or why the left and the right are two symmetrical lies

I will put things simply, even if it is unpleasant: the modern world believes itself stuck between two political, moral, and economic options, and it has not seen that both options are false. Not imperfect, not insufficient, but false down to their very presuppositions. The left and the right are not two divergent paths toward the common good; they are two dead ends built on the same fundamental error, two different ways of refusing to look at the reality of man.

What is proposed today as a "choice" is not one. It is a rigged alternative, a cheap dialectic, a shadow theater where people pretend to oppose each other to avoid asking the only question that matters: what is man, and to what is he ordered?

I. The left: conflict as ontology, the victim as idol

The modern left claims to start from reality. It says it looks at suffering, injustice, domination. But it never sees persons; it only sees structures. It speaks of man as a social product, an intersection point between power relations, a knot of economic, cultural, or identity determinisms. The concrete man disappears behind a compassionate abstraction.

This is no accident. Marxism and its heirs rest on a profoundly flawed metaphysics: reality would be fundamentally conflictual, structured by contradiction, driven by an internal struggle without transcendent finality. They kept the Hegelian dialectic but removed the Spirit; what remains is only an engine running idle, a history without telos, where evil is never attributable to someone, but always to something.

In this framework, personal responsibility becomes almost indecent. Speaking of fault, sin, conversion is perceived as symbolic violence. Man is no longer asked to straighten up, but to explain himself. And by constantly explaining evil, one ends up making it structural, therefore eternal. The modern left does not liberate man: it excuses him until he is annulled.

II. The right: the king-individual and the commodification of reality

The modern right considers itself realistic. It speaks of responsibility, order, freedom. But this freedom is an empty shell: it is ordered to nothing. It is not the capacity to choose the good, but the right to choose, period. And since no objective good structures this choice, desire or the market takes over.

Liberal capitalism rests on another metaphysical fiction: the individual would be sovereign, self-founding, capable of producing his own values, ends, and meaning. The good becomes subjective, negotiable, revisable. Progress is supposed to emerge mechanically from the aggregation of private interests. It is an implicit theology, with its dogmas and its promises of salvation through growth.

In reality, the right believes no more than the left in man's finality. It knows that man is weak, but instead of elevating him, it organizes this weakness. It does not combat disordered passions: it transforms them into economic engines. It does not defend civilization; it manages its exhaustion hoping the market will delay the collapse.

III. Two camps, one same denial

What strikes, when you scratch a little, is that the modern left and right share the essential. They hate each other on the surface, but rest on the same fundamental denial: there is no human nature ordered to an objective end. From then on, the common good becomes either an empty slogan or a threat.

The left sacrifices the individual to history. The right sacrifices history to the individual. But both have sacrificed truth.

They administer the same metaphysical void differently, and then wonder why everything is falling apart: family, work, transmission, politics itself. They fight over the management of a world they have already made uninhabitable.

IV. Distributism: the social doctrine of the Church taken seriously

Let us be clear, because the obfuscation is constant: distributism is neither medieval nostalgia nor a third way cobbled together for anti-system aesthetes. It is simply what happens when you take the social doctrine of the Church seriously, instead of quoting it half-heartedly before going back to support systems that contradict it point by point.

From Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII lays the foundations. He simultaneously affirms two things that the modern world refuses to think together: the natural right to private property, and its subordination to the common good. Property is neither a sacred absolute nor an evil to be abolished. It is an extension of the person, a concrete means for man to provide for his own, to take root, to take responsibility. To deny it, as socialism does, is to mutilate man. To sacralize it, as liberalism does, is to make an idol of it.

Quadragesimo Anno goes even further. Pius XI explicitly denounces the concentration of wealth and economic power in a few hands, speaking plainly of an economic dictatorship. He recalls the principle of subsidiarity: what can be done at a lower level must not be confiscated by a higher level. This principle is not an administrative gadget; it is an anthropological requirement. It protects the person against the State, but also against the total market.

