Delivered at Mona for a conference honouring Rex Nettleford, this paper asks why Caribbean intellectual life stalled after self-determination stopped being contested. Best answers that the validating elites, trained on the campuses, kept adopting whatever orthodoxy was available, nationalisation and central planning in one decade, liberalisation and divestment in the next, without ever building concepts fitted to their own landscape and history. He reads the years from 1958 through the Rodney riots and the founding of CARICOM as a period in which pragmatism displaced philosophical speculation and sovereignty quietly eroded. Support comes from outside the region: Godel, non-equilibrium physics, evolutionary biology and phenomenology have all unsettled the picture of order and equilibrium that Caribbean social science borrowed. Best concludes that imagination is primary and science one of its forms, and proposes an extradisciplinary graduate faculty built on history and geography, with the creative arts at its core and panyards, mascamps and dance theatres as teaching sites.