Most politicians and other conmen who perform intellectualism aim to exploit your shame of being ignorant. When you didn't really understand what someone said but end up referencing them or agreeing with them, it is usually because you want to signal intelligence in order to compensate for the shame you feel for being ignorant. I think this shame is taught to us in school when classes display open academic rankings, as if to say that those of you below on the list are less intelligent than those who are above on the list.
While I am obviously not attacking merit entirely, I think the ranking as it is done in schools not only turns curiosity into a vice by shaming the ignorant, it also breeds a fear of failure from day one. So when people leave school, they do degrees in things that they not only don't like but also don't understand. Some of them go on to do PhDs and even master's degrees.
For most people, instead of dropping out of university when it doesn't make sense to them, they start to believe that they are stupid instead. In return, they end up performing intelligence instead of learning. And those who can, cheat. Obviously, cheating is usually done through bribing, so don't be surprised when someone who bribed their way into a degree also bribes their way into a job and a promotion. That is why prostitution in corporations is almost normalized. Most people call it cheating too, but in my opinion, a married man and woman who have an affair at work are only cheating if there is no quid pro quo that comes with the affair. If one of them gets a professional advantage out of the relationship, then that is clearly Bad Black's turf. And no amount of English can sanitize that into cheating. I remember a BBC documentary by Patience Atuhaire that attempted to paint the female students who sleep with lecturers at Makerere for marks as some sort of victims. They are no more victims than the driver without a license who fires the policeman a ka 20k.
This kind of shame can be weaponized by power mongers to hijack democracy with corruption. And the trick behind engineering this type of shame is by creating artificial scarcity. If you drop out of university and don't get a job, it is your fault, despite all those who graduated and don't have jobs. A power system that stigmatizes people who aren't cut out for formal education also automatically creates backdoors for formal education credentialing so that it retains the ability to credential whoever is willing to serve its agenda.
This obsession with credentials over actual knowledge is exactly why our education system is fundamentally unprepared for AI. Take the computing courses being taught at all universities today in Uganda. About 70% of everything being taught is an AI prompt away. And the teachers who teach this prompting are also learning while pretending to have some authority when in front of their students. They are embarrassed of looking ignorant.
If I was at university right now, I would take on a skill like photography, plumbing, car mechanics, welding, or anything that I can only learn by doing it to hedge against the unconvincing probability of getting any value from the university degree. AI is an entirely new paradigm and, despite what your favorite activist stands for, it is going to take the job you're studying to qualify for. The only question is whether it will be before or after you leave university.
Stop convincing yourself that you know the things you don't really know. Stop hoping that there are authority figures that can know for you. Learn a skill that doesn't require you to show credentials to prove that you have it. AI is not coming for the credential. It is coming to do the actual work you lost your entire youth training for.
This world is run by liars, and you will have to learn to lie in order to live in it properly, but the only mistake you can make is to lie to yourself.