Skip to content Skip to footer

Essays

License to Raise and Rule

To drive a small scooter, one must have a driver’s license.

But to raise children or rule a country, one need have nothing!

Seen from the vantage point of a future observer living in the twenty-fifth century, our contemporary twenty-first century society will be considered primitive, not because we still have wars and kill one another for a piece of land or as a show of power, not because we destroy our environment, not because we are on the treadmill of the incessant insatiable pursuit of more material goods, but mainly because we allow people to raise children, and rulers to govern us, without their having a license to do so.

Proof of competence, ability, and expert knowledge are required for most jobs. To practice medicine, law, architecture, even to work as a plumber or a woodworker, people train for years and need to prove their competence or earn diplomas. But to become a parent or to rule a nation, qualifications are not necessary. Of course, this has been happening since the beginning of history. Society has tacitly accepted that the biological ability to procreate is sufficient enough reason to allow people to become parents and that the ability to rise to the top of the political hierarchy is sufficient proof of competence to allow one to govern cities and people, nations and countries. So here we are, 300,000 years since the appearance of Homo sapiens, and 5,000 years since the beginning of recorded history, having millions of parents unfit to do the job of raising kids and thousands of rulers who are unfit to lead us.

Yet these two jobs are the most important professions in human society. Raising a child is synonymous with creating a human being, since Man is not born but is made through upbringing (see: “The Incompleteness of Man” in my book The Eternal Ragpicker), while governing is the highest, most important job upon which human civilization is built and through which it evolves.

But what are the reasons for this state of affairs in the world?

To read the entire essay for free on Substack, please click here.

© 2026 Nicos Hadjicostis. All Rights Reserved.