Book: "Bobos in Paradise," David Brooks

• “Self-actualization is what educated existence is all about. For members of the educated class, life is one long graduate school. When they die, God meets them at the gates of heaven, totes up how many fields of self-expression they have mastered, and then hands them a divine diploma and lets them in.”
• “The new practice of writing your own vows really did mark a history turning point. The people who used the traditional vows were making a connection to the generations that had come before, taking their place in a great chain of custom. The people who wrote their own vows were expressing their individuality and their desire to shape institutions to meet individual needs. They were more interested in seeing themselves as creators rather than inheritors. They were adopting the prime directive of the educated class: Thou shalt construct thine own identity.”
• “The members of this class are divided against themselves, and one is struck by how much of their time is spent earnestly wrestling with the conflict between their reality and their ideals. They grapple with the trade-offs between equality and privilege (“I believe in public schooling, but the private school just seems better for my kids”), between convenience and social responsibility (“These disposable diaper are an incredible waste of resources, but they are so easy”), between rebellion and convention (“I know I did plenty of drugs in high school, but I tell my kids to Just Say No.”)
• “These educated elites don’t despair in the face of such challenges. They are the Resume Gods. They’re the ones who aced their SATs and succeeded in giving up Merlot during pregnancy. If they are not well equipped to handle the big challenges, no one is. When faced with a tension between competing values, they do what any smart privileged person bursting with cultural capital would do. They find a way to have both. They reconcile opposites.”
• “In the 1960s most social theorists assumed that as we got richer, we would work less and less. But if work is a form of self-expression or a social mission, then you never want to stop. You are driven by a relentless urge to grow, to learn, to feel more alive.”
• “Intellectuals have come to see their careers in capitalist terms. They seek out market niches. They compete for attention. They used to regard ideas as weapons but are now more inclined to regard their ideas as property. They strategize about marketing, about increasing book sales.”
• “Praise is the currency of the realm among the thinking classes…And since giving out praise doesn’t cost a person anything but actually wins affections, praise is ladles out freely and praise inflation occurs. The value of each unit of flattery declines, and pretty soon intellectuals have to pass over a wheelbarrow full of praise just to pay one compliment.”
• “In odd ways, these are moralistic people. Sex is now frequently seen as a way to achieve deeper moral understandings…Others use their sexual lives to advance social change. To avoid ethnocentrism, the orgies in the highbrow sex journals tend to be as diverse as the casts of kids on PBS children’s shows…But Bobs do more than merely moralize what was once subversive. They are meritocrats through and through. So the don’t just enjoy orgasms; they achieve orgasm. Sex...is like college; it’s described as a continual regimen of self-improvement and self-expansion.”
• “Free spirituality can lead to lazy spirituality, religiosity masquerading as religion, and finally to the narcissism of the New Age movement. The toppling of old authorities has not led to a glorious new dawn but instead to an alarming loss of faith in institutions and to spiritual confusion and social breakdown…The question for the educated class is, can you have your cake and eat it too? Can you have freedom as well as roots?”
• “As University of Chicago philosopher Mark Lilla has pointed out, the central disagreement today is not the sixties versus the eighties. It is between those who have fused the sixties and the eighties on one side and those who reject the fusion on the other. In the Republican party, moderates…do battle with the conservatives who want to refight the 1960s. On the Democratic side, the New Democrats do battle with those who have not come to terms with the Thatcher-Reagan reforms of the 1980s.”