Transcript
Ben Shapiro (0:00)
Well, folks, if there is one thing common to President Trump's Cabinet picks, it is Newton's third law of motion. So Newton's third law of motion suggests that for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. The same thing is true in politics. If you corrupt the doj, then President Trump is going to unleash Matt Gaetz on you. If you corrupt HHS, he's going to unleash Robert F. Kennedy Jr. On you. And all of this sort of reactivity in politics is leading to a bit of introspection on the part of people who backed Kamala Harris, people who hate Donald Trump. And what that's resulting in is a wide variety of theories as to why exactly Democrats have lost their way, why the left has lost its way in the United States. One of the biggest theories going right now is being brought out by David Brooks. David Brooks is, of course, a former pseudo conservative columnist for the New York Times. Then he turned toward the left. He famously suggested that he liked Barack Obama because he liked the crease of his pants or some such nonsense. But he's also been responsible for some sort of interesting social theories. He talked for a long time about the Bobo generation and sort of bohemian generation that formed its own morality. He's sort of an interesting writer. Well, he has a big piece on the COVID of the Atlantic this week talking about the death of the meritocracy. And his basic suggestion is that one of the reasons you're seeing outsiders like Donald Trump or R.F. kennedy Jr. Or Matt Gaetz or a wide variety of the figures that you are seeing in positions of power, as is a response to the failures of the so called meritocracy. Now, as we'll discuss, I think this is because David Brooks has a perverse view of what meritocracy actually is. David Brooks is not a meritocrat. He's not somebody who believes that people who have merit ought to rise to the top sort of naturally, that there's an evolutionary process by which people rise to the top. Instead, he is, like many members of the traditional left, a technocrat. He is somebody who's trying to construct systems in order to make the world a better place. He's not going to live with the evolved systems of, say, free markets and free government. Instead, he is a tinkerer. He is somebody who believes that as an expert, he can set up a system that is going to rule over hundreds of millions of people. And this is the actual plague of Western civilization. Over the course of the last century and a half, the movement from evolutionary structures of government and markets, and toward a technocracy, a group of people, a self appointed coterie of elites who are going to fix all of your problems. And so as we'll see, what David Brooks is doing in this essay, and I think it's really important because he does point out what he sees as some problems with the so called meritocracy. But the biggest problem is that he does not understand what a true meritocracy actually is. And very few people, it seems, actually do. In politics, the easiest thing to do is you make a mistake and then you attribute it to the philosophy of your opponent. So this happens very often. For example, with capitalism, 2007, 2008, there's a massive market crisis. That market crisis is not driven by free markets per se. It's driven by government tinkering with free markets. It's driven, for example, by the subprime mortgages pushed by the federal government under Bill Clinton, the attempt to spread home ownership throughout the society through technocratic tinkering. And then when everything falls down, the free markets and capitalism get blamed. The same thing is sort of happening here with meritocracy. So in my view, and traditionally, meritocracy simply means something that should be good for everyone, which is people of merit rise to the top of a system that is better than any of the alternatives. So, for example, aristocracy, which is you are born into rule or oligopoly, in which you essentially have a group of people who maintain their particular rule through corruption. Well, what we are watching right now, and what we've watched over the course of the last century and a half in America, is the transformation of meritocracy. The idea that anyone could get ahead if they had merit, into a technocracy ruled by an elite who are attempting to reconstruct the entire society in their image. So for David Brooks, he isn't actually solving the problems of meritocracy, he's making it worse because he is a tinkerer. He wants to better manage the so called better managed system. As I say, it turns out that systems in the United States, particularly organically, evolved to maximize actual merit. And then at the beginning of the 20th century with the progressive movement, we decided that wasn't enough. Free markets were bad, churches were a problem. All of these sort of natural institutions of life were impositions on the elites who are going to create a better managed system. So here's the thing. Free markets, which are in fact a natural outgrowth of a basic concept of private property, maximize both productivity and Innovation and free markets, they game for that. That is what they incentivize. If you innovate, you're going to get richer. If, if you are productive, you're going to get richer. This is the sort of merit that free markets actually incentivize. Communitarian church systems maximize virtue and social bondedness. So if you live within a community with a strong church or synagogue