What the Ivies have tended towards for generations now are “super conformers” — straight As and spent all their time in adult run extra-curriculars. People who spent all their time doing what authority wants. But in the past, they did seek out a few of the very smartest, too.
But, with the triumphal fall of the USSR and the “End of History” the Ivies decided that the system no longer needed smart people and stopped looking for them, they wanted nothing but super-conformers. But every system needs some smart people who aren’t entirely conformist.
This was anecdotal but fit everything I was seeing. Now here’s another data point:
This tracks my interactions with Ivy League grads exactly. Some of the older ones are brilliant, but anyone younger than their later 40s is a drone. Perhaps an intelligent drone, but a drone nonetheless.
People who are super conformers can’t actually be good analysts or creatives, because they can’t think original thoughts or challenge consensus views. And if you can’t do that, you can’t do paradigm changing real things or say “uh, boss, what we’re doing won’t work.”
American elites didn’t want any non-conformists any more. They wanted smart yes-men. So they lost Russia and sold their military, technological and industrial lead to China. They got filthy rich in exchange, in dollars that in 20 years won’t buy anything that matters internationally, leaving them as the equivalent of rich Indians in 1990. Yeah, you have servants and gold toilets and a mansion, but you run a country that doesn’t actually matter, and outside your gilded circle your society is a garbage dump. (If you visited India in those years you know that’s barely a metaphor. It’s just a description.)
What I have seen over and over again thru my adult life is that being right against the consensus is a career killer. (It sure did nothing for my career, but I’ve seen it in plenty of cases so this isn’t just “Ian is a bitter failure!” Heh.) I remember a study looking at media pundits who got the Iraq war right: people in the system already—fired, laid off or never promoted again. Pundits who got it wrong, but with the consensus? Their careers did well, thanks.
Incentives like this are picked up on quickly. You want everyone to be wrong with the elite consensus? You’ll get it! (See Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein for the centrist pundit versions.)
And this is just as true in most corporations. Look at all the morons jumping on the AI train. Spending trillions rather than just waiting and buying the tech once it’s clear which models work (and probably just using a Chinese open source model.)
Now, of course, this “be wrong with the crowd” incentive has always been most of the case in the sense that being wrong against the crowd would get you fired, and being wrong with the crowd wouldn’t usually hurt your career. But there was a time when the mavericks who were right against the crowd were rewarded and glorified, and that mattered.
Post collapse of the USSR and during the “End of History” era (Fukuyama is the poster boy for “got everything wrong but said what elites wanted to hear so was rewarded far beyond his merits”) elites didn’t want to hear anything but how everything they produced, including their shit, smelled like roses. There was no competition, so they didn’t have to be competent or care about results.
Or so they thought. Turns out that Russia wasn’t down permanently, just for a generation or two, and that China was real competition, but being smart they followed Deng’s prescription “Hide your strength, bide your time” and sucked up to American elites, whispering “send us your industry and we’ll make you rich and you won’t have to put up with uppity American workers and unions!”
American elites got what they wanted. The pure peace of being able to smash anyone who contradicted them, the joy of forcing workers to work for less and less and shut the fuck up about wanting to share in profits, vast wealth, plus two generations of courtiers who were entirely yes men, telling them how wonderful they were. “Oh no my lord, your shit smells like lilacs! Yes my lord, I’d love to lick it up, it tastes like bacon!”
China got what it wanted: the tech and industrial lead and the end of American hegemony.
No leader worth his salt doesn’t have a few people around him saying “you know, Jack, I don’t think this is a good idea.”
It’s been a long time since America had any leaders worth their salt.
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