Oh my. Bingo. Almost everybody knows, or thinks they know, what Bush means. But not Kerry. (Quote is of Clinton, charge is worse in Kerry’s case).

The lack of ROTC on elite campuses is a huge, negative, anti-free association thought censorship.

The Myers-Briggs personality 4-pair tests help here: the elites are NFs and NT, abstract (iNtuitive) Feelers and Thinkers. Most people are Sensitive (concrete, reality NOT abstract theory), both Ps & Js (um, open-ended and closure-oriented). Most of the elites all over the world are the 25% Ns, not the 75% Ss. (I’m an INTP)

And the increase in one-child families means lots of these elites have no family brothers & sisters who really ARE that different (at least two of my four sisters are S); their friends are mostly like themselves and the contact with the others is much less.

Smaller family size is certainly an aspect of reduced understanding for different types of people.

Remember Andrew Grove of Intel, whose motto is, “Only the paranoid survive”? His attitude is typical for a successful businessman. How many journalists are as concerned about getting issues and facts right as Grove was about not getting blindsided by misunderstood information?

To get a good story, some journalists embed with the army, some embed with the “freedom fighters”. 2 points of view with a clear delineation on who to beleive.

The behavioral attributes that makes one a successful journalist or academician are much different from those that make one a successful farmer or army officer.

Journalist can no longer relate to the larger population because they enter their own little subculture in late high school or early college and then never leave. They have no real-world experiences outside the subculture. There criteria for what makes a successful and “good” person becomes the criteria for becoming a successful journalist.

Everybody has this problem. Outside of our area of specialization, we’re idiots and we have little understanding of the nuances of peoples lives. Business people or military people don’t know what it’s like to be a journalist. Farmers don’t know what problems artist face.

This would not be a problem except to many of us have the idea that our knowledge and experience encompass the knowledge and experiences of others. We believe that we are superior in some sense and that the world view of others is just a limited subset of our own. Understanding that even the brightest human can comprehend only a sliver of all that it means to be human is a leap of humility that few of us, especially the best of us, can make.

The bad news for the media elite is that its overly inbred herd mentality is reducing its total available audience as well as its grip on reality. Decades ago I subscribed to Harpers and The Atlantic. Years ago Harpers got irritating and I let the subscription lapse. Now the Atlantic often remains unfinished when the next issue arives. There are just too many points of view available in real time on the net now, versus the all too predictable MSM, even in the regrettable absence of Steven Den Beste and Don Sensing.