{"id":1493,"date":"2020-12-16T21:18:18","date_gmt":"2020-12-16T21:18:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=1493"},"modified":"2020-12-23T01:59:45","modified_gmt":"2020-12-23T01:59:45","slug":"everyones-a-critic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2020\/12\/16\/everyones-a-critic\/","title":{"rendered":"Everyone’s a Critic"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Everyone's a Critic: Bulletins from a Second-Order Society<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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Toxic levels of self-aware self-reflection threaten our civilization and our souls.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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By Andrew C. Quinn<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Mitt Romney was having a bad week.<\/p>

This, as anyone familiar with the 2012 election\u2019s proceedings can attest, does not really narrow things down. That year\u2019s primary saw President Obama and his opponent Governor Romney trade so many awkward, embarrassing blows that countless weeks from that season could be called \u201cbad.\u201d But this week had been particularly brutal. While traveling overseas to burnish his foreign-policy credentials, the hapless Republican had managed to seriously offend vast swaths of Britain and the Middle East, sparking new doubts about his gravitas and poise.<\/p>

Frustrations boiled over one sunny day in Poland. Feeling neglected, a gaggle of American reporters began to scream questions at Romney from a hundred yards away, shattering the respectful quiet that hung over Warsaw\u2019s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier as the candidate departed a wreath-laying.<\/p>

\u201cGOVERNOR ROMNEY! Are you concerned about some of the mishaps on your trip?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cGOVERNOR ROMNEY! Do you have a statement for the Palestinians?\u201d<\/p>

And then, just as a furious campaign staffer commenced the tirade that would make him briefly famous, it happened. One especially loud and nasally voice sliced through all the rest. It shouted just four words\u2014four words for the ages.<\/p>

\u201cWHAT ABOUT YOUR GAFFES?\u201d<\/p>

After the episode went viral, observers agreed that something about this last question was especially absurd, verging on self-parody. But what? From Big Bird to binders to \u201cYou didn\u2019t build that,\u201d 2012 offered nearly infinite fodder for familiar rants about the banality of corporate journalism or the lapdog liberal media. Why should Gaffe-gate seem uniquely more inane?<\/p>

The answer lies in an idea from theatre and fiction. The \u201cfourth wall\u201d is the theoretical barrier separating audience from performance, the conceptual boundary between ordinary fiction and stories that are self-aware. When narrators speak directly to readers or when characters consciously acknowledge their fictionality, the author has breached the fourth wall. The technique pulls a story\u2019s first-order participants off their fictional plane and conscripts them into second-order criticism, making characters into commentators that reflect on their own reality from outside it.<\/p>

Gaffe-gate punched through the fourth wall in journalism. The question oozed strange self-awareness. It willfully blurred together the actual content of current affairs and ex post <\/em>analysis of it. The reporter sought not Romney\u2019s reaction to extrinsic events, but his second-order interpretation of a chattering-class narrative derived from his own behavior.<\/p>

News coverage about news coverage designed to shape perceptions of a perception.<\/p>

Millennials have a word for this. \u201cThat\u2019s so meta<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>

Meta indeed. And Gaffe-gate is not some isolated frivolity. It is representative\u2014a canary in the coalmine of modern meta-culture. At every turn and in every arena, we flee the first order for the second. We avert our gaze from the substantive content of events, ideas, and values, and stare hypnotically into refracted rainbows of conceptually distant criticism\u2014optically fascinating, perhaps, but profoundly insubstantial.<\/p>

From markets to morals to our own mentalities, meta is metastasizing. Everyone\u2019s a critic. Everyone\u2019s to blame. And everyone is suffering for it.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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This new media landscape, where our own reactions are the primary events to which we all react, is a different beast entirely.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Take the news we consume. Subway trains in Washington, D.C. are littered with banners on which smiling anchors from local TV ask, \u201cThink our job is to talk? Our job is to listen<\/em>.\u201d This information inversion is utterly impossible to escape\u2014and cannot be encapsulated better than in the stupefying sight of talking heads simply reading viewers\u2019 Tweets on the air in real time. Even more inane may be CNN\u2019s \u201ciReporter\u201d initiative, which exhorts ordinary people to record themselves opining and submit the video for broadcast. What do <\/em>you think? Tell us <\/em>your story. <\/em>Everyone truly is a critic, and one\u2019s qualifications for spouting this populist punditry seem inversely related to actual expertise.<\/p>

As with the election and the economy, simple shallowness is not the issue. Pointless, tabloidy reporting is hardly a recent development. But even trivia can be communicated in a linear fashion from a relatively more informed professional to a relatively less informed public, with public reaction coming after novel inputs are processed. This new media landscape, where our own reactions are the primary events to which we all react, is a different beast entirely.<\/p>

