About whom was this written, and when?
“There was an unbelievable degree of intellectual homogeneity, of acceptance of a standard set of views complete with cliché answers to every objection, of smug self-satisfaction at belonging to an in-group. … They had cliché answers but only to their self-created straw-men. To exaggerate only slightly, they had never talked to anyone who really believed, and had thought deeply about, views drastically different from their own. As a result, when they heard real arguments instead of caricatures, they had no answers, only amazement that such views could be expressed by someone who had the external characteristics of being a member of the intellectual community, and that such views could be defended with apparent cogency.”
That was Nobel-Prize winner Milton Friedman on his Economics colleagues while a visiting professor at Columbia University in 1964-65.
Sometimes, when shaking my head at the antics on today’s social media, I think about that line from Friedman.