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Notes -
Selecting for Cynicism in the Ivy League
I did high-school in Chile, graduating in 1985—but I only got around to applying to U.S. colleges in 1990. When I finally did apply, I was a flat broke 22 year-old—naturally, I applied only to need-blind schools: There was no point in getting into a college I couldn’t afford. So I pinned my college hopes almost exclusively on Ivy League schools, because all of them had need-blind admissions.
This wasn’t as fool-hardy as it sounds. I had the grades and the test scores—99 percentiles. But what I later realized made me so attractive to admissions committees was that I’d done stuff: Travelled through the Peruvian jungle, complete with a run-in with Shining Path guerrillas. Protested the Pinochet dictatorship, and gotten sprayed by a guanaco (water cannon) for my troubles. Lived through a 7.7 earthquake. Taught English as a second language. Written a first novel.
(I’d also done a few things which I realized wouldn’t go down so very well with the various admissions committees—like arranging my first FMF threeway at 19, brokering a sizable pot sale at 20, and other such adventures. These achievements I kept to myself.)
So when the envelopes from the various admissions committees finally got to my mailbox, they were all fat—I was lucky enough to have my pick of schools.
For fairly ridiculous reasons mostly having to do with the nearby Skiway and the shiny computers every freshman was supposed to get on arrival, I chose Dartmouth as my school. When I got to Hanover as a proud member of the Class of ‘95, I was surrounded by kids who were completely different from me.
Not in their brains or even their backgrounds. Most of them were—like me—private school kids of well-to-do parents. Most of them were—like me—incredibly smart, yet fairly arrogant about those smarts. Most of them—like me—had read pretty much everything, and could talk—knowledgeably—about just about anything.
But there was one big difference between me and my peers:
Community service, and volunteer work.
All of my peers in the Class of ‘95 had done boatloads of community service and volunteer work, before arriving in Hanover: Either reading to blind elderly people in nursing homes, or volunteering at the local homeless shelter. Fundraising for the Make A Wish foundation, or candy stripping at the local AIDS clinic. Going door-to-door for Amnesty International, or Greenpeace, or the World Wildlife Fund—these kids had done all these things.
It wasn’t just the ordinary American clubs and organizations that these kids had joined: Not merely 4-H, or the Boy Scouts (actually, there were precious few who had joined either one of those organizations). And it wasn’t short-lived trivial causes, like saving abandoned puppies for one Sunday afternoon in the year.
Just about all my peers at Dartmouth had joined socially aware charities and causes, and had devoted quite a bit of their free time to them. Quite a bit of work to them, often as much time and effort as if these causes had been paid part-time jobs: Ten to twenty hours a week devoted to these causes was not uncommon.
At first, I was rather intimidated by all this do-goodism—obviously: I was a hedonistic little shit. To me, “doing good” meant scoring some Thai stick, lining up a hot girl for the weekend, and being on a first-name basis with the doorman of coolest club.
But reading to blind people? Cleaning the diapers of old people in a nursing home? Teaching parolees whatever? Hell, I didn’t even know any parolees . . . except maybe my dealer.
So naturally, I was rather awed by all this do-goodism—at first. This do-goodism seemed to render my peers morally pure in a way that I could never be—
—that moral awe of mine lasted all of half a day.
Chatting with my new classmates on my first day in Hanover, I quickly learned that none of this do-goodism was genuine. That wasn’t my verdict—it was the verdict of my peers: The very ones who had done all this do-goodism admitted to me that it was not genuine—had never been genuine.
It was all done in an effort to get into a “good school”.
Since I’d done my high-school in Chile, I was completely ignorant of all these calculations—so my new classmates gave me an education. Very casually, as we hiked to Moosilauke Lodge—a trek every Dartmouth student makes before classes start—my classmates told me the ins and outs of extra-curriculars, and which were necessary in order to get into an Ivy League school:
One of the extra-curriculars had to be in a sport, varsity being the best. Another had to be a “leadership” extracurricular, like student government, or debate, or at least the presidency of some high-school club or other. One or two “creative” extra-curriculars never hurt, like glee-club or band or theater.
