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Superiority Complex: Democritizing Elitism |
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Written by <a href='/community/profile/68-danieleaton'>danieleaton</a>
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Wednesday, 30 October 2002 17:51 |
Article: Superiority Complex... , theatlantic.com
This article by David Brooks could have been called "I'm Ok, You Suck". His topic: the downside of American style pluralism. What could that be? He says, Mindless Self-Validation. Here are a few things he comes up with...
(1) pluralism encourages ignorance : i only need to know about the communities i choose to belong to
(2). pluralism encourages moral mediocrity : i only need to respond to views held by communities i already endorse
(3) pluralism encourages political inaction : there is no need for reform, simply form or join your own closed society
excerpt:
"You can construct your own multimedia community, in which every magazine you read, every cable show you watch, every radio station you listen to, reaffirms your values and reinforces the sense of your own rightness. It is possible, maybe even inevitable, that you will slide into a solipsism that allows you precious little contact with people totally unlike yourself...We are a nation in which almost everybody is above average. We are convinced that we are running our own lives quite well, whereas the idiots around us are screwing up theirs. The journalist David Whitman called this "the optimism gap" in his 1998 book of the same name: my kids' school is good, but the nation's schools stink; my congressman is wonderful, but members of Congress in general are bums..."
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