La Fontaine’s grasshopper is dead, long live the parasite.
The ants have held the world together for centuries. They drained the swamps, lifted the stones, drew the plans, opened the roads, healed the bodies, passed on knowledge, protected the weak. They built, patiently and without rest, what others too quickly believed to be guaranteed: infrastructures, institutions, a culture of effort and responsibility. They shaped modernity without ever seeking light, too absorbed in holding up what the pride of men constantly threatened to let fall.
Today, they are still here. Invisible, discreet, exhausted, and above all, disillusioned. They walk the hospital corridors during the grey hours, maintain production lines, fill classrooms, balance the accounts, occupy the silences. They design from the shadows, they correct, they prevent, they anticipate, never raising their voice. Engineers, doctors, teachers, farmers, researchers, craftsmen, developers, accountants, logisticians, all those who build without making noise, and without illusions. They hold society together like others hold a rope over the void, without applause, without safety, and above all, without backup.
But while the ants held the world at arm’s length, another species, once negligible, transformed into an arrogant parasite. La Fontaine’s grasshopper was but a carefree child; her modern descendant has become a calculating strategist, a specialist in performative victimhood, always demanding more, without memory, without duty, without limit. She does not ask to contribute, she demands a red carpet. She does not seek justice, but the exception. She does not reclaim a place in humanity, she fabricates minorities as others raise fortresses: to retreat into, to rule from, to become untouchable.
Every pain becomes an identifier, every deviation an identity. The finer the crack, the more exploitable it becomes. What once united, our shared condition, the effort of the many, the tangible real, is systematically dissolved in a kaleidoscope of curated susceptibilities. She segments, she divides, she fragments everything she touches. She atomizes the universal in order to reign over its debris.
And always, she demands. Louder. Higher. Whatever the cost. The cost, in any case, will be borne by others. By those who build, who repair, who transmit. She takes offense at the speed of networks. She feeds on screens, on echoes, on dopamine. She dulls herself in a tide of absurd content, jabbing each day at the most useless novelty, like a digital addict who no longer knows what she’s looking for, but can no longer bear to stop.
She no longer knows what it means to be. She only wants to appear.
And in the face of this, the State, once a principle of order and justice, has itself turned into an institutional grasshopper. It no longer governs, no longer manages, no longer leads, no longer thinks. It merely compensates. What once stood as a collective architecture has become a reactive organism, obsessed with immediate stability, blind to the real.
It no longer consults facts, it scans trends. It no longer decides by law, but by noise. Its only compass is the chatter of social networks, that new kind of sewer where everything floats at the same level: foolishness, pain, manufactured rage, meticulous analysis. It no longer distinguishes nuance from hysteria, nor knowledge from slogans, for all is flattened, spilled, and forgotten.
In that digital cesspool, the State no longer keeps its word, it changes hashtags. It no longer governs a nation, it moderates a platform. It no longer builds, it surfs. Each day, it improvises a check, a grant, an announcement, whatever it takes, as long as the algorithm calms down. It no longer protects foundations, it merely mops up the overflow.
And while it performs, while it puts on a show, the State lets die what it claims to defend. Services collapse. Schools unlearn. Hospitals are drained. Young talent escapes. It delays. It communicates. But beneath the varnish, everything is cracking. And those who still produce, those who still endure, know, without always admitting it, that one cannot govern forever against the ants.
So the ants withdraw. Not in anger. Not in vengeance. But out of lucidity. They do not protest, they do not cry out. They shut down, sell off, stop hiring. They reduce their sails, they drift away. Some stay, but detach quietly. They slow down, isolate themselves, transmit less and less. They no longer teach the value of effort, because they know it is no longer acknowledged, nor rewarded, sometimes even viewed with suspicion.
Some exile themselves. Others burn out. And the younger ones no longer dream of being useful, but of being seen. They do not want to build, but to capture attention.
And no one is moved. Silence makes no headlines. Departure does not spark outrage. Withdrawal is not spectacular. As long as screens light up, as long as the flows circulate, as long as the levies fall, everything seems under control. But those who observe can already see the voids: the empty competitions, the abandoned professions, the fled vocations. Teachers resign, doctors leave, craftsmen close their shops. Society does not burn. It collapses silently.
And those who remain know, without saying it, that this retreat is a verdict.
The system will not collapse tomorrow, it is already collapsing, slowly, not in a blaze but in scattered fractures, not with the noise of a fall but through the quiet erosion of what once made it stand: meaning, energy, substance. The cracks deepen in the foundations while façades still hold, still shine, still speak the language of continuity, though everything beneath has begun to recede. The speeches mask the absences, the statistics hide the resignations, and the great machinery of appearances continues to turn, as if the silence were just a pause, not a verdict.
