What Is “A Stick of Dynamite in the American Elite”?

On December 25, 2022, I submitted a letter of concern to 180 professors at five American universities.

The letter makes 8 claims.

1.  We are living in a dystopia.
2.  Dystopia is a perception that arises from our moral values.
3.  Justice is shared by all.
4.  In America, justice has a structural blockage.
5.  The blockage is a product of meritocratic rot.
6.  The American university should have been a secular monastery to truth, reason, and moral wisdom.
7.  Instead, it’s devolved into a mining and production plant for Social Power.
8.  This devolution has had consequences on humanity.

The university occupies an important role in modern society: it preserves and generates wisdom.

In the present century, the engine’s stalled inside a structural problem: Power-lust.

Power-lust has always been a problem, for churches and universities alike, throughout our evolution through modernity (Power-lust is structural to our existence). But in the last few decades, the problem’s gotten thornier:

Power-lust is now the only surviving spirit of the times.

Call power-lust the death of God’s psycho-spiritual revolution: these are the gold-rush centuries for “capital,” “reputation,” “appearances,” and “prestige.”

Social power and wisdom are at odds.

Not completely—not so totally and finally that we live in a perfectly upside-down world. But the tensions between “what social power rewards” and “what wisdom counsels” are already visible to everyone.

What is wisdom, anyway?

In this book, I offer a trial-balloon definition: It’s what we all have in common.

1. This book fails insofar as it fails as a book of wisdom.
2. Ironically: for it to be appraised by the Socially Powerful as a book of wisdom, it requires Social Power.
3. Social Power and wisdom have a Magic Eye relationship: what lacks Social Power is often assumed to lack wisdom.
4. This book has no Social Power.

A bit more creativity and a few more chess-moves pulled this book into its final form.

I first brainstormed this book in New Haven, CT, in 2020, during the pandemic. I told my roommate all the musings I had about Power-lust, the death of God, wisdom, and social power—and he challenged me to prove it.

Never one to shy away from a mountain, I send this trial balloon into the air, into the future, with a kiss.