The Ivy League, Mental Illness, and the Meaning of Life (2014)
&gt; And I think we see that in the last 50 years, the meritocracy has created a world that’s getting better and better for the meritocracy and worse and worse for everyone else.<p>But weren&#x27;t you saying just the opposite? That being part of the elite, which here you call &quot;meritocracy&quot; because you&#x27;re playing a card trick, drives people crazy?<p>Here&#x27;s what I think: You&#x27;re talking to the elite (if you weren&#x27;t, you wouldn&#x27;t be in the Atlantic), and you know said elite are more comfortable thinking of themselves in terms of &quot;meritocracy&quot; (even though one of your theses is that there&#x27;s no meaningful merit involved), and you also know that pretending to care about unequal distribution of social benefits is currently in fashion among your audience (hence the preference for &quot;meritocracy&quot;, because it implies that your audience&#x27;s unequal share is earned). Keeping all three of these plates spinning at once is difficult; the sentence I quoted is them all hitting the ground at once.<p>&gt;Davis: Some criticize this kind of self-reflection as narcissistic[...]<p>&gt;Deresiewicz: [...]the main point is to know yourself so you know what you want in the world. You can decide, what is the best work for me, what is the best career for me, what are the rewards that I really want. And maybe you’ll end up saying that I do need a certain level of wealth, but you will know it because you will have come to know yourself.<p>Nope. Nothing narcissistic here. You know, in ages past when countries had explicit aristocracies rather than the implicit ones which deposed and replaced them, &quot;the main point&quot; as you put it was to serve others, rather than oneself. Can&#x27;t imagine what brought that to mind just now, though. Totally unrelated to anything, no doubt.<p>&gt;Gaining self-knowledge isn’t a simple or predictable process. Are there certain things that can only be learned outside the classroom?<p>Could there possibly be any <i>wronger</i> question to ask?<p>&gt;Aside from the classes themselves, the fact that we’ve created a system where kids are constantly busy, and have no time for solitude or reflection, is going to take its toll. We need to create a situation where kids feel like they don’t have to be “on” all the time.<p>Are you sure? What it sounds like you&#x27;re saying is that &quot;we&quot; have been doing the best &quot;we&quot; can for decades, and the result is barely tolerable. Are you sure it wouldn&#x27;t help more if you just stopped creating situations? If the problem is that you&#x27;re raising your kids inside a Skinner box, why would you think the solution is to make the walls less opaque? Are these the only terms in which you can think? You don&#x27;t need to answer that one.<p>&gt;When I taught humanities classes, I never talked about self-reflection, and I never invited students to talk about their feelings or their backgrounds or their experiences.<p>Well, you got that right, at least, if only by accident. And it has to have been by accident, because you think you got it wrong. The context couches this as a failure on your part, but why would it be? Why would you think that someone <i>else&#x27;s</i> self-reflection should have anything to do with <i>you</i>? You don&#x27;t need to answer that one, either.<p>So how does this amazing article finish? With its subject telling us about his own college experience, in the course of which comes this marvel, which I&#x27;ve emphasized so you don&#x27;t miss it:<p>&gt;I drifted for two or three years after college until I reached <i>a cinematic moment in my life</i>[...]<p>Why <i>cinematic</i>? Because we&#x27;ve all seen this movie. To call it &quot;transformative&quot; would be erroneous, because a plot twist doesn&#x27;t change the shape of the plot, it&#x27;s part of the story all along; to call it an &quot;epiphany&quot; would be the same, plus stupid, because we all know God is dead. Indeed, part of the interview describes how academia has tried to fill the former social role of religion and failed at it.<p>But this possibly quite significant point is glossed over entirely because it&#x27;s not important to Deresiewicz&#x27;s movie and therefore not important to the article or the audience, who are (presumed to be) in much the same state as the subject: their problem isn&#x27;t that they&#x27;ve failed to live the movie plot they thought they wanted, it&#x27;s that they&#x27;ve <i>succeeded</i> at it and found themselves nonetheless unfulfilled. Which is fine as far as it goes, what a shame for them but who cares, right? Except they&#x27;ve managed to inflict the same disaster on the next generation, because they are not only narcissistic but incredibly stupid besides.<p>And, having recognized the existence and nature of this error, what do they feel really matters? Is it that their descendants, their students, their supposed protegees, are going to have to find their way out of this clusterfuck on their own because everyone who might be expected to help them is too self-absorbed to bother and too stupid to succeed at it anyway? Of course not. No, what matters is who gets the blame, specifically that it be anyone but they themselves:<p>&gt;But the take home message is that everyone has to liberate themselves from this system. Education should be an act of liberation. We need to make a better system but ultimately everybody has to claim their freedom for themselves.<p>These are literally the last words in the article. Do you think that&#x27;s an accident? Because it&#x27;s not an accident.