https://edankrolewicz.substack.com/p/buried-talents
I believe that to those to whom much is given, much is expected.
This is not a popular position among my peers.
They prefer a morality of non-interference: be kind, don’t hurt anyone, tend your garden. They’ve constructed elaborate philosophical frameworks to justify why people with top-tier cognitive abilities, financial security, social capital, and institutional access have no greater obligations than anyone else.
I think they’re wrong. And I think, deep down, they, too know they’re wrong. The fact that they squirm at the suggestion that maybe they’ve been optimizing for the wrong thing suggests as much.
I’m writing this as someone who is trying to figure it out, in public, and who thinks the figuring out might be useful to others in the same position. I don’t have a clean answer for what elites should do with their lives. I have my own bets—civic technology, participatory democracy, trying to make government work better—and I have no idea if they’ll amount to anything.
What I do have is a clear view of the problem, and I think naming it honestly is worth something, even if the solution remains incomplete.