The look of someone discovering reality. This young woman stood in front of a smashed shop window in Paris last night and said the smashing and looting are not what the cause is about. She still believes the people who broke the glass share her cause. They don’t. They have their own. This is not how she imagined it. It has a name: cognitive dissonance – the pain of watching reality contradict what you were told to believe. She learned it last night, in pain. Millions of others will learn it in the coming months – the same way. Because reality doesn’t need the media. It comes through the window. We were right all along.👇🏻 And they were wrong. So will they admit it now, and let go of their delusions? Or will they double down? In 1954, an American psychologist infiltrated a small cult that had predicted the end of the world on a precise date. The date came. Nothing happened. Did the believers give up? The most committed did the opposite: they started preaching harder than ever. That is what most true believers will do. Admitting the error would cost them their friends, their careers and their image of themselves. So they will blame the police, the "far right," the economy, the weather – anything but the idea. For them to change their minds, their whole system will have to collapse – the salaries, the institutions, the friends who all think alike. Belief survives as long as the group survives. We have seen it before: in 1989, when the system fell, Poland’s communists woke up one morning as social democrats – and a good number of them as businessmen. But the believers are not the audience. The people watching are. Reality rarely converts the priests. It converts the congregation – one broken window at a time. And yesterday was much more than a broken window. A day like that must have opened the eyes of millions. Events like that change history. The priests will keep preaching. The congregation has already started to leave.

It's the Civilization, stupid. And France has lost its own. That young woman in Paris thought she and the people breaking the windows stood for the same thing. Politically, maybe. Ideologically, even, to a degree. Civilizationally – not at all. And civilization is the basis of everything else. A Polish historian, Feliks Koneczny, put it in one sentence: you cannot be civilized in two ways at once. Two people can share a slogan and still live by opposite rules – about property, about law, about violence, about what you owe a stranger. There can be no stable common ground between them. Only a temporary alliance against a common enemy, which ends the moment the windows break. France has lost its civilizational values. Or rather, it has lost the ability to state them. Because saying things openly and plainly was never part of the French way and values. Rhetoric is. The French absorb their rules of civilized life from childhood – the manners, the codes, the unwritten "ça ne se fait pas" – without ever spelling them out. Among themselves, it works. With foreign populations, it fails. You cannot explain a code you have never put into words. You cannot transmit what you cannot say. The rhetoric doesn’t work if you haven’t absorbed it first. And the government that should defend the French way of life now belongs to another civilization itself – however French it looks. The civilization of mental communism: managers, procedures, slogans. It has no instinct to defend a way of life. Only the instinct to administer it. You can integrate people into a civilization, possibly. But you have to be able to state the rules clearly. That is the advantage of plain-spoken cultures: what you can say, you can teach. And what you can teach, you can pass on. It's the civilization, stupid.