or mosque, the people who tend to do best in those systems are the people who are the most virtuous and who create the most social fabric. Government is a substitute for neither of those things. Managed systems are a substitute for neither of those things. This is one of the reasons why colleges have collapsed in the United States. So colleges originally were supposed to feature and innovate productivity and virtue. The idea was to create good citizens who are good at things. So for example, the purpose of Columbia University when it was founded in 1754, it was founded as King's College. According to its first president and William Samuel Johnson. He wrote, quote, the chief thing that is aimed at in this college is to teach and engage the children to know God and Jesus Christ and to love and serve him in all sobriety, godliness and righteousness of life with a perfect heart and a willing mind and to train them up in all virtuous habits and all such useful knowledge as may render them creditable to their families and friends, ornaments to their country and useful to the public weal in their generations that they may be qualified to make orderly, intractable members of this society. So in short, these people were not being made to reshape the society. Columbia University was designed to teach eternal truths, to pursue knowledge of nature and nature's God, to create good citizens and good men, to feed into things like free markets and property rights, to feed into things like good membership in community. Well now of course, Columbia exists not to teach either productivity or godliness, but to teach an elite set of values that confers membership on a self appointed aristocracy. And that is the David Brooks problem is that the thing that he is railing against, the thing that he's recognizing, which is the failure of the so called meritocracy. He's not wrong about it. It's just that he's mislabeling is not the failure of meritocracy, it's the failure of a technocracy that's been established over the course of the last century and a half and that has failed the American people. So David Brooks's essay in the Atlantic, I'm going to quote extensively from it. I want to critique it, because I think it's very important. I think that again, a bait and switch is being attempted here. And it's a dangerous bait and switch because the solutions that David Brooks suggests basically maintain that the same elites who have screwed things up ought to maintain control of the system. And that's the problem. So he writes about his idea, which is that there was a shift in how the meritocracy worked happening around the turn of the mid century in the United states in the 20th century, 1950 to 1960. Essentially he's talking about James Conant, who was the president of Harvard. And he says, in trying to construct a society that maximized the talent, James Conant and his peers were governed by the common assumptions of the era. Intelligence, that highest human trait, can be measured by standardized tests and the ability to do well in school. From ages 15 to 18. Universities should serve as society's primary sorting system, segregating the smart from the not smart. Intelligence is randomly distributed across the population. So sorting by intelligence will yield a broad based leadership class. Eventually, Conant's vision triumphed and helped comprehensively refashion American life. If you control the choke points of social mobility, you control the nation's culture. If you change the criteria for admissions at places like Harvard, Yale and Princeton, you change the nation's social ideal. Okay, so the basic idea that he is promoting here is that a sort of test based meritocracy at the universities is the big problem. Now what that replaced, of course, was the idea that if you had a brother or a dad who went to Harvard, you went to Harvard too. And so what Conant pushed was the idea that instead if you're a poor kid who did well on your SATs, you should be able to go to Harvard. That isn't a bad thing. Okay, that isn't a bad thing. So what's the problem? Well, David Brooks is suggesting that actually we set up a sort of replacement, a replacement meritocracy that is based on intellect. And that's the problem. Quote, would we necessarily say that government, civic life, the media or high finance work better now than in the mid 20th century? We can scorn the smug wasp blue bloods from Groton and Choate, and certainly their era's retrograde views of race and gender. But their leadership helped produce the progressive movement, the New Deal victory In World War II, the Marshall planned NATO and and the post war Pax Americana. After the meritocrats took over in the 1960s, we got quagmires in Vietnam and Afghanistan, needless carnage In Iraq, the 2008 financial crisis, the toxic rise of social media, and our current age of political dysfunction. Okay, so first of all, you can see the category error right away, right? He says that the break happened in the mid 20th century and that up until the mid 20th century everything was hunky dory. But half of the things that he mentions before the mid 20th century are things that are not exactly great. So for example, the progressive movement in the United States, which has generated an outsized, extraordinarily large bureaucracy in American government, has been really bad. And what you're watching right now is a reaction directly to that because it wasn't a meritocracy. The break, as it turns out, in