David McElroy

Whatever perceived consensus might have once existed in this country about the sort of place “we” wanted it to be is now gone.

There was a broad mythical narrative that a large majority basically bought into — and most of those people were white. Because black and brown people didn’t have political power and were vastly underrepresented in media, the perception existed that the mainstream white culture was “the American culture.”

This broad white culture was seen by most as what the country “ought to be.”

Although there was vigorous competition within that white culture for power and control, the cultural consensus was fairly well accepted. Other groups were considered tiny players in the political and social sense.

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You are deceiving the world around you. And I am, too.

We mostly do it by what we don’t show to other people. We deceive by the things we hide. It’s not a conscious decision. We learned in our formative years what people didn’t like about us. We learned the parts of us that would cause us trouble when others saw them.

And so we learned to hide who we are.

We built masks for ourselves. We learned what would make people approve of us — and we wore those masks with pride. We craved approval. We craved love. We didn’t understand what we were doing, but we learned that acting in certain ways got us more of what we needed.

We learned to think of those artificial behaviors as our personalities. We learned to believe that these masks we showed the world were who we really are. But we were fooling ourselves.

Personality is a mask. That’s not who you are. Your personality is the defense you learned to use — to hide the real you from the world. And most of us hid so well that we’ve lost sight of who we really are.

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Our culture is intellectually broken. This might not seem important to most people. It might not even seem interesting. But if you can tell that we are somehow off course — in ways that are both large and small — you need to understand that we’re off course because terrible ideas dominate the culture.

You and I weren’t adequately educated about ideas when we were young. I assume your education was similar to my own. I thought I was pretty bright simply because I was always ahead of my peer group in discovering information that schools rarely taught. But when I became an adult, I discovered that there were fundamental holes in my intellectual foundation. This is almost certainly true of you, too, unless you have gone back and educated yourself.

It’s time for us to stop accepting the idiocy that we are handed by a shallow culture. But until we understand why ideas matter, it’s impossible to know where to start in understanding what’s really happening in a broken and dysfunctional modern culture.

(Some of you might notice that this is an updated version of something I shared last year before I started this podcast.)

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