. The autopsy revealed a fatal brain injury. He was beaten to death for what he represented.

This is not an ordinary criminal case. It is a symptom, and it calls not for a partisan reaction but for courageous clarity.

Two commitments, two logics, two levels of responsibility

Much of the international press has simply described Quentin as a “far-right activist.” While not inaccurate, this description is incomplete. Honest analysis requires us to draw finer distinctions than those that fit a headline.

Founded in 2019, the Némésis collective presents itself as an identitarian feminist movement. It denounces sexual violence against women in public spaces and insists on its connection to migration. The collective positions itself as a defender of what it calls “European civilization.” The collective’s origin touches on a genuine concern. After the mass sexual assaults on New Year’s Eve in 2016 in Cologne, a significant segment of the feminist left remained silent about the perpetrators’ origins for fear of fueling racism. This left a rhetorical and political vacuum that identitarian movements were quick to fill.

The vacuum was real, but the way Némésis chose to fill it is far more questionable. The collective’s discourse racializes sexual violence, designates Muslim immigrant men as a structural threat to women, reduces wearing the veil to “political Islam activism,” and promotes a conservative, exclusionary vision of femininity. Némésis is neither a neo-Nazi organization nor a simple women’s rights movement. It is a radical right-wing identitarian collective whose rhetoric stigmatizes an entire ethno-religious category of the population. This is both ideologically problematic and socially dangerous, even when no physical violence is incited.

This is precisely the fundamental difference with La Jeune Garde Antifasciste, the group from which Quentin’s assailants appear to have come, according to judicial sources. Founded in 2018 by Raphaël Arnault, who was subsequently elected to the French parliament under the La France Insoumise banner, this far-left collective was structured around combat training and planned physical confrontations with far-right groups, according to French authorities. This is precisely why the government dissolved it in June 2025. The difference is not one of degree, but of nature. Professing radical ideas is one thing, however objectionable. Organizing groups of masked men to chase and beat political adversaries in the street is another matter entirely, and it is this second logic that killed Quentin Deranque.

I want to be clear: I do not share Némésis’s positions or their vision of a “European civilization” reduced to an identitarian fortress closed in on itself. I believe in a new civilization that is open and founded on dialogue between human beings. It is a civilization that acknowledges the complexity of the world and seeks common solutions in a spirit of mutual goodwill. However, rejecting their ideas does not authorize me to equate them with killers or to claim that legal identitarian discourse is equivalent to deadly lynchings. Ethical clarity requires these distinctions.

The political atmosphere that makes this possible

However, it would be insufficient to look only at these two fringe groups, ignoring the rest of the political landscape. Quentin’s death occurs against a broader backdrop in which elected political representatives have progressively abandoned debate in favor of designating opponents as enemies.

La France Insoumise, comparable in spirit and method to the most radical wing of left populism found in several Western democracies, has popularized a conflictual grammar in which opponents are entities to be delegitimized rather than interlocutors. The persistent accusations of antisemitism against several of its elected officials — accusations that they contest but that their handling of the October 7, 2023, massacres has substantially fueled — betray a structural difficulty in clearly naming hatred when it presents itself in a politically convenient guise. Refusing to label the massacre of 1,200 people based on their Jewish identity as an antisemitic crime in favor of a geopolitical framework of “resistance” is not a trivial semantic debate. It authorizes a narrative in which the dehumanization of certain people becomes understandable, if not justified.

Rima Hassan, the central figure in this polarizing debate, embodies these contradictions. She is genuinely committed to the Palestinian cause but multiplies militant appearances and statements that, according to her critics, blur the line between humanitarian advocacy and legitimizing hate speech. Multiple proceedings for “apology of terrorism” have been opened against her in France, none of which have resulted in convictions thus far; all are still under judicial review. However, these cases outline a political space where ambiguity is systematically cultivated, with consequences for the social climate that cannot be ignored.

From words to blood: the mechanics of dehumanisation

There is a slippery slope between words and actions. This slope is not inevitable; millions of people hold radical opinions without ever raising a hand against anyone. However, it becomes dangerous when language ceases to acknowledge the full humanity of others.

It becomes dangerous when a radical-right activist is seen as a “fascist” to be neutralized, when a pro-Palestinian citizen is seen as a “potential terrorist” to be crushed, and when a university conference is seen as “an act of war” and a counter-demonstration as “a nest of Nazis.” In this context, physical violence is merely the natural extension of the discourse. All that’s needed is an opportunity and the impunity of numbers. The slogans have done their work; they have stripped the opponent of his humanity.

The lynching of Quentin teaches us precisely this: a group of individuals pursued, surrounded, and beat a man already on the ground—some of them masked, that is, knowingly—because they had absorbed into their militant imagination that this man deserved to live less than others. This is not uncontrollable madness; it is ideological coherence carried to its most bestial conclusion.

It is the return of militia logic: organized groups hunting and beating their political opponents in the streets. History has seen its darkest forms, and we believed we had learned from them. Every form of thought that claims allegiance to humanity must unambiguously condemn this, regardless of political affiliation.

The shattered mirror of a society that has lost its common reference points

This tragedy forces us to face something we generally prefer to avoid: modern societies have entered a phase of profound dislocation of their shared ethical reference points. This is not because people are fundamentally worse than before, but because the symbolic structures that once contained conflict—respect for the law, a culture of debate, recognition of shared dignity, and the spiritual foundation of “thou shalt not kill”—have eroded faster than our collective capacity to register it.

Social media has created echo chambers where each group reinforces its worst fears and darkest judgments about others. Political spectacle has replaced deliberation with conflict. In this ethical and spiritual void, violence fills the void left by words. Rather than arguing and seeking compromises from which each interlocutor might benefit, violence imposes itself, provokes fear, and forces the other to yield.

Quentin’s death is a tragedy, but we must not allow it to blind us to an even more troubling tragedy: young people on both sides are so deprived of inner resources, a shared language, and spaces for genuine encounters that they can no longer see their political adversaries as anything other than threats to eliminate. This is the true poverty of our age—not only material poverty, but also the poverty of the soul that makes it impossible to look the other person in the eye and recognize that, despite all that divides us, he is made of the same clay and has the same essential humanity.

