How the Elite rigged Society (and why it’s falling apart) | David Brooks

so I have a confession to make I'm a member of the educated Elite my parents were historians of Victorian England our Turtles when I was growing up were named Israeli and Gladstone the culture in our home was think yish act British very stiff upper lip we showed no emotion and then when I was seven I read a book called paddings in the bear and decided I want to become a writer and that was Central to my identity ever since in high school um uh what you call like fourth form or something like that um I

wanted to date a woman named Bernice and she didn't want to date me she dated some other guy and I remember thinking what is she thinking I write way better than that guy and so those were my values H and then when I was 18 the admissions officers at Columbia Wesley and brown universities decided I should go to the University of Chicago and some of you may know the saying about Chicago it's where fun goes to die my favorite saying about Chicago it's a Baptist school where atheist professors teach Jewish students St Thomas aquinus so

it's very educated Elite uh and I fit right in I had a double major at Chicago in history and celibacy while I was there um and then after school I got a job where an educated Elite person should get a job I was hired to be the conservative columnist of the New York Times a job I likened to being the Chief Rabbi at Mecca uh not not a lot of company there and then I got a job on PBS which is our PBS NewsHour which is our version of news night and again educated Elite uh

we have a wonderful audience somewhat seasoned and so if a 93y old lady comes up from me the airport I know what she's going to say I don't want your program but my mother loves it uh and so so we members of the educated Elite did some good things we created the internet brunch and mocktails you're welcome we did some bad things we designed a meritocracy design designed around the skills we ourselves possess and rigged the game so we succeeded and everybody else failed by age 12 children American children of affluent kids are four grade

levels above everybody else by University the age rich kids are 77 times more likely to go to university or to ivy league university than kids from poor schools in adulthood 54% of the people at Elite workplaces went to the same 34 Elite colleges so we ended up creating a cast system people with high school degrees die nine years sooner than people with college degrees people with high school degrees are five times more likely to have kids out of wedlock people with high school degrees are 2.4 times more likely to say they have no friends so

we created a cast system even though we pretend to be egalitarian but the worst things we did were not Material America has a very strong economy the worst things we did were spiritual we privatized morality and destroyed the moral order uh George Marsen is a great historian who said what gave Martin Luther King's rhetoric its power was the sense there's a moral order built built into the universe that if slavery is not wrong nothing is wrong if segregation is not wrong nothing is wrong we took that essential moral order that holds people together and we

decided it's up to you to find your own truth find your own values back in 1955 a great American journalist named Walter Litman understood this was going to be a b big problem he said if what is right and wrong depends on what each individual feels then we are outside the bounds of civilization um and so without a strong moral order it's hard to have trust it's hard to find your your meaning in life and so America and I think Britain too has become a sadder Society rise in mental health rise in suicide 45% of

high school students say they are persistently hopeless and despondent four since 2000 the number of Americans without close personal friends is up by fourfold since 2000 the number of people who say they have no who say they are in the lowest happiness category is up by 50% we've just become sadder the third thing the educated lead has done and this may not please you is we produced Donald Trump uh some people think Donald Trump is a populist Donald Trump and Elon Musk went to the University of Pennsylvania and IV League school and became billionaires JD

Vance went to Yale Pete hexi went to the Princeton Yale Steven Miller went to Duke Fox News typ like Laur Ingram went to Dartmouth and they represent the educated Elite and the key factor of the educated Elite is that they're not pro-conservative they're anti-left they don't have a positive Vision conservative vision for society they just want to destroy the institutions that the left now dominates and this means in the first place they're astoundingly incompetent I have a lot of sympathy with what drove people to vote for Trump but I I'm telling you as someone who's

on the front row to what's happening do not hit your wagon to that star thank you you're supposed to boo P heith gave away our bargaining chips with Putin before we even had negotiations Elon Musk has 25y olds firing people who were controlling our nuclear codes it's like Sam bankman freed got control of our Nu nuclear Arsenal second Elite narcissism causes them to eviscerate every belief system they touch conservatives believe in healthy societies are built on healthy institutions they're an anti-institutional conservatives believe in steady and gradual change Edmond Burke their disruption conservatives believe in constitutional

government Donald Trump says I alone can fix this conservatives believe in moral Norms they're destroying moral Norms conser the other belief system that they are destroying us judeo-christian Faith judeo Christ faith is based on service to the poor service to the Immigrant service to the stranger I went to numibia South Africa throughout the 1990s and 2000s and I watched people die of AIDS then I went back with my friend Mike Gerson and I saw those 25 million lives saved I saw people living lives of dignity and so what's the first thing Donald Trump did he

