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Tolu's avatar

I like the idea of EHC as a character profile of the type of people who have disproportionate influence over institutions, but it seems to fall apart when you start getting into ideology or ideas. Like you've defined EHC to exclude everyone but liberals. Libertarians aren't EHC because despite caring about ideas, most are closer to conservatives in that they would rather make more money than influence institutions as a low paid journalist (even though the entire idea of libertarianism is trusting markets and economic incentives over government institutions). Socialists and communists aren't EHC either despite also caring about ideas because they are authoritarian. But then how is Luigi Mangione EHC? Isn't murdering your opponents the ultimate form of authoritarianism? The way you are defining it comes off more as liberal self-aggrandizement than an actually useful term.

You say wokeness requires an "unnatural" dogmatism to maintain its hold over smart/idealistic people. This is just a way to excuse liberals for acting like authoritarians, as if there wasn't massive overlap between liberals and wokes. If the stifling dogmatism wasn't coming from EHC liberals, where was it coming from?

Another problem is simply the nomenclature, which I imagine most the pushback you get on this topic comes from. Using the actual definition of human capital, meaning-maximizers do not necessarily possess more human capital than wealth-maximizers. Saying Brian Thompson is low human capital and Luigi Mangione is elite human capital just sounds ridiculous. Saying it's your definition of elite human capital doesn't make it less ridiculous.

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Steven's avatar

"Individuals begin to signal virtue. Truth becomes a lingua franca through which smart people communicate with one another. An individual tries to show that he is honest and caring."

The first sentence here is redundant. Individuals at EVERY level of society and class signal their virtue, only the means and virtues differ. A trucker wearing a MAGA hat is virtue signaling. Trump has frequently been accused of virtue signaling (draping himself in the flag, etc). This is not a unique characteristic of your EHC. You can easily find many articles on the topic comparing leftist political correctness to the Right's 'patriotic correctness'. You're surely also familiar with the concept of "Luxury Beliefs", yes? The beliefs that characterize our elite signaling are NOT notable for being significantly more truthful, in fact, they are often already proven counterproductive for society (with the actual negative externalities of these fashionable beliefs concentrated outside the elite class).

"Truth becomes a lingua franca..." It's amusing that you immediately gave an example that also implicitly contradicts your premise: peppering one's speech with foreign languages and phrases is a typical "I'm better educated and more culturally cosmopolitan than thou" 'virtue' signal, but it's deliberately contrary to clear communication. Your EHC doesn't use 'Truth' as their primary mode of communication, much the opposite, they more frequently use deliberate obfuscation and ambiguity. Although much of this can be put down to the liberal enjoyment in playing word games, it's also often deployed as a shibboleth. The euphemism treadmill likewise. In fact, deliberate ambiguity that enables the Fallacy of Equivocation is something of a trademark for this social class given their frequent fondness for Motte and Bailey arguments.

I'll grant you that college students tend toward the upper end of the IQ distribution, but the study results are rather clear that they rarely start or end their education with any superiority over the average populace in either critical thinking or morals (which is frankly a horrific failure of our education system at every level). They may be better 'problem solvers' in a strictly narrow technical sense, but they generally aren't 'better people' in any demonstrable sense beyond theoretically having more to lose if they get caught (although they also often seem to suffer less severe consequences when caught). You might particularly want to avoid using a supposed lack of cheating in academia as your example since plagiarism scandals have become commonplace and teachers actively complain about administrations deliberately discouraging them from accusing students of plagiarism even when it's obvious. Along with rampant grade inflation, 'equitable grading practices' that factor social justice into grading, and drastically reduced academic standards themselves (less reading and homework assigned, fewer and shorter essays, the proliferation of "easy A" classes that substitute activism for academics and 'group participation' for individual merit) higher education is very much in crisis right now and the credentialing it provides of dubious value.

