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Of Intellectuals, of Cabbages And Kings

I keep hearing about how our political polling organizations still do not understand the Trump voter. In all honesty, they never understood the Reagan voter either.

But they’re not alone in this certainly the Democrat party has never understood the Trump voter, they never understood the rig and voter.

They tend to sneer derisively at those voters dismissing them as idiotic and “anti-intellectual”.

An intellectual is a person who engages in critical thinking, research, and reflection about the reality of society, and proposes solutions for the normative problems of society, and thus gains authority as a public intellectual.

So says Wiikipedia… But, I hasten to add that many believed Fidel Castro was an intellectual. Many thought the same of his partner in crime, Che Guevara. I will quietly point out that everything they did including the millions of dead, was within the boundaries of law in their country at the time.

Mao, also, was considered an intellectual. Everything he did, including the millions of dead, was within the boundaries of law for China.

Joseph Stalin was considered to be an intellectual by many, as well. Similarly, everything he did including the millions of dead, was within the boundaries of law for his country at the time.

And of course, Hitler, too, was considered by many to be intellectual and yes, everything he did including the millions of dead was within the boundaries of law at the time.

so much for the absolute value of intellectuals in government.

A short while ago, I responded to an unusually thoughtful column by Jeff Jacoby. In that column, Jeff goes on at great length to painstakingly list as many people who might have been considered responsible for the deaths of his family members and so many others.

I am by no means unsympathetic here, and made that clear to him, in other correspondence. But in the comments, I make a few other things clear, too…

Who, or what killed them?

An idea. and an idea offered humanity by the supposedly smartest guys in the room.

I want you to seriously Ponder the words of Victor Frankl on this point:

“I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.”

Do you still wonder why anti-Semitism is on the rise in our supposed institutions of higher learning?

The Holocaust is what happens when we turn our futures over to these supposedly smartest guys in the room.

Ponder once again the supposedly anti-intellectual strain going through worldwide politics.

As I said last December…

“I’ve noted before that this is a worldwide trend we’re dealing with, involving the rejection of the establishment. The election of Trump is a symptom of that, as is Boris Johnson winning in the UK… and what else can we call the humiliation French president macron has been suffering in France? What else can we call the protests in Hong Kong? What else can we call the rejection of the politics of Angela Merkel in Germany? I suggest these are all part and parcel of the same thing… A rejection of socialism.

People around the world who have been watching for the last five or six decades, and seeing socialist policies enacted, and seeing the horrendous results of that enactment, are rejecting it in numbers like we have never seen before. The people in all those areas above feel betrayed, and rightly so.”

Is there anybody who doesn’t understand that our educational system is completely broken? [1] and who is it that runs the educational system?

Self-styled intellectuals, who have been handed the power of government. And that’s just one example of many.

Over at Fee Lawrence Reed writes to these points [2], while quoting historian Paul Johnson, saying that there is a tendency…

…among ordinary people to dispute the right of academics, writers and philosophers, eminent though they may be, to tell us how to behave and conduct our affairs. The belief seems to be spreading that intellectuals are no wiser as mentors, or worthier as exemplars, than the witch doctors or priests of old. I share that skepticism. A dozen people picked at random on the street are at least as likely to offer sensible views on moral and political matters as a cross-section of the intelligentsia. But I would go further. One of the principal lessons of our tragic century, which has seen so many millions of innocent lives sacrificed in schemes to improve the lot of humanity, is—beware intellectuals. Not merely should they be kept away from the levers of power, they should also be objects of particular suspicion when they seek to offer collective advice.

Reynolds notes this and adds commentary from 2011, in part saying..

Part of the problem is that the American distrust of intellectualism is itself not the irrational thing that those sympathetic to intellectuals would like to think. Intellectuals killed by the millions in the 20th century, and it actually takes the sophisticated training of “education” to work yourself up into a state where you refuse to count that in the books. Intellectuals routinely declared things that aren’t true; catastrophically wrong predictions about the economy, catastrophically wrong pronouncements about foreign policy, and just generally numerous times where they’ve been wrong.

Global warming anyone? Middle East peace anyone?

Those are pretty good examples each of themselves, but let’s take Middle East peace. Along comes Donald Trump after 70 some odd years of looking for peace in all the wrong places, Donald Trump gets it done, and of course, gets absolutely no acknowledgment from the intellectual crowd as a result… And that would include the supposedly nonpartisan press who didn’t touch the story, a story which was probably the biggest in the last 70 years.

The intellectuals can’t seem to bring themselves to understand, much less admit, that somebody else actually solved the problem that they’ve never been able to,or God forbid that there are things that they’ve just gottten unquestionably, and disastrously wrong.

Most of it is inability to believe that they’ve been outsmarted and out negotiated by somebody they consider their intellectual inferior.

Again, it takes a lot of training to ignore this fact. “Scientists” collectively were witnessed by the public flipflopping at a relatively high frequency on numerous topics; how many times did eggs go back and forth between being deadly and beneficial? Sure the media gets some blame here but the scientists played into it, each time confidently pronouncing that this time they had it for sure and it is imperative that everyone live the way they are saying (until tomorrow). Scientists have failed to resist politicization across the board, and the standards of what constitutes science continues to shift from a living, vibrant, thoughtful understanding of the purposes and ways of science to a scelerotic hide-bound form-over-substance version of science where papers are too often written to either explicitly attract grants or to confirm someone’s political beliefs… and regardless of whether this is 2% or 80% of the papers written today it’s nearly 100% of the papers that people hear about.
I simplify for rhetorical effect; my point is not that this is a literal description of the current state of the world but that it is far more true than it should be. Any accounting of “anti-intellectualism” that fails to take this into account and lays all the blame on “Americans” is too incomplete to formulate an action plan that will have any chance of success. It’s not a one-sided problem.

If you want to fix anti-intellectualism, you first need to fix intellectualism and return it to its roots of dispassionate exploration, commitment to truth over all else and bending processes to find truth rather than bending truth to fit (politicized) processes, and return to great, foundational humility that even the press could not overplay into hubris. And they need to drop their blinders whereby they excuse away the damage that intellectuals have done while ignoring these ancient precepts and only crediting themselves their successes, because it cuts themselves off from the very object lessons that could help them return to this time-tested approach to science, which they still flatter themselves that they follow.

Indeed, Joe and Jane Average are quite correct in their suspicion of the intellectual crowd, having historical reasons which have been proven time and again for that suspicion.

Keep this post bookmarked, because I’m going to be referring back to it over the next 4 years, frequently.