How the Masses Ruin Knowledge
Anti-intellectualism and its resultant alienation.
Link to Original Essay
Being a writer and a philosopher is not a choice one makes, for it is a commitment, and commitments make us, not the other way about. For, if the choice was as free and easy as the folk understanding of it suggests it is, few would choose to go down that path. This is because, while it is necessarily fulfilling work, it is only so for someone like myself, who, existentially, had no other choice. I could not do otherwise, for if I tried, I would be doubly miserable.
Nonetheless, this path is not glamorous in the slightest. One marches forward through spurious and arbitrary means, which one justifies perpetually by way of their ends — which are, themselves, indefinite. Ultimately, these ends are self-grounded, as one does it for no other reason than that one cannot see themselves doing anything differently.
Consider, however, what the incentives are and are not in contemporary American culture and how deviating from those incentives serves only to ostracize individuals and groups with profound vexation. To be a writer, philosopher, or just an overall educated human being is, in effect, to be an unproductive drag who is only understood by other unproductive drags — to whom no one has any interest in understanding. Using ‘big words’ generates reliable responses from folks, most of which being exclusively sardonic in intent, not — as would be more welcoming and appropriate — a question as to what that word might mean. No one cares to know, and they want you to know they do not care to know either.
Perhaps this is merely an outgrowth of our natural ego-centricity. Prior to the scientific revolution, nature was viewed through the lens of the super-natural. In Western culture, what this amounted to is that everything in nature is here for a purpose that is specifically related to us, humans — though, more accurately, me, this human. So, the nose was put there because it is perfect for us to put glasses on, and so too are cows because they make a perfect Sunday night dinner for us. This super-natural spin on our egocentricity has transformed since the scientific and industrial revolutions and has been sublimated in our mass exploitation of nature and others. We over-inflate our importance as a species at a macro level, and at a micro level, we do the same with respect to ourselves.
We would have done it sooner had we the technology and understanding — unreflectively, we care only about what is relevant to us, and what is relevant to us is tempered by what is determined as appropriately relevant by our wider normative context. In America, therefore, what is important is filtered through celebrity culture, hyper-partisanship, consumerism, and the frogmarch we have against everyone in pursuit of financial gain. Thus, who cares what “implicature” or “reason” or “morality” mean? What good will any of that do to me? No one will outright say this, but such reasons underpin how little value our culture shows towards the humanities and the general pursuit of knowledge for its own sake — “wisdom,” as Aristotle puts it. If wisdom arises out of anything in American culture, it is incidental and therefore, not truly a form of wisdom. Knowledge can only be an accidental by-product of American culture, for its primary aim is productive, not philosophical or theoretical. We don’t care to understand — we only care to consume and shame anyone who seeks to do otherwise through innuendo in social causes and economic hardship in pragmatic cases.
Such a profound lack of wisdom is not somehow new to humanity — as if some specific system is in place that has unnaturally facilitated our egocentricity and its resultant anti-intellectualism — and thus was perhaps the basis of Thrasymachus’ pessimism in Plato’s Republic in his definition of justice as that which benefits the powerful the most. Or, in Marx’s postulation that history is nothing more than the strife between the powerful and the weak — that capitalism is merely the natural genealogical outgrowth of pervious human economic systems.
In the case of Marx, however, we have what can only be deemed a profound nativity: that, if only we enlighten humanity through the critique of systems such as religion or capitalism, that somehow this will amount to an unprecedented mass moral psychology of egalitarianism and intellectualism.
Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.
That, somehow, humans can, on the whole, discard their over-inflated sense of self-importance not only as a species but as individuals. Nietzsche was much wiser on such a point, stating that these illusions can surely be lifted, and a wise moral psychology may result from it, but that this can only be the case for very few individuals, who will — due to their overwhelming scarcity — suffer greatly as a result from profound alienation. Few will understand them, and yet, understanding is precisely what they desire most — in a context where understanding others are the least sought-after mental state humans, on the whole, have. We want to be understood but seldom care to understand. Despite the fact that the two are not mutually exclusive, this will persist en masse as long as humans do.
Independence is an issue that concerns very few people: –it is a prerogative of the strong. And even when somebody has every right to be independent, if he attempts such a thing without having to do so, he proves that he is probably not only strong but brave to the point of madness. He enters a labyrinth, he multiplies by a thousand the dangers already inherent in the very act of living, not the least of which is the fact that no one with eyes will see how and where he gets lost and lonely and is torn limb from limb by some cave-Minotaur of conscience. And assuming a man like this is destroyed, it is an event so far from human comprehension that people do not feel it or feel for him: — and he cannot go back again! He cannot go back to their pity again!
Fundamentally, people have a profoundly difficult time seeing past their own suffering — to what is most proximal to them. If it is not relevant to adding zeros into their bank account or to further inflating their sense of self-importance, it does not matter — and to suggest that anything otherwise does is to be met with a swift and excruciating social and practical exclusion. To have an interest in knowledge or anything else for its own sake is to be met with censure from the masses — not even one’s family and friends exclude themselves from the fun, for there is a strong sense in which people take pleasure in such banalities.
Yet, there is a sense here in which this individual or independent person — or, most accurately, a person that simply cares about wisdom — who takes the majority of humanity to be ego-centric and anti-intellectual, is themselves being opaque to themselves and everything else. How is this not being ego-centric? How can it be that one calls themselves ‘wise’ and yet therein calls most others unwise?
Well, firstly, there is no sense in which I take myself to be wise in the colloquial sense of the term. I will let others be the judge of that, for one can only judge themselves by such standards with partiality, hence making the endeavor not worth it at all. My mother and other ‘adults’ denigratingly referred to me as ‘wise’ growing up — some things never change!
Aristotelian wisdom, by contrast, is to understand many things that a lot of people do not because such things are difficult to understand. I hope to be wise in this respect, though I am not confident that it can be perfectly attained. At the very least, it is a wisdom that a profoundly small sub-set of the population aspires to attain. This says nothing about their moral standing as moral agents — for, there are many ‘wise’ individuals who know a lot of difficult things, who likewise are morally ignorant. All that is being said here, instead, is that if you are one of the rare individuals who has a lot of specialized knowledge, it is nearly guaranteed that you will have a hard time operating in normal society for want of minds one can arrive at common ground with. None of us are better than anyone else — and what separates us from the rest is that seldom do we think so.
The difference, as I see it, is that such individuals do care to understand others, for their understanding does not (ideally) discriminate in what is to be understood. None of this implies blindness to poverty, practical plight, and the general woes of humanity. Rather, what I’m suggesting is that such interest and understanding is precisely the reason why other people are so quick to censure individuals who have a self-grounded interest in the nature of things.
Such alienation is surely to go over the heads of most readers, only to be interpreted as an elitist predicament. Insofar as that’s the case, the point of this essay has been proven. Insofar as, by contrast, a suspension of judgment is made, this essay has served its purpose.