The urgency of recovering our common humanity

I want to speak in my own name and clearly dissociate myself from all forms of radicalism — whether political, discursive, or physical — that reduce the world’s complexity to slogans and reduce people to symbols to be destroyed.

The crises we are experiencing—the migration crisis, the identity crisis, the geopolitical crisis, the ecological crisis, and the crisis of meaning—are real and profound. They deserve better than tribal responses. These crises call for slow, humble thinking capable of holding together seemingly contradictory realities: migrants can be both victims of unjust systems and perpetrators of violence; defending Israel and standing in solidarity with Palestinians are not mutually exclusive; and love for European civilization and openness to other cultures can coexist. Holding these paradoxes alive without hastily resolving them is the most courageous act of thought available to us today.

This requires a type of work that political discourse will never perform for us: work on ourselves, our own hatred, our own absolutist certainties, and our tendency to reduce others to caricatures in order to maintain our identities. This work is spiritual in the deepest sense—not religious in the narrow sense, but interior, patient, and demanding. It involves forgiveness—not naive forgetting, but the sovereign decision not to allow hatred of the other to define who we are. It passes through dialogue—not strategic negotiation, but the authentic willingness to be changed by what the other has to say. It passes through humility—the recognition that my interpretation of the world, however legitimate, is incomplete in the face of the infinite complexity of reality.

The absurd brutality of Quentin Deranque’s death can be an invitation. Not to vengeance or political escalation—his parents themselves called for calm with remarkable dignity. Rather, it should prompt us to ask ourselves what kind of world we want to live in. Do we want to live in a world where people die for what they believe in, or do we want to live in a world where we learn, even painfully, to talk to one another?

Quentin was twenty-three years old. He loved mathematics and sacred music. He died because someone decided that belonging to an idea stripped him of his right to life. May his death teach us what we had not learned any other way: that the humanity of others cannot depend on their opinions. It is precisely this fragile and demanding principle that defines a civilization worthy of that name.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

To go further

In the face of the trials of our time, what ancient teaching, what new wisdom or what personal experience still helps you to hold steady, to understand, or to discern? Share your thoughts in the comments and let us benefit from your perspective.

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The World We Cross · New World · 21 min
To open up perspectives, test out possibilities, seek forms of life more fit to be inhabited.

The diagnosis of an era seeking meaning

Our era is characterized by a dizzying contradiction: never has humanity possessed so many technical means to transform the world, and yet never has it felt so powerless in the face of the existential threats weighing upon it — climate disruption, biodiversity collapse, resurgence of totalitarianisms, dissolution of communal bonds, collective spiritual exhaustion. Instrumental reason, which was supposed to emancipate us, seems to have generated new forms of enslavement: contemporary individuals find themselves reduced to an algorithmic profile, an economic function, a standardized consumer.

This crisis is not merely material or political; it is profoundly spiritual and existential. It reveals the failure of the great modern narratives — indefinite progress, perpetual economic growth, blind faith in technology — to give authentic meaning to human existence. In this context of disenchantment and disorientation, spiritual existentialism emerges not as a systematic doctrine to be passively adopted, but as an existential posture capable of answering the most urgent questions of our time: how do we authentically inhabit our finitude? How do we preserve the irreducible dignity of the person in the face of forces of massification? How do we articulate inner freedom and collective responsibility? How do we recover a living relationship with transcendence without sacrificing critical thinking?

The timeless foundations of a philosophy of embodied existence

Spiritual existentialism has its roots in a philosophical and theological tradition spanning the centuries, from Job crying out his revolt against divine injustice to Kierkegaard asserting that “subjectivity is truth,” through Dostoevsky exploring the abysses of human freedom and Orthodox mystics celebrating cosmic transfiguration. This current immediately rejects any reduction of human existence to abstract categories, biological or sociological determinisms, philosophical systems claiming to exhaustively explain the mystery of being.

At the heart of this thought lies a fundamental conviction: existence precedes essence. This formula, far from being a mere intellectual provocation, means that human beings are not first and foremost a predetermined nature, an assigned social function, a destiny written in advance. They are a perpetual project, freedom in action, infinite responsibility that discovers itself progressively through choices and commitments. Unlike a manufactured object whose essence precedes existence — the knife exists first as the idea of “cutting” before being fabricated — humans exist first in the world, then progressively define themselves through their acts.

This existential freedom is not a comfortable blessing but an overwhelming condemnation, as Sartre affirms: “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.” Anguish arises precisely from this consciousness of our radical freedom: faced with the infinity of possibilities, no determinism can excuse me, no given nature can justify me. But this anguish, so well explored by Kierkegaard, far from being a pathology to cure, constitutes the very signal of our access to authenticity, the proof that we are capable of transforming ourselves, of rectifying our trajectory, of becoming otherwise.

Spiritual existentialism, however, distinguishes itself radically from atheistic existentialism by affirming that this freedom does not float in the void of an absurd and indifferent universe. It is rooted in a living relationship with transcendence — whether it be named G-d, the Absolute, the Mystery of the Living, or simply recognized as that dimension of depth that infinitely exceeds our rational categories. Kierkegaard expresses this magnificently with his concept of the “leap of faith“: a total existential commitment to what transcends reason, not through blind irrationality, but through lucid recognition that ultimate truth cannot be grasped by conceptual intelligence alone.

What spiritual existentialism teaches us

The absolute primacy of the person over systems

Spiritual existentialism tirelessly proclaims the irreducible dignity of each concrete person against all abstractions claiming to subsume them — whether in the name of eternal Truth, historical Progress, the Nation, the Market, or any collective Cause whatsoever. This conviction is born from a profound existential experience: singular suffering, ineluctable death, personal anguish cannot be “explained” or “justified” by any rational system. As Ivan Karamazov cries out in Dostoevsky: “If the sufferings of children have served to complete the sum of sufferings necessary for the acquisition of truth, I affirm in advance that this truth is not worth such a price.”

