Against the University
The Death of Genius
The modern university sells the illusion of progress at the cost of its soul. What was once a revered institution where students pursued knowledge as a path to mastery is now a machine for credentialism. Reflecting the broader decay of the West, campuses that once rewarded risk and daring were replaced with a culture of safety and predictability. The academic pursuit of truth now demands a quiet nod of obedience to the bureaucrats who guard the gates. As a result, the virtues that built civilizations are slowly fading away. The willingness to storm beaches both literal and metaphorical is now dismissed as a relic of a bygone era. Heirs to an evolutionary drive to strive and conquer, young men wander these halls while revving in neutral, their potential lying untapped beneath an abundance of caution and forced inclusivity. They are told that it is no longer their turn, to sit still, and be quiet. But the soul does not wait; it withers.
For decades, the modern university has engaged in a performative ritual of atonement for centuries of historical exclusion, less out of genuine remorse and more in an attempt to cement its moral authority. In the process, it has committed a far greater sin: the suppression of excellence itself. This stands in stark contrast to the iconoclastic minds and spirits that forged the modern economy of our nation, solving big problems and taking equally grand risks. But the corporate priesthood now performs its rituals of performance metrics and sensitivity training, demanding uniformity from their congregations. “We still reward excellence,” they insist, pointing to GPAs, degrees, and selective admissions. But these are hollow metrics. They are proxies that measure compliance and patience, not originality, impact, or mastery of craft. Predictability is their gospel, and disruption is their heresy. However, genuine creation is neither safe nor predictable. Those sparks of God-given creativity have always defied the tidy confines of cultural dogma. The burning ambition and competitive fire that once pushed empires forward are now recast as threats to the fragile balance of the bureaucratic machine.
Herein lies the betrayal: Having exiled the virtues that built modernity, the systemic rot now denounces their very existence. The modern university dismisses these traits as “toxic.” Young men who show ambition are labeled aggressive; those who seek competition are told they are doing so at the expense of others. The systems that once forged leaders now create well-credentialed mediocrities, incapable of true vision or contrarian action. These disengaged men do not disappear, though. They channel their energy elsewhere. Sometimes, this energy finds destructive outlets in the form of shallow consumerism, aimless hedonism, or extremist ideologies. At which point our new cultural priests declare, "See how destructive masculinity is?" This cycle is the sinister genius of their narrative. They have stripped men of the structures that cultivate strength and then blamed the chaos on masculinity itself. There is nothing accidental about this. Corporate managers, bureaucrats, and tenured professors are all beneficiaries of the very systems that a paradigm shift led by a new generation of great men would challenge. Theirs is a world in which no Alexander may push beyond the horizon, no Napoleon may rise from nothing to reshape history, and no Prometheus may steal fire to challenge the order.
But progress need not come at the cost of what made progress possible. The inclusion of women in academia is not a problem—it is a triumph. For centuries, half of humanity’s potential was denied entry at the gates of the ivory tower. But progress is not zero-sum. The elevation of women does not require the diminishment of men. Yet this is precisely what has occurred. The structural reforms designed to accommodate a learning style more traditionally coded as feminine—one of collaborative, consensus-driven learning—have come at the expense of frameworks that channel competitive energy, a drive not exclusive to men but historically beneficial to masculine achievement. The result is a system that fails both genders: women are sold a lie disguised as liberation, told they can shatter the glass ceiling and claim their rightful place at the top. In reality, they are funneled into becoming interchangeable cogs in the same bureaucratic machine that stifles men. They are all promised empowerment but delivered a hamster wheel. Sterile careerism offers a safe path to titles and salaries but demands nothing of the soul. It is a hollow pursuit, one that conflates personal gain with collective progress. The fire that once drove individuals to build, fight, and conquer for the advancement of something greater is left to smolder.
This is the great irony: in the name of progress, we have created a system where no one truly progresses. The corporate bureaucratic complex, the golden calf of our age, demands that men and women kneel before its altar of predictability. Young men are told that college is the first step toward the corporate C-suite, only to one day discover they have been chasing a mirage. Women are told they have been handed the keys to the kingdom once reserved for men—but the kingdom has been hollowed out, its throne replaced with ergonomic office chairs, its crowns swapped for the hollow validation of LinkedIn endorsements. The modern university has abandoned its higher calling, switching its dutiful role of credentialing workers for the machine. It no longer forges souls, only entry-level employees.
