…the biggest roadblock today is that so many of America’s best-educated, best-placed people are too invested in old social models and old visions of history to do their real job and help society transition to the next level. Instead of opportunities they see threats; instead of hope they see danger; instead of the possibility of progress they see the unraveling of everything beautiful and true.
Too many of the very people who should be leading the country into a process of renewal that would allow us to harness the full power of the technological revolution and make the average person incomparably better off and more in control of his or her own destiny than ever before are devoting their considerable talent and energy to fighting the future….
In most of our learned professions and knowledge guilds today, promotion is linked to the needs and aspirations of the guild rather than to society at large. Promotion in the academy is almost universally linked to the production of ever more specialized, theory-rich (and, outside the natural sciences, too often application-poor) texts, pulling the discourse in one discipline after another into increasingly self-referential black holes. We suffer from ”˜runaway guilds’: costs skyrocket in medicine, the civil service, education and the law in part because the imperatives of the guilds and the interests of their members too often triumph over the needs and interests of the wider society….
We can see the same unhappy pattern in knowledge-based American institutions beyond the groves of academe. The mainline Protestant churches have a hyperdeveloped theology, an over-professionalized clergy ”“ and shrinking congregations. The typical American foundation is similarly hyperdeveloped in terms of social and political theory, over professionalized in its staff ”“ and perhaps thankfully has a declining impact on American society because its approaches are increasingly out of touch….
Mead makes many good points.
We need broad-based thinkers who can produce concepts that when applied to reality, and to what has historically made the United States both ‘work’ and ‘prosper,’ will preserve the ‘essence’ of what has made the USA work and prosper.
Today’s leadership is much more ‘trained’ in disciplines and ideologies rather than ‘educated’ in how to think.
Our leaders seem much more determined to apply complex and unproven ‘fairy castle’ ideologies rather than confront the real world with a disciplined thought process that deals with ‘down to earth’ realities.
Part of the problem of course, is that far more people can comprehend solutions to problems that are based upon a diciplined thought process that deals with reality and that this approach to problem-solving endangers the various ‘priesthoods’ of those ‘who know better’ but who are merely the product of abstract schools of thought that are detached from reality.
So, as a result, we have leading our nation, unreal thinkers who are producing unreal and unworkable solutions to the problems facing us.
When we live in a culture that is so jaded that the only thing that intellectually stimulates us anymore are talking heads that are crude, loud, and vulgar, and usually dripping with vitriolic sarcasm and satire, is it any wonder that people who should be the best and brightest are the ones most likely to keep their mouth shut for fear of being yelled at or shouted down with new ideas.