Yet the grasshopper sees nothing. She inhabits a world of augmented reality, a theater of notifications, indignations curated like a feed, and orchestrated fragments of self where even pain is staged and identity performed. She listens only to what screams loud enough, gazes only at what flashes, feels only what touches her directly, and dismisses the rest as irrelevant noise. She believes she is owed everything, that light emerges without being maintained, that water flows without purification, that food appears without cultivation, that knowledge arises without being passed down. She moves through a world built by ants as if it were an app, a feature, a natural state of things, unchallenged, unquestioned, undeserved.
She believes reality should bend to her experience, that truth is an opinion, that comfort is a right, that complexity is a form of oppression. She is irritated by what resists, offended by what requires effort, and she mistakes freedom for whim, equality for sameness, justice for instant reward. The very idea of effort has become alien to her, even suspect, a remnant of another time, another species.
She no longer sees that the ground is crumbling beneath her feet, because her gaze is fixed on the screen; she no longer senses that her inner world is emptying, because everything around her teaches her not to think. Thinking is too slow, too uncertain, too solitary. It requires silence. It requires friction. So she scrolls, she shares, she ingests noise, until the boundaries between self and spectacle dissolve, and the only trace of thought is the echo of others’ thoughts, repackaged, retweeted, devoid of depth or doubt.
And the more she sinks into this flow of artificial urgency and hollow agitation, the more she crushes beneath her unseeing feet the very ruins of a world that once held, maintained, supported her without asking anything in return.
She lives now among simulacra, in the tyranny of immediacy, surrounded by false information and true addictions. She believes herself free because she is connected, informed because she is overwhelmed, strong because she is loud. But she is on a leash. She is alone. She is blind. And during that time, everything declines: standards, language, culture, the capacity for nuance, the presence of conscience. Everything declines, except the confidence with which she speaks.
And then will come the moment, not announced, not predicted, when something, somewhere, will simply stop functioning: a service, then another, a breakdown, a delay, a promise never kept, a line without end, a silence without answer. And no one will be there to fix, no one to resume, no one to replace what has been lost. The grasshoppers will look around, lost, and they will ask, with surprise and confusion: “Where have the ants gone?”
But they will have waited too long to listen. They will have disdained effort too often to recognize its absence. They will have worshipped ease so blindly that the reappearance of reality will seem like an injustice. They will not see that, through indifference and contempt, they have worn out and cast aside those who once bore the weight of the world.
And when they finally understand that the ants are no longer there, it will already be too late. They will demand, again, as they always have. But nothing will answer. No one will be left to power the machine. No one to extinguish the fire, reopen the school, repair the hospital, keep the light alive. The system will not fall. It will go dark.
The ants are not on strike. They are not angry. They are gone. And they will not return.
If Jean de La Fontaine were to return among us, he would no doubt recognize his grasshopper, but he would struggle to find his ant. The world has changed, and so have the seasons. Winter is no longer merely meteorological, it is moral, social, civilizational. Today’s grasshoppers no longer sing, they demand. The ants no longer preach, they disappear. In an age of networks and memoryless injunctions, perhaps the old fabulist, weary of pastoral rhymes, would have written something like this…
The grasshopper and the ant, final season
All year long, the ant in silent strain Bore her load through heat and rain. She healed, she built, she passed things on, While the State just slept and rambled on.
She sang no songs, no joy she sought, She planned, repaired, she worked, she thought. But skill, in time, lost all its weight Without a network, who relates?
The grasshopper, lit by screenlight’s glow, Filmed her moods in a curated show. She danced, denounced, performed her role, But never learned, nor shaped a goal.
Real life bored her, she craved a thrill, Lived on buzz, on likes, on dopamine’s will. The world, she claimed, owed her its grace, She wanted it now, right to her face.
She cried “Justice!” but fled the test, Called herself free while dodging the rest. The word “effort” brought her despair Hardship, to her, was never fair.
The State, now grasshopper in disguise, Handed out gold, and dreams, and lies. It patched the present, blamed the past, And dug more debt with every cast.
One evening, sensing winter’s breath, The ant withdrew, in silence left. She closed her books, her shop, her door, And let the chaos shout some more.
She didn’t protest, nor loudly quit, She simply vanished, bit by bit. And when the void began to spread, The grasshopper cried, but none answered.
Hospitals closed, the schools went dim, The lights went low, the networks thinned. The grasshopper screamed, reposted, cried But the real world slipped outside.
“Where are the ants?” she wailed in fright. No voice replied. No spark. No light. Only a whisper in the air: “They left. You chased them. They’re not there.”