The Durak is Dead! Long Live the Durak!

Lei Feng died on August 15, 1962. He was twenty-two years old, a soldier in a transport unit in Fushun, and he was standing in the wrong place when a reversing truck knocked over a telephone pole and the pole fell on him. He had been, by every available account of his actual life, an unremarkable young man. He liked his comrades. He wrote in a diary, as many young soldiers in many armies in many centuries have, things that were earnest and slightly stilted and not, on first reading, of any historical significance. He was a nobody. He died a nobody’s death.

Six months later the Chinese state turned him into the most famous soldier in the country. The diary, heavily edited and in some portions reconstructed, was published in March 1963 alongside Mao’s directive Learn from Comrade Lei Feng. The figure it produced was an ideal young man of the revolutionary period: anonymous, tireless, devoted, the kind of person who washes his comrades’ feet without being asked, darns their socks while they sleep, tightens the nameless bolt because it is loose and because nobody else will, and goes to his grave having done all of this without asking anyone to notice. His self-description, in the diary’s most-quoted line, was that he wanted to be a screw that never rusts. A small component in a larger machine, useful without being visible, corroded only by time and not by vanity. The campaign has run every March 5 for sixty-three years. It is running right now, in April 2026, with renewed intensity under Xi. The ideological courses are full. The posters are going up again. The children in the classrooms are being told, once more, that this is what a worthy life looks like.

The figure is a version of something older. In the Russian peasant tale the same character appears as Ivan the Fool, the durak, the third son who is stupid and kind and gives his last crust to a beggar, who turns out to be a witch, who gives him a horse that runs on fire, who carries him to a princess who chooses him over his smarter brothers. The durak is not a description of peasant life. He is the fantasy peasants generated, over centuries of serfdom and grain requisitions and cholera, about how the universe would have to be arranged for their goodness to be worth anything. The fantasy was compensatory even then. The real peasant who gave his last crust to a real beggar starved in a ditch outside Novgorod and was not remembered. His body was pulled out in the spring by a tax collector who did not know his name and was buried in a pit with seven others whose names were also not taken down. But the tale existed. The culture named a category of admirable life that was not credentialed, not positional, not the output of a pipeline. The fool was honored, even if only in the story, even if the story was a story.

The honest thing to say about both figures is that the societies that venerated them never actually produced them. The Chinese state ran the Lei Feng campaign for sixty years and did not produce, at scale, a population of Lei Fengs. The soldiers who actually did the small anonymous work the campaign said they should do were passed over for promotion by soldiers who understood that the work was supposed to be done visibly. One of them, a private in Shenyang, spent his furlough in 1974 cleaning the latrines of a retirement home and was reprimanded on return for failing to document the service, and his file was closed, and he died in 2009 of an unremarkable cancer in a provincial hospital, and no poster was made. What it produced, at the outer edge of its engineering, was the Cultural Revolution, which is what happens when you try to coerce non-strategic virtue into existence at state scale and the coercion collapses into its opposite. The Russian peasants told stories about the durak for six hundred years and the durak never got the horse. Neither state accommodated the figure in fact. The campaigns and the tales were compensatory infrastructure built around an absent person, and the absence was the thing they were there to manage.

But. And this is the sentence the rest of the essay is going to turn on, so I want to set it down carefully. Those societies, at the level of their public self-description, named the figure. They wrote him down. They put him on posters. They made films about him. They organized children’s lessons around him. The delivery failed. The aspiration was public. The child could fail to become the durak, could fail to become Lei Feng, and still know there was a durak to have failed to become, a Lei Feng to have failed to become. The North Star was lit, even if the ship never reached it. That is not nothing. Hold that thought. I will come back to it.

The students around me are visibly unwell in a coordinated way. Not in the ordinary sense that exams are hard and sleep is thin. In the sense that the entire cohort is running the same internal weather system. Eyes too bright. Phones never down. A specific pallor that sets in around the third year, when the internship pipeline has narrowed and the five or six acceptable destinations have been named, and the people who have not yet been selected for one of the five or six acceptable destinations are doing the ambient work of metabolizing their possible unselection into a personality. They are twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two. They have been optimizing since they were eight. One of them, last November, finished a final round at a trading firm and took the elevator down to the lobby and sat on a bench outside the building for forty minutes without calling anyone and then went back to the library, and no one asked him about it, and he did not mention it, and the round had gone badly, and he failed the course he was supposed to be studying for that night, and none of this appeared anywhere. They can describe the apparatus they are inside in sentences of unnerving clarity, and the describing does not help. The describing is another move inside it.

