The Simplifying False Nuance

The most critical minds are not immune to denial. Why do some intellectuals exercise complex thinking on certain subjects while falling into simplification elsewhere?

The Roots of the Intellectual Paradox

How can we explain that enlightened minds, academics, and scientists can exercise complex thinking in some areas while fabricating complete denials of reality in others? Sociologists who know that everything is culturally constructed may fail to see that their own worldview, which they take as objective, is also a cultural construct.

This lack of ethnological self-reflection has, in my view, two main explanations. First, the position of social dominance that intellectual elites seek to preserve. Intellectual professions have become impoverished compared to what they were fifty or a hundred years ago. Since recognition through money has faded, the space for recognition becomes exclusively symbolic. One must absolutely be right, cling to this certainty, because it is what confers value in the symbolic hierarchy. The symbol of power is no longer the amount of money, but influence and intellectual legitimation.

The second point concerns the very nature of thinking among most intellectuals who actually reflect—I’m not speaking of those who identify solely with their erudition. These intellectuals are very often people with high intellectual potential, meaning they have arborescent thinking, an intrinsic ability to connect things that seemingly have no relationship to one another. This is precisely why they can invent new concepts, discover new things: they have openings due to their arborescent thinking that people with linear, structured thinking do not have. This natural curiosity fuels their desire to conduct research, write books, organize conferences, etc.

The Fragility of Arborescent Thinking

These people think in all directions. The paradox is that thinking in all directions constitutes both a great richness and a great fragility. It means being able to question everything all the time. It means not being able to settle on something, making digressions, doing several things at once. In short, it is potentially destabilizing, dangerous.

People with arborescent thinking unconsciously know they need to find supports to hold themselves together, to be able to function within social norms. To do this, and I can testify to this having analyzed it in myself, they will exercise their thinking fully in many areas of their life, and there will be other areas where their thinking will not exercise itself at all. There are areas completely blind to their thinking, which are necessary for their social survival.

For example, very intelligent people may absolutely refuse to undertake therapy, even when those around them indicate it could help them. They themselves are often very knowledgeable about all psychoanalytic and neuroscientific science. But they will not risk therapy themselves, even though they could explain to others how beneficial it could be for them. Why? It may seem completely absurd, but on one hand they need to feel strong, above others—this is the first trait I mentioned—and on the other hand, due to their unstructured thinking, they need to have supports.

Pillars of Denial as a Survival Mechanism

They will make themselves believe, in certain areas, that they are outside the reality of others. That they are not concerned. That they are so intelligent they are above questioning certain things, generally the things that most call them into question. For example, romantic relationships. Their partner may tell them it would be interesting to question the relationship, to go to couples therapy. And these people, yet intelligent, yet aware of life’s complexity, may completely refuse, because they have placed a support, that is to say a denial, in that spot. These places of denial are what give them “stable foundations” to be able to question everything elsewhere.

These cognitive blocks are the supports that reassure, that anchor. They are pillars of denial that allow brilliant minds to hold together and not explode the entire psychic structure of the person. As Anna Freud showed in The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936), defense mechanisms are not dysfunctions but strategies for psychic survival.

Those who have too great a narcissistic fragility, because they were abused in childhood, for example, will absolutely preserve these pillars of denial throughout their lives. But those who are less fragile at the narcissistic level, who have less need to prove their worth to themselves in order to feel the right to exist, will be able to gradually soften these pillars over the years. Perhaps because they had fewer traumas in childhood, perhaps because they were able to have spaces for self-questioning, or met people who confronted them with kindness.

They will realize that their supports were not at all in these pillars and that they can perfectly well live in the world in a much more flexible and mentally mobile way. They can gradually, through their self-questioning, through their therapeutic work, become more a part of the world, feel less imprisoned by their superiority complex, less on their “platform” above these pillars, but more in harmony with the world.

The Gérald Bronner Case: Brilliance and Blindness

When we read texts by certain intellectuals, brilliant in many respects, where there are other places in total contradiction, stupidity contrasting with the intelligence expressed elsewhere, we may tend to believe them and not see that these are pillars of denial intended to hold their narcissism together—that is, their existence.

Let us take the example of Gérald Bronner in an interview published in Le Point special issue of November 2025. He says many very interesting things about post-reality, about no longer wanting to make contact with the real. But further on he states that during the Covid crisis, some people thought Covid-19 did not exist: « If they had been in the majority, we would never have been able to lock down, there would have been millions more deaths. This is also true for vaccination. »

What is interesting here is that he reduces the controversy of the Covid-19 period to those who thought the virus did not exist and those who thought it did, which constitutes a first denial of reality, an extreme simplification. What the scientific disagreements rested on during this period was not the existence or non-existence of the virus—there was consensus on that, no scientist ever said this virus did not exist. The disagreements were about the methods for treating this epidemic so that it would not generate a slaughter of deaths.

