Larry Middleton
In your last paragraph you actually state the reality of intellectualism: its inability to come to solutions. This is the basic difference between leadership styles of Barack Hussein Obama – and his acolyte Hillary Clinton – and say Donald Trump. Donald Trump finds solutions to problems while Barack keeps compounding the problems with no solutions in sight.
Too many intellectuals believe that education in the classroom is the greater resource, while intelligent people believe in the education you learn outside the classroom is just as great or greater than what you learn inside the classroom.
My thinking is that when we are far too much in our heads with learning things that are irrelevant to our making life better for ourselves that’s really bad for us. People in the west seem to scorn those who have little education in the classroom and the classics without realizing historically that the classroom of life is the education we receive in life is really the greater education.
Obama has no ability at skilled negotiation and neither does Hillary. In their view the negotiation is about deception and deceiving others. Trump believes that skilled negotiation is about dealing with your own strengths and the strengths of others. He despises weak willed people who have no ability to communicate and must rely on deception, threats and intimidation. Enemies quickly realize that people like Obama and Hillary will capitulate easily because they need to make their tactics work quickly otherwise they know they will fail. They (Democrats) have been failures at life and so they are failures at every other thing. Obama was a mediocre student at best and it would have been better had he been a complete failure and run off to the circus, he might have actually done better as a person. Instead all he learned was how to become corrupt and indecent.
My view is that the worst form of failure is the intellectual who cannot grasp the intelligent reality of our world. Intellectuals like Obama and Hillary see the world unrealistically and when the world comes crashing down on them they fail to react intelligently. Benghazi and Fast & Furious are prime examples of the unreality of their world and their choices. As a result people died needlessly in both examples and then like intellectuals often do they go into denial and when denial doesn’t work they lie. The reason being is because they cannot cope with the reality of the world around them. They live fantasy lives because they cannot connect with the reality of the intelligent world around them.
There are several kinds of vulgarity. The first vulgarity are those uneducated drug and alcohol addicted louts whose every second word is “Fuck” and they are unimaginative creatures that will never see themselves as what they really are. Everyone around them is stupid because they don’t understand their uneducated reality. To them everything is simplistic because they don’t have a hope in Hell to learn much of anything education wise.
The second vulgarity are intellectuals who all too often see their own educational reality as the only reality, anyone who doesn’t follow that plan is not worth bothering to speak to. They close themselves off to others who can often help make sense of their reality and help them come to solutions they have no hope in Hell of achieving, but they live in closed societies where they only talk to their intellectual selves and refuse to listen to any advice from other quarters.
The third vulgarity are people who perpetuate victimhood of themselves and minority others. They are often as crude and crass as any of the lesser beings who don’t know better, we can always feel sorry for those who don’t know better, but those who should we can feel no true sympathy or empathy for them. All too often they have higher education though they exhibit crassness and crudeness in the classroom that youth seem to gravitate, too. They are generally not as well educated because they more than likely were mediocre students without any real ambition. Better to let the state look after them so they get degrees where they teach or do some other mundane thing like politics where intelligent thinking is out of the question. It’s the one ability they do seem to have to get the best pension schemes and easiest way out of life, or having anything to do with intelligent life. Truly it’s not all of them, but the majority is more likely the truth. If they had no education they would be on welfare, whatever is the easiest and laziest way out.
The Godless! If you were going to be a good little intellectual the first thing that usually goes is faith in God, again not every intellectual follows this path. With the end of faith in God goes the willingness to moral persuasion. It’s the old, “Hey, there’s no God so we can fucking anything we want.” We can swear, we can watch pornography, we can do drugs and alcohol to excess and who gives a rats fuck about our kids, the state will look after them after we’re too fucked up to care for them ourselves. And while we’re at fucking up our kids let’s be teachers and fuck up everybody else’s kids while we’re at it. The fun and joy we can have fucking up the world around is simply because we’re a bunch of Godless shits.
