The liberal virus

TOWARDS THE END OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY a sickness struck the world. Not everyone died, but all suffered from it. The virus which caused the epidemic was called the « liberal virus. »
This virus made its appearance around the sixteenth century within the triangle described by Paris-London-Amsterdam. The symptoms that the disease then manifested appeared harmless. Men (whom the virus struck in preference to women) not only became accustomed to it and developed the necessary antibodies, but were able to benefit from the increased energy that it elicited.
But the virus traveled across the Atlantic and found a favorable place among those who, deprived of antibodies, spread it. As a result, the malady took on extreme forms. The virus reappeared in Europe towards the end of the twentieth century, returning from America where it had mutated. Now strengthened, it came to destroy a great number of the antibodies that the Europeans had developed over the course of the three preceding centuries. It provoked an epidemic that would have been fatal to the human race if it had not been for the most robust of the inhabitants of the old countries who survived the epidemic and finally were able to eradicate the disease.