America is the only country on Earth that can jog a marathon, stop to argue with itself at mile 11, eat a corn dog at mile 17, and still cross the finish line first.

That is not mythology. That is the punchline of the last half-century. We have been operating at about 60 percent effort and the rest of the world is still squinting at the scoreboard like it is a solar eclipse.

And I know what you are supposed to say. “Come on, we are trying. Look at our spending, our programs, our initiatives, our committees.” Yeah. We have more committees than a Vegas buffet has shrimp. We are doing paperwork. We are doing policy theater. We are doing slogans. We handicap ourselves with insane media propaganda. We promote obesity and distraction to the susceptible. We are doing that uniquely American thing where we confuse activity with achievement.

But trying, in the basic, serious, muscular sense?

No. We have not been trying.

Because if we were trying, we would not treat the smart kid like a social problem to be managed.

We bully our high performers. Not always with fists. With contempt. With the little smirk that says, “Hey, genius, dial it back, you are making the rest of us look bad.” Like intelligence is a vanity license, competence is cheating, or curiosity is a moral offense. God forbid a kid loves math or asks questions getting to identification of first principles. Get him out of here before he starts solving things.

And then we did something even stranger. We went after the structures that used to develop talent, which is supposed to be our greatest national resource.

Honors classes, advanced tracks, gifted programs. We started looking at them the way medieval villagers looked at comets. Suspicious. Ominous. Probably the devil. So we eliminated them or diluted them in the name of equality, which is a beautiful word that sometimes gets translated into a simple operating principle: drag the ceiling down until everyone can touch it. Then we created conditions in classrooms to prohibit excellence and make everything inferior, but at least it strove to keep everyone at the same level.

And on literacy, we managed to turn reading into performance art. We took phonics, which is basically “letters make sounds, sounds make words,” and replaced it with something so vague it belongs in a crystal shop. Educational astrology. “Feel the word. Sense the word. Become one with the word.” Meanwhile, a huge number of kids cannot reliably decode basic text. That is not a learning strategy. That is a national self-own.

So imagine you are a bright kid in that environment. You are not just learning content. You are learning incentives. You learn that excellence is not rewarded, it is negotiated. You learn that standards are not standards, they are optional suggestions. You learn the safest move is to play small, blend in, and never be the kid who raises their hand too often.

Then the small number of kids who fight through all that, who still read, still build skills, still develop real competence, finally get their reward.

And what is the reward?

They get told, politely, that merit is not the main thing anymore. That admissions and opportunities are going to be distributed according to a moral algebra that discriminates racially and sexually, meeting quotas instead of inviting the talented to participate. Then they hear the same tune when they apply for the first job. Then again when they apply for the next job. Then again when they try to move up. Every rung comes with the same discrimination.

And all of it is framed as justice, which is an incredible trick. They call it equity and fairness to discriminate against talent. And if anyone asks for clarity, they act outraged like someone just yelled in church.

Meanwhile, kids are watching. And kids do what rational people do when the incentives are incoherent. They opt out. The insanity of it all concludes with a rational decision to disengage from the system. Their talent goes latent and they use it elsewhere, often not to societal benefit. It sleeps.

If competence is not the path to opportunity, competence becomes a hobby. Something you do if you like it, not because it is honored. So they put their energy into what looks rewarded. Sports. Social status. Podcasting. Anonymous posting. Their abilities search for an outlet where they won’t be blocked, even if no reward awaits.

And here is the part where the whole thing becomes a national psychological thriller.

Even with all that, we still win.

We still dominate the industries that matter. We still produce the technologies the planet runs on. We still set the cultural tempo. We still have the deepest, broadest innovation engine on Earth. That is not because we are flawless. It is because our underlying talent base is ridiculous. Our entrepreneurial reflex is unmatched. Our best perform at the highest levels. Our appetite for reinvention is baked in. Our willingness to break models and build new ones is the closest thing the human race has to a cheat code.

It is like watching a heavyweight boxer shadowbox with one hand tied behind his back while the rest of the division trains like their lives depend on it. You can hate the showboating, but you cannot deny the power.

Which tells you something important. There is a giant reserve of suppressed American talent sitting under the surface, which was the key point Herrnstein and Murray wrote about, recognizing the incredible potential if only it could be focused and properly organized.

There are kids who would thrive under real standards. There are students who would race ahead if you simply let them move at their natural pace. There are young adults who would build world-class things if the country stopped treating excellence as a liability. There are millions of would-be engineers, scientists, builders, and serious thinkers who got the message early. “This is not for you.” “Do not stand out.” “Your achievements are suspicious.”

Now people will say, “But other countries grind their kids.” Sure. In some places, kids study like it is a hostage negotiation. Nobody is rooting for misery. But when a country is willing to admit that competence matters, it tends to get more competence. That is not ideology. That is physics.

And even compared to cultures that run education like a boot camp, we are still on top in the outcomes that shape the modern world. And here is the kicker. The boot camp approach often snuffs out creativity and joy, and those are two of America’s great strengths. Grinding is great for memorization, but not so much for understanding how things really work. Humans made into robots are rarely impressive creatures. We are not just a study machine. We are a creation machine, when we let ourselves be.

So what happens if America decides to get serious and once again establish competence?

What happens if we bring back real tracking and real honors paths, and we reawaken the classics in thought, literature, and the arts that formed generations of builders? What happens if we teach reading in a way that reliably teaches reading? What happens if we reward mastery instead of managing optics? What happens if we stop using admissions and hiring as a moral stage play and return them to their purpose, putting capable people where they can do capable work? What happens if we tell kids the truth, “If you are good and demonstrate capability, you will be developed, not blocked”?

I will tell you what happens.

The same thing that happened when we built railroads across a continent. The same thing that happened when we turned industrial capacity into victory twice in one century. The same thing that happened when we invented whole sectors of the economy like we were improvising.

We surge. We do not just improve. We compound. We accelerate. We pull the future forward.

And that is why I keep coming back to the same idea. America has not been trying. But America can try again. And when it does, it is not going to look like a gentle adjustment. It is going to look like a wake-up.

So if your whole worldview depends on lowering standards, punishing excellence, and confusing equal outcomes with equal dignity, I have one upbeat prediction for you.

The moment America decides to build talent instead of suppress it, a lot of people are going to discover they were standing on the wrong side of the line.

Because when this country locks in, it does not just win. It makes winning look ordinary.