The working class people generally have a better scope of education intellectually and intelligently. They are good with and to their neighbours, school systems and with family. Most have well structured families, give their kids spankings when they need it and do right by themselves and their families. Most never swear in front of their kids or have to put cash in the jar every time they do, my son-in-law contributes regularly. On the other hand my daughter gets upset when I say the word “Frick” and my grandson catches the fact that I didn’t actually swear and kept it civilized. On the other hand he missed the little English girl, really cute and she has such a crush on my grandson, when she called him a “sausage.” She called him a sausage, clever girl, because he did something very rude that I had to get quite angry with him over. I actually had to explain later to my daughter what she meant by the word “sausage” and she couldn’t believe that her mother would let her use such expressive language, even if she didn’t understand it. I do wish my daughter was more clever and less intellectual. She can really be quite annoying when she fails to understand the simplest things.
As for me I can be quite crass and crude at times depending on my mood swings. I’m educated from both ends of the street. University, college and the school of hard knocks and I’m not above knocking someone about when necessary even at my age. The fact is that I pay attention to the details and quite adept at reading between the lines. I know when someone is lying and telling the truth. Can tell the intellectuals from the intelligent and those who are a bit of both. You do have to understand that to me not everyone who has education from institutions is intelligent. That’s because too many intellectuals hide themselves away in their own enclaves away from the real world and the intelligent. They see things from a very limited perspective. So, while your attending all this fancy lectures please continue to learn from others who have skills in life. You will learn they have more than just a skill, but have a worldly view that is quite poignant and reflective of reality. My own writing skills pales to your own, but I see things with my eyes wide open and with clarity of the purpose of others. One must be able to find solutions to problems as much as have questions to the problems to come up with a solution, one without the other is a rather useless exercise in intellectualism. The latter we see all the time by our political leaders who rarely have a solution to the problems, but have an ability to make the problems much worse in scope.
Think on this in an intelligent manner: problem = solution. In an intellectual manner the equation is: problem = no solution or creation of a bigger problem.
How does this work in real life? Simple, take the equation from the standpoint of western leadership: Islamic terrorism in the west = more Muslim immigration. That’s how we can go from bad to worse. Not a solution; just adding to the problem. Why? Because we know that Islam creates 99% of all terrorism in the world and is backed up hundreds of Sura’s in the Qur’an and the Sunnah. The obvious solution to protect one’s own nation, and Israel does this quite well, is not to let Muslims live in your country. It’s just a simple solution that doesn’t create any more problems. You cannot miss this reality in France, Germany Britain and Scandinavian countries today. More Muslims = more terrorism.
I agree with much of what you say, particularly that so-called intellectuals rarely find a solution to anything. That is why I usually refer to them as ‘ineffectuals’.
To paraphrase Benjamin Disraeli, most of them are inebriated with the exuberance of their own verbosity.
I think this problem is not necessarily a given for intellectuals or academia, but that they are more susceptible to this problem. Real experience is certainly indispensable, but at the same time, life is short and there are limits to how much one can experience in one lifetime and limitations also on how many correct lessons one can draw from those experiences. Education should be the avenue through which the collective experience of our predecessors and lessons drawn from those experiences are passed on to new generations.
To really benefit from an education, one should also have a life rich with personal experiences, both good and bad. The insights drawn from them can be compared with a million other analogous examples from our education and from this it becomes possible to develop a better understanding of the underlying principles. However, foregoing one of these – either education or personal experience, renders the other less beneficial or possibly even detrimental in different instances.
A life spent entirely, or in great part, behind the walls of academia, surrounded by others living in the same manner, will be highly susceptible to great and complex myths in the same way that one who has no education at all and relies entirely on his own experiences will be susceptible to less complex, but equally fallacious myths – superstitions, for example.
The reason is simple. An academic will have access to all the most attractive wishful thinking on record. And that wishful thinking will have been added to, criticized, developed, tossed about, combined with other myths or partial truths, etc. until they grow into something quite perverse. By contrast, such wishful thinking outside of academia by non-educated people will be more limited in scope. Most likely, such people wouldn’t have the idle time to sit around fleshing out all the ambiguities and follow each tangent of logic to its ultimate conclusions in the way that academics do.
But almost certainly, it is the former group – the ivory tower academics, who represent the greater threat.
First, the fallacies they profess and promulgate are always, for the reasons outlined above, greater in scope. They will reach wider audiences and have some aura of credibility about them owing to the institutions that produce them and the social status or caste of the academics themselves. Also, their pupils will have direct access to the levers of power in society. The consequences of their flawed perceptions of reality and the misguided fervidity with which they hold these myths to be true will therefore be more widely and intensely felt by the societies over which they exercise control.
