The Ouroboric Gag, Part IV

Ontological Hallucinations and Denial

“While the musicians were discreetly tuning up, men in evening dress could be seen moving from one row to another, bowing gracefully to friends under the flood of light bathing the proscenium. In the soft hum of well-mannered conversation they regained the confidence denied them when they walked the dark streets of the town; evening dress was a sure charm against plague.” - Albert Camus

Our school has a “Renaissance Reader” program, an idea I learned about and adapted from Dennis Manning, former Head of School at Norfolk Academy, who, from everything I have heard, seems to have been a very good leader. But in my last post, I quoted Daniel Quinn—“If the world is saved, it will not be saved by old minds with new programs but by new minds with no programs at all”—and adding a program to a.) get students to read more and b.) provide time for students and teachers to engage in an intellectual discussion seems like a contradiction to everything this series has been pushing against.

It’s addition, not subtraction. It adds to the bolus the Ouroboros is gagging on. The great swelling we independent-school leaders have been complicit in for several decades now.

The “Renaissance Reader” program allows students to choose six or more books a year (from a list of 12) to read, and when they finish a book, their last step is to have an “intellectual discussion”¹ with the faculty sponsor. Students who become “renaissance readers” are recognized at awards day.

The fundamental goals of this program are laudable: no grades; built-in and challenge-by-choice; learning for learning’s sake (hardly anyone completes it for the accolade); a high level of intellectual engagement; and formative, developmental conversations about the student’s ideas and what they carried away with them from their experience with the book.

But if you’ve been reading this series faithfully, then you might ask…

• Why do you have to add programs to a system if it is functioning properly? Isn’t that why the Ouroboros is gagging?

• Additional programs add to the incoherence independent schools are facing, not to mention the increased metabolic costs for teachers, right?

• What role do these types of programs play for independent schools if they are tangential to the core drivers of the “college admissions industrial complex” (Molochian forces), the superorganism that orients so many of our “strategic” decisions?

You’re absolutely right to ask these questions, even if the program is “ideal” (i.e., employs literature in the service of adolescent development, while generating a high level of attunement between student and teacher). It certainly does have a metabolic cost for the adults—they have to read their choice book deeply to ensure they can facilitate a discussion with the student; they have to schedule a time with the student during their planning period or after school, when they could be working on other things. It’s an addition to the already robust cadre of programmatic offerings, and so adds to the complexity and potential incoherence of the system, the swollen bolus preventing renewal—We have a new reading program? What is their English class for, then?

But no, though it may not be immediately obvious, the “Renaissance Reader” program is not tangential to Molochian forces; it’s what we call a “differentiator”: participation in this program potentially disrupts the otherwise efficient sorting process in college admissions. It suggests something “genuine” about the student’s love for learning and can be used to outcompete other candidates with similar GPAs and SAT scores. Not all students think like that, of course, but the logic of a system oriented toward perverse incentives refuses even to share the crumbs from its abundance. Moloch demands the sacrifice of all you love most and pollutes even the purest of intentions, because not doing so threatens the gravity that binds us to his Faustian bargain.

And yet, despite all of these realities, I love the “Renaissance Reader” program.

And God help me, I want more students to participate, which means increasing our community’s metabolic costs and increasing student and teacher burnout—this impulse is bound to the lamentation that began this series, and if I’m really honest, represents the quixotic hope that with enough of these “good” programs, the whole system will re-orient toward human development, that they may bind us against Moloch because we recognize their obvious goodness, which is unpalatable to Moloch.

But I should be honest about what that hope actually is. It is the belief—irrational, stubborn, and not entirely unlike the thinking I have been indicting throughout this series—that if we accumulate enough good programs, enough pockets of genuine human engagement, the system will eventually tip toward something better. That the Renaissance Readers will multiply until reading for its own sake becomes the norm rather than the exception. That Moloch can be slowly starved by feeding what he cannot digest. This is, of course, a program in exactly Quinn’s sense: a pre-packaged response from an old mind that cannot quite bring itself to imagine that the container itself must break before anything genuinely new can grow.

I know this. You probably know this, too.

And I still want more students to participate. Perhaps that is what it means to work inside a system you no longer fully believe in—you tend the small fires because you cannot yet bring yourself to burn the house down, which sounds terribly unwise, and because the people warming themselves at those fires are real, and they are right in front of you.

This year, I sponsored Albert Camus’s The Plague. I had always wanted to read it, and this program gave me the opportunity. What emerged in my reading and discussions is a framework—a textbook framework—for how humans respond to dire situations that are beyond their comprehension, whose scale is too vast to grasp, and that demand significant alterations in the way they live and think.

