Balkanization of the Mind

It is not just for small Eastern European countries any more.

Balkanization is not limited to geography; it also exists in the human mind.

I have witnessed the phenomenon - not in a pure sociological setting but in relationship to academics and business.

I graduated from a 21-month executive MBA program at the University of Utah in 2005 that focused on international business. I was surrounded by fifty-four of some of the brightest people with whom I have ever shared a classroom. These were all experienced businesspeople and professionals (the minimum threshold was 10 years of upper-level business experience or the equivalent) – we had doctors, lawyers, health care administrators, finance and accounting professionals and people like me – dirty finger-nailed manufacturing folks.

The amazing thing was this – even though each could speak intelligently about international conditions – only about 30% had ever traveled outside North America (other than on a Mormon mission), less than 15% for business and only five people had ever actually worked abroad.

I was one of the five, I was able to see that while the academic theory and research was technically accurate, the “flavor” of doing the work in an alien environment consisting of an unfamiliar language and culture was simply missing. My classmates were like technically perfect concert pianists, striking every key with precision and perfect timing, yet not really “interpreting” the emotion of the music – there was no feeling or understanding of the work.

What is going on today is nothing new. Charles Murray wrote Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010.in 2010. Thomas Sowell wrote The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy in 1995 and Intellectuals and Society in 2009. Victor Davis Hanson wrote The Politically Correct University in 2009.

All or part of those books examine the bubble surrounding an elitist class of white Americans who generally see themselves as the “best and brightest” and gravitate toward careers that control the lives of others. Charles Murray argued there is a new upper class that makes decisions affecting the lives of everyone else but every year, know much less about how the “everybody else” lives…and that makes them vulnerable to making mistakes.

Murray writes:

“No voice of the human heart is so acceptable to [a despot] as egotism,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville. “A despot easily forgives his subjects for not loving him, provided they do not love each other.” That couldn’t happen in the United States, Tocqueville argued, because of the genius of the founders in devolving power:

Local freedom . . . perpetually brings men together, and forces them to help one another, in spite of the propensities which sever them. In the United States, the more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people. On the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: they listen to them; they speak to them every day. [Alexis de Tocqueville]

That’s not true anymore, especially today. Economic and ideological segmentation has become so pronounced, the new upper class increasingly consists of people who were born into upper-middle-class families and have never lived outside the upper-middle-class bubble, the danger increases when the people who have so much influence on the course of the nation have little direct experience with the lives of ordinary Americans, and make their judgments about what’s good for other people based on their own highly atypical lives.

And they simply do not understand how atypical they are.

EV’s are a good example – someone who has never lived outside a major city simply can’t understand why EVs aren’t popular outside the cities and urban areas, they can’t comprehend driving 30 miles to the nearest Walmart (or even know what a Walmart is) or the truckers moving freight can’t stop every 150 miles and wait two hours for a charge.

“It is the greatest economy ever! Fifteen million jobs created, so why not just dump your 15-year-old Honda and buy an eighty grand EV?” the balkanized elite say. “What’s the problem? Why do you want to kill the environment?”

Murray made a convincing argument that while there is no such thing as a “regular” or “ordinary” American, there is a “mainstream” in America that understands. He wrote:

In one sense, there is no such thing as an “ordinary American.” The United States comprises a patchwork of many subcultures, and the members of any one of them is ignorant about and isolated from the others to some degree. The white fifth-grade teacher from South Boston doesn’t understand many things about the life of the black insurance agent in Los Angeles, who in turn doesn’t understand many things about the life of the Latino truck driver in Oklahoma City. But there are a variety of things that all three do understand about the commonalities in their lives—simple things that you have no choice but to understand if you have to send your kids to the local public school, you live in a part of town where people make their living in a hundred different ways instead of a dozen, and you always eat out at places where you and your companion won’t spend more than $50 tops, including tip.

Taken in total, there probably is no such thing as an “ordinary” American, but the “mainstream” exists with enough access to common culture, most Americans are not balkanized into enclaves where they know little of what life is like for most other Americans, but many of the members of the new upper class are balkanized.

The balkanized elite’s ignorance about other Americans is far more problematic than the ignorance of mainstream Americans about them. It is not a problem if carpenters or truckers cannot empathize with the priorities of Ivy League professors, but it is a problem if those professors, or as Murray notes “producers of network news programs, or CEOs of great corporations, or presidential advisers” cannot empathize with the problems or priorities of the rank and file carpenters and truck drivers.

It is inevitable that people have large areas of ignorance about how others live, but because these highly credentialed elites tend toward positions of power, it is even more important the members of this new, largely self-segregated upper class be aware of the breadth and depth of their ignorance.

Objectively, every presidential administration has some degree of this problem, but through their policies, pronouncements, and actions, they have demonstrated it is particularly acute in the Biden Administration.

It is the Dunning Kruger Effect in real time.