To Bite or to Be Bitten by Reality? Is This the New Question?

by Laurent Ledoux

What I Learned in 2025

Hello everyone!

As I have done every year for over fifteen years, allow me to share with you what the past year has taught me.

In 2025, once again, Shakespeare was everywhere. Not only on stage and on screen, but in public life itself. The most powerful and most criminal men on the planet perfectly embodied the famous lines from Macbeth, that king as bloodthirsty as he was illegitimate: they saturated the media like those "players who strut and fret their hour upon the stage, full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing."

To our great collective misfortune, however, these men — for they are only very rarely women — their egos bloated by the flattery of "fawning spaniels", these "caterpillars of the commonwealth" fattened on the applause of a crowd stupefied by social media, are likely to linger a few more hours on the world's stage.

But in 2025, it was another of Shakespeare's lines that haunted me most. The most famous of all. And I was not the only one it pursued. How can one "be," indeed, when moments of stupefaction multiply? When reality shifts faster than our capacity to understand it?

So much so that one might be tempted to reformulate the question: perhaps the question of our time is no longer to be or not to be. It is, above all, that of our relationship to what is. To bite or to be bitten by reality? Is this the new question?

It is this question — that of our changing relationship with reality — that made me think the most in 2025. I saw it surfacing beneath each of the events that caused so much fear, sadness, and anger this year. I will not recount them here: they are too numerous, and you already know them.

What I want to share instead is what this year taught me personally, and what it might inspire us, Europeans, to do in the year ahead. Drawing on many experiences and sources, I have distilled five learnings, followed by a poem: a pastiche of Kipling's "If" addressed not to a son becoming a man, but to us, Europeans, learning to become a genuine political actor in a world that no longer waits for us.

Part One. The Key Learnings

1. A Sense of Loss and the Tearing of the Veil

I lost American family members and friends this year. Not to death, but to a choice I cannot understand. They chose to support a rising authoritarian regime in a country that once welcomed me warmly as a foreign student. I lost, too, the dreams of liberty and democracy I had naively associated with America, despite knowing it was far from perfect.

More broadly, I lost my sense that the world was progressing toward an international order based on the rule of law. That order has been demolished. Not suddenly, but its destruction became undeniable this year. The most powerful heads of state today are destroyers rather than builders. Their strength lies in their own incoherence, which makes them unpredictable. They are predators, openly so. They lie systematically.

This is not new, of course. But it has never been so obvious. And so, I lost "my" world and often wonder now in which world I actually live.

What I learned: the veil through which we see the world is both misleading and fragile. When it tears, we must look clearly at what lies behind.

2. The Frailty of Our Democracies

Mark Carney at Davos

We knew our European democracies and Union were imperfect. But, still, they appeared to me among humanity's greatest achievements: the transformation of a continent (that had destroyed itself repeatedly) into a space of peace, cooperation, and shared law. I believed our unique political achievements and the size of our unified market would gradually lead others to embrace this model.

I was wrong. Our ideals are not wrong, but — as we realized too late this year — ideals will never prevail if they are not backed by power. The 2025 US National Security Strategy made this brutally clear, framing Europe as a "declining, self-destructive continent" and explicitly calling for the cultivation of "resistance to Europe's current trajectory within European nations." There's an irony here we should not miss. If Europe were truly declining, no one would bother attacking it. The very intensity of the pressure — the tariffs, the rhetoric, the interference in our politics — reveals the opposite of what it claims. You don't try to subjugate what you consider irrelevant. Europe is targeted precisely because it matters: 450 million educated, prosperous citizens forming the world's largest single market. That is not weakness. That is leverage. And we should dare to use it — calmly, strategically, without arrogance, but without the self-deprecation that has become our reflex either.

What I learned: we must reform how our democracies work, and fast. As Mark Carney, Canada’s Prime Minister, brilliantly argued at Davos, we need to harness "the power of the powerless" (Václav Havel's phrase) when they unite. This requires institutional reform, integrated defense, the courage and capacity to exclude those who don't play by common rules, and within each country, addressing the inequalities that fuel extremism on both left and right. In its current configuration, Europe cannot mount effective diplomacy or credible defense. A genuine European defense requires a complete political-military command chain and autonomous intelligence. The path forward may be what worked before: a coalition of willing states (like Schengen or the euro) beginning the federative process and expanding over time.

3. The Need for a Long-Term Perspective

Steven Greenblatt

We cannot properly understand what is happening without knowing history. What is currently unfolding in America feeds on long-unresolved issues: the unfinished work of racial justice; four decades of neoliberalism and exploding inequality; deep cultural and religious fractures; the crisis of political dialogue; the silent disintegration of federal unity and historical patterns of authoritarian temptation. The pattern of demagogues exploiting resentment is ancient. The current President is a symptom of this "shattered America," not its cause.

On a more hopeful note, my dear friend Stephen Beatty offered me this year a wonderful book: “The Swerve”, by historian Stephen Greenblatt, which vividly recounts how Poggio Bracciolini, a book hunter, found in 1416 a miraculously surviving copy of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, Lucretius's De Rerum Natura and this discovery helped spark the Renaissance. This book taught me that even small acts, inscribed in larger currents, can unleash tremendous positive forces. The monk who copied a manuscript, the scholar who recognized its importance — neither could foresee the transformation they enabled.

What I learned: we must think in centuries, not news cycles. The European project itself took decades to build and will take decades more to complete. Impatience is the enemy of wisdom.

4. The Need to Feel Useful — and the False Dichotomy

I witnessed many friends despairing this year because they felt useless in the face of such rapid, overwhelming change. I often despaired and felt useless too.