Hypothesis as Reality: A Grammatical Denial

When he says “we would never have been able to lock down” and “there would have been millions more deaths if we had not locked down,” he bases his reasoning on a supposition. In the very form of the sentence, it is not a reality. He opposes reality, he speaks of what he sees as reality, but his sentence, by its very grammatical form, is not a statement of reality: it is a hypothesis, a conditional, not the present tense, not an affirmation, but a supposition.

He therefore passes off a supposition as reality. It is a hypothesis that if we had not locked down, there would have been millions of deaths. If we take Sweden, which did not lock down, there were not more Covid deaths than in France. There are indeed many other countries that did not lock down populations, such as Taiwan for example, where there were a total of 8 Covid deaths during the entire period.

At the time of the first lockdown, WHO recommendations were absolutely not to lock down, but to mass test populations, to isolate only sick people and treat them. “Test, isolate, treat,” and absolutely not lock down. A posteriori statistics have shown, very paradoxically, that lockdown periods and vaccination campaigns were systematically followed by surges in Covid viral infections.

The Paradox of Health Measures

The great paradox, therefore, is that lockdowns were in reality accelerators of transmission, because people already infected transmitted the virus at home, instead of being isolated. France chose not to test and to wait 9 months before beginning testing, when tests could have been possible almost immediately.

Vaccination never protected against transmission of the virus; this was absolutely not among the properties of Covid-19 vaccines and was never their effect. On the contrary, vaccination campaigns diminished precautions: people believed their vaccination protected others, which was a conscious lie by authorities and laboratories. Vaccinated people could perfectly well be carriers of the virus and transmit it. The only benefit of vaccination concerned very elderly people or those with comorbidities, to prevent severe forms of Covid.

This is very interesting because with Gérald Bronner, we have someone who has complex and interesting thinking on many aspects, but who, on a subject where he is in full conflict of interest, simplifies radically, and lies, perhaps without realizing it. This is denial. Bronner was appointed by Emmanuel Macron as head of anti-disinformation during the Covid period. He was therefore paid to discredit all hypotheses opposed to the State hypothesis on Covid, and this was for him a very high social distinction: how could he think against what gave him legitimacy?

When the Defender of Rationality Denies Complexity

Later in this same interview, he also says that we must “promote critical thinking, rational thought”. I quite agree with him! But his own thinking on Covid is in no way rational and in no way critical, because he does not take into account all the elements. He looks at the situation with a total and deliberate denial of a major part of reality, and with a belief in a single point of view. Precisely, he himself is in a post-reality, that is to say the construction of a false reality that one tries to force oneself to believe is true, even though, if one goes looking for data, one can find proof of the contrary.

But this data is discredited—this was the whole concept of the label “conspiracy theory” during this period. All those who criticized were immediately discredited so that the constructed fictional reality, the post-reality, would not be questioned. This is very surprising from someone who precisely works on these subjects. But I have explained the reasons previously.

It is important for us, as readers of intellectuals, to know that the same person can have absolutely fascinating and enriching thinking on certain aspects, and that it is quite worthwhile to read this person, but that on other aspects, this same person can have completely simplistic and absurd thinking, completely imaginary, while believing they are still being nuanced and reasonable. This does not discredit the relevance of other areas of their thinking.

The Selective Administration of Proof

To finish on Gérald Bronner, at the end of the interview, he says we must “explain what critical thinking, rationality, the administration of proof in science represents for us”. But precisely, on Covid, he advanced hypotheses that are only hypotheses and that are absolutely not proven, that are matters of scientific controversy.

What are the supports for proof? What are the perspectives on reality that we bring, and the way we bring them, to justify that something constitutes proof? This remains subjective, and false causalities can be postulated. Beware of the simplifying false nuance. We see this often even in scientific publications, and this is why there must be several scientific publications reaching the same result for something to be considered “proven.”

He finally says: “The perception of the multifactorial nature of many phenomena, for example, protects against ideologies which, to prosper, need to reduce these same phenomena to a single parameter.” This is absolutely fascinating, because I completely agree with what he says there, but it comes in absolute opposition to what he himself conveys on the subject of Covid-19.

Beyond Immobility: The Possibility of Change

Once again, it is not for me to discredit his entire thinking, but to say that in certain places, his thinking is a simplifying false nuance, and in other places it is a true complex nuance that takes into account the complexity of the real. This paradox is worth questioning. I would advise Gérald Bronner to undergo psychoanalysis to do less harm, because he leads many people to mistake bladders for lanterns in certain places, while in other places, he encourages them to think for themselves.

Humans have the capacity to move forward, to question themselves, and perhaps to grow themselves in their level of consciousness and presence in the world. For me, paradoxes deserve to be illuminated, discussed, opened up, because it is about deconstructing in the other the belief that they would need these props of denial in order to exist.

If humans soften these supports of denial, they can gradually enter a more flexible, more horizontal, and more multifactorial life, precisely. They will have let go of the need to reassure themselves, they will have let go of their fears. They will be anchored, not thanks to supports of denial, but anchored in themselves, in trust, in their own presence. One must apply wisdom to one’s own blind spots. True nuance is not that which proclaims itself such, but that which is exercised with the same rigor on all subjects, including those where our personal interests or social position are at stake.