Nicolas Berdyaev develops this intuition by radically distinguishing the person (lichnost) from the individual. The individual is a biological and sociological category: the atomic unit, the specimen of a species, the number in a series. The person, on the contrary, is a unique spiritual reality, irreplaceable, bearer of a singular creative vocation that places them in direct relation with the absolute. Modern civilization — whether capitalist or totalitarian — tends to reduce humans to individuals, that is to say, to a function, a cog in the economic or political machine. This objectification constitutes the fundamental form of contemporary slavery.

For spiritual existentialism, no external authority — State, Church, Party, Corporation — can substitute itself for personal conscience in its relationship to the absolute. Leon Chestov writes forcefully: “No one but oneself can hold one’s own keys. And use them. In this matter, heads of Churches and States often prove to be sad and bad counterfeiters.” This affirmation possesses prophetic resonance in our era when algorithms claim to know our desires better than we ourselves do, when political and religious institutions arrogate to themselves the monopoly of truth, when technocratic experts decide what is good for the masses.

The struggle against objectification and massification

Berdyaev introduces a crucial distinction between spirit (dukh) and objectification (obiektivatsiia). Spirit designates living, creative, free personal reality that relates directly to the absolute. Objectification designates the process by which this spiritual reality becomes fixed, crystallizes into objects, institutions, dead concepts. Every human creation — intellectual, artistic, social, religious — undergoes this tendency toward objectification: living spiritual intuitions transform into rigid dogmas, impulses of creative freedom fossilize into oppressive institutions, persons become interchangeable social functions.

This objectification represents a form of permanent “fall,” a process of alienation constantly at work in our societies. The task of the spiritual person consists precisely in struggling against this petrification, in keeping alive the flame of spirit against forces of uniformization and standardization. It is an endless combat, for objectification is constantly reborn, but it is precisely in this combat that existential authenticity is forged.

Kierkegaard had already diagnosed this phenomenon when he wrote: “The crowd is untruth.” The institutional Church of his era had transformed authentic Christianity — risky personal commitment, direct relationship with Christ, faith lived in trembling — into a comfortable mass religion where everyone is automatically Christian by the simple fact of being a citizen. This critique applies mutatis mutandis to all contemporary forms of massification: social networks that transform singularities into standardized profiles, political ideologies that reduce human complexity to binary slogans, intellectual fashions that impose the conformism of groupthink.

Subjectivity as existential truth

One of the major contributions of spiritual existentialism lies in its rehabilitation of subjectivity against the pretension of rational objectivity to hold a monopoly on truth. Kierkegaard’s formula “truth is subjectivity“ has often been caricatured as nihilistic relativism. But it is something altogether different: Kierkegaard does not deny the existence of objective truths in the scientific domain (laws of physics, mathematical theorems), but he affirms that in existential domains — the meaning of life, ethical commitment, religious faith — a truth has value only if it is passionately appropriated by an individual, if it becomes the foundation of their way of being in the world.

A luminous example: a pagan who prays to his idol with all the passion of his soul, with total commitment of his being, is closer to truth than an orthodox Christian who mechanically recites prayers out of institutional habit. The difference does not reside in doctrinal content but in the degree of existential appropriation, of lived incarnation. This perspective revolutionizes our relationship to knowledge: it is not enough to accumulate information about G-d, about goodness, about justice; one must become what one claims to know.

This existential subjectivity is not volatile sentimentalism or complacent narcissism. It is passion — in the Kierkegaardian sense of infinite interest in one’s own existence, total commitment that puts at stake the integrity of the person. It is the difference between knowing the map of a territory and exploring it oneself, step by step, in the flesh of lived experience.

Creative freedom against the dictatorship of evidences

Russian existentialism, particularly in Leon Chestov, develops a radical critique of what he names “the dictatorship of reason.” For Chestov, the original Fall does not consist in the disobedience of Adam and Eve but in the fact that they chose the tree of knowledge of good and evil to the detriment of the tree of life. Eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge means accepting to submit existence to the eternal principles of reason, to laws of necessity, to the logical order of constraining evidences.

Since this Fall, humanity has lived under the reign of “one must,” of “it is necessary,” of “it is impossible.” We have internalized this servitude to the point of no longer even recognizing it as servitude: we call “wisdom” this submission to rational order. Chestov opposes to this tyranny of reason creative freedom: an ontological power that can radically transform the very nature of the real, undo the past, resurrect the dead, render non-occurred what has occurred.

This conception seems delirious from the rational point of view — and it fully assumes this. But for Chestov, asking the question “how could one undo the past?” already means submitting oneself to reason. Authentic faith does not ask “how,” it affirms: “With G-d, all things are possible.” Benjamin Fondane, disciple of Chestov, writes magnificently: “Well, yes, Chestov glories in being absurd — that goes without saying; and what if the absurd were the only way to find?“

This critique of reason possesses burning actuality in our era when techno-scientific rationality claims to reduce the real to what is measurable, calculable, controllable. It reminds us that there exist dimensions of human existence — suffering, love, death, hope, artistic creation, mystical experience — that irreducibly escape rationalization.

These philosophical teachings, far from being pure speculative abstractions, find their true scope in the responses they allow us to elaborate in the face of the concrete crises of our era.

Existential responses to contemporary crises

Facing the ecological crisis: an embodied spirituality of transfiguration

The contemporary ecological crisis reveals the failure of an instrumental conception of nature that reduces the living world to a reservoir of exploitable resources. Spiritual existentialism, particularly in its sophiological dimension inherited from Vladimir Solovyov, proposes a radical alternative. Solovyov’s vision of Sophia — divine Wisdom as the soul of the world, living link between creator and creation — affirms that the entire cosmos is called to theosis, to divinization, to transfiguration.

