Everything around you — money, power, knowledge, even love — has been hollowed out into symbols that no longer mean what they were built to represent. And the first casualties of this slow decay have always been the same: The children. The minds still soft enough to be shaped. Before I teach you how to build a sovereign mind, I need to show you how the world systematically steals it. How We Broke Minds Before We Broke Economies It all started, ironically, with good intentions. In a world of violence and chaos, pain was the first teacher. Primitive tribes disciplined their children through pain, not because they were evil — but because survival demanded it. Fall off a cliff? Death. Wander off at night? Death. So pain became education. Fear became a teacher. Punishment became a proxy for wisdom. The problem is we didn’t know when to stop. When survival became civilization, the lessons didn’t update. Parents still yelled. Hit. Threatened. Not to save lives — but to save face. To relieve their own emotional volatility. The original evolutionary function — protecting a fragile life — degraded into protecting fragile egos. Punishment survived evolution. It metastasized into abuse. And like all bad habits, it found new playgrounds. First, a little disclaimer for this section. I haven’t raised a child. I don’t even have a girlfriend. This isn’t about parenting from experience — it’s about thinking from first principles. Most people were raised by force, not clarity. By tradition, not truth. I’m here to help you look back at how you were shaped —so you can break the cycles that shrink minds and shatter confidence. What I share here isn’t personal wisdom. It’s universal logic. And once you see it, you won’t be able to unsee it. Hitting a child is foolish, lazy, ignorant, and psychopathic. If you want a child to wash their hands, don’t raise your voice — raise their awareness. Show them germs under a microscope. Let their curiosity become conviction. You’ll be amazed how quickly they become obsessive. Not out of fear. Out of understanding. But if you choose violence, you’re raising someone who listens to whoever can hit hardest — physically or socially. Now they won’t follow the truth. They’ll follow dominance. They’ll follow bullies. They’ll follow cults. If you can’t explain why something matters — if you can’t reason it out in a way a child understands —then maybe you don’t understand it either. And if you’re punishing a child for not doing something you can’t even explain, you’re a hypocrite with a belt. Discipline, whether to yourself or others, comes from clarity, not force. Fear-based parenting is generational stupidity passed off as tradition. But let’s not get naive: Children do need pain — but only the kind that carries information. The purpose of pain is to avoid it Pain is information. Abuse is distortion. A scraped knee from rough play? Useful. Being yelled at for asking a question? Distorted signal. Mistakes are how children prototype themselves. Every mistake is a tiny A/B test on who they are. Interrupt that with punishment, and you don’t raise a better version of them —you just force them to run your code instead of writing their own. A child scraping their knee on a climb learns about gravity. A burned hand teaches caution. These are local, contained mistakes — and that’s what makes them useful. But violence from a parent is systemic. It doesn’t teach the lesson — it teaches fear of mistakes. Now, the child avoids trial and error, not danger. You’re interrupting nature’s way of building wisdom: one small wound at a time, calibrated through experience, until the child becomes anti-fragile. True discipline is self-internalized clarity. You’re not training them to obey you. You’re training them to hear that quiet voice inside that says, "This is right." "This is wrong." "This doesn’t feel aligned." If you punish without helping them understand, they’ll learn to fear you — not love the truth. The long game of parenting is sovereignty. Your job isn’t to raise a compliant child. It’s to raise an autonomous adult. One who doesn’t need external validation or fear to do what’s right. One who knows how to think. How to listen. How to navigate hard things without collapsing. We didn’t just brutalize our children. We brutalized our systems. We took shortcuts everywhere. We built proxies for things too heavy to carry. And each shortcut costs us part of our soul. Money: How We Turned Value Into Paper Once upon a time, money was value. You had a cow, I had a sack of wheat. We bartered. You fed my family, I clothed yours. Then gold came along — a universal, scarce, beautiful medium. But carrying gold was dangerous. So merchants started issuing receipts — "I owe you 10 gold coins" — backed by actual vaults. It was smart. It was efficient. Until some enterprising Frenchmen figured out