Almost invisibly, as the cognitively talented ascended to power beginning in the late 1960’s, their corrupted values infused popular culture, and, since it seemed so natural and was so gradual, few noticed. Their values are not the aristocratic values of nobility of soul and refinement of sensibilities; or traditional character virtues like honor, duty, and courage; or American Puritan values of restraint, modesty and self-sacrifice.
Meritocratic elites worship ambition, money and status, classic bourgeois values, to which they welded social and economic libertarianism. They corrupted the meaning of liberation from self-mastery, which frees us from servitude to our passions, to the unbridled pursuit of appetites. And they remade society to benefit themselves based on liberation arguments.
This above quotation is from my essay “The Corrupted Values of the Meritocracy” found on my Substack Against the Current.
What the common people perceive matters to the relationship between elites and commoners. Increasingly, what the common people perceive are elites who, despite attending these top universities, come across as incorrigible ideological idiots. This casts both elites and the universities they attend in a bad light. One result is that fewer and fewer people with common sense aspire to attend these institutions and thus a vicious cycle is born. The more obvious result is that the problem commoners have with elite institutions is that their standards aren't high enough. Consequently, commoners are beginning to romanticize the old age of rarified Bertrand Russell style elites. This article seems to downplay this most important cultural observation.
Almost invisibly, as the cognitively talented ascended to power beginning in the late 1960’s, their corrupted values infused popular culture, and, since it seemed so natural and was so gradual, few noticed. Their values are not the aristocratic values of nobility of soul and refinement of sensibilities; or traditional character virtues like honor, duty, and courage; or American Puritan values of restraint, modesty and self-sacrifice.
Meritocratic elites worship ambition, money and status, classic bourgeois values, to which they welded social and economic libertarianism. They corrupted the meaning of liberation from self-mastery, which frees us from servitude to our passions, to the unbridled pursuit of appetites. And they remade society to benefit themselves based on liberation arguments.
This above quotation is from my essay “The Corrupted Values of the Meritocracy” found on my Substack Against the Current.
What the common people perceive matters to the relationship between elites and commoners. Increasingly, what the common people perceive are elites who, despite attending these top universities, come across as incorrigible ideological idiots. This casts both elites and the universities they attend in a bad light. One result is that fewer and fewer people with common sense aspire to attend these institutions and thus a vicious cycle is born. The more obvious result is that the problem commoners have with elite institutions is that their standards aren't high enough. Consequently, commoners are beginning to romanticize the old age of rarified Bertrand Russell style elites. This article seems to downplay this most important cultural observation.