David Brooks wrote in the New York Times that,
"The language of meritocracy (how to succeed) has eclipsed
the language of morality (how to be virtuous). Wall Street firms, for example,
now hire on the basis of youth and brains, not experience and character. Most
of their problems can be traced to this."
Alexander Solzhenitsyn warned of this same thing at a speech
to Harvard students in the 1970s.
We didn't listen, and the problem is growing.
Solzhenitsyn said that Russia, as bad as the communist
system was, shouldn't adopt America's modern system as its ideal.
He warned that in American universities, corporations, media
and government the question "Is is Right" was being ignored and the new
benchmark was "Is it Legal?"
This trend has grown in the United States ever since.