Solving The Problem of Anti-Intellectualism

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Hi all. Today I want to talk about one of the biggest problems that is currently ruining the world: anti-intellectualism.

In an ideal world, intellectuals and ordinary people would have a cooperative, symbiotic relationship. That's how prehistoric human societies functioned. The very first intellectuals were tribal medicine men and the very first average Joes were hunters. The medicine men relied on hunters as a source of food, and the hunters relied on the medicine men as a source of healing.

So … how do we restore this natural symbiosis between Webster and Average Joe? Who is responsible for modern anti-intellectualism?

In my opinion, modern anti-intellectualism is a two-way street. In some ways average people are being to harsh towards intellectuals. In other ways, intellectuals are being to harsh towards average people. The positive relationship between intellectuals and average people needs to be restored soon, since we humans now have the power to destroy the planet in several different ways. Let's talk about that.

What Average Joe Needs to Know:

- Don't trust Fox News or Infowars. That stuff is corporate business propaganda. I know that businessmen are generally more charismatic, polite and handsome than intellectuals … but the apparent friendliness of big business is a giant fraud. The intellectuals are the ones who have your best interests in mind.
- Stick to what you are good at.
- Remember that popular science magazines are not made by scientists. Scientific journals are made by scientists. Popular science magazines are made by businessmen. As a result, they usually contain a hyper-simplified and sensationalized version of recent scientific test results. If you are skeptical of something that you have read in a popular science magazine, check the sources. Real science is way more complex and way more boring than what you see in pop science media.
- Don't expect the truth to be simple. Elementary school math is simple, but all other truths in this universe are complex. Even average Joes should know this. Even fixing a sink, driving a truck or growing veggies requires practice and a good memory.
- Remember that there is no such thing as an all-around genius. When your sink is broken, do you call a plumber or a brain surgeon? Exactly.

What Intellectuals Need to Know:

- Remember that not all smart people are intellectuals. Some smart people become very good at trades, but never bother with anything too far-out.
- Remember that average Joes work hard so that you don't have to. Appreciate that.
- Remember that Average Joe works very hard and often doesn't have much spare time. He's going to hate you if you expect him to spend his free time fighting against racism, planting trees, or whatever. This is why governments need to solve these problems.
- Choose your words carefully. It is technically true that the God of the Bible was made up by misogynistic Middle-Eastern goat herders ... but there are better ways of saying that.
- Average Joe will be more keen on listening to you if you criticize many different froms of insanity ... not just the types of insanity which are very common in the West. Make it clear that you don't like Saudi Islam or North Korean Juche either.

Peace out.

EDIT: This post may contain some spelling mistakes because this site slows down whenever there is a lot of text on the screen.

I honestly kind of have a problem with dividing people between intellectuals and "average joes" because that could get pretty...well, something similar to classism or...elitism....I'm not sure the right word to use here because society doesn't really rank people by intelligence(or even education). But I guess my problem is that it could probably make "average joes" either feel inferior or resentful.

Though, it kind of seems like you're already careful in how you worded this post because you pointed out that smart doesn't automatically mean anti-intellectual. Still, I really don't like having a clear divide between people. Ideally, for me, I think everyone should strive to be an intellectual. And, more importantly, I honestly think everyone has the potential to be an intellectual as well.

Speaking from experience here but I grew up with the mentality that I was only going to be good at music and I really struggled especially in science and mathematics. When it came to languages, I really struggled with Spanish and my dad told me I would never be bilingual. Now I can speak Spanish and Chinese. And when I re-explored the concepts I struggled with in math and science when I got older, it actually was all easier to me. But a big reason why was that I got to learn in my own way, in a way that would make sense to me. I think a lot of people who struggle with certain subjects just aren't given the chance to learn in a way that would suit them.

I can just kind of imagine that if we divide in a way where the "ordinary" people are left just kind of having to agree with whatever the intellectuals decide they want the direction of society to go in without much say and an explanation just kind of being "hey! these are the intellectuals and they understand problems better than you do," that's going to cause resentment.

Considering that the word "elite" is already kind of used as an insult, I think that resentment is already kind of there.

Don't worry so much. Most workers already acknowledge that they aren't intellectuals. They only seem to resent intellectuals when the demands of intellectuals become unreasonable.



"Creating divides" between people is only a bad thing when there isn't a real divide. When a divide actually exists, there is nothing wrong with acknowledging its existence.

I totally get that you are trying to make me think of racial divides. We shouldn't obsess over racial divides because racial differences are only skin deep … and there are many interracial people in the world. This makes race a messy concept overall.

Compare racial differences to sex differences. The divide between the sexes is much more significant than the divide between the races because sex differences are more than just skin deep. Also, interracial people are far more common than intersex people.

