So I feel like the internet has made people think there are no good people to look up to, and this makes it harder to trust new people.
This strongly clicked for me. It feels like there is more to say around this (and I don’t know what / don’t know how to say it yet), but this feels like part of the puzzle.
[Added:] Actually, perhaps it seems even more central to me that it feels like the same thing that has made people think there are no good people to look up to also has made have a decreased sense of looking up to institutional cultures. Like, my inner simulator imagines that people joining the NYT look up less to the existing institutional culture than in previous generations, in ways that are bound up with looking up less to the existing staff.
I have an anticipation whereby if you want to be part of the popular discourse yet not simply ‘play your role’, you have to walk through fields of people saying awful things about you. [...] I feel like Musk does it constantly, and I think that Musk not letting this get to him this is part of what allows his basic successes with Tesla and SpaceX to be part of the discussion.
By contrast, this feels to me like a different question: I don’t think the stable, cooperative institutions of old were all that good at “not simply playing your role”. It would be great to have a new kind of institution that is good at both of these, and it seems conceivable that this is part of the puzzle about how to build stable cooperative institutions at all in our times, but my guess is that it’s not a big part of the answer to where these institutions used to come from.
This strongly clicked for me. It feels like there is more to say around this (and I don’t know what / don’t know how to say it yet), but this feels like part of the puzzle.
[Added:] Actually, perhaps it seems even more central to me that it feels like the same thing that has made people think there are no good people to look up to also has made have a decreased sense of looking up to institutional cultures. Like, my inner simulator imagines that people joining the NYT look up less to the existing institutional culture than in previous generations, in ways that are bound up with looking up less to the existing staff.
jsalvatier’s answer also clicks and feels relevant.
By contrast, this feels to me like a different question: I don’t think the stable, cooperative institutions of old were all that good at “not simply playing your role”. It would be great to have a new kind of institution that is good at both of these, and it seems conceivable that this is part of the puzzle about how to build stable cooperative institutions at all in our times, but my guess is that it’s not a big part of the answer to where these institutions used to come from.
Thank you for letting me know :)
(I will move my comment to an answer, given that it’s seemed to be helpful.)