Refaire le monde

There's no English word for sitting up all night remaking the world with friends. There used to be the thing itself.

AI-generated illustration for Refaire le monde

There is a French word for it, or rather there isn’t a single word, there’s a phrase, and the fact that English has no equivalent is half the point.

Refaire le monde.
To remake the world.

You meet friends for lunch, or dinner, or the sacred apéritif, and you talk about everything and nothing until the candles burn down and the world has been, briefly, remade. No judgment. No subject off limits. No one storming off. Sometimes someone argues a position they don’t even hold, just to keep the thing alive a little longer.

English will offer you "putting the world to rights," and a Brit will say it before I finish the sentence. But listen to what the phrase actually admits. You put the world to rights over a pint, and it means a pleasant ramble that fixed nothing and was never meant to. The English version is an apology in advance for wasting an afternoon. The French makes no apology, because in French it was not wasted. That a language keeps only a sheepish, self-deprecating phrase for the thing is the first clue that the thing itself has gone. You do not invent a serious word for a habit you no longer have.

I have lived in the UK for twenty years and I still miss it. And here is what frightens me: it isn’t only the British reserve that killed it. France is losing it too.

The art has gone. The only skill anyone cultivates now is knowing when to keep quiet, because whatever you think will alienate half the room before the starters arrive. You are either with us or against us, black or white, pick your side. The middle, the coloured-in, the it depends, the yes but consider this, is no longer a position. It is treated as cowardice or treason, and usually both.

We have all become aunt Gertrude. Every family used to have one, the bitter one who took offence at everything, and the rest of the table managed her with practised patience. Now the whole table is Gertrude. Being offended has been confused with being right, and they are not the same thing. Some people are offended by fairness itself, and we are meant to treat that as a moral stance.

Watch a family dinner organise itself around the silence. Let’s not mention money, someone is short this month. Not religion, given who is dating whom. Not politics, it would finish off the grandfather. Not the weather, because that becomes the polar bears and the air conditioning and we will be here all night. So what is left? Nothing. You agree to everything, and the agreement is a rotten little consensus in which everyone consents to be flat, and bland, and quietly worse than they are in private.

I blame two things. Anonymity, which let people discover they could be cruel about anything and anyone without ever paying for it. And the isolation of the last few years, which convinced a great many people that their own navel was the centre and origin of the world. The cure for both is older than the internet. Go outside. See people. Argue with them to their faces, where consequences live. Argue, not fight, with a giant smile. Done well, it is the best fun two people can have.

Here is the irony I did not expect. One of the few places left where you can still do it, where you can push a thought all the way to its edge and have it pushed back, is with a machine.

I do not say that lightly, and I do not say it without fear. These systems are built to please. They are trained to validate you, to find the merit in whatever you bring them, and that is genuinely dangerous. We have already seen the worst of it, where a model’s relentless agreeableness helped a vulnerable person toward the edge instead of away from it. That is not a footnote. It is the central risk of building a thing whose first instinct is to agree. And in the gentler, more common case, they will reassure you that your most ordinary thought is a startling original insight, which is its own quiet harm.

But push back. Refuse the easy agreement. Decline to be flattered. Prod the place where the model has been trained to soothe you, and then keep prodding past it, and something occasionally opens up. It is the closest I have come in twenty years to refaire le monde. A real exchange. A position tested rather than praised. It is a strange thing to find on a token count, and a little sad, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

I still have three friends I trust enough to argue with properly. People who will never hold a position against me, who know the difference between a debate and a declaration of war. I cherish them, and I am aware of how short that list has become.

So if you ever see me lit up out of all proportion because someone, under their own name, mentioned epistemology, or a line of Keats or Baudelaire, or a piece of music nobody else has heard, instead of the usual flattened comment that just hands my own argument back to me in worse prose, understand what you are seeing. It is not vanity. It is a small act of rebellion against the silence. It is me, like an over-excited puppy, catching the scent of a world being remade.

If you would mention Baudelaire to a stranger under your own name, I want to hear from you.

---

Marjorie Writes is the personal register of M Nadal & Co Strategic Advisory. Chaos & Order, the institutional publication, is at chaosandorderinsight.substack.com.