eviscerated that program my friends in America are conservative evangelicals in government who want to fight sex trafficking poverty they want to preserve National Security Donald Trump is declaring war on those Christians so don't so I've describ three different things we educated Elites brought you we destroy the social fabric through inequality we destroyed the moral fabric through privatizing morality and we destroyed the institutional fabric what's happening right now how can we come back well we already are I often ask people tell me about a time that made you who you are as a human being and

they never say I want a fantastic vacation in Hawaii they never say that they say I went through a really hard time the death of someone the loss of someone moving away from home entering a new vocation Paul tiik the Theologian said those moments of suffering interrupt your life and they remind you you're not the person you thought they were they carve through the floor of your basement of your soul and they reveal a cavity below and they carve through that floor and they reveal a cavity Below in moments of suffering you see yourself in

a more Deep Way than you ever did before and in those moments of suffering you can either be broken or you can be broken open and people who are transformed decide I'm going to be broken open and Nations that are going to be transformed by moments of suffering say we're going to be broken open we've been through periods of national crisis before across the world Nations have constantly hit a spiritual and cultural crisis and then revived this country between 1820 and 1848 I was here in the 1980s Britain recovered in the 1980s Australia in the

1970s Germany and Japan after World War II South Korea in the 1980s Rwanda after 1994 Chile in the 1990s my own country we've done this again and again we've grown not through a happy merry ride we've grown through a process of rupture and repair when society and culture is in crisis and we figure it out 1770s the Old Colonial order had to go sorry 1830s the East Coast Elite had too much power Andrew Jackson brought an era of populism 1860s the slavery order had to go Abraham Lincoln brought forth National Redemption 1890s we had failed

at industrialization we had a Civic Renaissance of all these Civic organizations that filled in the whole and created a sane Society 1960s the conformist culture of the 1950s had to go and we had the changes that came there the temptation of those who don't read history is to think this time is different we're in another period of rupture and repair we have spiritual resources I'm a conservative I believe the that we are inheritors of a great spiritual Legacy what Michael Oak called the great conversation we have the voice of Genesis that we're all made in

God's image that's the foundation of democracy we have the voice of Exodus that we wander through the Wilderness and we eventually get to the promised land we have the voice of Jesus even if you're not Christian blessed are the meek blessed are the poor in spirit that's a source of great strength in my country we have the voice of Alexander Hamilton poor boys and girls should rise and succeed we have the voice of Edmund Burke that we should be modest about what we can know because culture is really complicated and we should operate on society

the way we would operate on our father gradually and carefully we have the joy voice of John Stewart Mill we value diversity and pluralism because it leads to what he called adventures in living when you have a spiritual moral and relational crisis the job is to shift the culture and we are moving I think from a hyper individualistic culture the last years toward a communal culture I didn't like the social justice movement but it was an attempt to find Community I'm not particularly a big fan of Maga but it's an attempt to find Community cultur

change is about a shifting of the heart it's a Prov providing new answers to the question how should I live my life it's about soulcraft and it isn't done the way you do political change culture change Works differently it's done as Walter batet put it if you want to Wi people over enjoy the things that conservatives enjoy culture changes when a creative minority find a beautiful way to live culture changes when a small group of people find a better way to live and the rest of us copy that's the story of the early church it's

the story of the clam sect they weren't my cup of tea but it's a story of Bloomsbury I was mentored by William F Buckley it's a story of the conservative movement in America culture changes on a personal level when we relate to each other with attentive and generous gaze Simone VY said attention is the purest form of generosity culture changes on a spiritual level tselot said you can't create a system so perfect that the people in it don't have to be good it's when you put moral formation at the center of your society and finally

it happens at the Civic level when a thousand voices and a thousand different organizations create Civic institutions that provide healing and relationship in society that's how culture changes I was at a bar about two months after October 7th and if you had seen me there you would have thought sad Guy drinking alone I call it reporting so I'm scrolling through Twitter and it has all these brutal images from the Middle East but I come across a video of James Baldwin and he says you know there isn't as much Humanity as one would like but there's

enough and what you've got to remember is that when you walk down the street every person you meet you could be that person that could be you you could be that monster you could be that Saint you could and you have to decide who you're going to be now James Baldwin was treated shabbily by my Society because of his race and other things but he had a right to be bitter but even in that circumstance he uttered the ultimate humanist statement you could be that person that person could be you and the phrase that rang

in my head when I heard that was defiant humanism that even in harsh and brutal times were called upon to see each other in the fullest deepest and most respectful way that God imagined that they would be seen thank you very much