Intelligence and character aren’t the same things at all. Pretending that they are will lead us to ruin. The market is about to turn on many of us with little care for what separates us from each other. I’ve worked with and grown up alongside hundreds of very highly educated people for the past several decades, and trust me when I say that they are not uniformly awesome. People in the bubble think that the world is more orderly than it is. They overplan. They mistake smarts for judgment. They mistake smarts for character. They overvalue credentials. Head not heart. They need status and reassurance. They see risk as a bad thing. They optimize for the wrong things. They think in two years, not 20. They need other bubble people around. They get pissed off when others succeed. They think their smarts should determine their place in the world. They think ideas supersede action. They get agitated if they’re not making clear progress. They’re unhappy. They fear being wrong and looking silly. They don’t like to sell. They talk themselves out of having guts. They worship the market. They worry too much. Bubble people have their pluses and minuses like anyone else.
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In coming years it’s going to be even harder to forge a sense of common identity across different walks of life. A lot of people who now live in the bubble grew up in other parts of the country. They still visit their families for holidays and special occasions. They were brought up middle-class in normal suburbs like I was and retain a deep familiarity with the experiences of different types of people. They loved the mall, too.
In another generation this will become less and less true. There will be an army of slender, highly cultivated products of Mountain View and the Upper East Side and Bethesda heading to elite schools that has been groomed since birth in the most competitive and rarefied environments with very limited exposure to the rest of the country.
When I was growing up, there was something of an inverse relationship between being smart and being good-looking. The smart kids were bookish and awkward and the social kids were attractive and popular. Rarely were the two sets of qualities found together in the same people. The nerd camps I went to looked the part.
Today, thanks to assortative mating in a handful of cities, intellect, attractiveness, education, and wealth are all converging in the same families and neighborhoods. I look at my friends’ children, and many of them resemble unicorns: brilliant, beautiful, socially precocious creatures who have gotten the best of all possible resources since the day they were born. I imagine them in 10 or 15 years traveling to other parts of the country, and I know that they are going to feel like, and be received as, strangers in a strange land. They will have thriving online lives and not even remember a car that didn’t drive itself. They may feel they have nothing in common with the people before them. Their ties to the greater national fabric will be minimal. Their empathy and desire to subsidize and address the distress of the general public will likely be lower and lower.
Their empathy and desire to subsidize and address the distress of the general public will likely be lower and lower.
In a way, it’s the opposite: the farther away someone is from our elites in socio-economic-cultural status, the more our elites love them.
Native Americans – dearly loved, but they are pretty much the opposite of our elites. Black Americans; Africans; “migrants” — same game.
It’s not only ‘head’ vs ‘heart’…it is also different variants of ‘head’. As an example, Trump is very intelligent, but his intelligence is of an intuitive pattern-recognizing variety, whereas most academics, bureaucrats, and media types are people who think in a top-down deductive mode, who almost algorithmically apply the mental models in which they have been steeped.
Thanks for the recommendation; sounds interesting; I’ll grab a copy.
Comments:
Yang’s “bubble people” sounds awfully similar to Z-Man’s “cloud people”. Convergent evolution or descent?
“Thriving online lives.” I think we’ll find the exact opposite of this to be the case. In this I cite Steve Jobs’s “no gadgets for the kids” policy, Silicon Valley parents’ neo-Luddite schools, and an increasing awareness of the unaccounted externalities of digital surveillance. Call me crazy, but I have a hunch: Mountain View will be one of the last towns wired for facial recognition.
This almost makes me willing to plump down the money to read this.
I think Yang is on to something here, and it’s not something that’s insignificant, either. The trends he’s spelling out are why there’s going to be more and more trouble keeping this country together, and why the “elites” are in a heap of trouble.
As I keep pointing out, most of what these people have done doesn’t work. I can’t think of a single successful program or plan that they’ve come up with that hasn’t ended in utter failure, whether we’re talking about how to deal with the homeless, running businesses, or their perennial solution to transportation, “light rail”. Nowhere has any of it actually worked, and they’re increasingly nutty as that realization comes home to them. They’re ineffectual and ineffective in all ways, unable to make things work while they madly twist and turn at the controls.
