Who is really the strong one here?

- I’ve always been surprised by the fact that in this game, played mostly by men, the most powerful piece is the queen. In the end, the king can only move one square, like a simple pawn, and spends his time running away. 

- You’re right. The queen is the most powerful piece. In a way, this game expresses the idea that women are stronger, while men are limited and cowardly beings.

Easy, easy, my friends. Please don’t throw rotten tomatoes at me.

These words are not actually mine. They belong to Bernard Werber, a contemporary French writer whose books sometimes leave you sitting in silence, staring into nothingness right in the middle of a page.

"The Queen’s Diagonal" is the third book by Bernard Werber that I’ve read, after "The Ants" and "Encyclopedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge".

I don’t want to spoil anything for those of you who might want to read it, but I can say that in this novel, beyond the author’s fascination with the game of chess it also explores themes such as sociology, anthropology, psychology, and history.

But the theme that resonated with me the most is the question of the individual versus the collective. Groups, the collective, give us strength and take us further? But when we look at our collective society, we have never been as individualistic as we are today.

Everyone is connected, and yet everyone is separate.

So I keep coming back to the same question, without really knowing the answer:

Is it the crowd that makes the individual stronger, or is it the uniqueness of the individual that makes the crowd stronger?