This perspective implies that matter itself is not inert, dead, separated from the divine, but that it participates in the spiritual mystery. An embodied existential spirituality does not consist in fleeing the world to take refuge in a pure disembodied spirit, but in recognizing that transcendence expresses itself through creation, that each element of the living carries within it a divine spark. As the Hasidic tradition often evoked in this publication affirms: “There is not an atom of reality that does not contain the divine presence.”

This vision sacralizes the world without however sacralizing its exploitation. On the contrary, it calls for radical ethical responsibility: if the world is a bearer of the divine, then its destruction constitutes a profanation. The creative freedom of which Chestov speaks does not signify technocratic domination of nature but conscious participation in the work of cosmic transfiguration.

Facing the dissolution of bonds: communitarian personalism

Modern liberal individualism has atomized human communities, reducing interpersonal relations to contracts of mutual interest or superficial digital interactions. Simultaneously, collectivist movements — whether nationalist or neo-totalitarian — dissolve the person in the mass, sacrificing singularities on the altar of a fantasized collective identity.

Spiritual existentialism proposes a third way: a communitarian personalism that articulates the affirmation of the irreducible dignity of each person with the recognition of our constitutive interdependence. Paul Ricœur develops this perspective by affirming that our shared fragility, our common mortality, founds a radical equality and a responsibility toward the other that cannot be dissociated from responsibility toward oneself.

Berdyaev insists on the fact that the person cannot flourish in solipsistic isolation but only in communion with other persons, in an authentic spiritual community that respects the singularity of each. This communion is not undifferentiated fusion but mutual recognition of creative freedoms. It requires what Martin Buber names the “I-Thou” relationship — not the instrumental use of the other as means (I-It), but the dialogical encounter where each person recognizes in the other an irreducible presence.

In the era of social networks that transform human relations into quantifiable social capital, this personalist vision recalls that the authenticity of bonds is measured neither in number of “followers” nor in frequency of interactions, but in the depth of mutual presence, in the capacity to see and honor the irreducible singularity of the other.

Facing contemporary nihilism: an eschatology of hope

Contemporary nihilism does not always manifest itself as a conscious and proclaimed despair but more insidiously as a generalized loss of meaning, a diffuse sentiment that nothing is really worthwhile, that all values are equivalent or arbitrary. This passive nihilism feeds on the collapse of the great modern narratives and the revelation of their intrinsic violence: Progress engendered Auschwitz and Hiroshima, Reason legitimized colonization and exploitation, emancipatory ideologies produced the gulags.

Spiritual existentialism refuses both nihilism and attempts to authoritatively restore fixed values. It proposes an existential way: meaning is not given to us from the outside — neither by a providential Nature, nor by a teleological History, nor by an imposed Revelation — but it emerges from our free and responsible engagement in the world. As Sartre affirms, “man is the being through whom meaning comes into the world.”

But contrary to Camus’s nihilism which affirms that we must “imagine Sisyphus happy” by accepting the definitive absurdity of existence, spiritual existentialism maintains an eschatological dimension, a hope that human history is not an eternal recommencement devoid of finality but a drama tending toward transfiguration. This hope is not an easy consolation that would deny present suffering but an affirmation that the last word belongs neither to evil, nor to death, nor to the absurd.

Facing the technologization of existence: the affirmation of the unobjectifiable

Contemporary techno-digital civilization progressively submits all dimensions of human existence to the logic of optimization, measurement, control. The body becomes a set of biological parameters to monitor and improve. Emotions are quantified and monitored by “wellness” applications. Social relations are mediated by algorithms that determine what we will see, whom we will meet, what we will think. The human itself becomes a set of exploitable data.

Spiritual existentialism opposes to this totalizing objectification the affirmation of the unobjectifiable: there exists a dimension of the human person that irreducibly escapes all attempts at reduction, measurement, control. This dimension — which Berdyaev names spirit, which Kierkegaard names passionate subjectivity, which Chestov names creative freedom — constitutes precisely what makes us persons and not things.

Recognizing this unobjectifiability implies refusing the transhumanist fantasy of an “augmented” human who would be improved by fusion with technology. Not that all technology is bad in itself, but because the essence of the human does not reside in measurable functional capacities (physical strength, calculation speed, memory) but in the capacity to freely relate to meaning, to create, to love, to suffer, to hope — dimensions that escape technocratic logic.

Toward an existential spirituality for the 21st century

A spirituality of choice and commitment

Spiritual existentialism calls for a spirituality that is neither passive inheritance of an imposed tradition nor conformist adherence to an intellectual fashion, but free and risky personal appropriation. In an era when religious identities are increasingly chosen rather than inherited, this perspective takes on particular actuality: it is no longer a matter of being Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or Buddhist by simple family or cultural belonging, but of existentially committing oneself to a spiritual path because it resonates with our deepest experience, because it helps us become more authentically ourselves.

This existential spirituality implies what Kierkegaard names “becoming Christian” (or spiritual becoming, to broaden beyond Christianity): a never-completed process where the person progressively appropriates spiritual truths, transforms them into effective modes of being. One is never “Christian” in the sense of a fixed identity that one could exhibit; one is always in the process of becoming so, in a permanent tension between what one is and what one is called to be.

A spirituality of creative uprooting

Paradoxically, spiritual existentialism affirms that uprooting — tearing away from comfortable certainties, inherited evidences, firm lands of rational knowledge — can become the very condition of a deeper rooting. Chestov writes: “Authentic philosophy begins precisely with uprooting, with the voluntary suspension of all belief in the established order.”

This uprooting is not a nihilistic wandering without compass but an active availability to revelation, an openness to what exceeds our pre-established conceptual frameworks. In a world in accelerated mutation where old certainties collapse — whether traditional religious certainties or secular certainties of modernity — this capacity to “hold in uprooting” without sinking into despair becomes an essential spiritual competence.

My journey of spiritual nomadism actually embodies this spirituality of creative uprooting: I have traveled through multiple traditions (Judaism, Christianity, Sufi Islam, Buddhism, etc.), never enclosing myself in any fixed confessional identity, but drawing from these diverse sources to construct my own path as a spiritual seeker. This approach is not superficial syncretism but recognition that spiritual truth always exceeds the particular formulations given by historical traditions.

