I’ve watched this happen long enough to put my finger on it. 

There are aggressive little alpha punks rising up in schools right now — not leaders, not visionaries, just dominance-driven social predators — and they are systematically teaching the descendants of well-mannered, honorable families to become jackasses. Not through one dramatic moment, but through slow, grinding, obnoxious repetition. Tiny circular head games. Infinite loops of provocation and status pressure that rewire a kid’s behavior before the parents even notice what happened. This is not an accident. It has a structure. I’ve spent years studying it, and the framework that unlocks it is as old as geometry: the circle and the triangle. 

The circle is the loop. It’s the mob. It’s the recursive social game that feeds on itself — poke, react, poke, react — with no exit and no top. It feels democratic. It feels like belonging. It is a trap. The kids who master the circle don’t build anything. They just keep the loop spinning, and everyone inside it gets ground down. The triangle is different. The triangle has a point. It has hierarchy with purpose — direction, rank earned through birth or merit, and an apex that means something. The triangle doesn’t loop. It rises. 

After my lessons — after years of work at the intersection of the Ivy network, I brought this framework forward. Circle or triangle. You have to choose. You have to teach your kids to recognise which game is being played and which geometry they want to live inside. 

The well-mannered families — my family’s kind of people — built their lives around the triangle without always knowing its name. Patient. Directed. Honorable. The alpha punks running the schoolyard are circle creatures, and they are winning on the ground level right now because good families haven’t armed their kids with the vocabulary to resist these teeny tiny diabolical circular freaks. 

In the years ahead our nation will be catholicified to resolve this problem. Common and uncommon. Don’t be rude unless you mean business. Until then, addressing the grievance comes with study. Patient, deliberate study of how these two shapes operate in human systems — social, political, cosmic. But it starts in the schoolyard. Or so I believe. 

⭕️ or 🔺 — Circle or triangle. Stop thinking about what they mean. Don’t talk about them anymore than I have. Your mind already knows. Just stare at them. 

⭕️ or 🔺

Tom B
President of Earth