You can watch the weather system move through a lecture hall in real time. The professor is at the front saying something that was, a generation ago, the reason the course existed, and in the back row forty laptops are open to Leetcode or the internship tracker spreadsheet or the Discord where the acceptance emails get posted as they land, and a specific micro-quiet descends every time the tracker refreshes, because the refresh is a status event, and the status event is felt collectively in the room by everyone tuned to the same channel, and the people who are not tuned to the channel look up and do not understand why the temperature has changed and then look back down. That is one flavor of the weather. Another flavor is the way a third-year who has just failed the final round at one of the five destinations goes quiet in a way that is not sadness exactly, is not even disappointment exactly, is a kind of total internal rerouting, a person taking a very fast inventory of which story about themselves still holds and which stories have just been voided, conducting this inventory in public at the dining hall table while pretending to eat, the fork moving, the face composed, the inventory visibly running behind the eyes. A third flavor is the posture of the people who made it. They are not happier. That is the thing nobody wants to hear. They are relieved for approximately a week and then they are not relieved, because the acceptance converted the old anxiety into a new anxiety one rung up, and the new anxiety is about whether they can sustain the position the acceptance granted, and the sustaining is, it turns out, the whole game from here on.

These are not students suffering from the ordinary thinness of undergraduate life. They are suffering from a specific historical condition. The condition is that they have been, since early childhood, fed a diet of signals about what form of life counts as a life, and the signals have been overwhelmingly coherent, and the coherence means that deviating from the signals is not experienced as a choice but as a kind of moral failure, a shaming that no specific person ever administers but that the child administers to himself every time he considers an alternative. The signals do not come from TikTok. They come from parents, from teachers, from the commencement speaker, from the alumni magazine, from the op-ed about first-generation success, from the cousin at the wedding, from the aunt who asks about the GPA, from the high school guidance counselor whose job title is literally counseling and whose counsel is reliably in the direction of the narrowing funnel, from the university brochure, from every institutional surface the child touched between the ages of six and eighteen. By eighteen the child is not being pushed by any of those surfaces anymore. The pushing has become internal. The signals have been absorbed into the tissue of what he thinks he wants. By twenty-two he has what looks, from outside, like a set of preferences. He wants to work at one of the six companies. He wants to move to one of the five cities. He wants to date someone with a similar trajectory. These are not his preferences. These are the signals wearing his voice.

The reason this is visible to me, and to anyone else paying attention, is that the signals have begun to glitch. The cohort is articulate enough to describe the signals. The description has not loosened the signals. This is the specific new feature, and it is the feature that distinguishes this historical moment from previous ones: the population being shaped by the signals has acquired the literacy to name the shaping, and the naming is, structurally, helpless. The student I am thinking of can sit down at coffee and walk me through, with frightening precision, the way LinkedIn operates as a status-laundering apparatus, the way the personal-brand industry extracts labor from anxiety, the way the meritocracy narrative functions as a class filter, the way the whole prestige economy consumes young people and outputs content. He knows. He has read the essays. He has the vocabulary. And on the walk back to the library he will check the app, because the app is the infrastructure of his actual life, and the actual life runs on the app whether or not the theory holds.

The cohort is not defective. The cohort is not lazy, not shallow, not more self-interested than any previous cohort. The cohort is the product of a specific status arrangement, and the arrangement has worked so well that it has produced a cohort that can see the arrangement and cannot step outside it, and the inability is not a personal failing of any student in it. The inability is the arrangement working as designed.

The older, duller, better-established observation is that beyond a material threshold, welfare is positional. The Soviet polling data on this has been embarrassing the triumphalist narrative for thirty years. Citizens of the Russian Federation in the 2010s reported, on balance, lower life satisfaction than citizens of the USSR had reported in the 1970s, despite being measurably wealthier by almost every consumption metric. Ghodsee has written on this. Alexievich has written on this. The Pew and Levada numbers have been broadly consistent for decades. The engineer in Chelyabinsk who in 1982 designed a heat exchanger for a tractor plant and was respected in his building and took his family to a sanatorium on the Black Sea every other August is now seventy-one and sells vegetables he grows on a dacha plot to supplement a pension that covers rent and medication and nothing else, and when asked he says life was better then, and the polling records the answer as nostalgia, and the word nostalgia is doing a lot of work the polling does not examine. You can fight about the magnitudes. The direction is not seriously contested, and the direction implies something the current arrangement is not equipped to hear, which is that once a society is fed and housed, what determines whether its people are okay is not how much they have but where they stand in relation to each other, and by extension, what that society has chosen to honor in the standing.