In my opinion, the divide between workers and intellectuals is pretty solid. There are only so many hours in a day, and so most people devote their lives to either manual labor or intellectualism. Very few people can handle both.





We all have the capacity to be intellectuals, but not everyone has the time. For example, some people work at steel mills all day long and don't get much free time. It's not reasonable to expect those people to devote their free time to intellectualism. Let them relax when they aren't keeping the engine of society running.

Imagine that society is a ship heading for an iceberg. Do you blame the guy swabbing the deck, or do you blame the ship's captain? Which one needs to think harder?



Not really.

Think of how many people blindly obey clergy without question. If average people ask questions, we should answer them … but not everyone is going to ask questions.



Elites are illegitimate forms of authority who cannot logically justify their position. Most people have no problem with any authority figure who can logically justify his/her position of power.

This anti intellectualism wasn't something that "Just happened" it was encouraged and, to a degree, planned by people who wanted to entrench their positions in the hierarchy. People who could only see the short term benefits and not the long term costs.

People with average, below average, or only slightly above average intelligence have to compete in the world - for jobs, for food, for partners, etc.. They can't compete intellectually so they compete on a very different set of terms quite often.

Some try honesty and hard work - that can get you a certain portion of the way, it's admirable, the competition is also getting increasingly cutthroat and I've noticed, in all ranges of intelligence, most people who have the integrity to be 'real', authentic, kind, or honest also have aptitudes that other people can't replicate - so they've often have a degree of safety net to work with and some space to determine their own identity.

Then come the rest...

Lets just say - when you have only average intelligence, no talents that set you up to excel, the temptation to create your own games or distort reality becomes immense. A lot of people try to make up the difference in willfulness and it's the sort of 'bully' authority. Other people find ways to invent really distorted social rackets by their own peculiar rules, it's what 'cool' was back in high school. Lastly - most people engage in some degree of a) absolute social conformity and b) utter cruelty to those who don't conform. Most people engage in the the conformity/cruelty pattern mainly because they can weave a sort of social astroturf, ie. artificial reality, in which they can keep people who are about as intelligent/unintelligent as themselves in power. Where this gets interesting - yes, they loath and disrespect people less intelligent than themselves but they HATE with a PASSION anyone who might actually be of high intelligence or even genius beneath their eccentricities because that person is a very real mortal threat to their security whether they have any intention to be or not.

Procrustian conformity in everything from how you talk to what you watch on TV to whether you watch TV, to whether you pay attention to sports, what you know, what you don't know, just about down to how you pick up a pen or fork, is part of that shibboleth system. Our culture has a hatred of oddities because people on the out can be worse than dangerous in the serial killer way - they might be able to flip the whole paradigm of power, and anyone that dangerous has to be destroyed (X-Men sort of plays with this concept). Think of what happens to a girl whose classically beautiful and even a bit socially aloof or doing her own thing and how much other girls can't stand her and seem to band together against her. It's that same phenomena meant to catch intelligence or talent, steel the solid ground from under it, wrap it in antibodies, and try to drive it to desolation, to crime, to suicide, but in any case if not death at least some kind of neutralized irrelevance.


You're asking people of average to below average intelligence, ie. most, to give up their power to people they can't understand - who could create a world they could never function in and in their minds (with some merit) be utterly destroyed in, chemically castrated as a result of, etc..

It's great to dream big but you have to know something about the landscape you're in and why things are the way they are, otherwise we're doing something like sharing an online diary - ie. lots of words, possibly of personal revelation and interest to the author, but really signifying little to anyone else.

Admittedly there are plenty of highly intelligent people who are utter tyrants, their game tends to be sophistry (putting their intelligence toward that same 'lets distort reality' game I mentioned before) or turning resentments toward other people not like themselves into rather loveless avarice.

I think to get under what I'm seeing - as long as we're so often anti-honesty for our own survival-oriented reasons we won't get far on fixing anti-intellectualism.

This is not intended to be an attack; even the best of us are not spared from some degree of subconscious bias infused in to us by our society. That being said I feel inclined to point out that you have neglected half of humanity in your talk of average Joe's and medicine men as pertains to the first intellectuals. Women in hunter gatherers societies, if they were anything like more recent hunter gatherer societies, most likely served as healers in significant capacity and collected and prepared the bulk of the food for their communities. Let us not let our own society with our partially gendered language which awards the human standard to the male sex prevent us from acknowledging the contributions of females to society and how significant they are, nor let it prevent us from entertaining the idea of a female as an intellectual and recognize the influence of that on the children she raises.

