Cutting The Social Umbilical Cord

By Leo Gura - June 4, 2025

Don’t you see? If your mind is dependent on cues from society, if you need other human beings to validate for you what is true, real, right, and good, your mind can never develop beyond the development level of your culture. The only way to reach extraordinary levels of cognitive development is to go beyond every culture and every social group. This includes all religions, all universities, all corporations, all of science, all philosophical schools, all cults, all books, all podcasts, all forums, all AI, all social activities. Notice, the more developed your mind becomes, the further beyond culture it must go, the less social validation you will get. Eventually you will become so developed that you will be all alone. No one you know will be at your level of understanding. You will understand reality so deeply no one in society will understand you and you will not be able to explain it to them because they haven’t gone through the arduous and hairy development journey. This is a major reason why extraordinary development is so rare.

People do not appreciate how much of their development only exists because of the on-the-rails mechanisms that society offers — such as school or university. But who would you be, what development level would you have, without university? University is just taken for granted. University makes a certain level of development easy and automatic because it leverages the human mind’s readiness to follow the herd. No university kid is intelligent enough to have invented university on his own. He’s only there because society told him to go there, brainwashed him that it is right and good and normal. But imagine trying to reach a university level of development 2500 years ago all by yourself. That’s analogous to the challenge of reaching extraordinary development today, to go an order of magnitude in development beyond universities.

People do not appreciate the social push-back and isolation. How comfortable are you being all alone? How comfortable are you being misunderstood by everyone you know? How comfortable are you with everyone telling you that you’re wrong and delusional? How comfortable are you with being demonized and smeared? How comfortable are you with being unemployable? How comfortable are you with contradicting all of science, religion, business, politics, and culture? Very few humans have the strength of character and integrity required to reach and sustain an extraordinary level of development because it requires overcoming your emotional dependence on the whole social domain. Do not underestimate how emotionally dependent every human is on the social domain. Your mind craves validation, approval, love, friends, social status, being liked, fitting in, being part of a like-minded group, being regarded as good rather than dangerous.

See, when an academic or scientist begins the journey of studying reality, it never occurs to him that the understanding will eventually get so deep that he will become a social outcast, leaving behind all human conventions, and be treated as a traitor and crackpot by all his colleagues. Almost no scientist or academic has the balls needed to reach extraordinary cognitive development. That’s how serious social incentives are. Science and academia is all done within the domain of social survival. Reaching extraordinary cognitive development requires cutting the social umbilical cord, which most humans are not willing to do because the costs are so high. The costs are material but also emotional. The emotional labor has a real bite which rationalists tend to overlook because scientific rationality has the benefit of being the norm in today’s elite society. But good luck if you dare to question rationality and science. Now you get huge push-back and gaslighting from the Social Matrix.

Extraordinary development cannot be reached by following others, it requires leading yourself into mental territory no one has dared to go. It requires questioning things none of your colleagues is willing to question. It requires studying exotic, unconventional domains that your colleagues consider taboo. It requires a different mindset, attitude, values, and motivation than everyone else. It requires detaching yourself from the social domain, which means not only less friends and sex, it means losing many of the benefits of society. It literally endangers your life. So why do it? You’d need some extraordinary motivation that transcends survival.

Nobody appreciates just how deeply they are embedded in social survival. Just that insight is emotionally difficult to handle and will take you a decade or two of work to fully comprehend. Scientists just assume that they can reach truth or serious understanding without it rocking their social situation. This is very naive. That’s not how serious understanding works. Because reality is just that profound.

Contemplate this question:

What are all the reasons that extraordinary levels of cognitive development are so rare?

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