From Are We Better Off: In Search of Common Ground by Bill McKibben:
But if the gross power of wealth is all we focus on, we may miss the chance for making real change. Because the greatest power of elites has been their ability to make us think like them. Our habits of mind imitate too many of theirs, and it hobbles us — how else to explain our willingness, in democracies, to let such bizarre inequality persist and grow? I mean, why did we let them cut taxes on the rich?
The answer, at least in part, is that we’ve abandoned a sense of common purpose for a pervasive hyperindividualism. Each of the crises listed above stems in some way from that willingness to think of our own particular interest as somehow divorced from that of everyone around us. At least since Reagan, we’ve come as a society to think of private as good and public as tawdry, and so it’s no surprise that we’re now outsourcing every government function short of pulling the trigger in battle, or that we watch with remarkable calm the steady erosion of our educational system.