It is one thing to report breaking news, invite experts to comment, allow all this percolate, and then commission a public poll. It is something else entirely to regard an elite\u2019s self-interested spin and an everyman\u2019s instinctive emotions not as the implications of journalism, but as its proximate content. Even the lexical shift from content-rich terms like \u201cjournalism\u201d and \u201creporting\u201d to the bland and hollow \u201cmedia\u201d signals the move to meta: The mere fact that transmission is occurring, not the transmission\u2019s purpose, gets linguistic priority.<\/p>

The Internet has made pseudo-pundits and social commentators of us all, and what we self-appointed critics think about the news is<\/em> the news. The instant anything happens, we begin digesting the events like a self-determined hive mind. We scan desperately for the cultural cues that will shape our armchair analyses from the first millisecond of awareness. And we bubble-wrap every opinion in thick layers of timid triangulation.<\/p>

Contenting ourselves with parroting crowd-sourced snark may insure our egos against rebuke, but it condemns our minds to be unoriginal, uninteresting, and bleak. Certainly, a fruitful intellectual life does not require conclusively clutching preconceptual truth. That feat may well be impossible in this realm. But flourishing obligates us to at least use our concepts to pursue genuine knowledge. We need concepts of reality, not just concepts of concepts.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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So long as traders stare into a collective meta-mirror more than they reach for exogenous facts, disconnection is assured.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Omni-critique pervades other sites of public life. \u201cWhen the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.\u201d The famed economist John Maynard Keynes lodged this complaint in 1936, but its intuitive appeal endures. Now as then, many share Keynes\u2019s suspicion that investors have ceased weighing the actual, intrinsic merits of the businesses they bankroll. Save for a few stubborn old-schoolers such as Warren Buffet, conventional Wall Street wisdom now affirms that buying a security simply means gambling on others\u2019 expectations. Out with first-order economic investigation and in with the second-order sociological guessing game.<\/p>

Even Keynes\u2019s gloomy take proves insufficiently cynical. For though the objects of casino gamblers\u2019 guesses may be trivial and arbitrary\u2014playing cards or neon screens\u2014they do still exist independently of the observers\u2019 thoughts and feelings. To glimpse the modern economy, try instead to imagine a casino without any cards or games. Everyone simply sits in a circle and chooses their bets based on what others are betting. A surreal image, to be sure. But does contemporary corporate finance really seem any less insular or unproductive?<\/p>

This shift onto the second order explains our growing sense that the indices have ceased to track actual people\u2019s lived experiences in the economy. Of course massive bubbles inflate beyond reason; of course securities soar while incomes stagnate. How could it be otherwise when every investor has exchanged a detective\u2019s magnifying glass for the tortoise-shell hipster glasses of a self-aware critic? So long as traders stare into a collective meta-mirror more than they reach for exogenous facts, disconnection is assured.<\/p>

This grumble is not new, but the rise of automated, high-frequency trading lends it new salience. A stunning two-thirds of all transactions are now planned and executed in mere instants by massive computers that feed on reams of statistics and algorithmically evaluate market trends\u2014trends the machines themselves now drive. The culminating achievement of our civilization\u2019s most profitable industry is teaching robots to navel-gaze.<\/p>

And meta\u2019s march into markets did not stop there. An even stranger new phenomenon has observers pining for the days when Wall Street simply chased its tail.<\/p>

In theory, the Federal Reserve is an external regulator. It occasionally adjusts the guiderails but basically lets economic activity proceed on its own. But during the 2008 crisis, our central bank leapt into the breach, deploying drastic measures that made the Fed a colossal buyer and seller in its own right. The referee sprinted from the sidelines onto the field and started calling the plays himself. And these extraordinary measures remain mostly in place today.<\/p>

The result? Second-order side constraints have become the only pertinent first-order information. Investors\u2019 chief concern, dwarfing all others, is how the Fed will behave. This has made capital markets little more than colossal and expensive thermometers in Ben Bernanke\u2019s mouth. As if it weren\u2019t meta enough for traders to gaze endlessly into a giant collective mirror, they now obsess over the bureaucrats who hold up that mirror and fret that their forearms seem fatigued.<\/p>

The fiscal fourth wall lies in pieces at our feet. To be a financier is to be a critic of central bankers\u2019 press conferences and seemingly little else. The meta-economy is upon us.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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This lonely touch-screen liturgy lights up our faces, but rarely our hearts.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Bad enough that meta infests the public square. But our interior lives have shifted onto the second order as well, and this should disturb us even more.<\/p>

