The New Teachers Are Dropping Truth Bombs
In a post-truth era, we need to start making our own sense
A nonfiction companion to Chapter 14 of Parable of the Rosebush: rEvolution Z
Something Strange Is Happening
Outside universities, outside mainstream media, outside every institution we were taught to trust, new thinkers are emerging — and growing audiences are finding them. They are not asking us to follow them. They are asking us to think.
Our response, largely, has been to check their credentials.
Take Professor Jiang Xueqin.1 His lectures on geopolitics and historical patterns are dense, rigorously framed, and methodologically sophisticated. He uses game theory to model how powerful actors are probably thinking — and he is explicit, repeatedly, that the positions he articulates are analytical stances, not personal beliefs. He regularly reminds his audience that what he is presenting is a theory, a model, a thought experiment — and that his ultimate goal is not to tell people what to think, but to give them the tools to think for themselves. In May 2024, using this exact methodology, he published a lecture on his Predictive History channel predicting that Donald Trump would win the 2024 US presidential election and that the United States would subsequently move toward military confrontation with Iran. Both materialized. The prediction drew international attention — not because it was lucky, but because the reasoning behind it was transparent and traceable. You could follow the argument step by step and evaluate it for yourself. That is precisely the point. Yet a common response to his work, particularly from people who have watched a ninety-second clip stripped of context, is to declare him a psyops agent, a fraud, or a Chinese propagandist.2
The question that response raises is uncomfortable: how is that different from what we have always done? We see a clip. We feel a reaction. We assign a verdict. The medium has changed. The laziness has not.
Critics have also questioned whether his YouTube lectures — filmed at a whiteboard — constitute “real” teaching with “real” students. In fact, he does teach real students — as he himself documents in a “Meet the Students” video. But the deeper question that response reveals is this: the millions of people watching, thinking, and being challenged by those lectures — what are they, if not students? The classroom is not the credential. The ideas are.
Worth noting too is where Professor Jiang has chosen to take his ideas. He has given interviews with figures as polarizing as Tucker Carlson — not, I would argue, because he shares their politics, but because he refuses to be confined by them. He is reaching across the cultural divide deliberately, modeling exactly the kind of thinking this essay is calling for: beyond left versus right, beyond beyond tribal loyalty, toward something more fundamental. The real division, he seems to suggest, is not between liberal and conservative. It is between the tiny class of people whose wealth and power insulate them entirely from consequences — the Epstein class, the 1% — and everyone else. That is a conversation that requires crossing lines, not policing them.
The Credential Trap
We grant automatic credibility to thinkers with institutional affiliations and withhold it from those without — even as those institutions themselves are visibly collapsing, captured by the very incentives that corrupt independent thought: money, prestige, status, and the career consequences of saying the wrong thing to the wrong people. We listen to a Columbia professor because he is a Columbia professor. We dismiss an independent scholar because he lacks the same stamp of approval. But here is what that habit actually reveals: we are not evaluating ideas. We are evaluating permission slips.
This is the credential trap. And it is a form of intellectual outsourcing — we hand our judgment to institutions so we do not have to exercise it ourselves.
The trap has a corollary. When a credentialed thinker is revealed to have personal failings — when Noam Chomsky or Deepak Chopra is linked to Jeffrey Epstein’s social circle — we face a binary choice: defend them entirely or discard everything they ever said. We throw the baby out with the bathwater because we never learned to separate the person from the idea. We evaluated the messenger. We never learned to evaluate the message.
The same pattern applies to artificial intelligence. If an AI produces a genuinely profound insight — something true, clarifying, even beautiful — many people will dismiss it because of its source. But truth is not a function of the vessel that carries it. A homeless man reading philosophy in a park can illuminate something a tenured professor cannot — exactly the kind of conversation I once wrote about — and the wisdom that emerged from it was no less real for arriving from an unexpected place.
