The Elites Have Failed Us

Twenty years of death, mangled bodies, tormented minds and trillions of dollars spent in Afghanistan and it ends with people so desperate to leave the place that they are falling off airplanes as they try to get away.  How did we get here? That’s the question that terrifies me. 

We should all contemplate this question and try to arrive at some sort of national consensus. In the spirit of this necessary conversation, here is my contribution.

The elites have failed their country because they are conformists unable to live up to the first principle of American citizenship, independent thought.

It’s not just the Afghanistan war. While we were waging war in Afghanistan we were also inflating a huge housing bubble, impoverishing whole regions of the country for the sake of free trade with the Chinese, taxing households to rescue bankers from their own greed, watching in paralysis as millions of people, mostly young, got caught up in addiction to opiates promoted aggressively by doctors and a rogue pharmaceutical company, turning a blind eye to the problem of illegal immigration on our southern border, and, as a final insult (so far) against common sense, bungling our response to the pandemic and costing tens of thousands of citizens their lives. 

I think a lot of the blame goes to elite, higher education. Graduation from Ivy League schools leads to elite jobs. People in elite positions, whether it is in corporate America or politics, make the decisions the rest of us have to live with. For at least a generation, their choices have been horrible. But this makes a kind of sense because most of these horrible decisions have perpetuated the trend and maintained the status quo, whether it was continuing the war in Afghanistan, rescuing the financial system after the crisis only to rebuild it with even fewer, bigger banks and more concentration of wealth, or worshipping at the altar of free trade while foreign buyers unbolted factories and reassembled them in their own countries.

Honestly, how is failure on this scale possible?

The price for admission to an elite school starts early. Admission to the Ivy League requires high intelligence, discipline, and dedication. People who exhibit these traits early in life and, importantly, apply these abilities to those areas valued by institutions of higher education, such as academic work, structured after-school activities like music and sports and, eventually, international study, are the people who gain admission to elite schools. They are the smart, energetic, and organized children who have done what was expected of them and been rewarded for doing so. 

What they are not is rebels, visionaries, and free thinkers. They are the people who perpetuate the status quo because following the course suggested by their parents and other authority figures made sense and worked out for them. They have self-selected from an early age to be conformists willing to bury their youthful impulses and curiosity under mountains of homework, band practice, soccer practice, AP classes and, of course, some sort of community service to show their dedication to others. It helps if their parents were similarly motivated and have the higher income that generally accrues to graduates of elite schools and which they can, in turn, pass on to their children and their alma mater. They are the people who believe the system works because it has worked for them. They are not going to have unconventional solutions to problems they mostly can’t understand because understanding the problems would require a different life experience and proposing an unconventional solution would mean doing something different than what was expected of them.

A couple of caveats are in order. First,  obviously not all students at elite schools fit this pattern. These are general observations about a system and the results that system produces. Second, these are exceptional people with exceptional abilities, and they have their useful place in society, it’s just that their abilities don’t seem to include leading the country away from disasters. 

I’m reminded of a story my father used to tell about getting dropped off at Parris Island for Marine Corps boot camp. “The drill instructors lined us up and asked who had been to college. Six or eight of us had been to college, but a guy from Yale was the only one foolish enough to raise his hand. They beat that poor SOB mercilessly for the next three months.”

As a country, if we want the beatings to stop, perhaps we should stop doing what makes sense to the Ivy League graduates and start listening to the kids who worked their way up through state colleges and the adults who learned some tough life lessons before starting college as continuing-ed students. 

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