Hell-Bent for Cadre:

I’m hell-bent for leather, but I’m not Judas Priest. With full respect to the metal icon, I’m not here for kink—I’m here for cadre. And while I won’t spit on the grave of the founding leatherite Leon Trotsky, I didn’t show up for angst or aesthetic. This isn't a cosplay revolution. This is logistics.

The crisis we face—species-wide—isn’t a shortage of leaders. If anything, we’re drowning in them. Influencers, CEOs, self-anointed visionaries—every space is cluttered with people pitching answers. But cadre? The competent, disciplined organizers who hold the middle of the structure together? Those are extinct in the wild and endangered in captivity. We’ve got plenty of slogans. Not enough schematics.

In some contexts, the absence of cadre is structural—no one’s trained. In others, it’s engineered—competence gets filtered out because it interferes with grift. In still others, we see the gilded procession of mediocrity: nepo babies floating on résumé vapor, institutional legitimacy conferred by inheritance, not insight. The revolution in leadership—if it ever began—has flatlined. And everywhere, the real enemy persists: superstition, fear, lust for power, and a learned helplessness that masquerades as realism.

You can’t drone strike your way out of this. There aren’t enough prisons or predictive algorithms to patch a civilization with no purpose. We’re not starving for carbon, calories, or computing power—we’re starving for coherence. Whether we’re divine fragments or lucky apes, we’re not acting like a species with a survival plan.

We need purpose—not vibes, not spectacle, not vague appeals to justice or progress. A real, operational, species-level orientation. Not utopia. Direction. Something big enough to include everyone and clear enough to shape training, governance, and design. Because without it, the brain defaults: minimal energy out, maximal dopamine in. That loop ends in collapse.

But with purpose, everything starts to self-organize. Shared aim breeds compatible values. Not because someone preaches them, but because they’re functional. Strategy follows trajectory. People can identify what they’re good at, where they fit, how they serve—not abstractly, but tactically. Purpose clarifies contribution.

Great works are not built by an individua’ no matter how brilliant. The labor came from below, but the will came from somewhere else. One clear vision.. Or sometimes just a shared desperation strong enough to spark collective movement. So if you’re serious about solving problems—not just studying them, not just tweeting about them—then start with the question: What are we trying to do as a species? What’s the job? What’s the goal?

Because until that’s clear, all you’ve got is a stage show. Screaming into the void in vintage leather, flanked by slogans and Spotify links. And don’t get me wrong—I’ll always love punk. I’ll always love metal. And I’ll always respect the Trotskyists for trying to blueprint a world where form follows function.

But we don’t need more icons. We need infrastructure.

Hell-bent for leather? Fine. Just make sure it’s armor, not costume.