Nine-tenths of what enrages them is that they see the “rest of us” as uncooperative “wreckers” who refuse to behave as we’re told. There’s an essential inhumanity to their outlooks, quite akin to that of the old-school aristocrats that I think we can trace out a fairly clear descent from.
“They see risk as a bad thing. They optimize for the wrong things….They get pissed off when others succeed. … They think ideas supersede action. They get agitated if they’re not making clear progress. ..They fear being wrong and looking silly. They don’t like to sell. They talk themselves out of having guts.”
To the extent that this description is accurate, the problem Yang sees with these people is self-solving. Few people are going to get very far without being willing to sell (something), and being reasonably good at it. People who fear being wrong and lacking guts are highly circumscribed in the things they can do. People with extreme and brittle self-esteem (which he doesn’t mention but is implied) limit themselves in attempting to guard it, and shatter when their shield are pierces.
I would recommend this book to anyone.
Yang can’t have it both ways. If there’s going to be big government, or even a modern bureaucratic state, there’s going to be a governing class. And a governing class is a class. And a class has class consciousness.
The only way to manage the problem is for the ruling elite to be swapped out from time to time for a new elite. We all know what that means.
“Yang can’t have it both ways. If there’s going to be big government, or even a modern bureaucratic state, there’s going to be a governing class. And a governing class is a class. And a class has class consciousness.”
That’s a reasonable construct, and one that really can’t be refuted.
However, I would like to point out that “big government” and “modern bureaucratic states” are both things that we do very, very badly as a species. To the point where I would submit that this is not in our nature, and it’s about time we recognized that fact and quit trying to fit ourselves into the funny round holes, given our very square natures.
Fundamental point is that the inevitable ossification and corruption that comes with those two constructs are things that lead, in the end, to massive suffering, misery, and collapse. So… Why even start on that road? Why go that way? Are there no other options?
You create a power center, you automatically create an attraction for all that is worst in humanity. Those structures that enable the power centers are things we need to be very careful about bringing into existence, because they will inevitably be used against us. There’s not a single instance in all of human history where this hasn’t been true, and it is about damn time we recognized that fact.
There are no saintly kings, leaders, managers, or whatever else you want to title the bastards. Create a position of power, and someone will appear to corrupt it and misuse it. That’s the nature of man, and we need to start designing our institutions to reflect this fact.
I’m with Bomag on this one: ‘the farther away someone is from our elites in socio-economic-cultural status, the more our elites love them.’
The elite are excited by their collective adoration of the masses and even its violent, unstable dregs who cause trouble for the majority, though these are precisely the sort our supposed betters strive to carefully avoid (other than as brief virtue-signalling gestures, of course).
“In a way, it’s the opposite: the farther away someone is from our elites in socio-economic-cultural status, the more our elites love them.”
I don’t think they “love” because love implies caring and they don’t care the blacks keep murdering blacks. The first and principal reason is utilitarian, they use them to beat their own past they see reflected on common people.
The elite is fighting the past.
Of course, for it to happen the concept of Sin has to have regained a strong return. Sin is essential to control others, since it is a strong mechanism to weak resistance, while at same time building cultural power.
There’s something condescending about loving those far below your station. And there’s something cheap and easy about being tolerant toward those who pose no immediate challenge to you.
“Native Americans – dearly loved, but they are pretty much the opposite of our elites”
Silly. Has anybody been to the Navajo Nation? How many of these elites have? How many of them care a whit about helping what is essentially a third world undeveloped nation in the middle of the American heartland? They don’t care. I would argue the same thing with black America. They don’t care about those groups any more (or any less) than they do Appalachian coal miners out of work. They use them as symbols, but their personal contact or concern for the people of these worlds is about 0.
T. Greer, you’re quite right. They don’t care. Of course they don’t. And I don’t think social distance is necessarily the right metric, but it isn’t clear just what is.
Incidentally, what was your Charles Murray Bubble Score?