We all can feel it. An accelerated rate of change leading to a future so weird that every sociological map is outdated before you press the Print button. We’re inside it, the singularity, not the techno-utopian concept where we defy death and augment our brains, but the messy reality where exponential change makes prediction itself obsolete.
I don’t want to add to the cacophony of predictions about how artificial intelligence will do X, Y, or Z to help or harm humanity because, as creatures within the cloud of the singularity, neither I nor anyone else knows what is to come. Maybe AI will welcome us into the Garden of Eden 2.0 with a benevolent face. Maybe the Terminator’s metal-cheeked death grin will usher us into extinction. Maybe it will create Ayn Rand’s panty-dampening oasis of producers and makers living in a free-market technotopia on Mars. Maybe the future is mole people feeding on the detritus of the flood-forsaken, famine-ravaged, forest-burnt victims of the climate curse. No one can predict the future, and I won’t pretend I can.
Instead, as we hurtle through this singularity, I’d like to consider the ideas we ought to leave behind. Some of these may have helped our societies grow, but now they limit our vision and block our ability to adapt. If agility is the art of outrunning extinction, we can’t afford to carry the burden of beliefs that no longer serve us.
Meritocracy
In April 2025, President Trump signed an executive order titled “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy.” The EO is based on the belief that success or failure in the American system ought to be based on one’s effort, talent, and qualifications. It assumes that in the bedrock of reality, outcomes reflect one’s intrinsic qualities rather than any extrinsic advantages or systemic barriers. A person is in control of how hard they work, how long they study, and how diligently they develop their skills. Success is earned, as is failure, and that is not only how it is, but how it ought to be.
The President writes, “A bedrock principle of the United States is that all citizens are treated equally under the law [and] the commitment to merit and equality of opportunity…forms the foundation of the American Dream.” In other words, the Executive Order treats merit as an objective and measurable property: did you succeed or did you not? It is also morally neutral because when the rules are applied equally, the results are inherently fair and based on the product of “individual strengths, effort, or achievement.” This makes merit self-sealing. It explains away any disparities in outcomes as evidence of intrinsic differences rather than as signs of deeper structural distortions.
The problem with the concept of a meritocracy is that its actual function in society is to justify current hierarchies. It retroactively paints success as earned and failure as deserved. That story may have worked in a slower world, but in the singularity, which is an environment defined by volatility, unpredictability, and non-linear change, the assumptions of a merit-based system breaks down. If technological disruption, climate disasters, and authoritarian policies can redraw the landscape overnight, “merit” becomes less about stable, cultivatable qualities and more about one’s position in the right network, at the right moment, with access to the right resources and tools.
Clinging to the concept of a meritocracy blinds us to ways randomness, privilege, and access shape actual outcomes, and it discourages us from building systems designed for adaptability, mutual aid, and resilience.
When the ground is constantly moving, we can’t afford the illusion that the world’s tallest towers stand simply because they deserve to. History shows how quickly those towers can be brought low by men in caves.
Punitive Justice
Also in April, President Trump signed an executive order titled “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens.” The title alone lays out the framework. The president casts justice as a battle between criminals and innocents, with no middle ground. His order instructs police to “aggressively” pursue crime, provides them with “excess military assets,” and singles out officials who defend the civil liberties of communities already targeted by aggressive policing.
Taken at face value, punishment is not inherently illegitimate. We need mechanisms to mark boundaries in a society and deter harm in our communities. But the philosophy on display here sees punishment not as a tool, but as justice itself. The President treats crime as an enemy he needs to subdued, not a symptom he needs to understand. He equates safety with dominance, but safety comes from trust. Finally, the President imagines law enforcement as innocence embodied, which means that anyone who questions its methods must be siding with the enemy.
His later orders only reinforce this worldview. He declared a “crime emergency” in Washington, D.C. and federalized the National Guard, implying that only centralized force can restore order. His attacks on cashless bail reframe suspicion as evidence enough for the state to preemptively punish anyone who it arrests, collapsing the presumption of innocence into the presumption of danger. And his order prioritizing the prosecution of flag burners revealed the sacred core of this punitive logic: protecting a national symbol is more important than protecting the constitutional freedom the symbol is supposed to represent.
The worldview that emerges from these orders believes justice is punishment, freedom is submission, and safety is obedience. It elevates punishment into a totalizing philosophy, which is brittle and incapable of adaptation in a world defined by volatility and unpredictability. In the singularity, punitive justice becomes less a foundation than a fascist’s bunker: airtight, rigid, and destined to collapse after the strongman turns the gun on himself.
Nationalism
Nationalism connects so many of the Trump Administration’s actions. They see nationalism not as just pride in one’s country but as loyalty demanded, ritualized, and enforced. It is everywhere in his executive orders.
The flag desecration order is the prime example. By demanding the Attorney General “vigorously prosecute” acts of flag burning, the state turns a piece of cloth into a sacred object. Loyalty to the symbol becomes more important than loyalty to our 1st Amendment rights. In Trump’s world, dissent is sacrilege, and the high-priest of the Justice Department is ordered to flay iconoclasts.
We can also look to his order to “Make Federal Architecture Beautiful Again.” It may seem cosmetic, but it’s actually about conformity. It tells us that legitimate civic authority must look familiar and traditional. The more complex values of modernism and postmodernism are cast as alien, and their innovations as heresy. Anything that feels different or new is un-American.
The same logic runs through the President’s order to defund NPR and PBS, institutions he accuses of political bias. Congress createdtThe Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 1967 because, among other reasons, “it is in the public interest to encourage the development of programming that involves creative risks and that addresses the needs of unserved and underserved audiences, particularly children and minorities.” Additionally, Congress created the CPB “to facilitate the development of public telecommunications and to afford maximum protection from extraneous interference and control.” In other words, our representsatives designed it as a sanctuary for pluralism. The President’s decision to cut it down narrows the field of acceptable voices and ensures that justice aligns with the state’s official creed. When PBS and NPR don’t flatter the nation, the nation treats them as apostate.
Meanwhile, his order on “restoring truth and sanity to American history” reveals nationalism’s deeper instinct: to control our national memory. He commands monuments and museums to present a purified national story, scrubbing the country’s past of any contradictions. For nationalists, history is not about inquiry but catechism. It is a ritualized rehearsal of belonging, designed to reinforce loyalty rather than provoke reflection.
And then there are all his “America First” policies, the “American Dominance” initiatives, the tariffs, the attacks on undocumented immigrants. Each one redraws the line between “us” and “them,” defining success as whatever advantage “we” can secure over “them.”
Nationalism sees the nation as both fortress and altar. It sacralizes our symbols. It dresses our buildings up as temples to tradition. It punishes our only non-capitalist-owned media for wandering off-script. It cleanses our history classrooms of inclusive taint. And it frames our nation’s economic and global affairs as holy war, a contest of tribal dominance.
But the singularity changes the world’s definition to global networks, planetary crises, and identities more fluid than borders. In the singularity, nationalism becomes less a suit of armor than the harbor fleet at anchor, flags flying in the dawn, brass polished to a shine, a force confident of its power, and yet utterly unprepared for the airstrike that will render all of its ceremonies useless.
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Meritocracy promises fairness. Punitive justice promises safety. Nationalism promises unity. In reality, each one is obsolete code from an old operating system, and they shatter under the weight of the singularity’s volatility.
Survival in a fast-changing world belongs to those who can bend, share, and adapt, not to those who insist we continue to worship old and dangerous idols.