14 Jul 2012

Why Today’s Meritocratic Elite Behaves So Badly

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David Brooks is just one of several writers recently identifying the character of our contemporary elite as a grave problem, and he has a theory about the source of members of the modern meritocratic elite’s extreme sense of self-entitlement and personal exemption from any and all rules and standards.

The corruption that has now crept into the world of finance and the other professions is not endemic to meritocracy but to the specific culture of our meritocracy. The problem is that today’s meritocratic elites cannot admit to themselves that they are elites.

Everybody thinks they are countercultural rebels, insurgents against the true establishment, which is always somewhere else. This attitude prevails in the Ivy League, in the corporate boardrooms and even at television studios where hosts from Harvard, Stanford and Brown rail against the establishment.

As a result, today’s elite lacks the self-conscious leadership ethos that the racist, sexist and anti-Semitic old boys’ network did possess. If you went to Groton a century ago, you knew you were privileged. You were taught how morally precarious privilege was and how much responsibility it entailed. You were housed in a spartan 6-foot-by-9-foot cubicle to prepare you for the rigors of leadership.

The best of the WASP elites had a stewardship mentality, that they were temporary caretakers of institutions that would span generations. They cruelly ostracized people who did not live up to their codes of gentlemanly conduct and scrupulosity. They were insular and struggled with intimacy, but they did believe in restraint, reticence and service.

Today’s elite is more talented and open but lacks a self-conscious leadership code. The language of meritocracy (how to succeed) has eclipsed the language of morality (how to be virtuous). Wall Street firms, for example, now hire on the basis of youth and brains, not experience and character. Most of their problems can be traced to this.

If you read the e-mails from the Libor scandal you get the same sensation you get from reading the e-mails in so many recent scandals: these people are brats; they have no sense that they are guardians for an institution the world depends on; they have no consciousness of their larger social role.

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3 Feedbacks on "Why Today’s Meritocratic Elite Behaves So Badly"

JKB

This just in…..Turns out the product of a fine post-modern education don’t have traditional critical thinking skills, awareness of position, nor conventional morals. The Academy is confused as those things are suppose arise organically or perhaps it was something in the water. News at 11.



No Man

JKB is right.

They get brainwashed, not educated. They are imprinted with what to think, not how to think.

Case in point Bernanke, Geithner, and the ECB banking geniuses over in the economic dead-zone, Europe.

Second case in point: Nobel laureate Paul Krugman is a complete idiot. See the YouTube with him on CNBC: utter incoherence.

That Krugly and Obama received Nobel Prizes says more about the Nobel Prize than it does about the two credentialed imbeciles.

This us why everything the nitwit collectivist, central planners touches turns to excrement.

We are screwed.



SDD

For some reason liberals resist the most fundamental explanation for almost every problem they observe: It’s about behavior and personal choices. Even the liberals at NYT are starting to grudgingly admit this. See http://tinyurl.com/7rhkjx7



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