There's something fascinating about Macron, and a question that keeps coming back: is he cynical, or does he actually believe what he says? My take: he believes it. And that's far more worrying. Look at his path. His father was a neurology professor at a public hospital. His mother was a physician for the French social security system. His grandmother, a public school principal, partly raised him. Then the elite track: Henri-IV, Sciences Po, ENA (the school that trains France's top civil servants), the Finance Inspectorate, deputy chief of staff at the Élysée, Minister of the Economy, President. From birth to power, he never really left the orbit of the State. People will say: "He was a banker at Rothschild." Sure, for four years. But investment banking isn't entrepreneurship. You advise deals between large institutions. You don't risk your own capital. You never lie awake wondering how you'll make payroll. It's a world of networks, access and files. An extension of the high civil service, not its opposite. He never started a company. Never hired anyone with his own money. Never watched a customer walk to a competitor. Never got a tax audit and wondered if his business would survive it. For him, the reality of building something simply doesn't exist. It's not contempt. It's a blind spot. The image that comes to mind is a beautifully machined gear, spinning perfectly, that doesn't mesh with anything. It spins in a vacuum. His whole worldview works like that. Inside his world, everything is coherent. Every step follows logically. The reasoning is brilliant. But the axioms are wrong. And when you reason flawlessly from false premises, you reach false conclusions with flawless rigor. The most interesting part is what happens when reality knocks on the door. When you fail, you have two options. You can say: "I was wrong. What I've believed for fifteen or twenty years is false." That's brutal. It's an identity collapse. Or you keep the cognitive dissonance and explain the failure some other way: people didn't understand, we didn't explain it well enough, the reform didn't go far enough, the opposition blocked it. It's the exact same mechanism as "that wasn't real communism." The model is never wrong. It just was never applied properly. Reality is wrong, the theory is right. And meanwhile, the country burns. That's why "cynical or disconnected?" is the right question. You can reason with a cynic. He follows his interests, so if you change his incentives, you change his behavior. A disconnected believer, you can't. Every failure becomes more proof that you need to push further in the same direction. I think this explains much of the madness of European leadership. Not a bunch of villains plotting in a back room. Possibly sincere people, shaped in the same mold, raised on the same ideas, plugged into a system that is a flat denial of common sense. People so cut off from reality that their sincerity is what makes them dangerous. Macron is the purest embodiment of it. When you build a company, reality corrects you every single week. A customer who doesn't pay, a product that doesn't work, a competitor who moves faster. You don't get a choice: adapt or die. The State never dies. It never gets the bill. And people who have only ever known the State end up believing reality is just one opinion among many. The problem isn't that he lies. The problem is that he can't see.