You Are Enough
Installment 4 -- Dispensations from Discipline — The Teachers’ Betrayal
Editor’s Note for New Readers
This series, You Are Enough, tells the story of a lone survivor reflecting in the last days of a collapsed world. The collapse did not come by plague or bomb, but by a fungus of the spirit, long present in church, culture, and family life, which spread the validation of individuals: You are good. You are right. You are enough.
Our narrator, now sitting in the ruins of a courtroom where he sought safety, looks back on how those spores hollowed out individuals and institutions. The courts had become safe precisely because the lazy lawyers who presided and prosecuted had themselves been softened by validating schools. Their culture-validated contempt for free thought made them darlings of the mobs, who defended their courtrooms with their lives.
From this unlikely refuge, our protagonist recalls the unraveling: scholars abandoned their labs, utilities failed, justice crumbled, and colleges coddled, places where toughness was treated as trauma and validation became the creed.
So, the root, he concludes, is a fault in of society, ne, civilization itself: a weakening of an institution which was no longer a pier above the tides. Indeed, the Academy’s failure became the world’s undoing.
And so he begins again, speaking into the silent courtroom……
In the end, we had not seen the faults in education.
Not just the Sporeminaries that handed out diplomas like holy dispensations, but the whole Academy was denatured. Colleges should have trained us in the slowness of truth — in the grind of deep diving, in the humility to know that knowing takes years, even lifetimes. Instead, they canonized shortcuts: validation instead of rigor, certainty instead of curiosity, credentials instead of wisdom.
The spores found their way into lecture halls easily, for the ground had already been prepared. Trustees learned to worship profit; politicians demanded ever-higher enrollments; faculties flattered students because tuition dollars were their lifeblood. Courses thinned. Standards sagged. A downward spiral of dissipation set in. The brightest voices no longer asked, What is true? but only, What will sell? Degrees without depth. Credentials without contribution. Honors without honesty. Listen to profits, not prophets.
Reinforce random rabbit holes. Don’t decry delusion.
Some graduates bore their ignorance like ordained dogma, others like native superiority. But all resisted correction. They carried into politics and policy the very traits their schools had modeled: arrogance, subjectivity, and superiority. They learned early to repeat what was rewarded, to parrot without proving, to bear a witness that was false but flattering.
And so, when the great global conflicts arose, our leaders answered with tariffs, tantrums, and slogans — because no one had taught them that the world is complicated, that alliances are key and require patience, that truth is slow. Autocracy, Inc. pressed its advantage while we squandered ours, sneering at allies and mistaking insult for strength.
It was the teachers that failed us. They taught us to seem good, to sound smart, not to be wise. They taught us to graduate, not to learn. Unconditional love without any balance. They taught us that we were enough — when in truth, we were not even close.
Once the schools failed, the courts were bound to follow. For how could justice stand when its stewards were trained only in validation and contempt? Or not really trained at all. And if education could no longer teach faithfulness to Truth, then false witness was sure to take its place.