American life was not in 1950. The break was in 1900. The break happened in American life with the substitution of an expert elite in favor of the American people in favor of those organic systems that I was talking about, a free market and church communitarianism. The substitution of this top down system, it was attempted for a century and a half and its thorough failure in 2020 basically has led to what we are currently seeing. So again, the things he lists off as sort of wonders are the progressive movement, the New Deal victory in World War II. Victory in World War II, by the way, would not have been a simple. You can't just chalk that up to the so called smug wasp of blue bloods from Groton and Choate. There's very little of that sort of elitism in the victory in World War II. The victory in World War II was the most proletariat war in American history. It was literally a draft of the entire male population of the United States. And then he attributes to them the Marshall Plan, NATO and the post war Pax Americana. It's a lot easier to attribute that to the circumstances of the post World War II era than it is to attribute that to the expertise of the people who are leading the charge. Well folks, it is terrifying that a self appointed elite, moral elite are ruling the country. But that is coming to an end. But there is something else that should terrify any conservative in America Right now. As we speak, your Internet service provider is tracking and logging every single website you visit. And thanks to our wonderful government, they can now legally sell off all of that data to advertisers or whomever else wants to buy it. If you've been listening to my show, you know I'm not somebody who accepts this particular kind of surveillance. That's exactly why I use ExpressVPN. That's why I've been partnering with them for years now. When I'm researching topics for the show, I need to know that the Data is secure. ExpressVPN encrypts everything I do online through their secure servers. That means no one, not big tech, not the government, not your isp can see what you are doing online. Unlike some complicated privacy tools that require a computer science degree to operate, ExpressVPN works with just one click. It runs on all your devices. It's consistently rated number one by tech reviewers. It just works. Right now, you can take advantage of ExpressVPN's Black Friday Cyber Monday offer to get the absolute best VPN deal you'll find all year. Use my special link expressvpn.com Ben get four extra months with the 12 month plan or six extra months with the 24 month plan. Totally free. That's expressvpn.com Ben get an extra four or even six months of ExpressVPN for free. Expressvpn.com Ben Also this election season I visited six different states. I'm traveling all the time. Between all of that hits onto the podcast, our election coverage National I'm constantly on the go. Between all that travel, somehow I'm supposed to maintain health, hit the gym, spend time with the family. Well, when I was a little younger, I thought I could just power through on pure conservative willpower and caffeine alone. I learned pretty quickly. Peak performance requires peak nutrition, which means you have to eat enough vegetables. There is only one problem. I do not like vegetables. They are bad. Which is why I'm thankful to have Balance of Nature, which fits right into even the busiest of days. Imagine trying to eat 31 different fruits and veggies every day. That sounds miserable and time consuming. With Balance of Nature fruits and veggies, however, there's never been a more convenient dietary supplement to ensure you get a wide variety of fruits and veggies daily. Balance of Nature takes fruits and veggies. They freeze dry them, they turn them into a powder, and then they put them into a capsule. You take your fruit and veggie capsules every day and your body knows precisely what to do with them. This is kosher, which means that I can grind it in those protein smoothies and that keeps everything going Strong. Go to balanceofnature.com use promo code SHAPIRO for 35% off your first order as a preferred customer. Plus get a free bottle of fiber and spice. That's balance of nature.com promo code SHAPIRO so then he discusses what he does, what he thinks are the sins of the meritocracy. And again, the reason I'm pointing this out is because there's an attempt by so many members of the elite who have blown it to maintain their control by saying they're going to fix it. You cannot let them fix it because they blew it and even their diagnosis is wrong. So David Brooks gives what he thinks are six sins of the meritocracy. Sin number one is, he says the system overrates intelligence. He says, quote, the bottom line is that if you give somebody a standardized test when they're 13 or 18, you'll learn something important about them, but not necessarily whether they will flourish in life, nor necessarily whether they will contribute usefully to society's greater good. Intelligence is not the same as effectiveness. Okay, he is right that the system does overrate one type of intelligence, technocratic bureaucratic intelligence. Okay, that is true. Any top down system is going to do that. It's going to work to feature people who wants to fit into the system. This has been true since the days of ancient Chinese bureaucracy where you'd actually have bureaucratic tests that were designed to shuffle people into the upper systems of management. Whatever the system