Why Has the Left Lost Its Sense of Honour?

The left's inability to answer peoples' demands for dignity, autonomy and emancipation is the result of its adherence to the dogmas of free trade and globalisation. In France, La France Insoumise has abandoned its "Plan B", the exit from the European Union. It now promises, as the Socialist Party once did, to negotiate ecological and social policies from within.

It has, in short, become the Socialist Party, which made the same mendacious promise at the dawn of the 2000s, with one difference: back then, social-democratic governments held the majority within a European Union of only fifteen states. Today, the liberal-conservative right is overwhelming in a system of twenty-seven.

In other words, what we are promised is betrayal. To get around the obstacle, the non-sovereigntist left locks itself into a victimary and identitarian aporia.

The left has substituted victimary incantation for the struggle against predation.

The aim, through these tactics, is to build perpetual minority clienteles, reified, essentialised and confined within their status as victims, a status itself tied to a gender, an origin, a skin colour, and to set oneself up as the caring paternal figure charged with protecting and repairing them. Naturally, this infantilisation, which has its origins in the anti-racist movement of the 1980s, makes its benevolence conditional on keeping these populations indefinitely in their status as victims, force-fed with subsidies, positive thinking and legislative and regulatory exemptions, so as, on the one hand, to promise them a tangible improvement of their condition and, on the other, to keep them subject within a system of dependence upon the paternalist political force that has promised them not equality and emancipation but dependence and humiliation. To exist only in the negative, only insofar as one is a victim (the woman of men; the black of the white; the Muslim…), opens onto no other horizon than perpetual reparation and confinement within one's own condition.

In the image of Jean-Luc Mélenchon kneeling during the Black Lives Matter movement, which shows the degree of acculturation of the leaders of a movement that claims to be anti-imperialist, the left-wing clientelist, deprived of any capacity to change the structures of society in earnest, to remedy the suffering and the loss of purpose generated by the savage competition to which his people are subjected against billions of slaves of the Global South from whom he has no wish to break away, pounces on any event likely to arouse indignation among what he perceives as a people of noble savages, governed by affect, who he thereby hopes will forget the deep reasons for their suffering and their disaffiliation. The institutional left, which through its strategic wanderings and its renunciation of any form of political courage no longer has a people, and therefore no longer has an electorate, shows itself ready for every compromise in order to win one back, at the risk of losing all esteem, its own and that of others, and of completing its own marginalisation. In so doing, it renounces honour, which every healthy and living society places above every structure, including that of the State, because honour is nothing other than the internalised norm: the capacity to feel shame before being sanctioned; and therefore, paradoxically, the capacity to live in autonomy, outside the State, as much beyond it as beneath it.

The Jason Arday affair is only the latest illustration of this strategy for conquering the popular electorate which, for want of any real emancipation to offer, refers French citizens whom it persists in describing as "of colour" or "of origin" back to ever more distant origins. Jason Arday died of the weakening of our society and of our institutions, ever less capable of censuring deviant behaviour and ever more inclined to reward it rather than to punish it. Contrary to what is often claimed, the individual who takes up imposture is more often acted upon than acting: acted upon by the institution that feeds on him.

It would be easy to reduce him to a clown, when he was above all an object of which the media, the ideologues and, by capillarity, the academic institutions were fond. That cannot make him the mascot of any struggle whatsoever, nor justify the scandalous relativist discourses which, far from protecting him, led him to his ruin and condemned him. Jason Arday himself seems to have understood as much, through his act, after having clung to the very end to a victimary pathology (one that had led him, three years before his fall, to file a harassment complaint against a legitimate whistleblower), a counter-heroic pathology that had accompanied him since his birth into the institutional world and the public sphere. An act which, by its definitive character, acknowledged the aporia he had himself generated, unlike those who, by every means, by raising him urbi et orbi to the status of victim, seek to prolong his flight forward indefinitely: our responsibility remains whole, and our death is at once the result of our failing and the consecration, through rehabilitation, of the norm we were unable to respect.

