It feels like the veil has fallen and the old world, the one from my insulated education, the one from Transformers and Lego City, that one is gone. After the turn of the millenium we in the west convinced ourselves that poverty was ending, racism was soon to be gone, and technology and iPhones and computer games would fling us into a shiny frutiger-aero future.
The world I grew up with was simpler, naiver, sunnier.
There were rumblings, whispers, occasional headlines, the odd 4chan post bubbling to the surface, but generally we all assumed that stuff like torture harems were a thing of the past. Or at least, a thing of the ‘foreign’. But now we’re back to square one. Nero, Caligula, Vlad the Impaler, Jack the Ripper, Genghis Khan, Henry VIII, they are still alive here and now and they live in big glass boxes and Georgian Colonial mansions where they are invisible and nobody can see or hear their crimes. When they show themselves, their painted faces and surgical masks obscure the real person, the normal guy behind the arras.
Their worst fear was that we saw them as the email-sending, chronically-online redditors that they are – and now that we have, this may be one of our only opportunities to stop the cycle before it resets.
Over the next chapters of this serialised manifesto, I will outline what I believe are the best ways each of us personally can go about that monumental task. One of these is rejecting the elitist norms of academia. Unfortunately, to be taken seriously I have to adopt the voice of an intellectual who knows what he’s talking about, but make no mistake:
academia is dying, and good riddance.
This archaic system has gatekept some of the ripest fruits of human knowledge. Actual understanding of Shakespeare, Homer, even the Bible, is locked behind a construct of class markers and priviledge. Education has up until very recently been a liberty of the rich, but the internet has opened up a new door. As academia cries ‘the death of intellectualism!’, children in rural Senegal are becoming guitar virtuosos, and teens in India are becoming great filmmakers. What Substack deems the death of intelligence is really the death of a spiteful, chauvinist language that aims to keep the laypeople uneducated.
So my first call is to ask the other young people with bright ideas not to wait for a masters, or for a column in the culture journal, or for a bunch of dusty old men to agree with you – just speak, and learn. Through art, through music, through podcasts or word-of-mouth or YouTube videos or TikToks. The amount of bullshit coursing through our informational channels every day nullifies any objection that you don’t have the qualifications to join the convo . Look at the people who made it to the top: they’re friends with murderers, supporters of eugenics, and most of them are still watching the world burn. If anyone has a right to talk about this game, it’s us: the inheritors, the people born into it, the people with skin in it.
A dark horned figure
an ancient tired god
he tells me to breathe
as he teaches me a song