needs is what the system gets. Okay, but we've tried to fix the overrating of technocratic and bureaucratic intelligence by saying that everyone should go to college. Right? The problem is not elitism in this sense. The problem is the attempt to extend technocratic bureaucratic intelligence across the entirety of the American body politic. So it's important that a kid who got 1100 on his sats not go into sort of manual labor of some sort. Not going to woodworking or going to plumbing or going to fracking, but that that kid instead go to a college and become qualified to be a middle manager at a government agency somewhere. That's the problem. Now markets wouldn't make that mistake. In a free market system, you would not be able to get a loan. If you were 1100 SAT student attempting to go to college to study lesbian dance theory, you would not be able to obtain a loan. We constructed entire technocratic systems that were designed to funnel more people into this broken system. Right. The free markets are an amazing way to evaluate not for intelligence, but for productivity and efficacy. Again, you don't have to be particularly smart in America to get ahead in America. As it turns out, you actually just have to be fairly good at the job that you are good at. This is the benefit of comparative advantage in free markets. Comparative advantage suggests that people with very high IQ should do things that require Very high iq. And people who have mid level IQ should do things effectively that are required of people who have a mid level iq. And then they trade with one another and both of them are richer for it. Right? This is the reason why plumbers can make a lot of money in the United States, because free markets again maximize that which you are good at, a comparative advantage. One of the great discoveries of mankind. Okay, but that is the thing that our system does not feature. Okay. He says the second problem with the so called meritocracy is that success in school is not the same as success in life. He says success in school is about jumping through the hoops adults put in front of you. Success in life can involve charting your own course. Again, that is true, but markets solve for that. And he keeps forgetting markets. He keeps forgetting that it's not something that requires David Brooks to come in and tinker. If you really want people to rise based on things like agility. As we'll see, what you need is a system that features agility. And the system for some people does feature agility, Right? So for example, if you take a look at our business here, our business was founded by a Harvard Law graduate and two guys who did not graduate college. And we are a very large business at this point with 300 employees or so. Okay? Because of the free market, not because of the system that David Brooks wants to construct. Then he says the problem with the meritocracy is that the game is rigged. He says the meritocracy was supposed to sort people by innate ability. What it really does is sort people according to how rich their parents are. As the meritocracy has matured, affluent parents have invested massively in their children so they can win in the college admissions arms race. Well, here's the problem again. Why is the college admissions arms race the thing that matters most? And the answer is, realistically speaking, in a free market system, it isn't. And one of the great lies that people tell about economics in the United States is that there's no income mobility. Everybody's sort of stuck where they started. That isn't true. It just isn't true. In a 2014 New York Times article titled From Rags to Riches, for example, Washington University professor of social welfare Mark Rank talked about income mobility in the United States. And here's what he found. After a 44 year study of longitudinal data regarding individuals aged 25 to 60 to see how Americans moved up and down the income spectrum, it turns out 12% of Americans will find themselves in the top 1% of the income distribution for at least one year. 39% of Americans of all Americans will spend a year in the top 5% of the income distribution. Over half, 56%, will find themselves in the top 10% for at least one year in income distribution. And 73% will spend a year in the top 20% of the income distribution. So again, the idea that they have, like, a stagnant 1% that is ruling the roost over everybody else, that is not true. People can rise and fall in a free market system based on their own merit. But he keeps forgetting that the free market system has to be left alone. And so he says, quote, the meritocracy has created an American caste system. And he says that that is the fourth problem. This caste system, he says, quote, after decades of cognitive segregation, a chasm divides the well educated from the less well educated. The whole meritocracy is a system of segregation. Segregate your family into a fancy school district. If you're a valedictorian in Ohio, don't go to Ohio state. Go to one of the coastal elite schools where all the smart rich kids are. But again, that's actually not the problem. That's actually not the problem. It's linked to the fifth problem that he notices. Quote, he says the meritocracy has damaged the psyches of the American elite. He says the meritocracy is a gigantic system of extrinsic rewards. Its gatekeepers, educators, corporate recruiters, workplace supervisors, impose a series of assessments and hurdles upon the young. Students are