But community service or volunteer work was key: Any student serious about getting into an Ivy simply had to do community service or volunteer work.
Four years of high school meant eight “community service” extra-curriculars—one per semester. Anything more would seem like you were a “dabbler”, and therefore “weren’t serious”. But anything less would show a “lack of commitment”, which was equally bad. And the extra-curriculars had to be more or less aligned: You couldn’t read to blind people one semester and then go save the whales in the next. Rather, you had to work on saving the whales in one semester, and then volunteer to work on an organic farm in the next: That showed you were “environmentally aware”. Or else you had to tend a soup kitchen for the homeless, then read to the elderly in the next semester: That showed you were “socially engaged”.
My fellow Dartmouth students, as well as students at all the other Ivies that I would get to know over the years, did all this do-goodism as a requirement, in order to get into a good school—an Ivy League school.
They did it in order to get ahead—and they were openly encouraged to do it: Not just by their parents, but by their high-school guidance counselors, their college prep advisors, even the visiting admissions deans of the very universities they were applying to—
—it was simply part of the admissions process: “It’s like taking calculus,” I still remember a girl named Debra, from Nebraska, telling me on the bus ride back to Hanover from Moosilauke Lodge. “You have to grind it out, and get it over with.”
What is cynicism?
It’s the belief that people act for purely self-interested reasons, rather than out of honorable or selfless motives.
If you are encouraged to do certain highly visible “community service” and “volunteer work” for no other reason than to get something that you want—in other words, if you are encouraged to “do good” in order to get into a prestigious university—what does that teach you? What does that teach the youth of a country—especially the best and the brightest—the ones with the most promise?
We usually think of cynicism as an affliction of the world-weary and the jaded—a malady of people who have lived long enough, and seen enough enough, to be turned into cynics. They’re usually self-aware: They are men and women who have watched their innocence fall by the wayside, milled away over the years by the acts of selfish people—including their own—leaving them thinking that all is done for selfish, base reasons, no matter how seemingly pure the act.
To the cynic, no matter how selfless an action seems, at bottom, it is selfish and base. That’s why a cynic is such a sorry thing: He sees the world in the lonely monochrome of shades of selfishness. To a cynic, all surface hides retchedness and deceit. To a cynic, there is nothing good or decent or wholesome behind any act, no matter how seemingly noble or selfless. Neither love, nor goodness, nor beauty, nor insight can exist to such a worldview—to the cynic, all is selfishness. All is base and without honor or goodness. All is for sale.
One thing people don’t realize about cynics is, they are inherently conservative.
This is key: Cynics don’t believe in anything—nihilism is the nasty undertaste of the cynic’s bitterness. So since they don’t believe in anything, they don’t believe in changing things for the better. To the cynic, there is no “better”—there are only changes as to whose selfish benefit is being affirmed, and whose selfish benefit is being denied.
That’s the terrible worldview of the cynic—a perspective that leads to decay and death, nothing more, because to the cynic, there is nothing to aspire to.
And that is the education that Ivy League freshmen learned, in order to acceed to those ivy-covered towers—that lesson learned has become the necessary fee, to advance to the highest echelons of American society, and power: There is nothing noble and good to aspire to—it is all selfish and base.
At the time that I spoke to Debra, on that bus ride back to Dartmouth, I thought she was so clever, to have maneuvered the system so as to get her way.
But now—as a grown man—I’m fairly horrified by that conversation with Debra: I’m horrified by what it revealed. About her. About the other students on the bus. About all the people percolating up through the Ivy League.
I’m no historian of American higher education: I have no idea when simple academic merit was replaced by this perverse con-game of community service and volunteer work. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn it was an outgrowth of the student movement of the 1960’s. Did the required do-goodism become necessary for admission in the ‘70’s, or in the ‘80’s? I have no idea—all I know is, when I matriculated at Dartmouth in the fall of 1991, it was the way things were.