Nothing could exemplify the conflation of criticism with content better than the reading habits of an archetypical Millennial. It is fashionable to cluck one\u2019s tongue at the pervasiveness of skimming and summary, but who can afford to carefully comb through a book when you can dunk your head in the river of our collective consciousness and glean what you need through osmosis? A character in the 1990 film Metropolitan<\/em> said it best: \u201cI don\u2019t read novels. I prefer good literary criticism.\u201d From our conversations to our contemplations and even in our writing, we lazily gesture towards the Platonic shadows of arguments and ideas with which we have barely begun to personally engage.<\/p>

We seldom read whole hardcovers, preferring to scan summaries and prod at pared-down theses like pseudointellectual playthings. Undergraduates don\u2019t descend into one timeless work and live its prose from the inside out; they footnote 30 PDFs from Google Scholar after downloading a lit review. And we can\u2019t even lower our expectations rapidly enough to keep pace with our practice. Because\u2014let\u2019s be honest\u2014who really, deeply processes even the \u201clong-form\u201d articles we now lionize as lengthy? We peruse Twitter and Tumblr, scroll quickly but idly through a linked essay, and then applaud our erudition.<\/p>

Like a carb-crazed preteen pounding down potato chips, we gorge on criticism and conjecture that is always flavorful but never filling. Our conviction that satiety will follow if we just listen even more intently to the echo chamber deafens us to the delicate, gorgeous harmonies of first-order literature and theory. They cannot penetrate this tin-can telephone.<\/p>

Consider also the complaint\u2014already clich\u00e9d\u2014that publicly documenting our lives and our times has itself come to dominate those lives and those times. We social-media addicts ceaselessly chronicle our chronicling and interact about our interactions. Scanning a Facebook news feed is like stumbling into a room full of people composing diary entry after diary entry about the diary entries they and their friends are composing. This lonely touch-screen liturgy lights up our faces, but rarely our hearts.<\/p>

Even our goals and aspirations have ceased to aim at essential things. Modern man is a meticulous optimizer with no clue why he optimizes. That includes coastal cosmopolitans who worship cast-iron cooking, pricey down comforters, and the latest REI gear. Their self-righteous obsession with life\u2019s proper inputs and their deliberate refusal to \u201cjudge\u201d its proper outputs aren\u2019t especially consistent. This also includes data-driven acolytes of the \u201cquantified self\u201d movement: all their sleep tracking, life hacking, body scanning, and workflow tweaking leaves precious little time to muse about what ultimate purpose they are cultivating themselves to serve.<\/p>

Quitting all talk of transcendent values worth living by or objective truths worth living for has forced teleology from our consciousness, and second-order technique has greedily expanded to fill the void. Still hungry to live well but forgetting how to flesh that out, we incessantly discuss the means of our lives but overlook their ends.<\/p>

Employees surfing productivity blogs instead of working hard. Artisanal-everything \u201cmommy bloggers\u201d neglecting their kids while retouching family photos. Christians surfing faith-based lifestyle forums instead of reading the Bible. The Internet is not the only place where \u201ccuration\u201d and critique are crowding out the creation of novel, substantive content. This is happening in our very selves.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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What portion of modern relationships do we devote to defining and discussing and analyzing the relationship itself?<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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The creep of criticism hasn\u2019t spared our relationships, either. Ask an urbane twenty-something about their love life and marvel as even these intimacies are deposited coldly onto the second order. As we contemplate decisions large and small\u2014whether and when to text back, whether and when to break-up\u2014our actual affections are treated like afterthoughts next to self-aware commentary and forecasted implications.<\/p>

Every Millennial has watched friends literally reason themselves out of love with partners who made them deliriously happy, often on the sole justification that \u201cit\u2019s just not where I\u2019m at right now.\u201d As if a breathtaking sense of companionship were not proof positive that wherever you are is precisely where you ought to be.<\/p>

On-point passions are ceding the spotlight to \u201cprincipled\u201d perceptions. We reflect endlessly on what relationship we\u2019re ready for, whether our intentions gel with social scripts, and how love could interfere least with our preexisting plans. More and more, the ex post<\/em> implications of love\u2019s presence are regarded as core criteria for its existence in the first place\u2014and this lets neurotic self-awareness drive our actions when it so obviously should be shoved into the backseat. We are beckoned deeper and deeper into our own thoughts and intuitions and thoughts about those intuitions, a profoundly self-centered spiral that is sure to shed minimal light on the definitionally selfless state of love.<\/p>

What portion of modern relationships do we devote to defining and discussing and analyzing the relationship itself? However we may thirst for uncomplicated affection, our second-order society cannot check solipsism and self-scrutiny at the door. For anxious new couples feeling out their first steps, a \u201cdefine the relationship\u201d meta-discussion is the new third date. For veteran pairs trying to peer into their futures, conversation after conversation devolves into wearying summits on the state of the partnership, try though both parties might to avoid them. Even in love\u2014especially in love\u2014everybody truly is a critic.<\/p>