A spirituality of presence and action

Spiritual existentialism refuses the dichotomy between contemplation and action, between inner life and engagement in the world. It calls for an embodied spirituality where transcendence is not sought in flight from the world but in the very heart of ordinary existence, transformed by intention, love, attention.

The Hasidic tradition, which I frequently claim, expresses this vision magnificently: sanctifying the everyday (kadosh), recognizing the divine presence in each gesture, each relationship, each ordinary moment. Eating, working, loving, creating — all these acts can become manifestations of spiritual life if we accomplish them with consciousness, with total presence, with the intention of participating in the transfiguration of the world.

This spirituality also implies ethical and political engagement. One cannot call oneself spiritual while remaining indifferent to social injustice, ecological destruction, oppression of the most vulnerable. Paul Ricœur affirms that ethics precedes morality: before asking “what are my duties?” one must ask “what life do I aim for? toward what good do I orient myself?” And this ethical aim necessarily implies responsibility toward others, particularly toward the most fragile.

A spirituality of tragic joy

Spiritual existentialism does not promise easy happiness nor beatific serenity. It fully recognizes the tragic dimension of existence: suffering, death, injustice, the absurd are insurmountable realities. But it affirms that in the very heart of this tragic condition can be born a form of profound joy — not despite tragedy, but through it.

This joy does not result from ignorance or denial of suffering but from lucid acceptance of our finite condition associated with the affirmation that this life, despite everything, is worth living, celebrating, offering. Nietzsche spoke of amor fati (love of fate), but spiritual existentialism goes further: it affirms that authentic faith can transform fate itself, that nothing is definitively lost as long as G-d remains possible.

When I propose, in the presentation of these Dialogues of the New World: “Together, let us build a more habitable and joyful future,” I express precisely this fecund tension between lucid realism (the current world is not “habitable” for many) and active hope (we can transform this situation). The joy of which I speak is not escapism but spiritual resistance, affirmation of life against all forces of death.

Conclusion: embodied hope as an act of resistance

Spiritual existentialism proposes to the 21st century not a closed philosophical system to be dogmatically accepted but an existential posture, an art of living that articulates lucidity and hope, radical critique and creative affirmation. In an era when old certainties collapse and when new idols (the Market, Technology, the Security State) claim to occupy the void left by the withdrawal of the divine, this philosophy reminds us of fundamental truths.

First, no human person can be sacrificed on the altar of an abstraction, whatever it may be. Each singular existence possesses absolute dignity that transcends all utilitarian calculations, all ideological rationalizations. In a world that reduces humans to statistics — migrants drowned in the Mediterranean, civilian victims of bombardments, precarious workers — this affirmation possesses prophetic force.

Second, authentic freedom requires the courage of uncertainty. Faced with authoritarian temptations that promise security and simplicity in exchange for submission, spiritual existentialism affirms that it is better to live in the anguish of freedom than in the comfort of slavery. This freedom does not mean doing anything whatsoever but fully assuming responsibility for our choices, recognizing that we are co-creators of the world we inhabit.

Third, transcendence does not distance us from the world but engages us more deeply in it. An authentic spirituality does not flee the urgencies of the present to take refuge in a consoling beyond but finds in its relationship to the absolute the strength to transform the here and now. As I have already written: it is a matter of “contributing to the respiritualization of the world and to the elevation of the ethical level of populations.”

Finally, hope is not naive optimism but existential decision. Faced with announced catastrophes — ecological, social, spiritual — it would be “rational” to despair. But authentic hope is not a calculation of probabilities; it is an act of faith that affirms that the impossible remains possible, that the last word does not belong to forces of destruction, that life can reflourish where death reigned.

Spiritual existentialism thus invites us to become authentic persons: neither atomized individuals subjected to the determinisms of market and technology, nor undifferentiated masses manipulated by ideologies, but free and responsible subjects who dare to think for themselves, love with all their being, create the new, resist forces of oppression, hope against all hope.

In a century that promises to be difficult and decisive for the future of humanity, this philosophy of embodied existence, far from being an intellectual luxury reserved for a few privileged, perhaps constitutes the most precious spiritual resource we possess to avoid sinking into resignation or despair, but to continue building, “together, a more habitable and joyful world.”

To go further:

Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

Danish philosopher and theologian, father of existentialism, who placed passionate subjectivity and “becoming Christian” at the heart of his reflection against the Hegelian system and the institutional Christianity of his era.

Major Works:

• Fear and Trembling (1843)

• The Concept of Anxiety (1844)

• Either/Or (1843)

• Philosophical Fragments (1844)

• Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (1846)

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881)

Russian novelist whose works constitute veritable philosophical laboratories exploring radical freedom, the problem of evil, innocent suffering, and the encounter with the living Christ.

Major Works:

• Crime and Punishment (1866)

• The Idiot (1869)

• Demons (also The Possessed, 1872)

• The Brothers Karamazov (1880)

• Notes from Underground (1864)

Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900)

Russian philosopher, theologian, and poet, founder of sophiology and theandrism, who developed a mystical vision of divine Wisdom (Sophia) as the living link between God and His creation.

Major Works:

• Russia and the Universal Church (1889)

• The Spiritual Foundations of Life (1882-1884)

• The Justification of the Good (1897)

• Three Conversations on War, Progress, and the End of World History (1900)

Lev Shestov (1866-1938)

Russian existentialist philosopher in exile in Paris, prophet of the struggle against “the dictatorship of reason” and defender of absolute creative freedom against the constraining evidences of logic.

Major Works:

• The Apotheosis of Groundlessness (1905)

• Athens and Jerusalem (1938)

• Potestas Clavium (The Power of the Keys, 1923)

• Kierkegaard and Existential Philosophy (1936)

• In Job’s Balances (1929)

Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948)

Russian Orthodox philosopher exiled in Paris, thinker of the person and freedom, who developed an existential personalism radically opposing creative spirit to forces of objectification and massification.

