The Best And The Brightest? Please

There is a widespread belief among Americans that the people in charge -- i.e., the people sporting Ivy League diplomas and occupying the heights of power -- are "the best and the brightest."  Like so many beliefs, this one is comforting yet false.

A more accurate term for the American oligarchy would be "the better and the brighter," for while these people may be higher on the intellectual pyramid than most, they are not at the top and are not even intellectuals in the real sense. Real intellectuals are curious and defy conventional wisdom. The oligarchs are dogmatic defenders of conventional wisdom, highly skilled but completely incurious products of a university system fueled by government money and designed to manufacture conformity. I can count on one hand the number of people I met during my college and law-school careers who engaged in intellectual discussion; the vast majority craved only a sheepskin proclaiming them intellectuals, without actually having to be one. A typical person graduating from Harvard is no more an intellectual than a person graduating from community college. While the Harvard graduate is more articulate, literate, and numerate, he is only a more polished drone. For example, even college educators scored an average of only 55% on a civic literacy exam so rudimentary that anyone with a good high-school education should ace it.

So why do these middlebrows hold sway? Because they occupy the sweet spot on the pyramid. They are smarter than the indolent majority, who think of nothing beyond their crimped personal sphere and will accept whatever ideas the better and the brighter regurgitate in the news, politics, and entertainment. They are also more numerous than the true intellectuals who are higher on the pyramid, and whose unorthodox observations can easily be shouted down. Whereas true intellectuals can and often do expose the errors of Keynesian economics, the Federal Reserve, a "living" Constitution, environmentalism, the war on terror, a "compassionate" tax code, or a variety of other insane delusions Americans labor under, the indolent majority will not engage in any such critical thought but rather will heed the oligarchs, who are highly credentialed and must know what they're talking about when condemning such heresies.  

As I noted on another occasion when exploring the federal government's nasty habit of unconstitutional spending:

Discretionary spending has also corrupted America’s intellectual life. Universities receive incredible sums of money from the federal government in the form of research grants, scholarships, and similar redistributions of wealth. As a result, the academic class has become thoroughly statist and has lost any vestige of intellectual integrity it may have once possessed. Year after year the universities churn out bland publications and even blander graduates operating under the same unspoken assumption – that it is fitting and proper for government to reshape the world. Anyone entertaining an opposite viewpoint would be hard-pressed to find a more hostile environment than the modern American university, the supposed bastion of diversity that, in truth, prizes conformity above all else. A perfect example of the morass that the universities have fallen into is the recent debate concerning military recruiters, whom some of our “elite” institutions wish to keep away from their students. This refusal to cooperate with the federal government appears rather principled at first, until one learns that the universities simultaneously insist that the federal government may not retaliate by curtailing funding. As with Social Security, we see again the base notion of a “right” to receive other people’s money, when in fact it was wrong and illegal to transfer that money in the first place. Even worse, the universities have stooped so low as to cloak their funding addiction with the First Amendment, arguing that in today’s America it is impossible to separate individual freedom from governmental action. This is the quintessence of statism – that only the state can set us free.

The good news is that with the federal government going bankrupt, it will have a much harder time financing this stultifying conformity. People soon will have to live by their wits and deal with reality as it is; we can no longer afford the mythologies foisted on us, whose falsity grows more apparent every day.