trained to be good hurdle clearers. We shower them with disapproval or approval, depending on how they measure up. On any given day, students learn to ride an emotional roller coaster, congratulating themselves for clearing a hurdle one day and demoralized by their failure the next. But again, that's actually wrong. Okay? The reality is not that our students are petrified of losing out in the sort of college admissions game. The reality is that, again, the false meritocracy, the technocracy that's been created leads people who succeed there to believe that they are members of a higher moral caste, that they are higher. They have a different set of values that if you put she her in your pronouns in your bio, this makes you part of the coterie of the elite who are to rule society. The fake meritocracy that David Brooks is talking about has created an American cay system. But not economically. Culturally, it's people who get together in cloistered areas of San Francisco and Los Angeles and New York and Chicago and they believe that they are morally superior to all the people around them. Right. So what he is talking about here is again a category error. He is making a large scale mistake. He says in the end that what we should be doing if we want to fix the problems of what he calls the meritocracy, is redefining merit to include curiosity, a sense of drive and mission, social intelligence and agility. And he says if the meritocracy had more channels, society would no longer look like a pyramid with a tiny exclusive peak at the top. It would look like a mountain range with many peaks. Status and recognition in such a society would be more broadly distributed, diminishing populist resentment, making cultural cohesion more likely. Yes, that's true. It was called the free market. It was called the free market. It was called a thing that if you left it alone, then the meritocracy would not be the problem. The problem in the United States, as always, is that we don't have a true meritocracy anymore because people who believe that they are smarter than everyone else constructed a system and then shoved people into that system. And it turns out they suck at everything. It turns out that these people created a value system all their own because in order to ignore free markets and communitarian churches, which was the balance in American life, free markets representing rights, communitarian churches representing duty, that if you ignore that balance, if you destroy that balance, if you upset the apple cart in the name of a utopian social scheme, what you end up doing is screwing everything up at the give and take of free markets makes for better products, better productivity, better innovation, smarter people, actually. And that communitarian churches mean that the wealth flows downward too. Not just because free markets mean that everybody's boat rises with the. With the rising waters, but also because in a communitarian church, we all have the same sort of orientation that local communities and social fabric actually matter. They upset all of this from top down. Now they're trying to fix it from the top down. And the problem is that once you create an elite coterie of people who believe that they are at the top of the meritocracy based on their membership in this sort of moral top tier, their policies stink because they're totally disconnected from the rest of the American people. And then the rubber hits the road. And that's what we've been seeing. What we are watching right now is the revenge of the normies. It's the revenge of things like evolutionary free markets, where people like Elon Musk, a no name from South Africa can become the richest person on planet Earth. What they're looking for is a return to a system of morality where people actually know what it's like to raise a normal child in a normal situation with a normal family, as opposed to the bizarre social values of this elite that suggest that we should be totally morally apathetic about how families are raised or how children are created. Okay, that day is over. Because the coterie of the merit, the fake meritocracy, the technocracy, failed. And that is why you're getting the revenge of the Trump administration. That's why you're getting pics from the outside to wreck administrative agencies. Because you blew it. Because you blew it. It's not that the meritocracy was improperly screwed around with in 1950, 1960, with the university system. It's that a moral case was created at the top of American society that was willing to rule everybody. And we don't like it and it's wrong. And that didn't start in 1950. That started again with the progressive movement around the turn of the 20th century. And we're seeing the effects of it right now. All of it is bearing its fruit in the smallest possible ways right in our daily lives. Well, as we say, these technocratic elites, they believe they know what's best for you. But you know, who knows what's best for you? You. Which is why you should check out blinds.com they are kicking off their savings early with Black Friday megadeals all month long. The holidays are almost here. There's still time to upgrade your home with blinds.com so swapping out old blinds for custom window coverings is a small project with big results. They make it easy and they make it affordable. Skip the hassle of in home sales, visits and long wait times for quotes. With blinds.com, shopping online doesn't mean sacrificing quality, style or service. A