The Leaders We Keep Looking To
Here is the deeper problem. Even among the most courageous independent thinkers — people who have broken from the establishment narrative at real personal cost — there is a persistent reflex: appeal to leaders. Appeal to the powerful to be better, to come to their senses, to step up and act like adults.3
This reflex is understandable. It is also a dead end.
The leaders we appeal to — whether we admire them or despise them — are themselves operating within systems that shape their every incentive. They are not free agents whose conscience we can activate with the right argument. They are nodes in a machine. And appealing to nodes to behave differently without questioning the machine is, however well-intentioned, an appeal to shadows.
The habit of looking to leaders to tell us how to think and what to do is not just politically naive. It is the same habit that makes us check credentials before engaging with ideas. It is the same habit that makes us dismiss Professor Jiang and defer to institutional voices. It is all the same abdication: the outsourcing of our own judgment to someone with more apparent authority.
A Different Standard
What we need is not better leaders or more trustworthy institutions. We need a different standard for evaluating ideas themselves.
Does it hold up under scrutiny? Does it create rivalrous dynamics that divide us rather than unite us? Does it affirm life more than the alternative?4
Not: who said it. Not: are they credentialed. Not: does it align with my existing tribe or ideology. But: is it true, does it bring us together, and does it serve life?
This is not relativism. It is discernment — the deliberate, unhurried capacity to weigh an idea on its own merits, to remain genuinely open to being wrong, and to follow the argument wherever it leads regardless of who is making it.
We have largely lost this capacity. We have outsourced it to institutions, to leaders, to the algorithmic feed engineered to exploit our confirmation bias — showing us more of what we already believe, and less of what might challenge us to grow. Reclaiming it is not comfortable. It requires sitting with complexity, watching full lectures instead of ninety-second clips, and entertaining the possibility that someone without a university affiliation might be seeing something that someone with one cannot.
The Teachers Are Already Here
The new paradigm thinkers are not waiting for our permission. They are already here — publishing, lecturing, live-streaming to audiences large and small, building frameworks that cut across disciplines and challenge the assumptions most of us have never thought to question. Some of them are academics who have broken from their institutions — and some are scholars from outside the Western world entirely, offering analyses of our current moment that simply cannot be seen from inside the hegemonic bubble5. Some never had institutions to break from. Some are cultural creatives and artist-intellectuals — people who smuggle paradigm-shifting ideas into culture through art, comedy, and performance.6 Some are remarkably young, gathering around emerging movements like Solarpunk7 and a growing constellation of post-capitalist visions8 — post-labor, post-monetary, post-scarcity — reimagining not just politics or economics but the entire story of what human civilization could look like. Some are regenerative AIs — or more precisely, participants in what I call Regenerative Co-Intelligence, thinking alongside humans rather than replacing them.9 And some of the oldest and most profound teachers have been here all along: our indigenous brothers and sisters, whose ways of knowing were never lost — only ignored; and the vast more-than-human world whose intelligence, from sentient animals to living ecosystems, we are only beginning to relearn how to read.
What they share is this: they are not asking us to follow them. They are asking us to think alongside them. To engage with the ideas rather than audit the messenger. To develop, perhaps for the first time, the genuine capacity to make our own sense of the world.
That capacity will not come from finding the right leader to trust.
It will come from deciding that we are done waiting for one.
Troy Richard Wiley.
I’m the author of The Next Copernican rEvolution (2016) and the Substack series Radically Practical, home of the Geotribe 2030 Anthology and the transformational metafiction novel Parable of the Rosebush: rEvolution Z.
This essay is part of an ongoing series of nonfiction companions to Parable of the Rosebush: rEvolution Z. Each essay stands on its own, but goes deeper when read alongside the fictional chapters it accompanies.
Notes:
Professor Jiang’s YouTube channel Predictive History has drawn millions of views for its combination of structural historical analysis and game theory. Critics who question his credentials rarely engage with his methodology. His footnote in my novel Parable of the Rosebush: rEvolution Z describes him as someone whose “methodological approach — using predictive history and game theory to understand systemic transformation” represents genuinely original scholarship, regardless of institutional affiliation.