Every society answers that question. Every society has what you could call a North Star for status, a public agreement about what form of life is at the top, what figure the child is supposed to want to become, what shape a successful person takes when a parent points at someone at a wedding and murmurs that one, that one is doing it right. The North Star is load-bearing. It determines the direction of ten million small strivings every day. It is not a neutral artifact. It is the single most consequential thing a culture does. And the Lei Feng campaign, for all its failures, was an answer to the question. The durak tale, for all its compensatory nature, was an answer to the question. The current arrangement also answers the question. The current answer is the part we have to look at.

The current North Star, in every society I have access to, is moralized success.

I want to put that sentence down and sit next to it for a moment because the sentence is the whole argument and everything else is footnote.

Moralized success means: the cultural agreement that the person who accumulates credentialed advancement is morally superior to the person who does not. Not just luckier. Not just more disciplined. Morally superior. The kid from the suburb who gets into Harvard is understood, at the dinner table and in the alumni magazine and in the op-ed about meritocracy, to have demonstrated something about his character that the kid who did not get in has failed to demonstrate. The founder whose company exits at nine figures is understood to have proved something about his worth that the founder whose company did not exit has failed to prove. The athlete who wins Olympic gold skiing for a country she moved to at fifteen is understood, by the country she moved to and the country she left and the country she is competing against, to be a kind of emblem of excellence that the fourth-place finisher is not, and her subsequent transition into luxury brand ambassadorship is treated as the natural elaboration of an existing moral achievement rather than what it is, which is the monetization of a position her parents bought her into at a cost most of the people watching could never approximate. The kid in Thunder Bay who might have been faster than her on a board never got on a board, because his mother works two shifts at a long-term care facility and his father is in a different province and the closest hill is a four-hour drive and a lift ticket is ninety-five dollars, and he is nineteen now and works at a warehouse and has never skied, and nobody counts him as having lost the race because nobody ever counted him as having entered it. The kid in Kyrgyzstan who would have been faster than both of them lives in a village above Bishkek where the snow is good five months of the year, and he has never seen a groomed run, and he herds goats, and he is seventeen, and the Olympic scout has never been to his village and will never be to his village, and the comparison that would have ranked him first is a comparison the sport does not know how to run.

This is the racket and it is so total that calling it a racket sounds shrill, because the racket has produced the apparatus that would be used to evaluate the shrillness, and the apparatus is run by the racket’s beneficiaries, and they are not going to evaluate it against themselves. The moralization of success is class entrenchment wearing a moral costume, and the costume is so well tailored that the people inside it genuinely believe they put it on by merit rather than inheritance, which is the neatest trick the arrangement pulls off, because it conscripts the moralized into defending the moralization with the sincerity of the genuinely deceived rather than the cynicism of the consciously corrupt.

I want to be unusually direct here because the politeness that usually surrounds this subject is part of how the subject stays buried.

The Harvard acceptance letter is not a moral document. The Stanford acceptance letter is not a moral document. The Ivy admission, the Tsinghua admission, the Oxbridge admission, the Olympic medal, the McKinsey offer, the Google offer, the founder’s nine-figure exit, are not moral documents. They are, almost exclusively, outputs of a pipeline whose inputs are, in this order: the wealth of the applicant’s parents, the social capital of the applicant’s parents, the geographical accident of the applicant’s birth, the language the applicant grew up speaking at home, the network the applicant’s parents could activate on the applicant’s behalf, the tutors the applicant’s parents could afford, the private school the applicant’s parents could pay for or the public school whose catchment area the applicant’s parents could buy into, the four-hundred-dollar-an-hour college counselor the applicant’s parents could hire, and, somewhere down the list, below these other inputs in almost every case, the applicant’s own effort. The applicant’s own effort is real. I am not disputing it. I am saying it is the last input on the list, and the culture has organized itself to pretend it is the first input, and the pretending is the mechanism by which the class structure reproduces itself while claiming to be a meritocracy.

