We’ve been taught to worry about stupid people in power. That’s the wrong fear. Broken systems don’t survive because nobody is smart enough to see through them. They survive because the people best-positioned to expose them are usually the people most rewarded for keeping them intact. The threat isn’t a shortage of intelligence, it’s intelligence that’s been bought—quietly and gradually, through incentives and status and the slow comfort of institutional belonging. This includes, it should be said, the intelligence of whoever is making this argument. Intelligence Is Not Independence There’s a