Major Works:

• Slavery and Freedom (1939)

• The Beginning and the End (1947)

• Spirit and Reality (1927-1928)

• The Meaning of the Creative Act (1916)

• Dream and Reality: An Essay in Autobiography (1949)

Martin Buber (1878-1965)

Austro-Israeli Jewish philosopher and theologian, thinker of authentic dialogue, who developed the distinction between the “I-Thou” relationship (dialogical encounter where the other is recognized as presence) and the “I-It” relationship (instrumental use of the other as object).

Major Works:

• I and Thou (Ich und Du, 1923)

• The Way of Man (1948)

• The Legend of the Baal-Shem (1908)

• Tales of the Hasidim (1906-1928)

• Eclipse of God (1952)

• For the Sake of Heaven (originally Gog and Magog, 1941)

Benjamin Fondane (1898-1944)

Romanian poet and philosopher of Jewish origin, established in Paris, disciple of Chestov, who developed a tragic existential philosophy refusing all rational consolation. Murdered at Auschwitz in October 1944.

Major Works:

• Unhappy Consciousness (La Conscience malheureuse, 1936)

• Existential Monday and the Sunday of History (posthumous, 1945)

• Baudelaire and the Experience of the Abyss (posthumous, 1947)

• Ulysses (poem, 1933)

• Exodus (poem, posthumous)

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)

French philosopher and writer, major figure of atheistic existentialism, who affirmed that “existence precedes essence” and that man is “condemned to be free,” radically responsible for his choices.

Major Works:

• Being and Nothingness (1943)

• Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946)

• No Exit (theater, 1944)

• Nausea (novel, 1938)

• Dirty Hands (theater, 1948)

Albert Camus (1913-1960)

French writer and philosopher of the absurd, who explored the human condition confronted with the absence of meaning while refusing suicide and affirming lucid revolt and solidarity.

Major Works:

• The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)

• The Stranger (novel, 1942)

• The Plague (novel, 1947)

• The Rebel (1951)

• Nuptials (1939)

Paul Ricœur (1913-2005)

French philosopher of hermeneutics and personalism, who developed a thought of the person articulating narrative identity, ethical responsibility, and recognition of the other in their constitutive fragility.

Major Works:

• Oneself as Another (1990)

• Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary (1950-1960)

• Time and Narrative (3 volumes, 1983-1985)

• The Course of Recognition (2004)

• The Just (1995)

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

To go further

What form of life, of organisation, or of relation seems to you today the most fruitful for preparing the world of tomorrow? A concrete intuition is often worth more than a grand programme: set it down in the comments — it will nourish the reflection of us all.

And if you wish to express yourself on the subject of the New World, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and dialogue with you.

New here? The Opening page introduces the author, the project, how to take part, contact details, and the agenda.

Article disponible en français
The World We Cross · New World · 13 min
To open up perspectives, test out possibilities, seek forms of life more fit to be inhabited.

Many people give up hope of seeing any improvement in our societies, let alone being able to contribute to it, faced with widespread pessimism. Yet, every personal transformation creates a butterfly effect that influences the whole world. Gandhi understood this: "Be the change you want to see in the world." Discover how your personal awakening can transform humanity.

You have probably noticed it around you. Many people point out that our societies are regressing toward less justice and freedom and more violence and poverty. Faced with a seemingly bleak future, they retreat into pursuing personal well-being or, at best, the well-being of their family or community. They see no possibility of participating in more ambitious positive change.

This pessimism is spreading like an epidemic, accompanied by increased selfishness, latent anger, and social tensions. Moreover, modern societies are seeing a growing use of antianxiety and antidepressant drugs, while calls for help to charitable organizations are multiplying. These organizations are unable to cope with the increasing impoverishment of populations.

However, if we change our perspective, we will see that we have the opportunity every day to improve the world by influencing its direction. Our impact could be decisive if we collectively develop the conditions that would enable a different society through personal change.

When personal happiness is no longer enough

Of course, we can change how we perceive and accept our existence by working on ourselves. By accepting our human condition, which is linked to duality and impermanence, we can find happiness in marveling at life's simple pleasures.

However, we cannot ignore the fact that our daily lives unfold in a society facing numerous crises that generate anxiety and antagonism. The living conditions and mental well-being of a growing number of people are deteriorating, and most no longer see politics, religion, or justice as means to achieve significant improvements.

Our legitimate efforts to build personal or family happiness will not create a society that ensures a viable future for our descendants if they lead to indifference toward others. Nor will they be enough to curb the explosion of anger and thirst for revenge of those left impoverished.

This raises an essential question: How can our personal progress toward happiness be replicated collectively ? Solutions that lead to selfish, inward-looking happiness cannot be disseminated socially, since they remain indifferent to the condition of the majority.

Gandhi was right

Remember Gandhi's famous quote: "Be the change you wish to see in the world." If we deeply reflect on its implications, we may begin to envision a new horizon—a strategy other than turning inward or resorting solely to protests against political decisions that upset us.

If we want our world to evolve toward greater harmony, justice, sharing, and community, we must first examine whether we embody the improvements we would like to see in society. Then, we must think about how to spread these improvements.

Gandhi reminds us of our individual responsibility and encourages us to initiate and carry out change. Most human beings would obviously prefer to live in harmonious and peaceful conditions. However, they often look for initiators of change outside their environment and elsewhere than within themselves.

Have we examined our jealousies, anger, selfishness, and resentments sufficiently ? Do we realize that our thoughts, words, and actions affect the entire world around us ?

The butterfly effect of our daily actions

Like flocks of starlings that move in a compact mass, we are all interconnected, forming a large living entity. The overall flight direction of these flocks varies at the slightest turn prompted by a few individuals. This deep interconnection means that every gesture, attitude, and thought really matters.

Little by little, at work and in your daily life, when you show an open, smiling face and adopt a calm, caring attitude, you might share moments of humanity from heart-to-heart. These small events produce peace and well-being. This positive result can inspire others to follow this path rather than one of malice or indifference.