Claudine Gay serves as a perfect example that even Harvard first didn't check for plagiarism, even when selecting for its highest office, then attempted to cover it up with lawfare, then publicly defended it and attempted to smear anyone pointing it out as racist/sexist/etc, then finally even when effectively forced to remove her from that position by public pressure still kept her on as highly paid faculty actively teaching. You can attempt to differentiate EHC and Woke, but it's not the people you consider EHC that revealed the scandal, stood up for academic standards, or tried to hold her to account for violating them. It's disingenuous to nominally uphold EHC as a culture dedicated to truth and characteristic of our universities when our current university culture has demonstrably become hostile towards truth and made a point of punishing the tellers of inconvenient truths.

You're caught on something of a fork here: either your EHC isn't actually running the campuses or they've caved to the woke mobs because their virtue signaling (regarding truth-seeking) was hollow, but in either case the surveys out of FIRE show large majorities on campus (both student and faculty) who are self-censoring out of fear, even not saying facts they believe to be true. Ironically, American universities have become some of the LEAST intellectually curious, open to debate, and socially accepting of diversity of views places in America.

As for being more empathetic and caring? You ought to already know this is false. The alleged asymmetry of empathy is thoroughly debunked. They're just as biased and prejudicial against others as anyone, they simply have different outgroups they express it against. The numbers on charity are instructive: although liberals will self-describe as more empathetic, rate empathy higher on value scales, appeal to empathy more frequently as an argument, express greater desire to be empathic, and will give away more money in carefully constructed social science lab experiments... But it's conservatives, especially Blue collar, who donate higher percentages of their money, time, and even blood, than liberals do. Liberals virtue signal empathy more, but conservatives actually practice it more in the real world. You're going to have a hard time defining EHC in a way that your demographic doesn't actually demonstrate less empathy in measurable action than people you dismiss as LHC. Tolerance likewise, although the sides are very similar in terms of hostility to the outgroups, some studies are showing conservatives as currently the less vindictive and authoritarian than liberals in regards to enforcement against their outgroups.

There's even some fairly recent studies looking into victim culture (as opposed to honor culture and dignity culture) that have found that much of liberal empathy signaling is a mask for malevolent Narcissism, that they often prioritize harming their disfavored groups over actually helping the supposed objects of their empathy, and that falsely signaling empathy for alleged victim groups is frequently used as a way to strip the alleged victimizers of protection so that the signalers may action their sadistic impulses on them without being socially censored for doing so. Now, there's a decent case to be made that this is mostly a side effect of liberal capture of institutions and that the same kind of terrible people infect and abuse any power structure, liberal or otherwise, but it's not exactly a credit to your EHC's supposed intelligence, truth-seeking, or empathy, that their institutions folded to the Woke easily and thoroughly, rarely defending truth or virtue against attacks from the Left.

Your fundamental premise doesn't hold. You can certainly demonstrate that there is a class of intelligent people oriented toward abstract thought, sure. That's well substantiated. Then the idea immediately breaks down as closer examination shows them to be more novelty-seeking than "truth-seeking". Yes, that's often just as effective in producing innovation and discovering new things, but the distinction matters greatly in regards to any area where we already know the truth and any system that is already highly optimized. It's not just a pattern of elites continually building on the past up to bigger and better things, it's more frequently a pattern of Sandcastle Syndrome where the elite seekers reject the known simply because it IS the known and embrace the new simply because it is the new.

Disdain for the vulgar might be a virtue if it reliably motivated the elites to genuinely be better than the rabble. That's a very medieval concept of 'nobility', at least as romanticized by later historians. OTOH, the historical track record of aristocracy suggests that such a class identity as "their betters" rarely results in actually being better, merely an empty pretense and unfounded assumption of such. Even the pretense is perhaps worth something to society ("hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue"), but it's clearly not sufficient in itself to prevent the elites from becoming ideologically (and too often genetically) insular, inbred, and corrupt. Your EHC is NOT consistently self-correcting. They ought to be, if they weren't hypocrites, but the evidence suggests that they are hypocrites more often than not, and course correct only in the face of an angry rabble that has finally amassed enough power to credibly hold them to some accounting.

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