It was one of those bar discussions. Some guy who I hadn’t been talking to overheard me saying something along the lines of we “should shut down the disgusting two-bit operation the U.N. has goin’ that costs us a bundle and is of absolutely no use to anyone” and immediately jumped into the conversation, perhaps spirited on by the wine. Holding his finger aloft like one of those crazy imams we see on YouTube threatening America, he said to me, “You have no idea how much the U.N. does.” I pondered biting his finger for an instant but quickly dismissed the idea after looking the guy over and seeing that his hygiene was on a par with that of a wild boar. So I instead decided to ask him in a soft and gentle voice, “So, sir, enlighten us, what is the U.N. for?” And the guy, still screaming as if he were defending his mother from a mugger, stammered and said, “Many, many things.” Upon my insistence on wanting to know what it was that made the U.N. so useful in 2023, he said: “I don’t know, keep your mouth shut if you don’t know what you’re talking about! And now I have to go to the bathroom.”

Maybe the excitable chap at the bar was family to António Guterres or in the pay of any of the 1,000 absurd departments of the ludicrously large world organization — but maybe not; maybe it’s easier than all that; maybe he is just the offspring of the dominant uncritical thinking of our time. Something like: The U.N. is good because it is good. And if Trump doesn’t like the U.N., then it’s double good.

I write this well into United Nations Day, an organization that was founded to fight for peace in the world and now fights to make you ride your bike to work, doing very little for world peace because no collective has a worse temper than cyclists in suits. They get angry if they step in a puddle, they get angry if it’s hot and sweaty, they get angry if they are late and can’t pedal any faster without real-time supervision from their cardiologist, they get angry if you overtake them with your car, and, most amusingly, they get angry if you don’t overtake and stay behind them.

Organizations, like people, have a life cycle. I suppose the development of the U.N. has not been much different than that of any of us. At birth, as soon as you have the use of reason, you strive to do your job to the best of your ability, and you set yourself a broad, idealistic goal: peace. At 40 you have your first crisis because you see that half of the things you wanted were impossible, and the other half, now that you have them, bore you. In its midlife crisis, the U.N. began to focus on the ozone layer to try to connect with a younger public, being that at the end of the 20th century anyone who had seen a couple of Beatles documentaries were convinced that we youngsters spent our life doing yoga in the wild, living in caravans, listening to pacifist rock, smoking marijuana, and painting the lyrics of “Imagine” on walls.

At 60, if you are amongst the average, you are no longer motivated by your own work, everything is more tiring, and, in an attempt to change things, you start to take care of a rose garden and things like that; at 60, the U.N. made the planet their private rose garden and, for the sake of having a hobby, invested millions in dubious environmental programs. And from 70 onward — look at Joe Biden — you run the risk of starting to talk nonsense and making stupid decisions if you still have too much power and no one stops you; that is what the U.N. is doing, as it goes though a second idealistic stage that filters little by little down to the nations of the world and translates into green taxes, bans, and sermons by the secretary general announcing the apocalypse, as if he were the leader of some new age sect.

To commemorate U.N. Day, Biden made a friendly speech: After all, he is 80 and the U.N. is 78; I’m sure they played baseball together when they were kids. “From Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine and Hamas’ brutal terrorist attack on Israel to the threat of climate change, we face enormous challenges to the systems our forebearers fought so hard to create,” the president said, unintentionally giving us the key to this nonsense. If keeping the peace is still the main objective of the U.N., the mentions of Russia, Ukraine, and Israel are understandable. As children, we were given an IQ test in school that consisted of five or six objects that had something in common and one that had nothing in common with the others, which was the one you had to cross out; imagine a pear, an apple, a melon, a banana, and a stapler. After seeing how Biden mixes the real enemy (war and terrorism) with the imaginary one (climate change), I am convinced that he would be unable to cross out the stapler.

Of course, Biden is wrong, in everything, always, but on this occasion the error is induced by the U.N., which allocates almost all its potential today to environmental religion, another little to social justice (a party to which it had not been invited either), and a residual handful to the issues of war and peace. The U.N. has dementia. For its own sake and for everyone’s, the time has come to pull down the shutters on the luxurious New York office. If they close the U.N., I’m willing to hire António Guterres as a horror movie writer to save him from the trials of unemployment.

Translated by Joel Dalmau.