I think it’s useful to apply this framework to independent schools navigating the Metacrisis. And before I do, I want to say something plainly: the people inside these institutions are not villains. The men in evening dress believed in the evening dress. That is different from knowing it was a costume and wearing it anyway. What follows is not an accusation of personal moral failure. It is an attempt to name something structural and ontological that most of us have inherited rather than chosen—and that we cannot begin to change until we can see it clearly.

Denial Is the First Reflex:

No one wants to name what is happening, the reality of our situation.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of dead rats emerge from the sewers of Oran, plague-ridden and suffering a grotesque death; piles of them litter the streets, school playgrounds, and cafe terraces: “It was as if the earth on which our houses stood were being purged of its secreted humors; thrusting up to the surface the abscesses and pus-clots that had been forming in its entrails.” The initial reaction is dismissal—nothing to see here², just some odd, disconnected phenomena—followed by bureaucratic hesitation to name the problem. No one wants to cause a panic, understandably.

The system protects its self-image by refusing to see reality, even as reality worsens.

And here is the reality: Independent schools are perpetuating the Metacrisis by either ignoring, championing, or remaining blissfully unaware of their “modern hallucinations”³—the ontological beliefs so deeply embedded that they no longer feel like beliefs at all. They feel like the air. The structural problems I have been describing throughout this series aren’t causes. They’re symptoms. The disease runs deeper.

The plague is our fundamental—and often unconscious—ontological beliefs.

Before naming them, it’s worth saying what makes them hallucinations rather than simply values: they are beliefs about the nature of reality that the evidence no longer supports, that the Metacrisis is actively disconfirming, and that we continue to transmit to students as though they were self-evident truths.

Here they are:

• Separation Is Real: Independent schools teach students to think of themselves as individual achievers in a competitive landscape, systematically obscuring the relational and ecological webs that made their achievement possible in the first place. And not only that—independent schools think of themselves as truly “independent,” which, as I will argue later in this series, is not only structurally false but makes us a significant contributor to the Metacrisis. The myth of separation is not just something we teach. It is something we are.

• Progress Is Linear: Every strategic plan produced by an independent school in the last thirty years has pointed in one direction: more. More programs, more technology, more square footage, more AP offerings, more endowment. The possibility that less might be wiser is structurally unthinkable. Accumulation is what we sell parents and students, and when those measures of growth are all external, then “competitiveness” becomes the highest virtue—which reinforces the hallucination that we are separate, independent entities in a zero-sum world.

• Nature Is a Resource: We celebrate the sustainability initiatives our students pitch in their research class, while simultaneously preparing students for careers in industries whose foundational logic treats the natural world as raw material for human consumption. This is a fact we remain largely silent about. The recycling bin outside the main office is not a contradiction we have learned to feel, and that numbness is itself part of the problem.

• Growth Can Be Infinite: Enrollment targets, capital campaigns, and rankings all presuppose that the school’s health is measured by expansion. A school that chose to shrink deliberately—to serve fewer students more deeply—would be considered failing by every metric the industry uses. Consider, for example, how many environmental, political, and economic challenges emerge from having 8 billion people sharing the planet, and yet, when we see birth rates declining, it becomes a strategic emergency for independent schools that rely on steady or increasing enrollment to function. De-growth is not permitted as a serious option.

• Consumption Equals Happiness: The campus itself is often the argument: state-of-the-art facilities, manicured grounds, dining halls with fourteen options. We have built environments that equate abundance with flourishing, and then wonder why our students struggle to tolerate scarcity or discomfort. And negligent consumption is hardly a topic we address: for example, right now, there is an absolute craze to accumulate as many “squishy” NeeDo fidget toys at our school. Are we having a conversation about the energy and environmental damage required to meet the demands of our students’ hijacked brains?

• Individual Success Is the Measure of Worth: Awards day is a ceremony of separation—the students called forward from the students seated. We ritualize the sorting and call it recognition, then express surprise when the community feels thin or divided. The mere suggestion that success is collective or communal is anathema in our independent schools; it is, in the highest religious sense, blasphemy.

• Social Mobility Is the Purpose of Education: When we tell students that education is the path to a better life, we mean a more financially secure life, separate from and not responsible for communal challenges, which means we have already conceded the terms of Moloch’s bargain before the student has opened a single book. This is part of the American ethos, in general, and throughout our history has manifested in our laws, architecture, and economic policies, and has led to careless expansion, which has contributed to our spiritual crisis, one element of the Metacrisis. This is part of a specifically American pathology, one that James Kunstler articulates with precision in The Geography of Nowhere:

  “Community is not something you have, like pizza. Nor is it something you can buy. It’s a living organism based on a web of interdependencies—which is to say, a local economy. It expresses itself physically as connectedness, as buildings actively relating to each other, and to whatever public space exists, be it the street, or the courthouse or the village green.”

