Assembly Line Elite Culture

we are the best because we are all the same, which means we are very diverse

A single image from Harvard has clarified something I’ve been thinking about for a long time.

Context:

When @SenDanSullivan visited his alma mater last weekend and walked into the Widener Library, "I couldn’t believe my eyes. Nearly every student in the packed room was wearing a kaffiyeh. Fliers attached to their individual laptops, as well as affixed to some of the lamps in the reading room, read: 'No Normalcy During Genocide—Justice for Palestine.' A young woman handed the fliers to all who entered. A large banner spread across one end of the room stated in blazing blood-red letters, 'Stop the Genocide in Gaza.’”

Here’s the image:

Harvard students are in activist uniform, displaying the identical slogan on the machine that sits in front of their faces. Elite students at a top university, alleged to be the best of the best, are carefully identical in their virtue signaling. Uniformity is merit. To be the best is to be the same. As you rise, you converge and narrow. I mean, you don’t have to wear a kaffiyeh — you can always just go to state college. They have a lot of people like you in places like that.

Imagine the costs of this cultural cancer.

Speaking very carefully, for what will be obvious reasons, I live in a small and mostly affluent suburban town where the allegedly excellent public high school is allegedly a feeder school for top colleges. And I’m the parent of a teenager, so I live in the world of parents and high schoolers who are looking down the road at universities.

This uniformity is not an accident. Young people are being trained to behave like this. College counselors and the small army of “Ivy consultants” tell upper-middle-class teenagers to design their high school years around the story they’re going to tell on their college applications. The top schools are looking for X classes and interests, not Y classes and interests, so stop being interested in Y and focus on X. No, that’s not the kind of volunteer experience that the top schools want to see. No, that’s the wrong hobby, the wrong sport, the wrong summer. Credentialing is an industry, and young people are being taught to perform their lives within the expected lines. “The Ivies want to see your passion for social justice.” So be sure to show that.

It’s nice that you like doing that, I guess, but how is this going to look on your college applications?

There’s the result. Whaddya mean you’re going to the library without your kaffiyeh? And why aren’t you displaying the slogan like all the others? The young adults who made it through the sifter are the teenagers who performed the most reliable version of the expected identities, and now they don’t know how to turn it off. If it ever occurs to them to try.

Now, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu is the perfect model of a front row kid, a high school valedictorian with a perfect SAT score and a Harvard JD. As a member of the Boston City Council, she led the way on topics like transgender rights and climate change; as mayor, she boldly speaks out against whiteness. All of her performative pegs fit into precisely the correct holes. So watch this:

Heckled from off-camera, she keeps telling a heckler that “I will engage with you after this.” She’s been trained into robot-speak. She doesn’t say, “I’ll talk to you in a minute,” like a person. She engages, click whirrrrr. I will engage with you. I will engage with you. I will engage with you. I will engage with you. I will engage with you.

Watching high-status performers, now, you know from the opening line that you’re going to hear them say “let me be clear” at some point before they stop talking. Something is going to be “unacceptable,” a word that applies equally to all situations. Lawmakers missing a legislative deadline? Unacceptable. Mass murder? Unacceptable. If we ever lose a whole continent to nuclear war, know in advance that it will be unacceptable.

They speak like this because they’ve been trained to perform their words, which then emerge without being tainted by interiority. They come from the status lexicon, not from within. Obvious reference, with apologies for repeating it:

Never has there been so little diversity within America’s upper crust…Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters — speaking the “in” language — serves as a badge of identity.

But I always wonder what it’s like to sit in that room with all the other kaffiyeh-wearing uniform signalers, modeling identical performance. What…does that…feel like? My suspicion is that it feels good, which is the whole human problem.

Joan Didion, in one of my favorite essays about politics:

It occurred to me, in California in June and in Atlanta in July and in New Orleans in August, in the course of watching first the California primary and then the Democratic and Republican national conventions, that it had not been by accident that the people with whom I had preferred to spend time in high school had, on the whole, hung out in gas stations.

Scroll back up and take one more look at the image of the Harvard students in their social justice uniforms. Imagine what they’ll all be doing for a living in twenty years, what they’ll be running and leading. And then plan for a way to live apart from those systems.