The child of the Shanghai professor whose tutoring budget exceeds the annual income of the family in the rural village is not morally better at the gaokao than the child in the village. He is better at the gaokao because his parents bought him ten years of preparation the village child had no access to, and calling the score gap moral rather than structural is a lie, and the lie is told every day at every dinner table in every upper-middle-class district of every city in China, and it is told with complete sincerity because the people telling it cannot afford, psychologically, to see it as a lie, because seeing it as a lie would indict them. The child of the Palo Alto software executive whose college counselor charges four hundred an hour is not morally superior to the child of the single mother in Fresno who did not know what the Common App was until her daughter’s junior year. The Palo Alto child is the output of a fifteen-year pipeline the Fresno child was, through no fault of her own, excluded from. The Fresno child is now twenty-four and is a dental hygienist and owes nineteen thousand dollars on a community college associate’s degree she did not finish, and her mother still works the same shift at the same hospital cafeteria she worked in 2007. The Olympic athlete whose parents relocated continents and hired three coaches is not a moral emblem. She is a correctly-functioning output of a parental investment most families could not remotely approximate. Treating her as a moral emblem is what the investment was for. That is the whole point of the investment. The investment purchases not just the skill but the downstream moral laundering of the skill into emblem status.

This is the part that generates genuine fury in people who see it and are told they should not be furious about it. Because the moralization is not just an intellectual error. It is an active, continuous insult to every person who did not win the birth lottery and is being told, implicitly and explicitly, that the people who did win it are better people, not just luckier people, not just more advantaged people, better. It is being told this by the winners. It is being told this by the institutions the winners populate. It is being told this by the parents of the winners, who are, it must be said, among the most aggressive enforcers of the moralization, because the moralization is what converts their expensive parenting into confirmed virtue, and they have invested too much in the parenting to tolerate anyone suggesting the virtue was purchased rather than earned. The rage is legitimate. The rage has been told, for forty years, that expressing it is uncouth, is jealousy, is a failure of aspiration, is ressentiment with the capital R that Nietzsche’s shallower readers deploy to neutralize any critique from below. The critique is not ressentiment. The critique is a correct reading of what has been done.

And the thing that has been done is this: a society that could have organized its admiration around many different kinds of life has, over the past forty years, converged on organizing it around one kind, and the one kind is, almost exclusively, the one kind the already-comfortable can most easily deliver their children into. The convergence is not an accident of consumer preference. It is the slow, compounding, intergenerational victory of the class that benefits from it, and the victory is not even visible to them as a victory because the victory has been metabolized into the background assumption of what a good life is, and the background assumption is not something they chose, it is, they think, simply how things are.

The part of this that has broken the politics of the last decade is the second-floor moat.

When credentialed success becomes embarrassing to defend directly, because the class reality underneath it has become too visible to paper over, the credentialed class does not relinquish the moral authority. It relocates it. It stops claiming moral standing on the basis of the credential and starts claiming it on the basis of identity or politics or sensibility. The same Harvard graduate who thirty years ago would have said he got in because he worked hard now says, or implies, or lets be said around him, that his moral standing derives from his views on various matters and from the identity coordinates he inhabits and from the particular mix of solidarity gestures his social milieu has agreed constitute virtue this quarter. The credential is still there. The credential is still paying out, in the form of the job and the apartment and the invitation list. The moral story on top of it has been upgraded to a version the credential alone could no longer support.

The midwestern warehouse worker watching this happen is not confused. He can see the trick. He is not, in the main, more racist or more sexist or more anything than he was thirty years ago. What he is, is awake to the fact that the cultural apparatus that told him for forty years that his failure to clear the credentialed threshold was a moral failure has now told him that his failure to adopt the updated identity vocabulary is also a moral failure, and that both moral failures are being issued from the same zip codes, by the same people, with the same condescension. He votes accordingly. He is fifty-four and worked at a GM plant in Lordstown until it closed in 2019 and now drives for a regional parts distributor and has high blood pressure he manages with a generic prescription and a son in the army and a daughter who moved to Columbus and does not call. The vote is not a coherent political program. The vote is the specific noise a population makes when it has correctly identified that the moralization racket has been running on it from two directions at once and is no longer willing to pretend otherwise. Whether what he votes for is any better is a separate question. The diagnostic accuracy of the vote, as an act of reading the moralization, is not seriously disputable.

This is the thing that the credentialed class has most systematically refused to hear, because hearing it would require admitting that the class had itself been the mechanism, and the admission is intolerable. So instead the vote is filed as an eruption of primal bigotry, the voters are filed as a basket of this or that, and the actual content of the reading is thrown out along with the messenger. The thing being read was real. The reading was correct. The response to the reading was to double down on the vocabulary the reading had correctly identified as cover, which is why the reading has, in the subsequent years, produced more of the same voting pattern and not less, because the moralized class, confronted with accurate criticism of its moralization, responded by moralizing harder, and every additional layer of moralization has produced another electoral consequence the moralized class then filed as further evidence of the voters’ moral failure.

