The ANTI-INTELLECTUAL: a Menace and a Hypocrite. [Part I.]

[I'll preface this by indicating that I have not read the works of Thomas Sowell, nor do I intend to. All I know about him I have read in summary and heard by those who parrot his philosophy. I do not care. It is intrinsic to his thesis, which is very clearly stated, why to read him would be self-defeating. By the very claims presented in this thesis, any book he publishes would better serve the needs of our species were it burnt for warmth than were it read, alongside any other work of academic writing. Rather than to disregard the mass of conscious and unconscious wisdom our species has produced in print over millennia, I'd rather disregard his partisan and hypocritical opinion denouncing them. Read on for my elaboration. Boldface text is mine; where it occurs within a quote I use it to add emphasis to someone else's nonsense.]


"Those whose careers are built on the creation and dissemination of ideas — the intellectuals — have played a role in many societies out of all proportion to their numbers. Whether that role has, on balance, made those around them better off or worse off is one of the key questions of our times.


The quick answer is that intellectuals have done both. But certainly, during the 20th century, it is hard to escape the conclusion that intellectuals have on balance made the world a worse and more dangerous place. Scarcely a mass-murdering dictator of the 20th century was without his supporters, admirers, or apologists among the leading intellectuals — not only within his own country, but in foreign democracies, where intellectuals were free to say whatever they wanted.

... intellectuals are people whose end products are intangible ideas, and they are usually judged by whether those ideas sound good to other intellectuals or resonate with the public. Whether their ideas turn out to work — whether they make life better or worse for others — is another question entirely."

Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society.

Let's disregard, for just one moment, all the blatant contradictions in this argument, and talk about the ethos of the writer. Ordinarily, I must compel my fellows, by the force of psychological attack, to read the works of men like Thomas Sowell, who've devoted decades of their lives to finding answers to not only problems but to mysteries. Yet, in this situation, we are dealing with a man who clearly clawed his way up to the top of intellectual society, but only to tear down the very structure he has used to further his ascent to power, vilifying his opponents with the very sort of rhetoric he sought to vilify them for allegedly employing.


All that follows is a comment that I left upon a YouTube video which sided with his point of view (the latter using Star Trek as a capsule for its enterprise, though here I make no mention of that franchise but refer directly to the scholar cited):

 

"Thomas Sowell is a lifelong intellectual whose project was to vilify the class of intellectuals of which he was himself a vocal member. One cannot escape within his claims the very odor of authoritarian oppression which he seeks, apparently, to undermine.

Certainly not an intellectual who backs political agendas, in the slightest (or just someone who would like to take the credit for what other men have done, "successfully", with his ideas).

It is no secret that this anti-intellectual position is a hallmark of authoritarian society; as, I believe, Camus once wrote, the Marxists in a communist society are baptized without reading any sacred Marxist texts. The mindless masses we encounter in dystopia are often ruled either by fear (as Orwell saw) or pleasure (as did Huxley). Intellectuals are those who stand apart from that oppressive mindlessness; it’s no surprise that they feel alien, superior in melancholy musings, and indignant at the mindless hardship they must witness at the hands of zombies who devour brains instead of feeding them.

The “wisdom of the masses” always is the hallmark of oppression, for it is oppressive to condemn somebody for the evils of the World for holding and expressing an *opinion*, the product of research, review, and formulated with both care and passion. Concepts are themselves a form of liberty and dignity. All people have them, and all people use them, yet too often they know not the sources of their thoughts, since in their arrogance it would appear to them that all ideas worth expressing are their own and no one else's. Every human being owes one's personal conception of the Good to some philosopher. Oppressors merely are the ones who turn the work of their *selected favourite* philosophers to their own private ends, all irrespective of the common good they claim to represent and stand for.

Sowell's anti-intellectual hypocrisy is clearly a precise example of this attitude. It’s blatantly projection upon fellow members of his class, to which he clearly feels himself to be an outcast and, as such, "anointed" to condemn, to criticize, and finally to blame. His attitude is hostile to the very spirit of debate, diplomacy, and Reason, all of which are the antitheses of violence and oppression, though they are, of course, too rare (and that is no excuse, but rather impetus for change). He aims at the reduction of the boundless positive potentialities of Human Mind, itself a timeless good, to narrow frames of reference, among them economics, Nietzschean despair, and “scientism”. He achieves this by imposing a reductionistic dualism *on one side of which* reside the evils of the World. It is an argument intended, in the final stroke, to prey upon our weaknesses: our fears and our desires, those same instruments of our enslavement. If we fear the consequences of a thought, for fear that we’ll be “held accountable” for thinking it, then we won't dare commit the "thought crime", much less to express our thoughts to others, and, as a result, our minds become mere hosts for propaganda which reflects "reality".

The life of virtue never is defined by consequence but rather by intent. We do not know the consequences, and we can't control the consequences, but we must be free to think and act regardless of this limitation. There must be some dignity in that, a dignity unknown to those who've mastered, from their cynical ascension to the top of academia, the arts of mere manipulation and control. It's not Utopian to have a sense of conscience and the will to think, to dream, and to explore the beauty of IDEAS.

Literally drinking hemlock so I do not have to deal with this.

Now, at least, I know what I am fighting for, since you’ve identified precisely what we ought to fight against."


If it is war you want, it's war you'll get. You have betrayed us, Doctor Sowell, and I do not fear you nor your legion. This is only the beginning of my rant.


**[({R.G.)}]**


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