The solution is not regression. We cannot resurrect the aristocratic academies of the 19th century, where pedigree trumped genius—nor should we. Nor can we return to the gymnasia of ancient Greece or the ludus of Rome, where the pursuit of arete was inseparable from the social hierarchies of its time. The past, for all its achievements, was wrought with wide-sweeping exclusions that denied opportunity to vast swaths of humanity. Yet, in our efforts to correct these injustices, we have conflated inequality of outcome with inequality of opportunity. Individual differences in intelligence, physical ability, drive, and, consequently, achievement are not only natural but essential. It is the very engine of progress that propels civilization forward.
Instead, new institutions must be created that channel competitive energy rather than suppress it. We already have the blueprint: tech accelerators, where ambition is refined into world-changing innovation; athletic competitions, where an individual’s physical limits are tried and tested; special forces, where young men fight for their country bound together by the highest stakes. These institutions are successful because they understand that men are biologically primed to seek status through competition. Rather than the coddling of equal praise, they demand contests that result in winners and losers. Instead of worshipping safety, they reward risk. The goal isn’t competition for its own sake, but to produce exceptional individuals capable of building something enduring.
Implementing these models at scale is a necessity, but higher education values uniformity and group consensus over individual exceptionalism. It is no coincidence that many of our greatest modern visionaries, from Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg to Palmer Luckey, did not graduate from traditional institutions. Critics will cry “survivorship bias,” pointing to the Einsteins of the world who did emerge through academia. This misses the point. The modern university could not create Einstein or Jobs or Zuckerberg or Luckey; it would merely credential them. That is the best-case scenario, at worst it would stifle them and encourage them to play it safe. Today, we risk losing the next generation of visionaries to societal expectations of academic conformity.
To move forward, we must reject the false dichotomy between inclusion and excellence. The answer lies not in exclusion, but in specialization. Let universities fade into mediocrity, if they must. But upon their ruins, let us erect new spaces that restore the qualities that built our modern world. Our current competitive models (incubators, sports, special forces, etc) that demand excellence are not exceptions, but prototypes. They prove that men thrive when expectations are high, hierarchies are meritocratic, and purpose is palpable. This is not because society “constructs” them to, but because eons of evolution have wired their brains for glory. These institutions need not be male-exclusive, but they must be competitive, purposeful, and unapologetically elitist.
Women, too, deserve better than the lie of bureaucratic “empowerment.” The feminine spirit is a force of nature, not a problem to be solved or a quota to be filled. It is the primary creative force of life, culture, and the bonds that hold society together. The corporate bureaucracy demands a task-optimized type of participation that is counterproductive to raising a family, often forcing women to choose between caregiving or careers. The university, complicit in this betrayal, lures young women into an anti-family trap, only to leave them burdened with debt and funneled into climbing a ladder that leans against the wrong wall. True empowerment does not trade one cage for a slightly better cage but pursues the true desire of the soul. It is about building institutions that honor the feminine soul not as an afterthought, but as a cornerstone. Raising a family, having children, and embracing traditional feminine values must be given the high status they deserve. To get there, we need to rebuild our institutions to accommodate mothers and prioritize family. The unique power to nurture families has historically enabled women to transform culture and strengthen communities. Acknowledging this empowers rather than limits. A world where femininity thrives becomes a world reborn.
This doesn’t come at the expense of a world where masculinity also thrives. Let history be our warning: civilizations that neuter the competitive spirit succumb to decadence. Rome rotted from within when its legions became complacent. The Enlightenment did not emerge from a committee but from the minds of heretics who dared to be contrarian. We live in a time of stagnant innovation, crumbling infrastructure, and spiritual drift. Our moment does not demand more managers, but more warriors. More builders. More iconoclasts.
The path is clear. We must decentralize education, shattering the monopoly of the credentials machine. Let a thousand institutions bloom: some collaborative, some competitive, some nurturing, some ruthless. Let there be schools that crush the weak in pursuit of progress. Build an efficient market that competes for souls, and lights the conquering creative spirit that is desperately needed for progress. Delegitimize the degree and make it clear that capability is the new currency. The higher education bureaucracy, with its many obfuscated layers, will be very resistant to change. A more realistic goal is not to reform the old system, but to render it obsolete.
The modern world does not know what to do with men. It fears their aggression, their ambition, their hunger to test themselves against limits. So it neuters them and suffocates their instincts under bureaucratic safety. It pacifies them with empty comforts and shames them for the fire that once built civilizations. But that fire does not go out. It waits. It waits for the men who refuse to wave the white flag. It waits for the contrary ones who create where others comply and consume. The frontier is not gone, just hidden. The task of this generation is to find it and raise new institutions where the best individuals are forged with strength and courage. Let the old guard cling to their ergonomic thrones. We are not here to ask for seats at their table—we are here to replace them.
The future belongs to those who build it.