The hostage-taking committed around his act must therefore be put back in context, in the light of who he was, and first of all of his deliberate choice to become a symbol, occupying in the public sphere a condition turned function, to which he had irremediably bound his destiny. The singularly privileged function he occupied was a concession to the very ideologies he professed, which deprived it of any serious oversight and favoured a lightning ascent at the expense of all seriousness, an ascent which he moreover chose to turn into spectacle in order to monetise it, rather than to use as a vehicle for collective advancement and for the deepening of his thought. His works, unremarkable, consisted of assorted interviews meant to echo the consequences of "race" on individual trajectories. Lacking rigour, of little interest, and promoting the racialist political conclusions typical of the Anglo-Saxon world (affirmative action, selection on the basis of skin colour or origin…), they turned out to be riddled with weaknesses and, in certain instances, with plagiarism: so many displays of his difficulty in bringing himself into line with the very regulatory bodies to which, at the same time, he aspired. From his thesis to his few published articles, a substantial number of problems were found, leading to the opening of disciplinary proceedings against him.

Through this destiny, what was at stake was the reassertion and the universality of certain norms, relating in particular to academic fraud and academic standards, and the necessity of sanctioning their violation whatever the identity, and the condition, of the one who violated them.

His construction was, however, above all a media construction, and the product of a mutual instrumentalisation between himself and the institutions that hosted him, the last of which, Cambridge, is wrestling with its colonial liabilities, he himself having become repentance fodder. Presented as the youngest professor "of colour" (sic) at Cambridge, this man fed what he promoted: a racial differentialism that spared him from having to prove himself within the system which, while claiming to fight it, he sought by every means to join. It is hard to understand, and surprising, that anyone should be astonished that, once this card had been played, it should have been turned against him at the first difficulty. Yet here lies one of the principal blind spots of contemporary progressive "thought": in such systems there can only be victories, never responsibility. And that is exactly what those who today are indignant at the consequences of what they have bred cling to, against all evidence. The growing weakness of these ideological forces, to the point of their entry into crisis, stems from this cowardice, which leaves them incapable of producing sacred figures, symbolically potent, for want of offering them heroic paths and of allowing themselves to control them. Too attached to their comforts, the leading figures of these movements cannot conceive of sacrifice, not even in the form of the good death, and grow indignant at what ought to regenerate them.

The fall and the suicide of Jason Arday, as the many compromises, manipulations and complacencies that had led to the coronation of this "man without qualities" were being exposed, provoked an ill-digested emotion. Some wished to make an icon of him.

I stated very clearly and bluntly that it was, on the contrary, a good thing, in the tragic and moral sense of the term. For several decades now our society has wallowed in an unacceptable complacency towards lies and mediocrity. In the name of sacrosanct victimhood, whether structural or incidental, authorities rise up to heap scorn upon anyone who would attach a stigma to the fraud or the liar, thereby preventing any reconciliation of society.

For these people, any representative who accepts a form of symbolic instrumentalisation (one that casts him as a victim and, in so doing, guarantees that he will "keep" to his minority place) must be guaranteed in return an elevation to the pinnacle, whatever violations of the moral law he may have committed along the way. This singularly conservative mode of thought, and therein lies the paradox, demands the relativisation of every fault, and can exist only at the expense of the categorical imperatives, universal by essence, that are supposed to structure our society. It is obviously profoundly destructive for society, but also for the individuals who lend themselves to it, who become the tokens and foils of an established order that remains profoundly unjust and unequal. Through symbolic inversion, it breaks the function of moral edification which alone allows us to keep some form of inner cohesion and to avoid the plunge into anomie, that is, precisely, the loss of every bearing, which lies at the origin of social suicides.

It is obviously not possible to attribute to Jason Arday an amorality as grave and serious as the one I describe. Without ruling it out, it is not necessary to our reasoning.

It is, however, possible to see in the current dynamic a genuine perversion of society, one that presents a terminal danger to it. Grace cannot be kept without keeping judgement. No ontology can hold in anomie.

I draw a fully assumed link between this structural collapse and the epidemic of depression which, for some years now, has contaminated the Western world. In a world where no form of legitimate social regulation is any longer accepted, where everything is victim-feeling because the victim has become the figure of the hero, sacralised and impossible to contest, it is only normal that society should no longer hold. Where one had to build, hold and endure, we are urged to complain, to pity ourselves and to seek comfort. Where exigency and rigour reigned, suffering, pain and powerlessness are now consecrated.

