The Republic of the Mind

America began with a wager. The founders believed democracy could endure only if citizens could think for themselves. They bet that the wisdom once reserved for aristocracies — the texts, traditions, and debates that shaped civilizations — could become a shared inheritance.

Jefferson built the Library of Congress to make that vision real. Franklin founded the first subscription library so tradesmen and apprentices could access the books shaping public life. Lincoln, born to illiterate parents, taught himself Euclid by firelight to sharpen his reasoning and prepare himself for history’s burdens.

This was the wager: that free institutions could rest on free minds.

For nearly two centuries, we rose to meet it. We built libraries and universities. We passed the Morrill Land-Grant Acts to fund public colleges. We created the GI Bill and sent millions to study literature, law, and philosophy. Knowledge became infrastructure. Learning became civic.

But something has broken.

Literacy is collapsing, even among elites. Students read less, write less, and comprehend less than any generation before them. Trust in universities has eroded. The American university, once the flagship of civic education, has become an institution many no longer trust.

Alex Karp describes it as technocracy without philosophy. Millennials grew up on “Don’t be evil,” but lacked the courage or conviction to articulate a moral vision. Across Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and Washington, people master technique but avoid developing a point of view. Controversy is evaded.

Meanwhile, our attention has shattered. TikTok has compressed thought into seconds. Once-fringe relativism has migrated from seminar rooms into the bloodstream of institutions and media. Truth is treated as optional. Authority fractured. Philosophy, at its worst, has been hollowed into jargon or politicized spectacle. The hunger for meaning hasn’t gone away — it’s gone sideways. Prayer apps are booming. Astrology is viral. Pseudo-spiritual influencers command millions of followers. Twain’s quip cuts deeper than ever: a classic is a book everyone wants to have read but nobody wants to read.

We have more access to knowledge than at any point in human history. But access without orientation fails. PDFs don’t make you a participant. Google search doesn’t make you a citizen. TikTok clips don’t give you wisdom. The past has become a foreign country, and most Americans have lost the passport.

Some fear AI will replace teachers, students, and thinkers. Others hope it will spoon-feed us culture until struggle disappears. Both are wrong: the struggle is the point. Meaning emerges in tension, in dialogue, in wrestling with difficulty. AI, used well, restores that struggle.

For centuries, the frameworks that shaped minds were gated or inherited. Today, we stand at the threshold of something new: tools that do more than deliver information, tools capable of reviving the very habits of inquiry and judgment that once defined civic life.

That is why my company, Lightning, digitally re-built The Great Library of Alexandria, a collection of 4,000 of the greatest books ever written. But access is only the beginning. So we created Virgil, a Socratic AI guide to help you think about what’s in those books. Virgil doesn’t give lectures from a podium or impose a single interpretation. A fourteen-year-old homeschooler and an eighty-year-old retiree can read the same passage of Augustine, and Virgil will guide each differently.

Universities may rise or fall, but the hunger for meaning endures. The canon, once aristocratic, is now accessible as living dialogue. Paradoxically, it is technology that will restore philosophy to its original place: not as an academic discipline, not as a credential, but as a practice and way of life.

The stakes extend far beyond education. A free society cannot survive without citizens capable of independent thought. Keeping it free requires more than access to information. It requires the capacity to wrestle with ideas, to form a point of view, to apply wisdom to life. For the first time, we can democratize depth without flattening it.

The founders’ wager is unfinished. And will require as much cultural fortitude as technological innovation. America was built on the belief that free institutions require free minds. That promise has frayed, but it can be renewed.

This is working intelligence for the American mind. And the work is only beginning.

Original published on Working Intelligence by Palantir.

Shaped by Readers

From the beginning, we've been guided by the belief that great ideas are constructed brick by brick, line by line, voice by voice.

The ancient Library of Alexandria was a living network of scholars, scribes, and seekers. And we believe the digital Alexandria should be no different.

That's why we've adopted "Shaped by Our Readers" as our design philosophy.

Every feature, every fix, and every refinement is a response to something you've told us — a comment, a request, a spark. Whether it's the desire for deeper reading tools, clearer navigation, or more personalized guidance, we're listening. And we're building with you.

So if something feels missing, unclear, or ripe for invention: tell us.

The next brick may be yours.

Letter from the Founder

In our search for modern meaning, we've lost sight of the Great Conversation. Our universities have become factories of credentials, churning out degrees while leaving curiosity and critical thinking behind. Even at elite institutions, our youth no longer immerse themselves in books. Professors, caught in the grind of endless publishing, speak only to echo chambers, retreating into ideological silos while life's profound questions go unanswered.

The technology meant to save us has only deepened our emptiness. Language apps teach us how to order coffee but not how to appreciate Don Quixote. We binge on content that neither challenges nor nourishes us. Leisure has been hijacked by an economy of endless scrolling and addictive consumerism.

A generation searches for meaning in a marketplace flooded with shallow solutions. While modern approaches to wellbeing have their place, they often miss the deeper dimensions of human flourishing. The great books that once shaped civilizations gather dust as we trade depth for disposable feeds. We've lost the common language that once united us in meaningful conversations.

I was born into a tradition that offers another way. In Judaism, learning is not just a path to knowledge but a spiritual practice, one so essential that each day begins with a blessing of gratitude for the obligation to study. We approach texts not as puzzles to solve but as timeless dialogues to enter.

In our tradition, multiple interpretations coexist, each holding a shard of truth. For thousands of years, we've survived exile by making our home in the enduring power of great conversation. This approach moved me so deeply that I chose to become both a Rabbi and a Doctor of Theology.

This wisdom tradition offers a path through our modern crisis. What if we approached every text with the reverence of a sacred scroll? What if our technology, rather than distracting us, deepened our engagement with what matters?

Artificial intelligence provides an extraordinary opportunity to breathe new life into the classics. But this demands a shift in how we view learning—not as passive consumption but as active soul-craft, not as the transfer of information but as a journey of transformation.

This is why I founded Lightning. I envision a future where great books are not merely assigned but encountered as companions. Where timeless questions become living conversations, where ancient wisdom speaks to contemporary life, where each person discovers their own voice in dialogue with the past. A future where the rigor of academia meets the wisdom of timeless traditions—freed from the confines of ivory towers and unyielding dogma.

Learning is a practice that can change your life. The history of thought is not simply a catalogue of theories that are either right or wrong, but a great conversation, one that you can join. Your intellectual DNA contains traces of the conversations that have shaped your inner and outer world. By decoding it, you discover not just who you are, but who you can become.