Against the Common Lie
An Essay on the Degradation of Merit
In this putrid little age of equality not of opportunity but of outcome, a wretched gospel has been preached in whispers, then in shouts, and finally scrawled across every cultural edifice as if vandalism were revelation. We have been duped—not merely deceived, but drugged into a stupor of collective idiocy—into believing that excellence is dangerous, that brilliance is tyranny, that to rise above is to oppress. The great man, once carved into marble, now gets smeared in graffiti by the dullards who cannot climb but excel at dragging others down. And the tragedy is not that they do it, but that they are applauded for it.
In this foul theatre of the absurd, it has become fashionable to cast genius as myth, as the fever dream of romantic fools and fascist dreamers. The very notion that one individual, by virtue of rare talent and incandescent will, might bend the world, has been recast as a dangerous delusion. Oh, how they adore their new doctrine of "movements," of "socioeconomic forces," of the nameless tides of history that move men like driftwood. All so that the termites may feast without ever lifting their snouts from the rot.
Consider this: socialism demands equality not of the spirit but of outcome. It needs sameness, not merely in station, but in potential. It cannot abide the anomaly, the outlier, the man who dares to be more. And so, it turns on merit like a jealous lover, stabbing it through the heart while whispering sweet nothings about justice. If you think this a metaphor too lurid, look again at your modern saints—Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. None of them the cleverest boys in the room. They did not charm with thought but ruled by muzzle and famine. They were not the Nietzschean overmen; they were bureaucratic thugs in military coats, shoving the gifted into ditches.
The glorification of mediocrity is always accompanied by the crucifixion of greatness. The demagogues of equality know that to elevate the average, one must destroy the extraordinary. Brilliance, after all, cannot be mass-produced, and socialism detests anything that resists standardisation.
Observe how literature itself has become the accomplice in this ritual degradation. Take that long-winded exercise in plebeian sentiment, War and Peace—a book more suited to a bureaucrat’s bookshelf than a general’s desk. In it, Napoleon is not the titan who conquered Europe but a neurotic puppet, his genius diluted into coincidence and weather. He becomes the wind’s plaything, not history’s author. What vulgar mischief. The man who reshaped the world in his palm is rendered a jittery joke because the common man cannot tolerate that history might hinge on a single will more iron than his own. They even lied about his height, poor devil. Average by any continental measure, and yet they shrank him to fit the story of small men who needed a small tyrant to feel tall.
There is no dialectic, no historical necessity, no Spirit of the Age dragging us from one inevitability to another. The world is not a Marxist stage play with assigned roles and prewritten denouement. History is not Hegelian. There is no god behind the curtain pulling the strings. There are only men—and among them, the rare few who have the triple birthright of intelligence, imagination, and grit. Most are lucky to get one; to have all three is like finding a lion who writes poetry and fixes his own car.
These men—these anomalies—do not emerge from collective need, nor are they the synthesis of opposing social forces. They are accidents in the machine, spikes in the data, blasphemies against the flat line. And when they rise, the mob howls, the priests of equality scribble denunciations, and the mediocre demand tribunals. But still, they rise. They write the symphony, crack the atom, redraw the map. The others write policies to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
The true enemy of merit is not ignorance, but envy dressed in the rags of justice. And what we have now is a culture of envious cowards draped in the trappings of equality, who can do nothing but sabotage what they cannot match. They say the great man is a myth. Of course they do. So is honour, to a thief.
So let us not be fooled. Intelligence is rare. Creativity rarer still. Grit—the refusal to buckle, the willingness to bleed and not whine—is the scarcest of them all. But the man who holds all three? He is dangerous not because he oppresses the rest, but because he renders them irrelevant. That, they cannot forgive.
So they lie. They distort. They edit history to hide their inferiority. But the truth persists like a splinter in their soft flesh: history is not made by movements. It is made by men. Rare men. Dangerous men. And without them, we are not free—we are just equal in our decay.
On the Necessity of Aspiration: The Art of Building
Creativity, that spark of divinity wrapped in mortal neurosis, is not the private domain of the anointed. It festers, flickers, or flames in all of us—yes, even in the accountant who dreams in symmetry or the mechanic who rewires broken engines as if they were symphonies in steel. It does not always manifest in thunder. Sometimes, it’s a whisper in a workshop or a sketch half-scribbled before the boss walks in. One needn’t conquer Europe to matter. But one must build. To live is to construct—something, anything, even a better version of the self clawed out of the clay of habit and cowardice.