they could withdraw the real gold whenever they wanted — because people were happily printing the paper instead. When people who actually owned the gold came for it, there was no gold left. The illusion became the reality. Governments caught on. They printed more receipts than gold existed. Fiat currency was born — backed not by metal, but by "trust." Now, money wasn’t value. It was a promise of value. Today, that promise is printed like toilet paper. And so value itself — food, shelter, dignity — inflates, evaporates, and gets stolen quietly while everyone smiles politely at their bank statements. Voting: How We Turned Power Into Popularity Contests In ancient tribes, power was simple. You wanted leadership? Bring your sword. You wanted influence? Prove it with strength, wisdom, and sacrifice. But bloodshed was messy, so civilizations invented a shortcut: Voting. Instead of counting corpses, count hands. A brilliant invention — at first. But democracy, like everything else, decays. What started as a proxy for tribal strength became a numbers game. Votes weren’t weighted by skin in the game. They were distributed indiscriminately. Now, people who have nothing invested can cancel out those who built everything. Now, people who would have been ignored around the tribal fire can shout down those who would have led armies. Voting detached from power. It became a reality show. No strength. No sacrifice. No skin in the game. Just slogans. Just noise. Certificates: How We Turned Knowledge Into Expensive Wallpaper At first, education meant apprenticeship. Want to be a blacksmith? Sleep next to a forge for ten years and you’ll learn. Want to be a scribe? Spend your life hunched over scrolls. Learning was brutal. Intimate. Real. But as populations exploded and bureaucracies metastasized, a new shortcut was born: Certificates. Instead of actual skill, you got a shiny diploma saying you were "trained." At first, it worked. Then the universities realized they were a monopoly. They printed certificates like candy bars. Skill atrophied. Knowledge became performative. Dumb people walked out with degrees in Gender Studies and got lauded for it. How the Proxy Trap Steals Creative Genius Society trains you from birth to chase proxies: Money (not value) Votes (not power) Certificates (not competence) Approval (not love) Punishment (not clarity) By the time you realize it, you’re halfway through your life — over-leveraged, over-credentialed, underwhelmed, and terminally confused. Your inner child, the one that would have asked questions, that would have dismantled lies with a glance, is buried under sixteen layers of conditioning. Creativity is collateral damage. The only true creative genius is one who refuses the proxies. One who can sniff out the difference between the map and the territory. How to Escape the Proxy Economy (Before It Collapses) How to Escape the Proxy Economy (Before It Collapses) The proxy economy will collapse — not because people are smart, but because it can't sustain itself. can't You can only sell inflated illusions for so long before reality comes to collect. When the map becomes more important than the territory, people start crashing into trees. Hard. When the certificate matters more than the skill, when the degree matters more than the thinking, when the follower count matters more than the actual creation — decay sets in. When a house of proxies gets tall enough, it can't help but implode under its own fraudulence. We are nearing the tipping point. The Great Disillusionment is coming. The Great Disillusionment is coming. People are getting smarter — not because school taught them, but because pain is teaching them. Fast. The new creative class will be those who understand this: You cannot build a real life out of proxies. You cannot build a real life out of proxies. You must return to the soil. return to the soil You must touch the thing itself. touch the thing itself You must generate real proof, not signals of proof. generate real proof And the only way to do that is to detach your mind from proxies completely — and rewire your thinking around first principles and raw truths. detach your mind from proxies completely rewire your thinking around first principles and raw truths. How To Actually Detach from Proxies How To Actually Detach from Proxies Seek truth, not consensus. Seek truth, not consensus. The moment you start thinking, "What do people expect from me?" instead of "What is true?", you’re slipping back into the matrix of proxies. Truth is often lonely. Learn to love the loneliness. true Ask for the root, not the symbol. Ask for the root, not the symbol. Don't chase "how to make money." Chase "how to create undeniable value for specific people." Don't chase "how to look smart." Chase "how to understand reality better." Don't chase "how to get followers." Chase "how to make something worth being followed." The proxy always points back to a root. Most people stop at the signpost and start worshipping it. You have to walk the damn road. always Skepticism is your superpower. Skepticism is your superpower. When someone tells you, "This is valuable," ask: "Valuable to whom? Why? Under what assumptions? Against what alternatives?" The more questions you ask, the closer you get to the bone. Think in actions, not artifacts. Think in actions, not artifacts. The real thing is what you do with your life. Not what you display. do Practice micro-proof. Practice micro-proof. You don't need a massive audience, a credential, or a logo to prove you're valuable. You need to create one real effect on one real person. one one One solved problem. One changed life. One real artifact that changes the landscape for someone else. When you collect enough micro-proofs, you become uncancellable. Because reality vouches for you louder than the mobs can tear you down. Think from First Principles. Think from First Principles. Most people don't actually think. They copy opinions. They regurgitate narratives. They conform to the dominant vibes. First principles thinking is brutal because it demands you tear apart every belief you hold, ask yourself why it exists, and rebuild it yourself without permission. It’s harder. It’s slower. It’s lonelier. But it’s the only way to actually know anything. actually Prototype Your Mind. Prototype Your Mind. You don’t build a better mind through philosophy alone. You have to test it against the real world. test Every project you launch. Every piece of writing you release. Every conversation where you sharpen your views. These are stress tests for your operating system. If you’re not putting mental prototypes into the world and letting them succeed or fail, you’re not growing — you’re theorizing. Reality is the gym. Thinking is the warm-up. Reality is the gym. Thinking is the warm-up. Why Specific Knowledge Will Save You (And Everyone Else Will Drown) Why Specific Knowledge Will Save You (And Everyone Else Will Drown) "Specific knowledge is knowledge you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, it can replace you." The more general and common your knowledge, the easier it is for someone to undercut you — or for an AI to swallow you whole. Specific knowledge — knowledge born from your weird obsessions, unique pattern recognition, and unreasonable love for something — is the only moat left. The more you are like everyone else, the more you are replaceable. The more you are like everyone else, the more you are replaceable. Specific knowledge is important because it’s non-fungible. non-fungible It’s the difference between: A generic marketer versus a marketer who understands neuroscience + storytelling + niche humor. neuroscience + storytelling + niche humor A generic coder versus a coder who knows finance + security + AI ethics. finance + security + AI ethics A generic artist versus an artist who combines industrial design + poetry + Japanese architecture. industrial design + poetry + Japanese architecture It’s the intersections that make you sovereign. Even if you’re only: Top 10% in Design Top 20% in Psychology Top 30% in Storytelling At the intersection of those three skills, you’re top 0.1%. You own that niche. You cannot be easily replaced. own cannot The future belongs to intersectional freaks who embraced their authentic weirdness. The future belongs to intersectional freaks who embraced their authentic weirdness. If you can't dominate at something monolithic, dominate something fractal. fractal Final Word: Exit the Proxy Economy or Be Buried With It Final Word: Exit the Proxy Economy or Be Buried With It The future will be divided cleanly: Those who chased proxies and drowned with them. Those who chased proxies and drowned with them. Those who returned to reality and rewrote the rules. Those who returned to reality and rewrote the rules. If you want to survive, you can't just "think outside the box" — you have to realize the box was a trap designed to sell you plastic trophies. trap Find your own games. Write your own rules. Chase the real thing. Proof, not proxies. Reality, not reputation. Truth, not tribe. The world won't hand you sovereignty. You’ll have to forge it. But once you have it, no storm can steal it back. forge it And when the proxy economy falls — you’ll still be standing. You will inherit the earth. That's it, guys. Grab my free fundamental principles reading list: selar.com/firstprinciples Subscribe to my free newsletter to get more of this earlier: https://crive.substack.com https://crive.substack.com Talk soon, Praise

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The Proxy Problem: Why Money, Voting and Diplomas Won't Save You

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