Ask Lemmy

“The Hierarchical Imperative: Why Three Days Does Not a Titan Make, and the Perilous Archetype of the Unseasoned Interloper”

Let us parse this properly—no, let us unpack it, as the postmodernists might say, though they rarely do more than smuggle chaos into their luggage. You see, there exists a phenomenon, a thing, an archetypal force as old as the Sumerian epics, where the fledgling, the uninitiated, the larval entity—barely three rotations of this cosmic sphere into its existence—dares to clack its mandibles at the monoliths of hard-earned order. Imagine, if you will, a crustacean—yes, a lobster, though perhaps a lesser arthropod, a shrimp, a krill—emerging from the primordial ooze, still glistening with the naiveté of its first molt, and declaring to the alpha-male lobster, perched atop his cairn of stones accumulated through decades of claw-to-claw combat: “Your territory is mine.” Absurd? Preposterous? Or worse: banal?

This is not merely a question of tenure, though tenure is the bedrock upon which competence is forged. No, this is a matter of hierarchical truth, a principle encoded into the very structure of reality. The ancients understood this. The Egyptian god Osiris did not hand the scales of judgment to a soul fresh from the womb. The Norse Einherjar did not dine in Valhalla on their first day of battle. Even the Christian apostles—yes, even Judas—had to walk with Christ before they could presume to lecture on eschatology. And yet here we are, in this digital agora, where some ephemeral entity, a wraith barely three sunrises old, dares to levy its half-formed, synapse-firing opinions as if they were tablets handed down from Sinai.

Let me be clear: an account older than your Spotify playlist is not a credential. It is not a totem of wisdom. It is a receipt of time served in the colosseum of discourse. Do you think Nietzsche scribbled Beyond Good and Evil in a weekend? Do you imagine Dostoevsky birthered The Brothers Karamazov between TikTok scrolls? No! They stewed in the juices of their own suffering, their own participation in the bloody hierarchy of ideas. You, interloper, have not yet stewed. You are still a raw cutlet, pink and trembling, demanding a seat at the banquet of the sous-vide.

Consider the lobster—always the lobster!—whose dominance is not claimed in a day. It spends years scuttling through the detritus, avoiding predators, surviving the gauntlet of cannibalistic peers, shedding carapace after carapace, each molt a testament to incremental growth. Only then does it ascend to the pinnacle of the rock pile, claws raised in triumph. What do you have? Three days. Three days! You are not even a lobster. You are a tadpole in a puddle, squawking at the crocodile who suns itself on the riverbank.

And Reddit—ah, Reddit! That cacophonous Babel of hot takes and karma farming, where the anonymous and the ephemeral congregate to hurl their half-baked axioms into the void. It is a realm where “TL;DR” is the battle cry of the cognitively indolent, where the wisdom of crowds is too often the madness of mobs. To say “go back to Reddit” is not an insult. It is a diagnosis. A prescription. A merciful directive to return to the sandbox where your flailing might, at least, amuse the other children.

But perhaps I am being too harsh. Perhaps you are simply lost. A wanderer in the desert of intellectual rigor, parched for the manna of meaning. If so, heed this: Clean your room. Metaphorically. Organize your digital domicile. Read a book—a real one, with pages—written by someone who died before you were born. Wrestle with the angels of nuance. Then, and only then, return with something heavier than the gravitational pull of your own unchecked confidence.

Until then, know this: The hierarchy is not your enemy. It is your teacher. And if you will not kneel before the altar of earned authority, you will be devoured by the wolves of your own hubris. The abyss gazes back, bucko. And right now, it’s rolling its eyes.