A word that means nothing
Turn on the TV. Open a news site. Sit at a table with people who "follow the situation." Sooner or later you'll hear the word.
Elite.
Political elites. Business elites. Intellectual elites. Elites decide. Elites shape. Elites bear responsibility — or dodge it, depending on who's talking.
But ask one simple question: who exactly do you mean? — and the conversation stops.
Because nobody knows. The word "elite" in public discourse functions like an incantation. Everyone utters it. No one defines it. It's empty. Convenient. And precisely for that reason — dangerous.
Elite is a label we stick on people who've achieved success. Any kind of success. Built a company — elite. Got elected — elite. Published a book, run a podcast, have a million followers — elite.
But success in what? In what system? By what rules?
Before we answer who the elite are, we must first ask: in what world was this elite shaped?
The great startup on the Vistula
Poland in the nineteen-nineties. A country that — as the Polish rapper Taco Hemingway put it — had no identity. A country that overnight had to reinvent itself from scratch.
A new political system. A new economy. New rules of a game nobody knew, because nobody had ever played it before. It was the largest social startup in Europe. A fifty-million-person experiment on a living organism.
And like every startup — it was governed by chaos.
Who succeeded? Often those who were first. Not the best — the first. Those who understood that in a system without rules, the winner is whoever writes the rules themselves. Those who hit the timing. Those who had connections in the old system and knew how to transfer them to the new one.
I'm not saying all of them. I'm not saying without talent. But a huge part of Polish success in the nineties and two-thousands was success of circumstance, not formation. Success of chance, not principles.
And those people — or their children, or their imitators — are today called "the elite."
Thirty years later we look at them and ask: could a system that was itself chaotic and immature have produced a mature elite?
This is not a rhetorical question. It's a question about foundations.
Because if the elite are people who succeeded in a system where most things happen by accident — then the elite are simply beneficiaries of chaos. And there's nothing elite about that.
A label that was always an abstraction
But before we blame the transformation — an honest question: is it any different anywhere else in the world?
In London, Paris, New York — in countries that had centuries to shape their elites — is the definition any clearer? Do they know whom to truly consider elite?
I suspect not. I suspect that the elite has always been an abstraction. A label people tailored to themselves — not to their values, but to their interests.
Aristocracy? A group of people who monopolised land and declared that blood makes them superior. Bourgeoisie? Those who replaced blood with money and decided that wealth is the new proof of superiority. Intelligentsia? Those who had access to knowledge when most of society did not.
In every era the pattern is the same: a group of people with shared interests claims the right to the label "elite" — and defines it to fit themselves. Not values. Themselves.
And nobody ever asked much about the means. About how that success was achieved. About the price others paid. What mattered was that you were in the group. That you had access. That others recognised you as such.
The elite has always been a mutual admiration society with good PR.
This is not a cynical observation. It's a historical fact. From royal courts to panels at the World Economic Forum — the mechanism is identical. The costume changes. The structure remains.
And here we return to Poland. Because if the elite was always an abstraction — then we don't have a worse problem than the rest of the world. We have the same problem. Only more exposed. Because we didn't have centuries to cover it up with tradition, ritual, and patinated facades.
Here, the "elite" label is still fresh. The glue hasn't dried yet. And that's why it's easier to see that underneath — there's nothing there.
The prompt replaces the professor
But let's assume for a moment that material success isn't the only criterion. That the true elite is the intellectual elite. People who know more. Understand more deeply. Analyse more precisely.
For centuries, this criterion was reliable. Knowledge was scarce. Access to it — expensive. Whoever had a library, a mentor, a university — had an advantage. And that advantage created a natural hierarchy.
Except that world is ending right now.
Today, anyone with internet access can type a question into a prompt and receive an answer at a level that a decade ago required years of study. Geopolitical analysis. Legal diagnosis. Business strategy. Literature review. Philosophical synthesis.
Intellect has become a commodity.
I'm not saying people have stopped thinking. I'm saying that thinking itself has ceased to be a barrier to entry. If a machine can do in thirty seconds what an expert needed three days for — then expertise as such loses its uniqueness.
And this is not a dystopia. It's a fact. It's happening now. At this very moment, as you read this text.
The intellectual elite hasn't disappeared — but it has been devalued. Knowledge that was once the currency of prestige is now as available as tap water. Still essential. But no longer elite.
The question remains: if not material success and not intellect — then what makes a person elite?
A place where nothing happens by accident
I know a certain story. I'll tell it without names, without dates, without places that could be identified. Not because it's shameful. Because it's too pure to soil with context.
A child from Poland. Small town, ordinary family. But in this child — something extraordinary. A work ethic you don't find in adults. Consistency. Determination that isn't stubbornness — it's an inner imperative. And passion. Real, unperformed, unconditional.
This child gets into one of the best art schools in the world.