Not all of us are destined to carve our names into the spine of history, and that is no tragedy. But to slouch into mediocrity as if it were virtue—that is a sin far greater than hubris. We are not equal in talent, nor must we be. But we are equal in responsibility: to strive, to stretch, to become more than the sum of our excuses. To build rather than merely endure.
And to build means to court rejection, to flirt with ruin. It means being laughed at in dim rooms by men whose hands are too soft for calluses but too firm in their certainty. It means failing, sometimes publicly, sometimes spectacularly. But to fail with intention, to bleed in pursuit of something higher—that is a life worth living, not the safe sedation of never having tried.
Greatness demands rejection. It is not loved. It is suffered. And those who seek it must learn to be misunderstood, to be hated even by those they would lift. They must rise alone, often without applause, often amidst boos. This is the price. Not all can pay it, but none should sneer at those who try.
To build is to resist entropy. To choose creation over complaint. To embrace the challenge not as a right but as a burden one volunteers to carry. Those who wish for more must not demand it. They must forge it, defend it, and accept that their pursuit might earn them nothing but scars. But in that scar tissue lies meaning—a life shaped not by comfort, but by the stubborn insistence on becoming more.
The Architects of Ash: On the Parasites Who Rise by Ruin
There exists a breed of man—if we may call him that—who cannot build, cannot imagine, cannot ascend by effort or brilliance. He stares at the edifice of greatness with the gnawing gaze of a vulture circling a cathedral. He does not seek to understand it. He seeks to tear it down, brick by brick, until the heavens no longer have monuments and all the heights are levelled into mud. He loathes greatness not because it harms him, but because it reminds him of what he will never be. And so he begins the work of the saboteur—not of creation, but of quiet annihilation disguised in the velvet tongue of social justice, equality, and the collective good.
He is the clerical murderer, the bureaucrat of slaughter. He has no vision, only envy. No will to build, only the reflex to demolish. He wears a uniform or a suit or a priestly robe, but underneath he is always the same: a petty little creature armed with a doctrine that disguises his resentment as morality. He does not ask, “How can I become better?” He hisses, “Why should he be more than me?” And thus begins his crusade. Not upward—but against the ladder itself.
Stalin is his archetype, but he is not alone. Every era has its pallbearers of merit. These are not tyrants in the classical mould—no Alexanders, no Napoleons. They are not flawed giants. They are inflated vermin. They do not climb the mountain; they erode its base. They do not inspire; they coerce. They pass laws that clip the wings of the exceptional and call it fairness. They teach that ambition is arrogance, that confidence is cruelty, and that success is theft. And with every sermon, they herd a weary people into intellectual slavery where no man dares to stand taller than his neighbour.
Observe them closely. They do not celebrate the man who creates; they canonise the man who complains. They do not reward effort; they redistribute outcomes. They do not honour the mind; they sanctify the mob. Their heroes are not inventors but agitators, not philosophers but propagandists. And when history does not bend to their mediocrity, they rewrite it. They will not merely lie about Napoleon’s stature—they will reduce every Caesar to a footnote, every Shakespeare to a committee, every Newton to a collective mood of scientific inevitability.
Because if they can murder the myth of greatness, they can absolve themselves of their smallness.
And this is their victory: not to rise, but to ensure that no one does. They do not stand taller—they pull others into the mire. In their utopia, the eagle is shackled lest the pigeon feel shame. The mountain must be bulldozed so the valley can be called a peak.
But the cost of this cowardice, this sanctioned mediocrity, is civilisation itself. Every work of art, every discovery, every achievement of mankind—these are not products of the herd. They are the result of individuals, of sovereign minds, of men who refused to apologise for being more. Kill the great man, and you kill the engine of the world. Replace the builder with the redistributor, and you shall inherit a kingdom of ash where nothing is made, only rationed.
The denigrators of merit do not fear injustice—they fear excellence. They are not defenders of the weak; they are executioners of the strong. And their ideology—be it Marxist, fascist, or the modern syrup of democratic levelling—always leads to the same altar, where greatness is sacrificed for comfort, and the exceptional are crucified for daring to offend the average.
But there is still a choice. One can kneel to these priests of entropy—or one can stand, even alone, and build. One can dare to be misunderstood, hated, even destroyed, rather than become another grey face in the file of cowards. Because the truth, however buried, remains: the world has only ever been moved by the few. The rest merely vote on it afterwards.
So let them sneer. Let them write their revisionist gospels, their pamphlets of mediocrity, their sermons of sameness. The man who builds need not ask for permission. And if he must, the world is already lost.Subscribe