Oct. 27, 2025 - Epoch Times
03:32
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Over the course of the 20th century, IQ took on a different role in America's social structure. | |
| It became much more important in determining affluence, much more important in determining who's successful than it had been previously for complicated reasons I won't go into, and that we also had things such as the university system start to go out and vacuum up the kids with the most intellectual potential and send them off to a set of elite colleges where they formed a critical mass that tended to produce a culture of its own that had not existed | |
| before. | |
| Actually, people who have read Coming Apart encountered the same argument in Coming Apart. | |
| I virtually lifted a couple of chapters from the bell curve and put them in Coming Apart, didn't mention it to anybody, and none of the reviewers caught it because so few people actually read the bell curve as opposed to heard the stories told about it that they weren't aware of the argument. | |
| But that was the basic argument, and if I can say so, it's been borne out, I think, by what we've looked at the last 15 years. | |
| You have a cognitive elite that kind of lives in a world of its own, culturally and to a large degree politically. | |
| No, absolutely. | |
| And so let's talk about Coming Apart briefly, because I think of that as your most influential book. | |
| Probably was, yeah. | |
| But, you know, it's sort of one of the first to show that there's this malaise in America that, you know, arguably has resulted in the current political realities. | |
| Well, the segregation of the educated elite from the rest of the country, which had been quite minor in the early 1960s, had become stunning, which is to say that you go to northwest Washington, | |
| D.C. now, and for that matter, ever since, throughout the 21st century, northwest Washington, D.C. is just very dense with graduates of Harvard, Princeton, Yale, the other Ivies, Duke, Stanford. | |
| It's incredible how densely they're packed. | |
| And if you look at San Francisco, Manhattan, parts of L.A., you see the same thing that you have people from these elite schools in an elite culture with differences in everything from their child raising practices to the media they watch to the books they read, the television they watch, everything is a completely different culture. | |
| That all happened in a relatively short period of time and created an enormous sense of isolation. | |
| You had kids coming to full adulthood in their 20s and 30s who had never known anything except this quite affluent, highly educated, upper middle class living in enclaves. | |
| And that has produced a lot of what we see when the cognitive elite talks about flyover country, when they talk about rednecks, and more recently when they talk about MA people. |
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