If you write several essays about "the way society works" and they consistently resolve to a protagonist who happens to be very much like yourself, you're probably writing about your own mind, not society.
Everyone in SV wants to be "up and to the right" in every quadrant map of anything. How comforting to simplify life to those terms, to exceptional winners and conventional deadweight. But if society takes your myopic vision and resulting creation and then eats itself and all its democratic institutions, to paraphrase Prinicpal Skinner:
"Am I so out of touch? No, it's the users who are wrong."
pg is providing memetic ammunition for the very "culture wars" he claims he's trying to sit out. No introspection (or at least no _evidence_ of introspection), exactly as you say.
Genuinely pondering.
We all participate in orthodoxies that we're blind to (or at least not fully aware of). The only questions are "Which ones?" and "What are the consequences of our participation?"
In that sense, we're all "conformists".