I sometimes wonder if the modern elite has any clue how damned absurd they are. They strut around in designer sneakers that cost more than your monthly rent, wearing $500 t-shirts like they're papal robes, regurgitating Steve Jobs quotes they skimmed from a Substack post at 2am. And we're supposed to sit there, nodding like obedient lapdogs, pretending we've just witnessed a revelation.
But maybe the absurdity is ours to own.
After all, it worked.
They've pulled off the con of the century: convincing everyone that a good pitch deck equals good governance. It's a ruling class, but it's closer in nature to a circus of grifters and glorified used car salesmen who've huffed their own fumes so long they almost believe they're prophets.
I’ve met these people. You probably have too. They lean forward when they speak, they widen their eyes at just the right moment, they punctuate their stories with a carefully timed laugh. And every one of them is selling something. It doesn’t matter if it’s a useless gadget, a doomed startup, or a policy proposal that will disintegrate at the first brush with reality. What matters is that they’ve rehearsed the lines so many times they sound like they believe them.
And it might be funny if the eternal grift weren’t running our lives. But these hucksters aren’t confined to TED talks. They sit in the White House. They sit in state legislatures. They sit on university boards and at the helm of cultural institutions. They’ve colonized the nonprofit sector, the think tanks, the foundations. Anywhere there’s a microphone, a budget, or a gullible audience, they’ll show up in their genius cosplay and start spouting off about disruption, transformation, reimagining, innovating. They can hardly utter a sentence without it sounding like a trailer for an unreleased Theranos documentary.
Our public life has become unserious with rot. We’re ruled by men and women who don’t care if their ideas work. They only care if the pitch lands. Entire fortunes are built on nothing but vaporware and slogans. Political careers thrive on sound bites with zero context and negative depth. And we let them get away with it! We reward it. We hand them our money, our votes, our attention. We’ve convinced ourselves that confidence equals competence. We’ve made charisma a substitute for character.
Look at the consequences. Our infrastructure crumbles, but the consultants are flush. Our schools stagnate, but the “thought leaders” collect speaking fees. Our politics devolves into reality TV, but the candidates rake in donations. Our public trust collapses, but the influencers pump out more content. At every level, the salesman wins while the citizen loses. The public is stuck with potholes, broken systems, and hollow promises. The ruling class walks away with bonuses, book deals, and another round of applause.
I can’t help but think about how far we’ve fallen from the ideal of leadership as service. It didn’t use to be like this. Competence mattered. Results mattered. Dignity mattered. Now the archetype of leadership is a stage-managed fraud who can summon tears on cue and narrate a life-changing anecdote about an airport delay. Is this what we want to hand power to? Storytellers who can’t build? Charlatans whose closest trait to a redeeming quality is that they damn near believe their own hype? How much longer before the entire system collapses under the weight of its own lies?
We need to be done with this fetish for the salesman-genius. We need to stop pretending that a man in a blazer and sneakers who talks like he’s unveiling the iPhone is going to solve our problems. He isn’t. He’s just selling us lemons off a lot he doesn’t own. And every time we applaud, every time we click, every time we open our wallets, we’re buying into a scam that diminishes all of us.
Our ruling class is not visionary. It is not innovative. It is not competent. It is a cartel of hucksters living off our willingness to be dazzled. And until we say out loud that we see through the act, they’ll keep running it. They’ll keep standing on that stage, on every stage, smiling that salesman’s smile, and swearing that this time, finally, they’re going to change the world.
They’re not.
They’re just changing the price tag on the same Edsel.
