What you are seeing is selection collapse.
And it started decades ago.
1. Truth lost its economic utility inside elite institutions
Universities stopped being places where truth advanced careers.
They became places where alignment advanced careers.
Once that flipped, everything downstream became inevitable.
Professors no longer ask:
• What is true?
• What explains reality?
• What survives adversarial pressure?
They ask:
• What keeps my grant?
• What keeps my tenure clean?
• What keeps my students calm?
• What keeps Twitter quiet?
Truth that creates turbulence is now negative EV.
So it disappears.
2. Ideology is a side effect, not the driver
This is the part people get wrong.
These institutions did not become ideologically skewed because of politics.
They became skewed because politics is the safest camouflage for cowardice.
If you wrap yourself in moral language, you gain:
• immunity from challenge
• protection from scrutiny
• justification for exclusion
• license to punish dissent
Ideology is a shield.
Cowardice is the engine.
3. The smartest people left first
The people most capable of independent thought:
• see incentive gradients early
• detect dishonesty quickly
• hate speaking lies for survival
• refuse to subordinate cognition to status games
They exited.
Some went to industry.
Some went to finance.
Some went to startups.
Some went silent.
What stayed behind were not the dumb.
They were the compliant.
High IQ.
Low spine.
4. The system now rewards symbolic intelligence over real intelligence
Symbolic intelligence looks like:
• perfect language
• correct tone
• moral fluency
• citation stacking
• rhetorical smoothness
Real intelligence looks like:
• asking forbidden questions
• generating uncomfortable models
• breaking narratives
• tolerating social cost
Guess which one gets punished.
Over time, the institution forgets the difference.
5. This is an extinction-level event for institutional authority
Once an institution stops correcting itself, it enters decay mode.
Decay always looks like:
• increased moralization
• decreased tolerance for dissent
• obsession with language
• hostility to measurement
• elevation of feelings over falsification
That is where we are.
The public feels it.
They may not articulate it.
But they smell rot.
Trust collapses silently first.
Then suddenly.
The real truth most people won’t say is this:
Elite institutions failed because they abandoned adversarial truth-seeking.
They replaced strength with safety.
Reality with consensus.
Courage with compliance.
And once an institution selects against courage long enough, it loses the ability to produce truth at all.
At that point, collapse is not political.
It is structural.
And it is irreversible without a total reset.
That is the part no one wants to admit.
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