Contrary to what is believed, this is in no way a dynamic that protects innocence, or genuine victims. On the contrary, this state of affairs leads to an inflation of claims to the status of victim, blurring lines and frameworks and destabilising whole swathes of our society. Such is notably the case of our judicial institution, overwhelmed by the MeToo movement (a 136% rise in criminal proceedings opened in eight years), a movement whose benefits were captured by those who already had a voice, while judicialisation fell upon the working classes, all the while distancing our system from the canonical regime of evidence and positive law, in the name of a reactionary consensualism imported from the United States, and turning the judicial institution into a sclerotic machine for arbitrariness, incapable of dealing with real violence, of protecting the innocent and the genuine victims, as the Lyhanna affair has recently shown once again. I have seen this machine from close up.*

A movement that the institutional left embraced without discussion, whereas militant feminism had warned, as early as the 1970s, of the singularly instrumental and dangerous character of these carceral dynamics, which turn the institutions that are by nature the most reactionary (the police and the courts) into fantasised allies.

In other times and other lands, the management of shame and stigma made suicide a natural and noble solution. Structurally, every civilisation has associated the status of victim with a form of shame, not for the purpose of stigmatisation but of regulation, in order to avert the collapse of society and the sclerosis that a race for privileges would otherwise induce, the right to reparation generating its natural deviances and opportunistic behaviours, to the point where, absent any control, lying, instrumentalisation and betrayal become generalised. Until compassion and otherness are exhausted, and hatred and violence return: which is exactly what our societies are now facing.

Contrary to what many have thought, it was neither the gravity of the man's wrongs nor society's reaction that produced the violence of his act, but the fact that those wrongs had become him, rendering his destiny aporetic within the society in which he had built himself.

Did Jason Arday kill himself out of altruism and dignity, or out of egoism and anomie? It would be crediting him with a great deal to embrace the first thesis, which would have made of his suicide a kind of Western inseki-jisatsu, combining confession, an attempt to restore the symbolic value of the norm he had transgressed, and a way of protecting the cause that had been tarnished. The Roman suicide, aimed at restoring the dignitas of the one who had failed and at submitting him to the transgressed norm, would carry a form of laudable courage, and would justify calling his death good, in the moral and individual sense of the term. It is, however, far more probable that he died of having for too long behaved as a free rider of the system that was his own, incapable of respecting its rules because incapable, full stop, and yet promoted, in spite of it, on the sole strength of his identity.

Which is exactly what he had aspired to; and the consequences nail shut the coffin that his theories and beliefs, those of the post-Marxist, globalised social-democratic left, steeped in an individualist and consensualist Anglo-Saxon culture, had begotten.

His death then appears to us as a warning to all who would take these dark paths, and impose them on us collectively: to take paths without value condemns one to misery, exposes one to the enemy, individually as much as collectively, and leads to death.

The death of the individual who has failed, following a social reaction all the more massive for finding itself helpless before the absence of any applicable sanction, appears as a guardrail and a bulwark, appeasing the angry crowds, weary of seeing transgressions rewarded.

It is, for the man suicided by society, a way of admitting the superiority of the norm over the transgression, of refusing to contest either the fault or the value of that norm; an admission and a confession of failure which allows everyone to find their place again.

Jason Arday had neither the intellectual nor the social means to take a path of repair. The slope, too steep, came above all to shatter, too antinomically, against the very foundation on which he had built himself as an individual. To escape himself, once exposed in his imposture, had become impossible. To go on would have imposed on society and on himself alike a cost, and a violence, too great to bear. He had to die; that is naturally the conclusion he reached. To claim, in his name, that it would have been too great a violence, and a fortiori an unjust one, for society to have condemned him, is not only presumptuous and infantilising: it is to reproduce the very mechanism that led him to the situation in which he found himself.

For it must be recalled: the allegations that were raised were substantially accurate and well founded, whatever the instrumental intentions of those who made them, and whatever reservations might be attached to them.** And therefore the victimary discourse became indefensible, unless, in passing, one consecrated the very transgressions of which he stood accused. That racialist ideological entrepreneurs seized upon it does not call the nodal point into question; on the contrary, it shows the fragility and precariousness to which such constructions condemn whoever takes them up: through this destiny, what was at stake was the reassertion and the universality of certain norms, relating in particular to academic fraud and academic standards, and the necessity of sanctioning their violation whatever the identity, and the condition, of the one who violated them. The failure of the institution opened naturally onto the death of the transgressor, consecrated and heroised, then sacrificed, for want of any mediating body capable of simply sanctioning him. To hand the enemy the chance to seize upon it was a fault no longer moral but political, and one that defensive victimisation cannot repair. It is precisely in this that the death is tragic: it was ineluctable. It is not, for all that, a bad one; and it had become the only possible resolution in the configuration thus generated.

