RORBT is open to anyone ready to do the work. You don’t need a fancy degree. You don’t need a polished resume. You just need to point your anger in a useful direction. I’d know-because the credentials this society hands out tell you almost nothing about whether someone can actually do the thing.
I’ll tell you where I’m coming from, because I think you deserve to know who’s asking you to trust a system instead of a man.
Where I come from
I was raised in an evangelical cult. I can still quote entire chapters of the Bible from memory. I’m an atheist now-not because nobody taught me the text, but because I learned it well enough to see what was being done with it. I was raised in Falwell circles, direct friends of the Jerry Falwell family. That world was my whole horizon before it was anything I chose.
My parents beat the ever-living shit out of me because of James Dobson’s The Strong-Willed Child-a parenting book with all the credibility of the four humors, dressed up as scripture. I spent five years trying to connect with them through therapy. I did the work. I showed up. But at the end of the day, all they wanted was to re-align me with the cult and with their own unimpeachable narcissism. So I had to go no-contact. It’s been hard at times. It’s still far less hard than living with people who cut you down on reflex and challenge basic reason because they’ve got the intellectual fortitude of a gnat.
I had to drop out of university, too-after I caught the dean in a sexual scandal. Then I got expelled from the evangelical world that had insulated me my whole life, and I had to transfer schools and start over. So when I tell you a credential is not a measure of a person, I’m not theorizing. I watched the people with the titles, the pulpits, the deanships, and the family names. I know exactly how much the letterhead is worth.
The degree was always pay-to-play
Here’s the part nobody with a diploma on the wall wants to admit: we fucked all the degrees out of merit after the Reagan administration. The credential used to at least gesture at something-a rough proxy for “this person learned a hard thing.” Then we turned higher education into a debt-financed status market. Tuition detached from reality. Admissions became a game of legacy slots, donor buildings, and consultants who can polish a fail-son’s application until he looks like a Rhodes scholar. The whole thing became pay-to-play.
So now a degree mostly certifies that your family could afford one, or that you were willing to mortgage your future to a lender. It does not certify that you can organize a floor, run a meeting that doesn’t fall apart, read a contract for the trap clause, or keep your head when the boss brings in the union-busters. It does not certify that you give a damn. Some of the sharpest people I’ve ever worked with never finished high school. Some of the most useless never stopped collecting letters after their name.
Merit is the one thing they can’t take
Here’s why this matters, and why I keep coming back to it: merit is undeniable.
It’s not like a credential, which someone has to grant you and can therefore withhold, revoke, or gatekeep. A dean can expel you. A church can excommunicate you. An admissions office can reject you. None of them can reach inside the work you actually did and make it not-have-happened. When you run the rapid-response network that gets three families rehoused, that happened. When you map the whole warehouse floor and pull off the walkout, that happened. No committee voted on it. No one can tell you that you don’t fucking have it, because the proof is the result, sitting right there in the world.
That’s the only entrance exam RORBT runs. Not “where did you go to school.” Not “what’s your title.” Just: can you do the work, and will you?
No one granted you your merit, so no one gets to revoke it. That’s exactly why the credentialed class is so desperate to convince you it doesn’t count.
We built the whole thing around that conviction. Trust is earned by vouching and by showing up, not by a line on a resume. New people spend their first stretch in read-only probation-watched not for the right pedigree, but for whether they’re here to flatter and fish or here to organize. Roles rotate every ninety days, so power tracks the work instead of calcifying around whoever has the best biography. Nobody’s last name gets them a permanent seat.
If you’ve spent your life being told you’re not credentialed enough, smart enough, polished enough-by people who inherited every advantage and squandered most of them-I want you to hear this clearly: that was always the con. Point your anger somewhere useful. Do the work. The merit is yours, and it’s the one thing in this whole rigged economy that no one can take back.