Imagine if you considered each person your loved one and offered them the opportunity to show their best self through your loving welcome. You would create a virtuous circle. Thus, the possibility of improving the world is born by changing the general atmosphere and bringing harmony, hope, and joy.

Our societies are merely a reflection of who we are

Indeed, our societies, their failures, shortcomings, and dangers are the collective result of who we are. Of course, there are political and economic realities and accelerating crises, but aren't these consequences of the poor choices we have collectively tolerated or allowed to happen generation after generation?

Are these dysfunctions the result of anything other than our lack of awareness of our human bonds and our gradual abandonment of effective participation in our collective future over the ages? We have withdrawn into our individual needs, leaving the management of our common future to those who claim to act in the interests of the people when, in reality, they most often serve other interests.

I often reference La Boétie's 1576 book, Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, in which he tells us: "The tyrant alone does not need to be fought or overthrown. He is defeated by himself, provided that the country does not consent to its servitude."

The same applies to the negative aspects of social life. Let us start by not giving in to tensions, hatred, revenge, selfishness, and everything else that causes us to suffer. We should always bear in mind that our personal qualities, combined with those of others, determine the evolution of our societies.

The story of the two wolves

Do you know the Native American story about the two wolves? An old Indian tells his grandson that he is inhabited by an inner struggle between two wolves. One wolf is filled with envy, anger, greed, arrogance, resentment, lies, superiority, and false pride. The other is good, peaceful, happy, serene, humble, generous, true, and compassionate.

The grandfather explains that this inner conflict also takes place within his grandson, as it does within everyone. The child thinks for a moment, then asks his grandfather which wolf will win the struggle. The old sage replies with an obvious answer: "Simply the one you feed."

If so many people give up on their childhood or teenage dreams of seeing violence, injustice, wickedness, and poverty end, is it not because they have relaxed their focus on these two wolves within themselves?

How can we hope for a better world and believe that we can contribute to it if we allow ourselves to be absorbed solely by the external struggle for material life? How can we believe in this when we fail to eliminate the aspects of ourselves that we are not proud of ?

Why waiting for a savior doesn't work

When we abandon our personal responsibility, we have no choice but to shift the responsibility for change onto others. Thus, during each election, we hope for the emergence of a providential man who will do the job or believe in the imminent arrival of a messiah with the omnipotence to bring heaven down to earth.

This approach never works and never will !

As long as we carry within ourselves the potential for injustice and war, there will be injustice and war outside of us ! Not even the best elected representative—the most virtuous one with the most subtle laws—will be able to prevent greedy and selfish people from plundering everything around them. No law can prevent people dominated by hatred from seeking revenge.

As long as we believe that change does not come through us, and that we must wait for a hypothetical great day, as long as we do not embrace the demanding clarity of waking up from our dreams and illusions, and begin creating the harmonious, good world we wish to see outside ourselves, generations will pass without seeing humanity's suffering diminish.

Moving away from pyramidal models

From adolescence onward, when we question societal dysfunctions, we are taught that the only solution is for the majority to adhere to a political ideology or religious doctrine. This objective always requires people to obey an elite group of individuals who are considered skilled or wise enough to make the necessary decisions.

We are locked into a mindset that considers only pyramid-shaped systems. We rarely imagine that other ways of organizing our lives together might be possible—let alone a system that would allow us to build our own rules, closely aligned with our daily reality, through benevolent and fruitful consultation.

On a smaller scale, we function in the same way as the models that structure our societies. We gather around common interests and shared prejudices, willingly lining up behind charismatic leaders. We are ready to choose sides and express our opposition to others rather than seek common ground with them.

Watch a few political debates or follow a few social networks, and you will quickly see that antagonism and slander are more prevalent than peaceful exchange and the search for conciliation. Everyone seems to be looking for an enemy to confront with a few home truths.

To break out of this vicious cycle, we must recognize the limitations that this ancestral culture imposes on our minds. We must rediscover our taste for invention and freedom !

Regaining personal sovereignty

Ultimately, it's about giving ourselves the opportunity to truly live ! It's about discovering that beyond our routines, habits, appetites, and distractions, we have the choice to evolve and transform ourselves. Our identity, ways of thinking, and concerns are not fixed.

We can choose to invest in a more intimate space within ourselves—a fertile interiority—where we can reconnect with our essence. It's as if we're giving voice to the child within us who holds other talents, desires, and wonders.

If you stop devoting all your spare time to television, social media, and other distractions, you will discover how much you are hindered by preconceived ideas. These unthought-of prejudices, emotional automatisms, and unconscious routines that you believe to be yourself are, in fact, beliefs and limitations resulting from your family heritage and the culture of your time.

Then, you will feel the desire to free yourself from these constraints and think differently about yourself and the world. You will seek other answers and insights and feel that, behind this thick veil and complex tangle of ideas saturating our brains, simpler realities exist that we have forgotten.

At certain special moments, especially when you find yourself in a beautiful place in nature and allow yourself to be silent, you will feel capable of connecting with reality differently. You sense that you are part of a greater whole, an immense living entity.

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Spiritual awakening as a force for transformation

You may also experience this during meditation or when encountering significant texts that offer evidence of another life, one that speaks to infinity, beauty, love, and wonder. You then realize how many obstacles within you prevent you from accessing this greater, freer life.

These obstacles can be gradually overcome to create space for something new to awaken within us and allow our most intimate essence to resume growing and welcoming this renewal.

Those who experience this profound transformation are participating in the world's rebirth. They become a passageway through which living forces can irrigate the earth once again and offer themselves as a gift to all beings.

Each small victory you achieve by embracing the best of yourself benefits all of humanity. Your efforts to awaken and escape the pull of negativity are linked to the efforts of countless others moving toward the light. They all strengthen you.

All humans are connected as one great living entity, in which every breath, thought, word, and action affects everyone.

Building the new world

Those on the path to spiritual awakening have developed sufficient presence and self-awareness to begin changing themselves. They can see the immense distance separating our societies, torn apart by the convulsions of a sick civilization, from the new life flowing through and nourishing them.

