Christopher L. Hayes Quotes

#1. So even as the meritocracy produces failing, distrusted institutions, massive inequality, and an increasingly detached elite, it also produces a set of very powerful and influential leaders who hold it in high regard.

Christopher L. Hayes

#2. The meritocracy offered liberation from the unjust hierarchies of race, gender, and sexual orientation, but swapped in their place a new hierarchy based on the notion that people are deeply unequal in ability and drive.

Christopher L. Hayes

#3. In this way, more information and more openness can, perversely, feed more mistrust and more wild speculation: The more we know, the more we realize just how in the dark we truly are.

Christopher L. Hayes

#4. Each exposure of previously secret misdeeds - steroid use, Ponzi schemes, rigged intelligence - produces an acute and debilitating psychological effect.

Christopher L. Hayes

#5. The gap between median black family income and median white family income hasn't changed in twenty years," he told me. "That is not a society moving toward equality. It's a society that's reproducing inequality by race."56

Christopher L. Hayes

#6. A wide distance between the governors and the governed will produce a state that is predatory toward its own citizens, indifferent to their desires, and subject to the inbred whims and compulsions of its ruling class. It will produce crisis. Countering

Christopher L. Hayes

#7. We now operate in a world in which we can assume neither competence nor good faith from the authorities, and the consequences of this simple, devastating realization is the defining feature of American life at the end of this low, dishonest decade.

Christopher L. Hayes

#8. We can never be sure just which other business cards are in the pocket of pundit, politician, or professor. We can't be sure, in short, just who our elites are working for. But we suspect it is not us.

Christopher L. Hayes

#9. We ask the education system to expiate the sins of the rest of the society and then condemn it as hopelessly broken when it doesn't prove up to the task.

Christopher L. Hayes

#10. What we actually know firsthand is minuscule: the feel of the spring air on our skin, our own private daydreams and phobias. Outside of these tiny warrens of private knowledge, we have to depend on what others say.

Christopher L. Hayes

#11. As American society grows more elitist, it produces a worse caliber of elites. The

Christopher L. Hayes

#12. This is the cycle of a dynamic society. Equality is never a final state, democracy never a stable equilibrium: they are processes, they are struggles. Our task is now to recognize that that struggle is ours.

Christopher L. Hayes