June is commencement season, a time when the graduating classes of colleges and universities receive parting words of wisdom from eminent guests who enjoy general respect and wide repute. But, as we all know, such speeches have become joyless and platitudinous affairs, featuring the dreary rehearsal of predictable commonplaces. This was not always the case: 50 years ago, University of Chicago undergraduates still enjoyed addresses whose titles alluded to Medieval treatises on mystical theology. In a half-century, “The Cloud of Unknowing” has been replaced by “Three Little Secrets to Change the World.”

A cynic might argue that the inflation of commencement speech rhetoric has an inverse relationship to the value of the degrees conferred. In other words, any students who have deeply changed themselves through years of intense study—who had entered university as bright high-school students and who left it as young scholars—would not need to be told to change the world. Indeed, such students might well balk at hortatory-but-vacuous boilerplate of this kind. However, as the rigor of academic programs across the board relaxes, justification for them increasingly requires hyperboles that fail to convince and exhortations that cannot convict; as an eminent literary critic once observed, “language quails when it overreaches.”

Nor is the effect of even the most obviously clichéd speeches altogether benign. In his latest book, The Mystery of Joy, Peter Kreeft notes that the common commencement message, “you can change the world,” is a lie because, as he puts it: “you are not Jesus.” And, even if any specific speech is perfunctory and forgettable, the Messianic tenor that they share supports one of the most pernicious delusions of our time: that the salvation of the world is a human project. Children, from the earliest moments of their formal education, are now proselytized by their teachers and impressed into a cult-like worship of the environment. Belief in “climate change” has become a state religion, and the advancement of political policies which claim to avert an ever-imminent ecological apocalypse are the corresponding rites of this creed. Commencement speeches, then, do not simply aim to flatter their listeners, but to bolster an important tenet of our public, secular, and unacknowledged religion.

At its most extreme, this cult enacts recognizable outbursts associated with religious fervor; the attempts to deface or destroy famous works of art (like Da Vinci’s Last Supper) or crucial historical documents (like the Magna Carta) can easily be read within the long history of iconoclasm which stretches from ancient times to the Taliban’s destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001. These benighted attempts to “change the world” are evidence not only of the efficacy of the wide-spread climate hysteria rampant in the West, but also of the ascendancy of an outlook that can be traced to Karl Marx. In his Theses on Feuerbach, he wrote: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it”—a line which could easily garner riotous applause at a modern-day commencement address.

But the narcissism that such speeches flatter so flagrantly also feeds into other unlovely agendas beyond those of the political left. The unrealistic dreams that they conjure is part of a great smokescreen that conceals biological realities for the sake of short-term economic production. To ensure that men and women in the prime of their lives—and in their most fertile years—are making widgets instead of forming families, they are told, at their formal transition from students to wage-earning employees, that their profit-maximizing work is of world-historical import. Thus do capitalists and communists alike smile at the inflated rhetoric of commencement addresses, since it can operate either as an opium for the GDP-generating masses or a psychedelic that sets deluded radicals on their destructive path.

In the end, this is why the clichés of the graduation speeches are not merely banal but actually corrosive: they divert the natural idealism of the young and, in doing so, they distort an important truth. For human agency is real and great men and women have changed the course of history. From Caesar to Napoleon, from Michelangelo to Thomas Aquinas, from Saint Francis to Joan of Arc, history is replete with compelling stories of people who have single-handedly altered its course. But rather than studying these figures as inspiring examples, the principle they prove has been co-opted and channeled in directions that serve the powers that be. The great forces in our world today rejoice at the weakening of familial bonds and the withering of self-control. As the grip of tech companies and state censors tightens, college graduates would do well to heed the words of Pope Leo the Great to Attila the Hun, as the latter was poised to sack Rome: “We pray that thou, who hast conquered others, shouldst now conquer thyself.”

What other message should young people on the cusp of adult life receive? Surely, they should be reminded of a truth that they already intuit: namely, that the world is changed in the most powerful ways by bringing more people into it. The gratitude that graduation always inspires is proof enough: the proud parents watching their child receive a diploma do not recall the innumerable, invisible sacrifices that made that child’s path possible; at such moments, though, what a poet once called the “little, nameless, unremembered, acts/ Of kindness and of love” flare up, in the welling eyes of the child, who sees the deeds that, for so many years, have gone unseen.

If it is, indeed, “more blessed to give than to receive,” (Acts 20:35) then the greatest act that such gratitude should inspire is to give, in kind, to a generation yet unborn. While important educational milestones should be marked and celebrated, the pressures of straightening economic circumstances and unfounded ecological alarm should not prevent graduates from embarking on the same adventure that has brought so much joy to their smiling parents. Doing so might not have the obvious character of “changing the world,” but it truly does—and in ways which the world itself requires but cannot always detect. As the English writer, George Eliot, put it at the end of one her greatest novels: “The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” What conventional commencement addresses obscure is the commencement of life itself; in fact, they conceal the very place where the world is changed most often and most powerfully: in the deep recesses of the family home where children are welcomed and raised with love.