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Pastimes : Neocon's Seminar Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TigerPaw who wrote (926)	9/6/2003 4:24:51 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1112

Re: Members from a select group are further selected for even more power and prestige. The selection process becomes a self fulfilling predictor of success but leads inevitably to a sense of entitlement. From the Lemann interview: What did it turn out to be? Well, the fundamental irony of the American meritocracy, the system that Conant set up, is this: people will start madly manipulating the system to their favor and to the favor of their children. And the people who have more money and more power and more sophistication will be able to manipulate it more successfully. So, the sort of the tragedy of Conant's system is that some of his ideas just seem laughable today. The idea that America would become a classless society through the use of these tests. The idea that the people who score high on these tests would care only about public service and the good of the country and would be indifferent to money and power. The idea that they would be admired by ordinary people in the country. The idea that they would turn social arrangements completely upside down in the country. The idea that they would be enemies of privilege--they wouldn't want to privilege themselves above others, they would want to wipe out all privilege in America. I mean, these ideas are appealing but today they just sound impossibly naïve. You can't set up a system to distribute rank and privilege and assume it won't be used for that purpose by people and that people won't eventually figure out how to game the system and use it to pass on advantage. Every conceivable meritocracy, degrades over time into an aristocracy. It just has to happen that way. ____________________________________