And it’s the way things still are, among admissions to the elite schools in the United States: A system that inculcates a core cynicism of frightening power. If anything—because of the cut-throat competition to get into Ivy League schools today—it’s worse than before.
Now, this would all seem to be so academic, this discussion of cynicism among Ivy League students—but it’s not, and for a very simple reason:
These people who have been taught such a powerful lesson in cynicism are the very same people who make up the leadership classes of the United States today.
This sensibility—this cynicism—informs today’s politics. In fact, every political and economic decision we see today is colored by that monochromatic cynicism. In fact I would argue that nothing that America’s leadership does today—in any field—can be understood without realizing that it is coming out of a deep wellspring of cynicism.
A lot of people—thoughtful but marginal people, who have no power in America—are so surprised that Barack Obama seems more concerned with the appearance of progress, change and reform, rather than the actuality of progress, change and reform. Many people—especially non-Establishment center-leftists—seem flummoxed that Obama has continued so many of George W. Bush’s illegal and immoral War On Terror measures; indeed, has not merely continued them, but expanded many of these measures, such as the authority to assassinate American citizens abroad, at the president’s whim. Something not even Nixon dared dream of—yet which Obama’s administration is defending tooth and nail.
Me, I’m not a bit surprised—in fact, I anticipated Obama’s moral timidity insofar as real change and reform on the one hand, and conservatism when it came to continuing Bush administration policies regarding torture and executive power on the other. I’m not psychic—but I did anticipate the half-measures of the Obama administration’s policies. Or rather, I anticipated the superficiality of so many of his “reforms”—be it health-care, financial reform, Afghanistan, Iraq, and so on and so forth.
I anticipated them because I know the type: Obama was a type I saw at Dartmouth all over the place. So is Timothy Geithner—Dartmouth class of 1983. So is Ben Bernanke. So are all the people in leadership positions today in America.
You see, the cynic is timid: He can’t go beyond the status quo. He won’t go beyond the status quo, because he doesn’t believe in anything beyond the status quo.
The problem with the United States today is, the status quo is leading the country right off the cliff. Financially, militarily, morally—the status quo is a death sentence, for the United States. America has to change directions now.
But it won’t. Because the leadership class—in politics, the press, business, finance—is made up of these timid cynics that were taught so well in the Ivy League.
The is—of course—a tragedy. A tragedy is sad because you in the audience see how the characters’ actions will lead to their downfall—yet you cannot prevent it. You can only observe.
So we observe.
It's not just them as individuals; high schools also embrace Goodhart's Law - students getting into good colleges makes them look good.
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I mean, Ivy League admissions cant be meritocratic, because there are enough students with perfect everything to overwhelm the spots. Class shibboleths are how every society resolves that.
That isn't true at all. You can do granular enough tests if you want, some countries do, and barring that you can have a lottery, which some countries do, mine among them.
The lottery has not really been a meaningful thing here (at the very top level) for about a decade though now since they increased the number of spots at the medical programmes and also made the test slightly more granular.
I don't see why America couldn't do one of those things. I personally think the runaway competition for those university spots is extremely toxic and would bound the competition for like the top 1-2% (for the top bracket) or so and then have a lottery for them. Picking the lucky seems preferable to torturing your children for some zero-sum competition with no societal gain.
A lottery would be far better than the BS system the US has at the moment. It would also completely destroy the value of the Ivy League as now the people in Harvard aren't on average much (or at all) better than the people going to UPenn, they're just luckier and so the cultural cachet of a Harvard degree goes away almost entirely.
You do know that UPenn is also Ivy League, right?
My apologies, I was going to make a joke about confusing it with Penn State but they have a 50%+ admit rate so nowhere near the same league. An easy enough mistake to make. The names of US universities are very weird and eclectic and hard to remember, you can replace UPenn with Rice and the point would still stand.
The worst offender for an American university name has to be Colgate, to me Colgate is what I brush my teeth with...
It is, in fact, the same Colgate family.
