The Best and the Brightest
Contents
Summary
Institutionally approved people, the top men and women, with the best intentions and the fullest education and access to the best available information, create elaborate policies that misunderstand the most basic facts about the world, leading to immense suffering for ordinary people.
- ref. below
Article
From paywalled article - [1]
Despite the hyper-partisanship that is roiling In the United States, Ivy League dominance transcends political affiliation. And many of the most prominent people fighting to keep American institutions alive come from the Ivy League, too. But what I’ve described so far—GOP elites turning with petulant ferocity on the institutions from which they derive their power—is new. The failure of the elites who have always run the country—on the left, in the middle, and on the right—is not. The greatest study of the failure of American expertise is still David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest; it was written before I was born, but the process it describes, in rich detail, has been more or less completely replicated twice in my lifetime. Institutionally approved people, the top men and women, with the best intentions and the fullest education and access to the best available information, create elaborate policies that misunderstand the most basic facts about the world, leading to immense suffering for ordinary people. That is the Ivy League way— “brilliant policies that defied common sense,” in Halberstam’s phrasing.
Note: In the communist world, perhaps the ultimate example of The Best and the Brightest in the negative sense was Lenin. I read in The Gulag Archipelago that Lenin never got to know a single working class person. He was an intellectual elite who did not spend time with the working class. So how could Lenin really serve his proclaimed customers?. I'm still trying to grasp in 2022 what that was all about - an experiment in equality? Really? A really messed up experiment in providing a better life? From personal experience in communist Poland - I can say that the communist experiment was a big mistake, and the legacy of Stalin/Lenin must still be corrected in 2022.
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MJ Comments
Then there is also Open Source Ecology. Hopefully we don't fall into the same pitfall. My personal experience is that theory is much different than practice, and that the type of non-interdisciplinary, siloed, unapplied (theoretical) thinking taught at universities is dangerous to society. I wouldn't say that is unique to the Ivy League, but the higher ambitions of ivy leaguers make them correspondingly more dangerous. I was completely unprepared for solving pressing world issues after college - so I started Open Source Ecology and the current trend is to create college-level education specifically for solving pressing world issues, with a real world approach starting with open, collaborative development. Which means lifelong learning - constantly updating one's mental models.