They feel a growing closeness to all beings and a kinship of destiny that binds them to everyone. This kinship makes them perceive every failure to live up to the sublimity of human nature as a raw wound inflicted on the very body of reality. This sublimity becomes an obvious truth that compels them. They are outraged by the vulgarity and brutality humans inflict on one another, and by the overwhelming mystery of faces that so often collides with the dryness of hearts.

How can we be surprised that recourse to laws and constraints seems necessary to stem the excesses of our immense appetites and our worst impulses? How can we forget that these illusory safeguards have never improved humanity, and bring with them the permanent risk of becoming instruments of domination?

In an attempt to curb the worst of our humanity, we reduce the fluidity, diversity, and dynamism of life—that vital impulse that inhabits every being that comes into the world—by limiting ourselves to following the narrow path laid out by authorities of all kinds who are supposed to protect us from ourselves. We are often incapable of imagining the immense loss this represents and the atrophy it causes to our lives because we are so locked in a mental context that considers any other alternative impossible.

Those who gradually free themselves from this closed state of consciousness begin to glimpse this disaster—this strangulation of life—caused by all these systems of constraints. They then see it as obvious that each of their personal steps toward goodness contributes to reducing the evils from which the world suffers by reviving the power of life and opening doors to the future.

Freeing life from these constraints requires replacing all external authorities with the inner authority of love. In our current state, this love can only arise in us if we understand that attacking the integrity and happiness of others endangers our own.

Nevertheless, it is urgent to form a community with all those who share the premonition or certainty that this other path is possible. Sooner or later, we must prove it by creating an outline of society based on love and freedom. More and more people will then dare to commit themselves to the construction of this New World, seeing the end of antagonisms and the real implementation of the complementarity of human talents.

Change begins with you. It begins now.

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

To go further

What form of life, of organisation, or of relation seems to you today the most fruitful for preparing the world of tomorrow? A concrete intuition is often worth more than a grand programme: set it down in the comments — it will nourish the reflection of us all.

And if you wish to express yourself on the subject of the New World, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and dialogue with you.

New here? The Opening page introduces the author, the project, how to take part, contact details, and the agenda.

Article disponible en français
The World We Cross · New World · 5 min
To open up perspectives, test out possibilities, seek forms of life more fit to be inhabited.

It’s becoming clear that our Western societies are reaching a breaking point as crises multiply—social, political, economic, environmental, migratory, and more. But above all, it’s a profound crisis of meaning that people face today, as all the reference points that had previously guided the world’s evolution seem to be losing their strength, and the very foundations of human identity are being disrupted.

Restoring hope

Whether it’s political systems or religions, economic models or scientific advances, nothing can any longer stop the ever-faster increase in glaring inequalities between the ultra-wealthy and the destitute, nothing seems able to stop corruption at all levels or ensure that social justice and human rights are truly respected. This state of affairs is resulting in an alarming rise in resentment, born from the widespread suffering it creates among populations.

It’s becoming essential to offer credible alternatives, to restore hope to all those convinced that our world’s collapse is inevitable, but even more so to try to transform the powerful energy of anger simmering everywhere into a force for civilizational creation and invention. This would lay the groundwork for a new world and prevent the buildup of frustrations from erupting into extreme violence, which would lead to chaos or bring about the lasting establishment of dictatorships of a new kind.

Solutions must be invented together

Solutions will no longer come from yet another variation of policies, regardless of their social or liberal orientation, because existing governance systems have become so rigid and complex that they’re both extremely fragile and totally ineffective at addressing in depth the problems we face. The temptation to make them even more authoritarian and invasive in our lives, under the guise of finally making them efficient, is running through leadership circles, and that’s why respect for our individual freedoms and privacy has been declining increasingly fast in recent years.

Solutions to open the path toward a more just and humane world tomorrow can now only come from voluntary collective experimentation with new ways of relating and organizing how we live together, based on freedom and kindness, on self-management and dialogue, on complementary talents and their pooling.

This requires forming groups that remain human-sized, where each person can know all the others, so that debate and collective decision-making can truly gather the broadest participation.

Only small groups voluntarily gathered in complete freedom, without a leader imposing their rule, can indeed enable the gradual learning of putting love into real action in human relationships—not love in the romantic sense, though it’s not excluded that it could also develop as a form of collective friendship, but first and foremost love in the sense of the will to seek harmony and sharing with others.

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A space for mutual support and collective experimentation

Bringing subscribers together around my Dialogues for the New World can be an opportunity to spark the coming together of such a group of people, which could become, through the exchanges enabled by comments and chat, a space for support and mutual aid. This would foster the growth and fulfillment of each participant and could inspire the desire for real-world meetups.

And this publication would then naturally grow, through a kind of organic development of shared aspirations and talents, to open up to co-authors who would contribute on subjects familiar to them and encourage the development of joint projects beyond this platform itself.

By moving forward together in our spiritual development and gradually embodying, in our commitments and presence in the world, the fruits of awakening our noblest potentials, we could become proof that it’s possible to envision a future where we can once again trust in human genius.

If you think it’s time to take back control of our collective destiny, that to change the world for the better we must first change ourselves to be the best version of ourselves, or, as Gandhi said, that we must be the change we want to see in the world, then join me!

Together we can build our ark of new consciousness to weather the flood of our civilization’s collapse and reach tomorrow’s new shores where the New World is being invented !

© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World — Jérôme Nathanaël

To go further

What form of life, of organisation, or of relation seems to you today the most fruitful for preparing the world of tomorrow? A concrete intuition is often worth more than a grand programme: set it down in the comments — it will nourish the reflection of us all.

And if you wish to express yourself on the subject of the New World, send me a contribution of roughly one page for the Waymakers section. It will be published under your initials, a pseudonym, or anonymously, as you prefer. Other readers will be able to respond and dialogue with you.

New here? The Opening page introduces the author, the project, how to take part, contact details, and the agenda.