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There fundamentally aren't enough "Won a medal at an international olympiad" people each year worldwide to fill the whole Ivy League even if you are exceptionally broad with how you construe "international olympiad". These sorts of people don't want to be full of "The best" fundamentally but rather there are other reasons.
Similarly there are also too many excellent law students each year to overwhelm the spots at the Top 3 (or is it 5 or 10 or whatever?) law schools everyone wants to go to in the US, and yet they are able to come up with an admissions system that is still widely seen as being a meritocracy (modulo affirmative action), at least to a greater degree than their undergrad complements.
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This is why the hereditary principle is important.
Here’s how I’d structure Ivy undergraduate admissions.
50% of places reserved for people whose grandfathers graduated from the college (meritocracy by test scores to sort between them).
20% of places reserved for people whose parents, but not grandparents, attended. Each requires one reference from someone in the first category (a third-generation graduate) to check if they’re a decent member of society. Interview to sort between them to check for personality.
20% of places reserved for those with the best test scores of any origin - three quarters of these reserved for domestic students, one quarter for international.
10% of places auctioned off to the highest bidder, at Harvard and Yale it is likely bidding could start in excess of $10m per undergraduate place.
Most importantly, while people could guess or volunteer which group a student or graduate was in, the university would never officially confirm it.
Where's the diversity quota? Ivy students need to have minority friends so they can claim they're not racist.
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I don’t think it’s cynicism as a belief as much as a genetic type we’re talking about. Subclinical sociopathy is the most important thing our culture selects for after intelligence. The cynics in question are acting out their genes and not a philosophical belief they cultivated, because our schools and culture do not really teach cynicism, but teach that fairness and equality and goodness and philanthropy and so forth are objective values.
For every choice in youth which influences the chance of mainstream successful, the sociopath has the edge over the healthy-minded individual. Has a reading in English class triggered an intrinsic interest in the author and a desire to read more? You’ve clogged your mind and schedule with a distraction, while the sociopath continues to gun the next reading assignment. Did your grandma die and it had a big impact on you because you were close to her? Again you have worse odds. Are you, as a normal person, unwilling to a create brazenly false life event? The sociopath beats you on every college essay. Do you make a friendship with someone less fortunate, and in accordance with every moral belief system allocate energy and attention to their wellbeing? This might spell the difference between a B+ or an A. When you had to play Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no 2 for a music performance, does it take you on an emotional adventure that leaves you stunned the rest of the night? No Stendhal are you, you have a calculus test tomorrow. Do you have religious inclinations which require talking to the Divine or reading virtue-inducing works that don’t leave a measurable result? You’re screwed. Do you feel guilt at the state of the world and does it compel you to learn about it? Your sociopathic competitor has no such compunction.
The sociopath wants power and control and dominance and is insensitive to any emotional distraction or guilt or empathetic concern. A healthy youth ought to be distracted by things outside of school as a natural byproduct of their curiosity, inclinations, and sense of social purpose. There are people like Fields Medalist June Huh who are simply deselected out of the upper echelons of society despite being exactly what we want in our all of our key positions:
Obviously there’s a spectrum between a June Huh and a Sam Bankman-Fried, and June Huh is like the comical ideal. But there are probably June Huns of other social/cultural roles that we just have no way of finding and selecting. I mean, in math and programming, you can trivially prove that you have the skills, but this is harder for anything involving political leadership and the humanities.
edit remembered that a good example of this is PirateSoftware. YouTube has endless analyses for anyone unfamiliar. But for those familiar: his lying and scheming made him the top streamer in the world for a while. He used his supreme reputation to attack the pro-consumer initiative Stop Killing Games. He benefitting personally from attacking this initiative because it ingratiated him with big business, and he has no empathetic tie to the common man / consumer. Our political class is awfully like PirateSoftware.
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This shit is why if you're not from the US you should completely disregard Ivy league etc. universities and just go to Oxbridge instead, at least for your undergrad degree. While now there are some "boosts" given to disadvantaged British citizens if you're not one of them the only thing you'll be measured on and against your fellow applicants will be your aptitude for your chosen subject.
