Pineridge Blog

Lies the culture tells us (Part 2)

David Brooks is one of my favorite authors. You may have read his opinion column in KC Star. He also appears frequently on TV representing “the conservative” point of view in politi-cal analysis. Currently he has a great new book out called The Second Mountain. This is the final part of a column he wrote that appeared April 15 in the NY Times entitled, “5 Lies Our Culture Tells Us.”

You have to find your own truth. This is the privatization of meaning. It’s not up to the schools to teach a coherent set of moral values, or a society. Everybody chooses his or her own values. Come up with your own answers to life’s ultimate questions! You do you!

The problem is that unless your name is Aristotle, you proba-bly can’t do it. Most of us wind up with a few vague moral feel-ings but no moral clarity or sense of purpose.
The reality is that values are created and passed down by strong, self-confident communities and institutions. People absorb their values by submitting to communities and institu-tions and taking part in the conversations that take place with-in them. It’s a group process.

Rich and successful people are worth more than poorer and less successful people. We pretend we don’t tell this lie, but our whole meritocracy points to it. In fact, the meritocracy contains a skein of lies.

The message of the meritocracy is that you are what you ac-complish. The false promise of the meritocracy is that you can earn dignity by attaching yourself to prestigious brands. The emotion of the meritocracy is conditional love — that if you perform well, people will love you.

The sociology of the meritocracy is that society is organized around a set of inner rings with the high achievers inside and everyone else further out. The anthropology of the meritocra-cy is that you are not a soul to be saved but a set of skills to be maximized.

No wonder it’s so hard to be a young adult today. No wonder our society is fragmenting. We’ve taken the lies of hyper-individualism and we’ve made them the unspoken assumptions that govern how we live.

We talk a lot about the political revolution we need. The cul-tural revolution is more important.