That so simple and wholesome a statement should be met with scandal says a great deal about the state of drift of ideological forces which have lost every framework, and have shown themselves ready for every complacency in order to capture their public and survive electorally. Automatic solidarity with a human being on the sole ground of his postulated condition, in this instance the colour of his skin, is a political and intellectual indigence as great as it is symptomatic of a clan logic that increasingly gangrenes our society. It emancipates no one and protects no one, and will only intensify the dynamics we have just witnessed.

The forces that lend themselves to it*** will naturally perish, in the dishonour and anomie they will themselves have generated.

* I have always stood against these tendencies, and I have paid dearly for it. Committed, to the point of imprisonment, alongside genuine resisters, whether the Senegalese people, the most radical and consistent pan-Africanist thinkers, or the many militants ready for every sacrifice for their cause, I have also, as a lawyer, taken the side of those who suffered these violations of the moral law, through an instrumentalisation of the institutions in the name of "causes" that were in reality travestied and perverted to serve private interests. Thus the Mila affair: the ephemeral poster girl of the right-thinking left on the sole ground that she said she was a lesbian and a victim of harassment, who destroyed the lives of a dozen people thanks to the protection the judicial institution afforded her, before she was found to be a poster girl for Zemmour and convicted of racial insult, making cuckolds of all those who had renounced their moral imperatives, beginning with the most fundamental principles of the rule of law, in order to defend her. Thus, before that, the Marvel Fitness affair, in which a black man was crucified, sent to prison!, on the basis of false accusations brought by ideal victims (young, white women), with the blessing and intense support of that same "left" which suddenly held itself aloof from the courage it never ceases, in every circumstance, to profess: that left which, so fond of making skin colour a criterion, forgot it the moment the accused was black and the complainants matched its imaginary (the complainant Aline Dessine was eventually convicted in Belgium, amid general indifference, and her lawyer Laure-Alice Bouvier sentenced to eighteen months' suspended imprisonment). Thus, obviously, the Assange and WikiLeaks affair (wrongly accused of rape and ostracised for ten years), and then, much later, and as the natural fruit of these battles, my own, which led to my conviction for having told the truth bluntly and refuted a calumnious accusation, shaming those who had made sexual violence an instrument of personal and political vengeance, to the detriment of society. Each time, the institutional and metropolitan left, including in its most militant quarters, kept its distance, incapable of owning its contradictions, and the necessity of censuring the deviances that its own victories and the systems of power it had bred ended up generating.

** Caught up in a frenzy of overperformance, probably bound up with his legitimate sense of illegitimacy and with a sense of impunity, Jason Arday did not stop at accusatory inversions, multiplying unsubstantiated, and in many cases mendacious, allegations of persecutions to which he had supposedly been subjected, going so far as to invoke his autism to justify his plagiarism. He claimed, notably, to have raised five million pounds for charity, when he had collected only a few thousand. His declarations, moreover, followed a telling progression, as his lies and transgressions went unpunished, making the fall all the more inevitable: "more than £100,000" (2010), "£4.5 million for more than 80 charities" (2021), "just over £5 million", then "£5.5 million" (2024). In the autumn of 2025 the Advertising Standards Authority called for the withdrawal of unsupported figures; in 2025 Simon & Schuster quietly rewrote his biographical note ("part of several fundraising teams") and removed the sums from the British edition of his memoir, which he had not written himself, and which was published the week of his death. His visiting professorships (Ohio State, Durham, Glasgow…) were denied by several institutions; his childhood mutism and illiteracy have been disputed; his thesis contained more than a hundred plagiarised passages; and above all, despite his lightning ascent, he never produced any substantial work commensurate with the expectations of the institutions into which he had managed to get himself co-opted.

*** Prisoners of electoral regimes incompatible with any regime of shame, driven to valorise at any price the communities they seek to capture, the progressive forces, having failed to carry out their spiritual revolution, seem caught in the terminal regime of their secularisation. Having contented themselves with rendering unto man what was God's, and with leaving to the private sphere what belonged to the common, they have imprisoned themselves in a regime of forgiveness and redemption without judgement, ad nauseam, and of subsidy ad libitum, as the sole vectors of evangelisation.

French original: Pourquoi la gauche a-t-elle perdu le sens de l’honneur ?