Distributism follows directly from this. It affirms that productive property must be widely distributed, because man is only fully responsible for what truly belongs to him. A society of entirely dependent employees, even well-paid ones, is a fragile society, infantilized, structurally vulnerable to economic blackmail. Conversely, a society where families own, where work has a face, where the economy is locally rooted, is a more resilient, more human, more demanding society.

This is precisely why distributism is hated by all modern camps. It presupposes virtues: prudence, temperance, justice, responsibility. It promises neither salvation through revolution nor happiness through growth. It recalls that the economy is not an end, but a means, and that this means must be ordered to the good life.

V. Distributism, socialism, capitalism: three anthropologies

This point must be heavily insisted upon, because the confusion is deliberately maintained: distributism is not a soft compromise between socialism and capitalism. It is not an arithmetic middle ground, a lukewarm average between two extremes. It is another vision of man, and therefore another way of ordering the economy.

Socialism starts from an intuition that is not entirely false—injustice exists, concentration of power is an evil—but pushes it to the negation of the person. By suppressing or neutralizing private ownership of the means of production, it transforms man into a cog. The individual becomes a function of the collective, and personal responsibility dissolves into structure. It is no accident that socialism always produces crushing bureaucracies: it needs a central apparatus to manage what no one truly owns anymore.

Liberal capitalism commits the opposite error. It affirms private property, but detaches it from any moral finality and personal rootedness. Property ceases to be an extension of the person to become a pure abstract asset. In this framework, owning is no longer ordered to supporting a family, a trade, or a community, but to maximizing returns. The result is known: massive concentration of wealth, disguised proletarianization, structural dependence of the majority on a few rootless economic centers.

Distributism refuses both mutilations. It affirms that owning is good, but only if this ownership is widely spread, concrete, incarnate, ordered to the common good. Where socialism removes from man the possibility of owning, and where capitalism removes from ownership any moral limit, distributism reunites property and responsibility.

The difference is simple. Socialism does not trust man: it places him under guardianship. Capitalism does not care about man: it exploits his desires. Distributism makes a wager that the modern world considers insane: it trusts man on the condition that he be formed, virtuous, responsible.

VI. The common good and the dividing line

The common good is neither the sum of private interests nor the crushing of the individual. It is what allows each person to reach their proper end. And this end is not negotiable. It is inscribed in human nature itself. Without this hierarchy of goods, all politics becomes merely a technique for managing chaos.

Speaking of the common good today provokes an almost instinctive rejection, because it presupposes a truth about man, a norm, a measure that does not depend on voting or the market. This humiliates the left, for whom everything is a power relation. This humiliates the right, for whom everything is individual choice. Good.

Christ did not come to bless the precarious balances of the modern world. He came to judge them. He came to separate, to cut, to reveal. Being Catholic today is not about seeking a comfortable place in the existing political landscape. It is about refusing the imposed categories, refusing the false dilemmas, refusing the modern idols.

Biblical conclusion

We must finish without detour, because Scripture never circumvents reality. Christ does not offer a spiritual option compatible with the existing world order. He announces a judgment.

No one can serve two masters. One cannot serve both God and modern idols, whether they are called History, Market, Progress, or abstract Liberty. This is not a cultural conflict, much less a technical disagreement. It is an ontological incompatibility between reality as it is and the fictions that political modernity tells itself to avoid having to convert.

Let us be precise. It is not that Catholicism would be incompatible with political modernity, as if both were on equal footing and one had to choose. It is that Catholicism is so radical, so far ahead on the truth of man, that political modernity appears for what it truly is: an adolescent construction, backward, incapable of thinking man's ultimate end, incapable of thinking the good other than as an unstable compromise.

Political modernity believes it has surpassed religion. In reality, it has never surpassed idolatry. It has simply replaced God with abstractions, and the moral law with procedures. It believes itself adult because it rejected the Father. It has only settled permanently into immaturity.

Catholicism does not negotiate. It affirms that man is a creature, that his freedom is ordered, that his material goods are subordinated to his ultimate end, and that any political organization that refuses these truths is condemned to produce injustice, disorder, or both.

Christ does not ask if this is compatible with the times. He asks if one wants the truth.

The rest, whether it collapses or agitates, is but dust.