It's not his first time in the Grey Zone, and probably won't be its last.
I had a long exchange with Mehdi Nemri, mathematician and futurist, about a question that seems both abstract and urgent: how do elites perceive the future?
It began as an intellectual exercise, but quickly turned into something else. A mirror held up to our time.
We started, naturally, with defining the terms:
An elite, Mehdi said, is a group of individuals capable of influencing the destiny of a majority. By definition, it’s a minority - you can’t have an elite representing more than 50% of a population.
A sociological view, clear and precise. I added:
The elite is defined by its capacity to influence PERCEPTION. Not just influence the destiny of the world itself, but how the world is actually seen by the majority.
That difference - between governing the world and governing its perception - became the thread of our conversation.
1. The making of elites
Every civilization has its rituals of distinction. In France, Mehdi reminded me, the process is almost liturgical: selection, reproduction, and belief.
In France, even television adopts the language of the elite! During presidential elections they call interviews ‘the Grand Oral.’ For them, to become president, you must be ritually consecrated by the media elite.
At Sciences Po (prestigious university), the Grand Oral is the final rite of passage for France's future elites. A candidate draws a question on "general culture," prepares for 30 minutes, then faces a jury for 30 more.
The goal isn't accuracy but rhetorical mastery. You must think fast, sound brilliant, and stay composed. A perfect symbol of the French elite: language as power, performance as proof.
He had interviewed one of the directors of a French foresight institution. When he asked whether "culture générale" could exist outside the "grandes écoles", she replied bluntly:
The most brilliant minds come from there.
In that single answer, the system revealed itself: closed, self-referential, confident in its own hierarchy of intelligence.
The pattern, we agreed, repeats across civilizations - only the form changes.
In China, the elite is technocratic and self-regenerating:
They select from primary school, Mehdi explained. The best go to the U.S., then must return. The system feeds itself - it’s ultra codified, automatic, and robust.
In the West, by contrast, the elite has become predatory - feeding on its own narrative of merit while hollowing out the meaning of it. They go to Cambridge, Yale, MIT, and so on, to be able to participate in a high-end ritual.
Some elites exist only for themselves, Mehdi said. They secure their own future, not that of society.
There's also the aspect where elites perpetuate the myths of modernity and progress to justify their position on the future. Elites embody the dream of success within systems and the ability to influence them. I had studied precisely how, in modern societies, the myth of merit and success allows elites to survive as the driving force of the future. It seems fundamental to me in the relationship between elites and the structuring of the future.
Across cultures, the diagnosis converges: elites reproduce through selection, ritualization, and language - creating the illusion of movement while maintaining stasis.
2. Cycles of power and the illusion of permanence
From there, Mehdi brought the conversation back to one of his intellectual anchors: Ibn Khaldun, the 14th-century historian who first modelled the cycles of power.
He defined power through three poles, Mehdi said. The asabiyya - the clan spirit, the social glue of power. The mulk - material resources. And the dawa - symbolic resources.
He explained how these three poles determine the rise and fall of civilizations.
Empires, he said, collapse when their social cohesion disintegrates, their material base erodes, and their symbols lose meaning.
I told him that these ideas echo the logic of my own Quantum Framework™, where the world is read through seven interacting dimensions: kinetic, systemic, economic, narrative, symbolic, ontological, and noetic.
It’s the same logic, we describe it differently, but the underlying structure hasn’t changed. The cycles of power still turn, there's continuity, only the language evolves.
Mehdi nodded:
He was one of the first realists of elite sociology. He explained why societies collapse and rebirth themselves. Every civilization dies, then rises again.
When elites begin to divide and clash, the system collapses. This is what happened in Syria with the clans surrounding Assad, in the Ottoman Empire, in 19th-century China, and in pre-Napoleonic France.
3. From crisis to polycrisis
This time, Mehdi warned, the relationship to crisis has changed. The new consensus among prospectivists is that everything will collapse - and maybe never recover.