Another blaring alarm sounding off in your ear. Another frozen toaster waffle burnt to a crisp by the fires of your neglect. Another hot, sweaty Red Line car packed to the brim with the miserable denizens of the morning commute. Whether you’re a battle-hardened veteran or a wide-eyed new recruit, school is now in session. But as you sit in class listening to your professor drone on about the time they played shuffleboard with Christopher Walken off the coast of Gibraltar, you may begin to wonder why you’re here.
Now, I don’t mean that in an existential kind of way—I don’t want to get too nihilistic. What I’m trying to get at here is that you may be having second thoughts about pursuing a college degree. What made you decide to go to college in the first place? Nagging parents? Misplaced motivation? Societal expectations? It doesn’t matter, because regardless of what your reason was, you made a mistake. To become successful in this country, the last thing you want is a college diploma. What am I suggesting then? I’m suggesting that you drop out. Let me explain.
Whether you take your advice from George Orwell or Pink Floyd, it becomes clear that there exists only three kinds of people: dogs, pigs and sheep. The pigs run the farm, the dogs think they run the farm and the sheep prop up the system. College is part of that system, and it exists solely for sheep and sometimes dogs, but never pigs. Let me ask you: Out of those three, which would you prefer to be? I’ll give you a hint.
To be a dog or a sheep living within a capitalist system, there is only one way of life: to work until your fingers are raw. To put your nose to the grindstone until the only thing you’re smelling is the inescapable, paranoid fear that at a moment’s notice, you could be cast aside and replaced. It’s pushing yourself so hard that if you were to rub the calluses on your hands against sandpaper, the sandpaper would become smooth. This is the system delicately crafted by the pigs in order to hold on to their power and the only way to avoid becoming another cog in their dystopian design is to forgo your education to join their ranks. To become one of the porky ones.
Instead of going to college, you’ll begin your road to success by embarking on a vision quest. The goal of this quest is to isolate your mind by removing the noise of the outside world, thus traveling into your consciousness and finding your inner guide. The human mind is like an egg. Society constructs a shell around the yolk of our psyche, and only through breaking this shell and crawling back into the yolk, can we find the truth within. Of course, this is only possible through the use of hallucinogenic drugs. Magic mushrooms, acid, salvia or a good, old-fashioned peyote plant will do just fine.
Once you free your mind from the confines of the system, the next step is to start a business. It really doesn’t matter in the slightest what this business is or even if it’s ethical. The important thing here is that you form a company in your name that you have full control of. It could be a corporation that sells 3D-printed mule organs passing as human, or perhaps even a delivery service exclusively for sex toys. It could literally be anything as long as it starts out of your parent’s garage. It must start out of your parent’s garage. If your parents don’t have a garage, are dead or both, you’ll have to figure something out. This isn’t a suggestion, it’s a requirement.
To take a business and turn it into a multi-million dollar crowning jewel of what humanity can achieve at its full potential, you don’t need to be a computer engineer or a programmer or a rocket scientist. And you certainly don’t need a college degree. There’s only one trait you need to possess for success: You need to be an a—hole.
Your mission is your mindset, and anyone who seeks to prevent you from obtaining your goals is obstructing destiny itself. Remember, you are always the smartest person in the room. Always. You are the most capable person to complete any given task, and when you don’t get what you want, you stand in the toilet barefoot and you cry. When you shake someone’s hand, you maintain eye contact. A cold, soul-piercing gaze. You hold the grip until their knuckles turn white. Ten-seconds. Thirty-seconds. Fifty-seconds. Right around the minute-and-a-half mark, they’ll start to smell the bacon sizzling. This is your way of making sure they know their place.
The nature of pigs tends to be a cannibalistic one, and by this point in your career—if you’re doing it right—you’ll start to be viewed as a threat. Supposed colleagues will try to force you out. They’ll try to oust you from power and claim the throne for themselves. This is why it’s absolutely essential to be threatening at all times. After all, the best way to rule is through fear.
Determining what kind of threat to use in a situation can be tough for anyone in power, but I find that a good ol’ personal attack tends to work the best. As they say, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. If someone questions your authority, you don’t go after them, you go after their family. You tell them you’re going to kill their kids. Of course, you would never actually do it—it might harm your image. And besides, that’s a bone you can throw to the dogs.
I assume that by now you’ve become fully convinced that a college degree has no place on your path to success. However, one important fact still remains. This ain’t no Gryffindor, and this sure as hell ain’t no Hufflepuff. This s— is Slytherin. To put it simply, it’s evil. But of course, you’re well aware of this. After all, it’s this level of self-awareness that truly separates the pigs from the dogs. While the dogs quarrel amongst themselves, desperately clinging to their tiny morsels of perceived power, the pigs snicker from the shadows, reveling in the knowledge that their insignificant underlings compete out of a sense of genuine self-righteousness. They actually believe that their actions are morally justified.
Pigs, on the other hand, are fully aware that they’re in the wrong and realize their actions are governed by an unquenchable thirst not for wealth, but for power. The power to bend the heavens to their will. The power to construct an impenetrable fortress at the center of human civilization from which they’ll rule as untouchable deities. Inside this temple will lie the spoils of their conquest and the severed heads of those who stood to defy them. Those who doubted them will be plastered across the walls. And do you know what you won’t see anywhere on those walls? A diploma.