The loop is now, I think, structurally closed. The credentialed class cannot drop the moralization because the moralization is the last thing securing their children’s position against the obvious fact that the position was inherited, and the working class cannot stop voting against the moralization because the moralization continues to insult them every quarter, and the politics of the next decade is going to be, to a first approximation, the two classes staring at each other through the wall of the moralization without either being able to break it, because breaking it from either side would cost the breaker the only moral ground they currently have.

Lei Feng is on the poster in the classroom. He has been on the poster for sixty-three years. The children in the classroom are not looking at him. They are looking at the phone under the desk, which is showing them the girl from their high school who got the Tsinghua offer, or the boy two grades up who got into Stanford, or the cousin who made principal engineer at twenty-six. The poster is still there. The campaign is still running. The state is still going through the motions. But the actual North Star, the live star, the one the children are orienting their lives by, is not on the wall. It is on the screen. And the star on the screen is not a star of service, not a star of the screw that never rusts, not a star of the durak giving away his last crust. It is a star of successful class exit, dressed in moral language, lit from beneath by money the admiring child will almost certainly never have, and the light from it is what is making the entire cohort sick.

The durak is dead. The campaign survives him. The posters are up.

Lei Feng is a printing order placed by a ministry office in Beijing, renewed every February, executed by a state press in Hebei that also prints fire safety notices. The posters are trucked to schools where janitors tape them above the blackboard and the tape yellows and the posters tear at the corners and are replaced the following March by identical posters printed from the same file. The janitor is a migrant worker from Anhui paid the provincial minimum wage who has been on a waiting list for outpatient surgery at the municipal hospital for eleven months and will remain on it. The ministry official who signs the renewal has not read the diary. The press operator has not read the diary. The janitor has not read the diary. The children have not read the diary. The diary is in a warehouse in Fushun that is being rezoned for mixed-use development, and the original pages, the real ones, the ones a twenty-two-year-old actually wrote in before the pole fell on him, are in a climate-controlled archive that has been entered by fourteen people since 2001.

The durak is a seasonal character in a textbook chapter on folklore that Russian eighth-graders read in March and do not think about again. The last storyteller in the Arkhangelsk oblast who told the tale in something approaching its peasant form died in 1997 and her recordings are in a university library in Petrozavodsk that has had its power cut twice this year for unpaid bills. The grandchildren do not speak the dialect. The tale exists now in the form of an animated short produced in 2019 by a studio in Moscow that was acquired in 2022 by a conglomerate that also owns a regional bank, and the short is available on a streaming service whose licensing agreement expires in August and will not be renewed.

Shurik, who in 1965 walked into the wrong apartment reading a textbook with a girl he was in love with, and who in 1973 built a time machine on the kitchen table of his Moscow flat because he was a polytechnic engineer and believed the project was worth the effort, is now eighty-two years old and lives in the same flat, which was privatized to him in 1993 for a voucher he did not fully understand, and the building has a beauty salon in what used to be the ground floor laundry, and the institute where he worked on oscillation dampeners until 1994 was liquidated and its building sold to a logistics company that subleases it to a marketplace fulfillment operator. His pension is nineteen thousand rubles a month. The textbook is still on the shelf. The girl left him in 1982. His son emigrated to Israel in 1996 and calls twice a year. He watches the films on New Year’s Eve like everyone else and laughs at the parts that used to be funny and does not laugh at the parts that used to be tender, because the tender parts require a world he built the time machine inside of and he is the one who outlived it, and when the credits roll he turns off the television and boils water for tea and the kettle is the same kettle.

The girl with the Tsinghua offer is in a dormitory in Haidian preparing for a midterm in a course she selected because it was strategic, not because it interested her, and she is twenty years old and has not slept more than five hours in nine days, and her roommate is in the same state, and they do not discuss it. The boy at Stanford is in a coworking space in Palo Alto writing a cold email to a partner at a fund that has already passed on his company twice, and the email is the ninth draft, and he will send it at 2am and will check for a reply every eleven minutes until he falls asleep, and the reply will not come. The cousin who made principal engineer at twenty-six is on his third antidepressant and his second marriage and has not spoken to his parents in fourteen months, and his parents tell people at weddings that he is doing very well.

The North Star above the desks is somewhere else now, and nobody in a position to move it has any interest in moving it, and everyone else is looking at the screen, and the looking is reproducing the arrangement every hour of every day, and the arrangement does not know it is an arrangement, and the people inside it do not know they are inside it, and the ones who do know cannot leave, and the ones who leave are not remembered, and the pit outside Novgorod is still there, and it is full.