Insipidness abounds when mediocrity becomes the new meritocracy, while banality can offer good standing in your local hate group. So, from the top of the system to the bottom, we can have goals.

Why are we cultivating these trends?

I always wanted to fit in, to be accepted, but I felt like I was on the outside regardless of how much I tried. Now I know I’m on the outside, and I no longer want to fit in; I want others to rise up from the muck of their putrid minds, shake off the stink of intellectual stagnation, and reinvigorate their humanity by embracing what has propelled our species forward for millennia, which in my view is the exploration of potential.

I’m afraid we are course-correcting the trajectory of advancement we’ve been moving down and that it may prove to have been too fast for the majority of our species to keep pace. After one hundred years of incredible technological progress, it appears that the powers that be are curbing our path forward. Instead of paving the way with policies that allow and encourage easy participation and personal development, we are harming the structures and institutions that have, in the past, been responsible for giving an opportunity to those who can and are willing to grasp them.

My opportunity to advance my own early education was wrecked by a system that forbade my overly ambitious curiosity and insisted I conform to my peers both socially and intellectually. If I wasn’t fitting in, I was in trouble. I was cast aside while those who preened themselves in blind subservience were elevated to seize the chance to attend the best post-secondary schools.

Maybe my socioeconomic background played a role, or maybe the majority in my community were simply destined for tertiary roles in society, and education was not deemed to be imperative. But still, my curiosity and desire for knowledge were bolting straight ahead; I just couldn’t tackle the mistrust of systems that seemed to reward cultural conformity and, too often, intellectual mediocrity.

Today, we look at designer medicine based on individual genetics and extol the virtues of this future form of healthcare, and yet we still force our children through a meat grinder that makes too many of them look and act like formless bags of gray meat. How can we consider a new practice of medicine that could treat 325 million Americans individually and not be able to start tackling individualized education for our children?

Did the experiment of enlightenment fail, or are we failing nature? When do we return to cultivating potential and stop the race into the depths of our own worst instincts?