Uncle Yarv #5: math edition

"You may ace the Putnam, but you are not worthy until you have made a girl moan."

[Please note: everyone who wrote in to “Uncle Yarv”, except girls (come on, girls! Really! You saw the rules! Besides, what do I know about girls anyway?), will get a response, probably short. All your letters are good. Like any advice columnist, I am not posting the best ones—just the best ones to riff off.]

Abdullah in Port-au-Prince writes:

I'm an 18-year-old who just recently dropped out of a Math PhD program. You already know how unbearable the university system has become. While mathematics itself can’t be corrupted by leftism, the people and culture around the departments have bought into it, hook, line and sinker. This year it’s so bad, in many graduate courses there are more mathematicians pretending to be women than there are women pretending to be mathematicians.

Few Gray Mirror readers will forget this memorable line.

My whole life up until this point I thought I was going to be a mathematician no matter what. But at some point, the rot and decay become too much to bear and you have to reevaluate everything, burn it all, and start fresh. This is the onerous task I'm dealing with here.

Rumor has it that the Bronze Age Pervert, too, once dabbled in mathematics. Some even say it was nothing less than category theory that first made this man dream of the revolt of vitalism, the return of the spirit of the Bronze Age, and the destruction of the cities in fire—but who can know?

You also dropped out of your PhD at a similar age, way before it was the cool thing to do.

Well, I mean, I was like, 20. Also computer science is a little different. I was always a math kid, and then I was 13 and I realized that differential equations are hard, which meant I was not going to be a mathematician. So I had to do something gay, right?

I'm wondering if you have any tales and life lessons you can pass on from that period of your life, after you quit academia and before you became the world's leading critical race theorist.

I have a million! (I am not the world’s leading critical race theorist—that would be a Siberian shaman known only as “Hakan”—from whom I have learned but little.) I would tell them all here, but I just told a bunch to some doofus who is writing a book. I kind of like him and it might cut in on his sales, don’t you think?

Is there stuff that went well that you should've done earlier? On the flip side, did you make any mistakes of youth that were costly in terms of time, energy, and power?

I made nothing but mistakes. I made so many mistakes it would freeze your bones. I took the wrong jobs, had the wrong friends, said the wrong things, and dated the wrong women. And it took especially hard work not to be an early Google employee or at least just Bitcoin whale—but I was up to that task.

Every regime change comes with a new elite class, a la Pareto. Eventually, the gods will decide that enough is enough and give /ourguy/s a chance to rule. What should a young man be doing now so that he is ready to jump into the patrician class and rule when the opportunity presents itself?

He should be doing more or less the same thing he should be doing if the gods do not so decide, or if there be no gods at all: succeeding.

Right now, I've been focusing on moneymaxxing and gymcelling.

I would add bookmaxxing and sarging. If you’re still on campus you can combine them by chatting up freshman girls in the library, like a creep. Just use your old ID card. You may ace the Putnam, but you are not yet worthy until you have made a girl moan.

Is this enough to become worthy? It seems to me like the above is the most efficient route for a young reactionary to gain a modicum of power. What would you do in my situation to go from literally 0 power to something non-negligible?

Go to law school?

But only a top school of course. In any top-tier institution you’ll find /ourguys/ are there—the closer to the top, the more of them there are. You’ll have to practice ketman, of course—but if you can ace the Putnam…

The next regime is always made of parts of the old regime. But it is never made of the dregs of the old regime—but of its most successful parts. While there are plenty of ways to succeed, it is simply a cope to suggest that any prospective regime change would obviate the need to succeed in the present regime. Statusmax, Abdullah!