Our individual and collective apparent incapacity to stop the madness of a few highly visible predators led me to reflect on Gandhi's teaching that we must "be the change we want to see in the world." Gandhi is right. But we should not conclude that changing oneself is sufficient. Retreating into self-development while the world burns is its own form of escape.

The Biblical story of the flood offers a similar teaching. In times of crisis, our first duty is to remain centered, to reconnect with the source, building our inner ark before the waters rise. But we cannot stay in the ark forever. We must eventually act in the world, for the common good. Inner transformation is necessary but not sufficient.

What I learned: no matter how individualistic or disconnected we've become, we still crave the opportunity to genuinely help another person. Creating spaces where people can be and feel useful to each other is among the most important, and most neglected, tasks of politics.

5. Our Relationship with Reality — The Defining Issue

Gerald Bronner and Asma Mhalla

You may have noticed a pattern: all four learnings concern changes in my perception of reality. And indeed, when I reflect on it, this is the defining issue I spotted this year. Perhaps not just for me, but for all of us.

The sociologist Gérald Bronner, in his book “À l'assaut du reel”, argues that we have shifted from "post-truth" to something more radical: "post-reality." We no longer merely twist facts. We have built technological and social environments where we no longer feel reality's resistance at all. Bronner calls this the "ductilisation du réel", reality becoming malleable like clay, shaped to match our desires.

This isn't accidental. It results from what he calls the "deregulation of desire." Humans have always wanted to take their wishes for reality. But now entire ecosystems (consumption, media, algorithms) accelerate and normalize this tendency. The present becomes "cannibalistic", devouring our capacity to think long-term.

Similarly, Asma Mhalla, in her analysis of what she calls the "Cyberpunk Era" describes a form of power that no longer needs force. It obtains consent through seduction, ergonomics, and design. Control works not through censorship but through distraction; through the dilution of meaning. As she writes: "the excess of information produces the same paralysis as censorship."

What I learned: if we no longer share a common foundation of reality, democracy becomes ungovernable (no longer a shared basis for arbitrating climate, health, security, budgets, etc.). To maintain this common foundation, we must strive to protect in Europe “the infrastructure of reality”, that is, comprehensible methods of proof, credible institutions that apply them, and an information space where manipulation is costly. And to do this, there are many levers available, even if they are not easy to implement. I detail them in this “Memo to Europe on protecting the reality's infrastructure”. I will limit myself here to mentioning the first one, which I consider to be the most critical in all its potential meaning: indeed, making “critical thinking” a mass public policy. Not just a fun module in middle school. A real project. Because the problem is not that “people are stupid”, it is that the attention economy and polarization make our biases profitable. And in this context, we must also learn to manage our attention better—to refrain from giving it to agitators and grotesque buffoons, even when they claim to be the most powerful persons in the world. Our attention is precious; we should not squander it on those who seek only to provoke. To name them is already a concession. This newsletter makes none. Not once, not anywhere.

These five learnings could have led me to cynicism. They didn't. Because running through each of them is a stubborn thread: we still care. About truth, about democracy, about each other, about being useful in a world that seems to have lost interest in usefulness. And caring, in times like these, is already a form of resistance. But resistance needs expression. It needs a voice that isn't just analytical — that says not only what we've understood, but what we aspire to. Which is why I turned to poetry.

Part Two. The Poem

When I was about ten years old, my judo master, François Vassart, made me copy Kipling's "If" hundreds of times — in André Maurois's beautiful French translation. All my life, this poem has accompanied me, offering an arduous but inspiring path towards a noble horizon: the kind of person I aspired to become.

The geopolitical upheavals of this past year made me (and so many others) realize that instead of lamenting the loss of an important ally, we Europeans must concentrate on strengthening our democracies and institutions — becoming more sovereign and independent on all fronts: military, technological, digital, economic, financial, cultural. This is the underlying inspiration for my little pastiche.

Note: As each stanza addresses a specific challenge drawn from my key learnings of 2025, I comment here the key ideas behind each verse and the authors or events they reference.

An Invitation to Lucid Action

These above verses attempt to hold together what might seem contradictory: Europe must become powerful enough to defend its values while not becoming what it set out originally to overcome. This is not a clever synthesis that dissolves the tension. It is a call to maintain dynamic equilibrium between seemingly opposed imperatives: patient and urgent, gentle and strong, open and protected, remembering and forgiving.

Ironically, Kipling's original "If" was addressed to his son, guidance for becoming a man in the British imperial context. My adaptation addresses us collectively in a way that he might never have imagined. And yet, the virtues required are not so different: patience, resilience, balance, self-mastery, and the courage to rebuild after failure. But I believe the stakes have shifted today from individual character to collective survival. Therefore, as I mentioned it earlier, my poem modestly attempts to provide guidance for becoming a genuine political actor in a multipolar world that no longer waits for us.

So: To bite or to be bitten by reality? Is this really the new question?

My short answer is no. That framing still assumes an adversarial relationship with the real. The true question is different: How do we learn, as the great spiritual traditions teach, to say yes to reality, and then do what the situation requires? Not to bend the world to our wishes, nor to be crushed by circumstances, but to see clearly and act accordingly. Engage lucidly as our moment urgently requires.

The good news is that this is possible. Europe has done impossible things before. Peoples who slaughtered each other for centuries now share a parliament, a currency, a court of law. That achievement, however incomplete, proves transformation is possible — if we choose it, if we work for it, if we hold together what would otherwise fly apart.

The choice is ours. The work begins now. And if we can do it — as the poem says — we shall be more than memory and market. We shall be a will, a conscience, a light for those who still believe that law can triumph over force, and that the future can be better than the past.