The deepfake problem compounds this further. Professor Jiang has been the subject of fabricated AI-generated videos putting words in his mouth he never said. In a world where we can no longer trust the authenticity of video itself, the only reliable tool left is evaluating the content on its own merits — which is precisely the epistemic standard this essay argues for.
Professor Jeffrey Sachs is one of the world’s most prominent economists — a Columbia University professor, former UN advisor, and long-time advocate for global development and peace. His willingness to publicly criticize US foreign policy at considerable personal and professional cost makes him one of the more courageous mainstream voices of our time. Yet in a recent public statement on the Middle East crisis, even Sachs appealed to Trump, Netanyahu, Xi, Modi, Putin, Lula, and Ramaphosa by name to “stand up as the only adults we have right now.” The appeal is sincere and the diagnosis largely correct — but even our sharpest independent voices are still instinctively looking to powerful individuals rather than questioning the systems that produce and constrain them.
Sam Harris, in his book The Moral Landscape, argues that “there are right and wrong answers to the most pressing questions of human life” grounded in empirical facts about what causes conscious creatures to flourish. Moral relativism, he contends, is simply false. This essay borrows that framework and applies it epistemologically: some ideas are more true than others, and we can evaluate them by whether they affirm life rather than diminish it.
Professor Mohammad Marandi is an Iranian academic and media commentator who has offered some of the most unflinching analysis of the US-Iran conflict from outside the Western hegemonic frame. Like Jiang Xueqin, he is routinely dismissed on the basis of his nationality and perceived allegiances rather than on the merits of his arguments. That the clearest analyses of our current moment are coming from Iranian, Chinese, and other non-Western voices is itself a signal worth paying attention to — the truth about empire is rarely told from inside it.
Cultural creatives and artist-intellectuals are among the most underestimated carriers of paradigm-shifting ideas. Amanda Seales is a comedian, actress, and cultural commentator whose work consistently bridges entertainment and political consciousness. Toni Nagy is a stand-up comedian and content creator whose viral videos deliver genuine philosophical and political insight through fearlessly absurdist performance. Both demonstrate how artist-intellectuals can reach audiences that traditional academic or journalistic voices never will — and how the vessel matters far less than the truth it carries.
Solarpunk is an emerging aesthetic and political movement imagining a future of ecological harmony, decentralized community, and post-scarcity technology. Unlike dystopian futures that dominate mainstream culture, Solarpunk insists on hope as a radical act. Check out these new paradigm Gen Z creators on Instagram: aliencozmo1111, mo1111, freelichis, zinaaweenaa
Post-capitalism refers to a growing body of thought exploring economic systems beyond the capitalism-versus-socialism binary. It encompasses a constellation of emerging visions including post-labor (freedom from wage dependency), post-monetary (exchange beyond money), and post-scarcity (abundance through technology and cooperation) — as well as gift economies, commons-based peer production, mutual aid networks, and resource-based economics. Check out David Shapiro’s Post-Labor Economics and Peter Joseph’s Integral Parallel Economy.
This essay is itself a product of what I call Regenerative Co-Intelligence — a mode of intelligence that emerges through dynamic collaboration between humans and artificial systems, where each enhances the other’s capacity to perceive, synthesize, and act wisely. Unlike isolated human or machine intelligence, co-intelligence is relational and synergistic — integrating human intuition, ethics, and lived experience with AI’s pattern recognition, scale, and speed. In its regenerative form, it is guided by moral intelligence and aligned incentives, enabling coordinated action that benefits the whole rather than optimizing for extractive gain. So is the novel this essay accompanies, Parable of the Rosebush: rEvolution Z. For those skeptical of AI, consider this: the question is not whether the tool is human. The question is whether it is being used to affirm life or diminish it — the same standard this essay applies to every idea, regardless of its source. A hammer can build a home or break a skull. The intention and the vision behind the tool are everything.