  The independent school campus is, in many ways, the architectural argument against everything Kunstler is describing: a deliberately bounded, aesthetically coherent, self-sufficient world that models separation from the surrounding community rather than embeddedness in it. We build belonging inside the gates.

• Science and Technology Will Save Us: We have added coding curricula, AI literacy programs, and maker spaces with the quiet faith that the tools that created the Metacrisis will, with sufficient student ingenuity, resolve it. This is not education. It is the same hallucination with better equipment. This is why I am exhausted by the conversations around AI. AI is just the latest development that will be metabolized by the logic of Molochian forces and keep us on the path toward eventual chaos and collapse. The Aymara people of South America have a unique way of visualizing time: the past is in front of them—visible, known, already happened—and the future is behind them, unseen, because it hasn’t arrived yet. This is the complete inversion of the Western orientation, which faces an imagined future with inexhaustible optimism and rarely pauses to study, contemplate, or be genuinely instructed by the past. We are too busy moving forward to notice what we are leaving behind.

• Certainty and Mastery Are Attainable: Grades, rubrics, learning objectives, and standards all perform the same function: they convert the irreducibly complex act of human development into something measurable, and then mistake the measurement for the thing itself. The tragedy is not that we measure—it’s that we have forgotten we are measuring a shadow, not the person.

• Reality Is Objective: We teach students that the world has correct answers and that their job is to find them—and then release them into a civilization whose most pressing problems are not waiting for the right answer but for the courage to live differently inside irreducible uncertainty.

These hallucinations have consequences. They lead independent schools to impact the Metacrisis in at least three direct ways.

They reproduce the leaders who drive it.

Independent schools exist primarily to prepare students for selective colleges, which exist primarily to credential students for positions of economic and institutional power. The students who pass through this pipeline disproportionately become the decision-makers—in finance, technology, policy, energy, media—whose choices scale. Independent schools are not merely adjacent to the Metacrisis. They are finishing schools for the people who will manage, accelerate, or potentially interrupt it. What those students believe about the world when they leave matters enormously, and right now the schools are largely handing them the hallucinations intact.

They legitimize the values that sustain it.

The hidden curriculum of an independent school—what the building says, what awards day says, what the strategic plan says, etc.—teaches a remarkably coherent set of values: individual achievement is the measure of worth, competitive advantage is the goal of learning, consumption signals flourishing, and the future is something you optimize for rather than something you inherit responsibility for. These aren’t incidental. They are the load-bearing walls of the institutional culture, and they are precisely the values that the Metacrisis requires us to outgrow.

They model the wrong relationship to crisis.

Perhaps most damaging is what independent schools implicitly teach about how to respond when something is wrong. The answer modeled is almost always: add a program, rebrand the mission, hire a consultant, launch a strategic initiative, issue a statement. The answer is never: stop, look honestly at what we are, and ask whether the institution in its current form is part of the problem. Camus’s Oran is instructive here. The men in evening dress are not villains. They are people doing what institutions train people to do—maintaining the appearance of normalcy because the alternative requires a kind of courage the institution has never asked of them and would not know how to reward.

And every day, incredible teachers work within this system, to buck against it, to rage against its transactional drift; they are renegades, and many are found in independent schools, drawn there by the autonomy to stretch their legs within the American educational system (shout out to TJ Gee at Park Tudor School). Students love them, administrators may, too—but often, they frustrate the “business as usual” ethos. And while they may be politely allowed to exist, their existence is nevertheless encouraging, but it’s not enough to tip the scales. We’ll explore this, too.

Denial is only the first stage of Camus’s framework. But as I just heard Laura Calderon de la Barca say on the Mind & Life Podcast, “To heal the system, you have to bring the system into the room.”

There is more to come—and more, I think, that independent schools have yet to move through. But this post has already grown too long! The next post will take up what follows denial, and what it might ask of us. And yes, the question of what binding might look like—what is still possible and what has already failed—is coming, as I promised in my last post.

1. We don’t create a rubric for “intellectual discussion.”

2. A shoutout to Will Richardson, who often uses this phrase in his social media posts about the “dead rats” that are emerging and piling high while we continue to ignore the problems.

3. This list comes from Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s Outgrowing Modernity: Navigating Complexity, Complicity, and Collapse with Accountability and Compassion: 62-68.