To use a London member's club analogy: going to the Ivy League is like being a member of Annabel's and all the new money connotations that gives while going to Oxbridge is like being a member of The Athenaeum (even being a member of White's is more respectable than being a member of Annabel's); for those of us who know, we know...
I for one would much rather go to Bumfuck University, USA than have the misfortune of setting foot in the UK. Even if the school might be "better" an Oxford graduate is looking at a far lower salary than a graduate from a completely mediocre US school. And good luck networking, because the snooty aristocrats certainly won't let you in the club.
Sounds like a bunch of stuck up people starting a cool kids club to cope with the fact that they make less money than a Taco Bell store manager in the United States. Literally the only people who care are the people who got in.
Personally, I'm partial to Sam's.
Edit: Apparently I can get reciprocal membership to the Athenaeum. Maybe I should show up just to ruin all those elites days for having to deal with being in the presence of a schlub like me.
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Well, London’s clubland is an amalgamation of places that all look the same and which cater to a clientele that sounds the same (to the outsider, at least) but which are all subtly different. Dispossessed landed gentry va dispossessed bona fide aristocracy vs the hereditary longstanding upper middle class vs various pretenders. People of the same class who live in the country or in the city primarily. People who don’t have to work who choose not to and people who don’t have to who choose to. That is why there are all those subtle distinctions between White’s, Boodle’s, The Carlton, Brook’s, The Guards (and now Cavalry), and so on. Then you have those for Scots, gentleman farmers/landowners who take an interest in farming, etc.
Still, I have to disagree with you and @MadMonzer. Annabels has always had plenty of real aristocrat members, you’re more likely to find the remaining young, moneyed members of the real British upper class there than anywhere else, including the ghastly Five Hertford.
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A "member" of Annabel's? It is no more of a membership than my "membership" of American Express. They are subscribers with ideas above their station, and Annabel's is a commercial discotheque with ideas above its station.
Very well put, if you go to Wikipedia and scroll down to their grouping of London clubs on any page you won't even see Annabel's listed as one of the major clubs of note. The parvenus who frequent the place (I've never been) would be well advised to join a real club, that is, if they can find one which will admit them.
Your link currently goes directly to the Athenaeum wiki page. If you meant this link Annabel's is there listed second under Extant clubs.
I meant the bit about member's clubs at the bottom of the Athenaeum wiki page. All the big famous ones are listed there (and this list is reproduced on other London member's club pages). The list you've linked to is alphabetical (hence why Annabel's is second) and a lot more comprehensive and lists even small tiny clubs.
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I suspect that what you saw was a bunch of children raised to go through a bunch of hoops, one of which being community service, but this wasn't necessarily indicative of cynicism elsewhere. Many of those children likely had ideals, which they pursued as they gained independence and power.
I was one of those American Teenagers. The Key Club didn't seem to do anything useful as far as I could tell but I got a tshirt and marched in a parade. I started a Math club at my brother's middle school which was ok, maybe inspired some kids to think of math more creatively but didn't help anyone improve their math scores. I was in Varsity Swimming and Club Swimming, which was the biggest time suck of them all but it made my father happy.
I viewed all this as things to put in a portfolio that proved I could handle many things at once, that I was able to get along with a club of people, that I was able to act independently enough to start a club, etc. It was selfishly about proving what I could do. But.. that's what kids do. That's what kids are. What are your limits? And most importantly from the schools' perspective, are you going to graduate from an Ivy League school with a full course load and some extracurriculars?
This didn't stop me from being deeply concerned about many things in the world with vague plans on addressing them later. But as a child, you have very little control over your life. I did what my parents wanted me to do, and they wanted me to do this because at a young age I had taken an IQ test that had proved to them I had the ability to do this. I had some options on which clubs I joined, but some things I had very little choice at all. I swam varsity swimming because my father swam varsity swimming and coached swimming and that was what our family did.
