The Kung Fu Crisis, Part II

Earlier this week, I posted about the aesthetics of intelligence and what happens when cognition becomes something you can simulate, download, or fake with enough confidence. You can read that piece here.

This follow-up pushes the idea a bit further. Not just what’s happening, but why it feels the way it does — like everything’s polished, confident, and a little bit hollow.

::: pullquote Everyone knows kung fu now. But nobody remembers what it’s for. :::

This one gets a little abstract, a little epistemic, and maybe a little mad-at-the-multiverse.

If I veer into slop, well, at least it’s interesting slop.

Everyone’s faking it now. Worse, they’re mostly faking it well enough. Mostly.

Trump’s latest tariff proposal reads like it was optimized for coherence, not consequence — 10% across the board, 54% for China, 20% for the EU. The justification hits all the right rhetorical beats: trade imbalances, job protection, national strength. But the math doesn’t hold. It’s a white paper written by vibes. Whether it was authored by a human or by someone thinking like an LLM is irrelevant. The structure is there. The logic-tree is intact. But the outcome is absurd.

This is what happens when cognition becomes a product — when we reward clarity of format over clarity of consequence. We’ve made it easy to simulate insight. And now the people in power are doing it on purpose.

Everyone knows kung fu now.

Or at least, everyone looks like they do. Thought arrives fully formed, movements crisp, arguments tight, analogies punchy. No hesitation, no strain. Insight, or the appearance of it, is everywhere — downloadable, composable, endlessly repeatable.

But real thought was never that clean. It wobbles. It doubles back. It forgets what it was saying halfway through and circles the drain until something clicks. It requires lived uncertainty — not just the idea of doubt, but the gut-churning discomfort of not knowing.

What we’ve built instead is a culture of cognitive choreography. We’ve industrialized the forms of insight without their origins. The aesthetic of knowing has replaced the act of discovery. And in a world where the right words are always one prompt away, what’s left to fight for?

We’ve become fluent in wisdom we never earned — and worse, we’ve started to prefer it that way.

What’s strange is how familiar this should be. Pop culture already primed us for it. We’ve long adored protagonists whose minds function like narrative engines — Sherlock, Doctor Who, House, Data. Characters who observe, deduce, and deliver conclusions that feel supernatural only because they skip the part where uncertainty lives. Their cognition is stylized, theatrical — and we eat it up. We don’t just tolerate intellectual performance, we mythologize it.

But only when it’s internal.

The second that kind of cognition becomes externalized — when you use a tool, a model, a system — it suddenly becomes illegitimate. Fake. Less-than. We celebrate minds that conjure insights from nowhere, but turn suspicious the moment someone admits they needed scaffolding. The savant is a genius; the person with a prosthesis is a cheat.

We want intelligence to be mythic, not mechanical. Because if it’s mechanical, then anyone could do it. And that terrifies people more than ignorance ever did.

I tried to fight that impulse once — the urge to make thinking look good. I took a swing at the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, mostly out of boredom and nerdspite. I built flawed alternatives, annoyed a physicist friend, stacked bad models on top of worse ones. It didn’t go anywhere. But it wasn’t useless. The process itself showed me where my reach ended — not because someone told me, though the expertise helped, but because the math did. That kind of failure doesn’t go viral. It might not even be the kind of thing you talk about. But it teaches you something. The aesthetics of insight can’t do that.

The real crisis isn’t misinformation or manipulation — we’ve always had those. The crisis is credibility without cognition, structure without source, meaning without memory. The old gatekeepers are gone, but what replaced them wasn’t openness. It was speed. Confidence. Style.

And now we all know kung fu.
Or at least, we know how it’s supposed to look.