Class. Class is the issue most prominent intellectuals come from the upper classes, when they hear the problems of the working class they dismiss them as ignorant.

On another note you seem to be obsessed with prehistoric tribes, you say how they valued intellectuals but how would you know because they are literally prehistoric.

But that is not how history functioned.

People where often times persecuted for making discoveries I mean wasn't Galileo persecuted for stating the earth was round rather than flat?

Basically anti-intellectualism is nothing new.

Right now it is the scientists saying 'Global Warming is real, we need to do something about it' Its documented its true. And if you have always been facinated by weather and such as I have its pretty easy to notice some climate changes going on in your own community. I mean so much info is out there about it its essentially willfull ignorance to deny it, yet denying it is becoming a popular movement. Science says its happening, some people think their personal opinion is more valuable than science that says we are making the planet harder to live in. Fact of the matter is if we do't make some significant changes in the resources we use and how we live, than we are screwed. Like you can't even deny it now. I mean seems now severe weather warnings are the norm.

Close. He was persecuted for claiming that the earth revolves around the sun.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_yet_it_moves

I think the people who actually outright deny man made climate change are a tiny minority not much bigger than flat earthers.

The biggest issue with climate change is not only how powerful oil companies but how much very powerful countries depend on oil they won't allow the world to get off oil they will kill anyone who seriously threatens them.

Yep.

The oil industry needs to clean up the mess it made.

Unfortunately, you can always count on Fox News (big oil's propaganda machine) to stir up anti-science attitudes in the general public.

This is the problem. Big business is very good at hiring fake "intellectuals" who divide and confuse the general public.

That's why we are living in a "post-truth era". Corporate puppets have become very skilled at posing as intellectuals lately.

Wrong. The climate denial movement is much more prominent than the flat earth movement.

This is mainly because professional climate deniers like Christopher Monckton can get financial support from the oil industry. There are very few companies who have any good reason to throw money at flat earthers. This is why climate denial is a huge, perpetual manufactroversy … whereas the flat earth movement is a pitiful den of grown men running around like headless chickens.

Not always. Bill Gates is from the upper class and he seems like a decent guy for the most part.



Well … any discussion of politics and philosophy is inevitably going to go back to prehistoric tribes once it becomes deep enough. I like to start deep.

When we are talking about politics and philosophy, we always have to consider human nature. It's impossible to really understand human nature without considering how it evolved.

We can learn about prehistoric tribes by studying hunter-gatherer societies that exist today, as well as tribes that were described in historical documents. Many modern hunter-gatherer societies have members who specialize in medicine.

Its true, and it pisses me off...I mean the longer solutions are put off the worse it gets. Hell I even donated 15 dollars to the Sierra Club because from what I understand they have made positive impact and even have lawyers on the team and such to challenge bad environmental policies. I mean I wish I could become a monthly donor but right now all I get is SSI income so even 15 dollars was a lot for me to donate to something that will help the environment but that i will not see a profit from. But I am still glad I did if they help the environment and its been a long-going organization than yeah damn right I want to help them help our environment.

But also in the envelope they sent to ask for a donation included a cool sticker...its a bumper sticker and I don't have a car so I don't have a direct use for it right now but it says 'Make America Green Again'. On the site they have a T-shirt with that slogan and I kind of want to get it. I mean I'd love to walk around with a shirt that says that. Noted that people who display this sticker are probably still driving a gas vehicle, but baby steps...baby steps it might work better than throwing it all in peoples face at once. But yeah I want to support an organization that works towards making a safe world that maintains natural habitats and ecosystems.

Also apparently that gold mine they want to open in alaska, is useless...there is more gold in thrown away cell phones than they would be able toe extract from that mine.

Maybe once I start making an income I could volunteer for some cool project to help the earth, I mean some people may find this gross but I would like to help the efforts of collecting ocean plastic and such I mean I'd like to build things for a better world. Maybe digging into trash is the way to it....I mean so much stuff is thrown away, there could be valuble resources getting trashed. I mean I have almost developed a dream of creating some sort of company that specializes in trash recycling and reprocessing. I mean from what I understand there are a lot of resources in trash, maybe someone threw out an old cell phone or a whole desktop computer system. You cold take those things apart and get usable material out of them. I mean a while back my brother built a computer, using a few parts from the annual trash dump. In our town they'd have a couple days of the year you could go dump all your hard to dispose of trash. Well my brother collected a bunch of computer parts and built a desktop he ended up selling it at one point he was short on money...but point is he used, used computer parts, stuff that was thrown away to build a desktop tower. Of course he had a friend who could install an operating system on it, but yeah he made it from waste parts. IDK how, but I saw it before he sold it and it seemed to work pretty damn good.