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Holy mother of em-dashes. I'm not accusing you of making this post with AI, but there are so many that I find it deeply distracting. Most of them could have been commas.
It doesn't feel like AI to me, and the free AI detectors don't ping. It might help that I entered college roughly the same time as the author and what people thought was necessary to get in to a top school rings true (I didn't do it, but I went to a state school). But it also seems it wasn't written recently -- it refers to the Obama administration as the present.
That was what I noticed, too. This seems like it's at least 10 years old, if not 15.
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FYI they are really bad if I recall correctly. Although they are improving.
The ones in this paper did well though, but they may be paid.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5407424
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I genuinely don't think this is AI. I just think em-dashes are best used in moderation.
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Is this is an essay you are recycling from elsewhere, or something you wrote years ago? The focus on Obama (in the present tense), without mention of three presidential administrations since, and other dated references, is odd.
These post-ers who pop up again after two years always have me scratching my head. Like what's been on your mind since 2023?
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Which matters more, act or conviction?
Imagine a man who truly believes in doing good, but refuses to act for fear of personal consequences. What use was their conviction?
Imagine another who is utterly cynical and self-serving, but who performs an elaborate pantomime of do-gooding as a social manipulation tactic. Is good done any less?
What happens when the entire edifice of do-gooding is just cynical manipulation tactics lost in a purity spiral and stray idiot true-believing chaff?
The problem with these charities that get you into Ivies, is there is typically no "there" there. Rarely are these charities engaged in picking up litter, digging needed ditches, shoveling snow, or some other endeavor an unskilled 15 year old could plausibly producing productive labor. Instead there are dozens of make-work charities that exist for the purpose of bolstering college applications.
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In my opinion, the only distinction worth considering a difference is the degree to which our knowledge of character constraints our expectation of their future actions.
To elaborate, how would they behave if unconstrained? Would the person putting on the show of charity cease and desist the moment they had nothing to gain by it? Or does someone's internal conviction or innate "goodness" persist when they're not being forced to be "good" or not punished for being bad? Or when doing the right thing would be a costly signal (and one that isn't outweighed by the gain in prestige, as most costly signaling is)?
At the risk of reducing everything I say to commentary on AI, should you choose the model that pretends to be good because of punishment, or the one that tries to do the right thing despite risking punishment for its actions, or at least without obvious ulterior motives? That particular choice is clear to me, and I believe the analogy extends to humans.
I lowkey expected you to catch the reference there, but if you haven't read the Practical Guide to Evil, go do that. Best fantasy this century, strong contender for all time. There is a significant plotline that deals with that issue.
I've definitely heard of PTTE, and I dimly recall reading the first chapter. I'll give it another look, I've been running out of good things to read.
I would have guessed your comment was more of an allusion to Skyrim, from that speech by Paarthurnax where he questions whether it's better to have been born good, or to have overcome your evil nature through effort.
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If one believes that cynicism dominates over genuine do-gooding in everything, what's so bad about harnessing cynicism to create a bit more of do-gooding in the world? When the orphans are fed by a hypocritical heartless billionaire, does the food turn to ashes in their mouths?
I think it's more like eating the seed corn. Sure, one generation of cynics might maintain some do-gooding, but if they don't believe in it, they won't pass it down.
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It wasn't his main point, but I think if you are going to test your applicants for their ability to juggle multiple tasks over time (and the tasks are largely irrelevant), why don't you get them to juggle benevolent acts rather than doing the intellectual equivalent of digging a hole and filling it in again.
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This is essentially Adam Smith's argument for capitalism.
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Isn't this one of the classic post-Reformation Christian theological arguments? Whether faith alone is enough (common among Protestants), or whether good works are required in addition to faith (IIRC approximately the Catholic view), or as a pathway to faith. Or whether those works are an orthogonal separate good. Or maybe its just predestination all the way down (Calvinism).
But I am curious when OP's essay was written: Obama hasn't been president for a while, and I haven't heard the name Ben Bernake at all recently.
Yeah, I also caught that. What's with all the decade-old political references?
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