And suddenly — a different universe.
Dozens of hectares of parkland. Buildings that remember centuries. Halls, corridors, traditions that carry a weight that cannot be manufactured artificially. Structure. Organisation. Culture. A place where nothing — absolutely nothing — happens by accident.
For someone from Poland — from a country where rules are still being established, where most things still happen ad hoc, by feel, by "we'll figure it out" — this place is like a space station. A different civilisational level. Not better. Different. Older. More mature.
And this child spends nearly a decade there.
Ten years of daily discipline that isn't punishment — it's form. Ten years among people for whom excellence isn't ambition — it's the standard. Ten years in an environment that doesn't tolerate mediocrity, because mediocrity is simply incomprehensible.
What happens to a person who lives in such a place for a decade?
They are formed.
Not educated — formed. Because this isn't a matter of knowledge you can read in a book. It's a matter of habits, reflexes, values driven into the bone. Aesthetics as instinct. Precision as habit. Respect for form as something natural, not enforced.
Such a person returns to Poland — and doesn't fit. Not because they're better. Because they have different coordinates. Different criteria. Different expectations of reality.
And nobody asks them for their opinion.
The elite nobody listens to
Here is a paradox I cannot find an answer to.
A person who built a fortune trading land in the chaos of reprivatisation — is invited to panels about Poland's future. A person who won elections by promising things they never intended to deliver — shapes the media narrative. A person who wrote three books and runs a podcast — is an "opinion leader."
But a person who spent a decade in one of the oldest and most rigorously organised environments in the world? Who was shaped by a tradition stretching back centuries? Who knows what discipline, form, and the pursuit of excellence mean — not from books, but from daily life?
That person isn't even part of the conversation.
Because they don't have a company. Don't have a mandate. Don't have a million followers. They have something else — something that cannot be bought, inherited, or prompted.
They have formation.
Formation is not education. Education can be bought. Formation is years of being in an environment that demands more of you than you would demand of yourself. It's the internalisation of values that happens slowly, quietly, without a certificate at the end. It's a process in which a person doesn't learn answers — they learn questions they didn't know how to ask before.
And this is the only thing that cannot be automated.
You can prompt knowledge. You can prompt strategy. You can even prompt empathy — in the form of a well-written text.
But you cannot prompt character. You cannot prompt a decade of daily discipline. You cannot prompt the moment when a person stands before a mirror at five in the morning and knows they must be better than yesterday — not for a reward, not for a promotion, not for followers — but because that's what's required.
That is elite. Not by title. Not by wealth. Not by intellect, which today is available at the tip of a prompt.
Elite is formation.
A better world — but not an easier one
One might think: since knowledge is becoming universal, since intellect is available from a prompt — we're heading towards a better world. And in a sense, that's true. A world where everyone has access to knowledge, tools, and analyses that were once reserved for the few — that's a more just world.
But there's a trap in it.
Universal access to intellectual value does not relieve us of moral choices. On the contrary — it makes them more urgent.
Because when knowledge was scarce, we could delude ourselves that access was the barrier. That if everyone had the same knowledge — they'd make good decisions. That the intellectual elite was automatically the moral elite.
Now we see that's not true.
A person with access to the best analysis in the world can still choose cynicism. Can still choose short-term profit. Can still know what's right — and do something else.
Knowledge tells you what's possible. But it doesn't tell you what's right. That's what formation tells you. Or its absence.
And that's why the question about the elite in the age of AI is not an academic question. It's a question about who will make decisions in a world where everyone has the same information, but not everyone has the same values.
A question I have no answer to
I don't claim to know what a world should look like in which the voice of formed people — not merely successful ones — carries weight. I have no recipe for a system that could recognise them. I don't even know if they themselves would want to be recognised — because formation, as I'm describing it, by definition doesn't seek applause.
I also don't know whether the problem can be solved. Perhaps the elite will always be an abstraction. Perhaps it will always be a label people stick on themselves. Perhaps the only thing we can do is stop pretending we know what the word means.
But I know one thing.
The next time you hear the word "elite" — on TV, at a conference, at a dinner table — ask yourself:
Is that person elite because they achieved success? Or because they were formed?
Because those are not the same thing.
Success can be accidental. Knowledge can come from a prompt. Fortune can be inherited. A mandate can be won with promises.
But formation cannot be faked.
And perhaps that's precisely why we so rarely talk about it. Because if we start — it turns out that most people we call the elite are not.
And those who are — stand to the side. Quietly. Without a camera. Without a microphone.
And nobody asks them for their opinion.
And the world — this new, open one, with knowledge at arm's reach — still waits for someone to tell it what to do with that knowledge.
A prompt won't tell it that.
One more thing. It is an immense privilege to spend even a moment among people of true elite. The kind built by formation. Not by a label.
And the difference is felt immediately.