design expert can help you make the perfect selection on your schedule. Can even handle everything from measure to install, all for one straightforward price. I've used blindsidecon myself. Let me tell you, it is much easier than shopping in person. I love them because they're trustworthy. Across the board, blinds.com has a wide selection, accessible experts. You can talk to live installers who actually know what they're doing. When I use their service, they helped with everything you've got, measurements, installation, the whole thing. It was seamless. With over 25 million windows covered, blinds.com is the number one online retailer of custom window coverings. They're the smarter way to transform your home for the holidays. Shop Black Friday Megadeals all month long@blinds.com get up to 45% off sitewide plus a free professional measure right now that's up to 45% off sitewid plus a free measure for limited time@blinds.com rules and restrictions may apply. Blinds.com go check them out right now. Also, when we started Daily Wire, the biggest question mark was what we would do for hr. You know, when you start a business, you're focused on creating awesome product. It's difficult to find a managing professional capable of handling day to day HR tasks. Well, if that sounds like you, you need to talk to my friends over at Bambi. With Bambi, you're not just getting an HR manager, you're getting a dedicated partner who's available by phone, email and real time chat. They'll handle crucial tasks like employee onboarding, terminations and performance reviews. With Bambi's HR Autopilot feature, you can streamline essential HR practices like employee training and feedback procedures, freeing up time for what really matters to your business. All of Bambi's HR managers are based in the United States and can support the nuances across all 50 states. HR managers can easily cost 80 grand annually, but Bambi starts just $99 monthly, so no matter the size of your business, Bambi can work for you. Don't wait another minute. Schedule your free consultation by visiting bamb.com right now. Type Ben Shapiro under podcast when you sign up. Spelled B A m b e e.com that's Bam B. Type in Ben Shapiro again. Bambi.com it's very easy to forget about HR, but then that's what comes and bites you. So don't do it. Instead, head on over to Bambi.com, type in Ben Shapiro to get started. It takes a while for bad theory to hit the streets, but bad theory has hit the streets to take just the most obvious example. Over the course of the last couple of weeks in New York City, according to the New York Post, a blood covered lunatic toting two knives trekked across Manhattan, a savage broad daylight stabbing spree that left a woman and two men dead Monday, according to the cops. The sick suspected stabber, a mentally ill homeless man with eight PASS arrests in New York City alone was stopped by a hero cop thanks to the help of good Samaritans, including a cab driver and a British tourist, said NYPD Chief of Detectives Joe Kenny and police sources. Ramon Rivera, 51, was identified by sources as the Person of interest in custody seen with a long beard and unwieldy hair in a grizzled mug shot obtained by the Post. Police have no other suspect in the state of unprovoked random attacks, said Mayor Adams. He said today we have three innocent New Yorkers just going about their lives who are the victim of a terrible, terrible assault. It's a clear example of the criminal justice system, mental health system that continues to fail. New Yorkers who designed that system, the technocracy, not a meritocracy, a technocracy of people who believe that they have a morally superior view of the universe in which the mentally ill ought to be able to walk the streets, in which, if you defend against attackers on a subway, you are tried for manslaughter. That's happening currently, right now in New York. You want to know why this sort of stuff is happening? Because no one steps in between killers and their victims. Because if they do, they might be prosecuted by precisely these idiotic technocrats. That is why when people look at situations like this, this is so easy to stop. Like in any normal society, this would be stopped forthwith. The sort of evolutionary basis of all society and government is to stop the killer from attacking the innocent. That is why the government generally has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, because you don't want people revenge killing one another. And so the idea is, the basic bargain is you give up some of your rights so that the government will defend you against the crazy guy in the street who's going to stab you. One right you don't give up, by the way, is the right of self defense. But New York City, you can give that up, because if you're Daniel Penny, you. You go to trial on the basis of defending others. You wonder why there's a backlash against the technocrats because they designed an unworkable system. It's the technocrats who designed a system that said that we have to open our southern border wide and allow in 10 million people from who knows where with values that we don't understand or know. And those people have to be let in in the name of social justice. And the backlash is coming in the form of the Trump administration's crackdown on immigration. Tom Homan, who's the bulldog border czar who's going to be appointed by President Trump. He talked yesterday about how excited he was to get started on the job.