The Best and Brightest Led America Off a Cliff

Via a blog link, this article examines the group-think and political correctness coming out of America’s most elite universities — the places that produced Presidents Bush and Obama — and identifies several points of failure…

The multiple failures that beset the country, from our mismanaged economy to our shredded constitutional rights to our lack of universal health care to our imperial debacles in the Middle East, can be laid at the feet of our elite universities. Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford, along with most other elite schools, do a poor job educating students to think. They focus instead, through the filter of standardized tests, enrichment activities, advanced placement classes, high-priced tutors, swanky private schools and blind deference to all authority, on creating hordes of competent systems managers. The collapse of the country runs in a direct line from the manicured quadrangles and halls in places like Cambridge, Princeton and New Haven to the financial and political centers of power. 

…having had many of these people work for me in the past, I will say this; they are bright, having passed through the “IQ filter”.  A few are truly outstanding individuals.  However, many have a sense of entitlement that leads to sloth as well as a lack of common sense that must be a result of being sheltered from reality their entire lives.   This results in a misguided sense of “we know what’s best for everyone else”…

These elites, and the corporate system they serve, have ruined the country. These elite cannot solve our problems. They have been trained to find “solutions,†such as the trillion-dollar bailout of banks and financial firms, that sustain the system. They will feed the beast until it dies. Don’t expect them to save us. They don’t know how. And when it all collapses, when our rotten financial system with its trillions in worthless assets implodes and our imperial wars end in humiliation and defeat, they will be exposed as being as helpless, and as stupid, as the rest of us.

…Read it all.