…there’s a metacognition deficit. Very few in public life habitually step back and think about the weakness in their own thinking and what they should do to compensate…

Of the problems that afflict the country, this is the underlying one.

David Brooks, (“A Case of Mental Courage”, New York Times)

Brooks begins with the story of how Fanny Burney mustered the courage to set in writing (hence remember and relive) the experience of her mastectomy — the cutting of flesh, the scraping of bone, and more. There was, in her day, no surgical anesthesia.

In reaching his diagnosis of modern American culture, Brooks describes the decline of cultural expectations regarding metacognition, a process that feeds the flames of confirmation bias on the internet.