From the Pulitzer Prize-winning culture critic  for <i>Time</i> magazine comes the  tremendously controversial, yet highly persuasive,  argument that our devotion to the largely  unexamined myth of egalitarianism lies at the heart of the  ongoing "dumbing of America."<br><br>Americans have always stubbornly clung to the  myth of egalitarianism, of the supremacy of the  individual average man. But here, at long last,  Pulitzer Prize-winning critic William A. Henry III  takes on, and debunks, some basic, fundamentally  ingrained ideas: that everyone is pretty much alike  (and should be); that self-fulfillment is more  imortant thant objective achievement; that everyone  has something significant to contribute; that all  cultures offer something equally worthwhile; that  a truly just society would automatically produce  equal success results across lines of race,  class, and gender; and that the common man is almost  always right. Henry makes clear, in a book full of  vivid examples and unflinching opinions, that  while these notions are seductively democratic they  are also hopelessly wrong.