It is a tragically self-defeating delusion that constant \u201ccheck-ins\u201d about happiness and fulfillment will produce an increase in either. Far better instead to check out<\/em>\u2014to surrender some self-awareness, relax our tight grips on the helms of our hearts, and let the warm winds of organic sentiment fill our sails and carry us across the uncharted sea. Love invites us, two by two, to lose ourselves in one another\u2019s souls and in the world\u2019s adventures. Why settle for cynical critique when this miracle lies on the table?<\/p>

Blind sentimentalism is not the only alternative. Between creepy, controlling rationalism and unanchored volatility lies an age-old balance. Love should look more like Thomas Jefferson\u2019s famous letter on the subject: A two-way dialogue between Head and <\/em>Heart.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Should a genuine spiritual life be a jog through stunning scenery, or an anxious time trial spent staring at our speedometers?<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Men and women of faith may have read this much and nodded knowingly all the way. It is tempting for Christian believers to assume we are immune from seduction by the second order.<\/p>

But why should this be? Because eloquent writers like Chesterton and Lewis assure us that belief means taking root in the true essence of things? Surely such statements present more of a challenge than a guarantee.<\/p>

It is time to confess that our own spiritual lives are often threatened by the very same compulsion to critique: \u201cDo I believe in God enough to call myself a Christian?\u201d \u201cIs this what loving Christ feels like?\u201d \u201cAm I just tricking myself?\u201d To be sure, a healthy faith requires some reflection and questioning to grow. But we must take care\u2014self-consciously weighing and measuring our faith quickly become false idols all their own. Should a genuine spiritual life be a jog through stunning scenery, or an anxious time trial spent staring at our speedometers?<\/p>

It is so easy to lose precious minutes of prayer fretting self-consciously about the petitions we are offering. It\u2019s so easy to lose sight of the Lord we hope to encounter behind a dusty haze of meta-analysis about the path our spiritual journey is taking. It\u2019s so easy to find time aplenty to obsess over the denominational typology of our views, the intellectual rigor of our apologetics, and the social implications of our values\u2014but then to short-change the radically first-order practice of kneeling, breathing, and making ourselves present to our Creator.<\/p>

Christ\u2019s two great commandments challenge us to \u201clove the Lord thy God with all thy heart\u201d and \u201clove thy neighbor as thyself.\u201d They simultaneously direct our gaze upward into the distant heavens to seek the face of God and outward into the eyes of our brothers and sisters to love them just as fiercely. Markedly absent is any instruction to gaze vainly into spiritual mirrors and fixate on our own reflections.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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But we can begin, I propose, by sanctifying our own hearts. By attempting in earnest to cordon ourselves off as mostly meta-free zones.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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I must conclude without a grand solution. I own no master plan to pull back the filmy curtains and let the bright and vibrant sunshine of real facts and values and beliefs dispel these second-order shadows. Like any worthwhile project, returning meta-analysis and detached critique to their rightful place\u2014a small, piquant dessert after a hearty meal of real things\u2014will defy tidy summary and top-down orchestration.<\/p>

But we can begin, I propose, by sanctifying our own hearts. By attempting in earnest to cordon ourselves off as mostly meta-free zones.<\/p>

Let us stop laboring\u00a0so\u00a0self-consciously to\u00a0self-cultivate. Let us stop splashing in the shallows of irony and interpretation and dive deep into\u00a0oceans of vibrancy and meaning. Let us cease to be\u00a0Thoreau\u2019s \u201cmen [who]\u00a0lie on their backs talking about the fall of man and never make an effort to get up.\u201d<\/p>

When\u00a0we\u00a0talk, when we\u00a0vote, when\u00a0we\u00a0eat and sleep and read, and\u00a0most especially when\u00a0we\u00a0love\u2014our brothers and our sisters as well as our Father\u2014let us\u00a0do\u00a0these things fiercely and intentionally. Let us act\u00a0more than we analyze.<\/p>

The Bible offers clear instruction to us who habitually seek refuge on the safe but shallow second order. Rather than personally engage with Jesus and his followers as they traveled through Jericho, a man named Zacchaeus opted to climb a sycamore tree. He preferred to analyze and reflect from afar. Christ called to the man with a simple command that we latter-day critics likewise must heed:<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cMake haste and come down.\u201d<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Andrew C. Quinn<\/strong> has a Midwestern heart, an East Coast education, and a Washington, D.C. address. He researches public policy at the American Enterprise Institute, writes freelance, and plays jazz and hip-hop saxophone.<\/em>\u00a0
<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Toxic levels of self-aware self-reflection threaten our civilization and our 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