Adding to this will be the fact that those who live lives which are impoverished of personal experience will be much more susceptible to delusions of grandeur, and an unquenchable thirst for recognition. A need to be admired to make up for their lack of rich experiences. This impetus, combined with their fallacious prescriptions to cure society’s ailments (or what they perceive to be so) is precisely what makes them dangerous and so often destructive.
The only thing worse for society than when such people succeed in forcing their false reality onto society is when they fail – and in their failure become embittered and allow this to shade their thoughts and their future work so that their pupils too will feel the vestiges of their resentment and harbor a grudge against those elements of society which have stood in firm opposition to ‘progress’… and resolve to crush them when their time finally comes, and avenge the insult done to their mentors who, owning to the grandiosity of the visions that eventually evolve from the multi-generational intellectualizing of falsity and wishful thinking, are held in an esteem usually reserved for the prophets of religious sects.
Problem; People enter the formal, state education cocoon at five years old, and never leave. This creates in them the believe in their own moral and intellectual superiority over everyone else. One feels their influence everywhere; TV,radio,think-tanks. If someone thinks there’s a problem;climate,economy,immigration,alcohol there will be an ‘expert’ to explain it all.They will tell us we should stop doing something or other, and the government should give them, the experts, more money so they can find some more problems/solutions. After all, haven’t they produced research papers, attended seminars, carried out surveys etc. They are like the ancient gods looking down from on high.
What is the solution? One solution which might go someway to provide different perspectives on life would be to bar anyone from university until they are at least twenty one. If would be undergraduates had to work and support themselves, (join the adult world) if only for a few years, it might lead them asking questions about what they really want from university and life in general. More importantly, they might question whether university can provide it.
Just a thought.
Intellectuals and intelligent people are not mutually-exclusive groups. I think it’s a mistake to separate the categories and present them as opposites in the tendentious way seen here. Strictly speaking, the term ‘intellectual’ means somebody who possess a developed intellect, which implies intelligence. True, not all intelligent people are intellectuals, but all intellectuals are intelligent. It’s difficult to see how it could be otherwise, though it should also be acknowledged that intelligence is a relative concept.
Richard Littlejohn, to take a random ‘for instance’, is undoubtedly intelligent, but I find it difficult to picture him as a candidate for the Honours School at an Oxbridge college. But that may just be snobbery on my part. It may be that I have this prejudice about him because he doesn’t write nice articles and say nice things using academic phrases.
However, the converse does not apply. Littlejohn may (or may not) be more down-to-earth, worldly-wise and practical than the Oxbridge candidate, whereas the Oxbridge chemistry student might struggle to use a tin-opener without his Mum’s help, but it doesn’t follow that the more intellectual one is unintelligent.
For that reason, though I can see the cogency in the essay, I am struggling to see the logic in the distinction made. The confusion arises from the belief that having intellectual inclinations makes you an intellectual, as opposed to just an individual with a certain role or interest. Lawyers, vicars, journalists, writers, accountants, academics or whatever, are all intellectual workers, and undoubtedly possess a degree of intelligence, but they are not intellectuals in the strict sense.
I think this essay is really more about the author’s anti-elitists resentments – or ‘ressentiment’, to be more precise. The term ‘intellectual’ is used imprecisely to denote people the author simply doesn’t like. I have no idea if Barack Obama is an intellectual, and don’t see the point in asking him. He may or may not be, but it’s perfectly plain that he is intelligent or he would not have made it to where he is. Dan Quayle is intelligent. Ian Duncan Smith is intelligent. Jeffrey Archer is intelligent. Tony Blair is intelligent. Etc., and so on. These people are not prominent by accident. They become prominent, at least in part, due to their own talents and abilities, which involve (among other things) plotting and scheming their way into positions of power and influence, a skill in its own right – a skill, I might add, that I do not myself possess (though it was not for want of trying).
The other misunderstanding I see in the essay is the author’s belief that today’s powerful intellectuals are no good at coming up with solutions. To the contrary, it ought to be plain that people like Barack Obama get to where they are precisely because of their talent in finding solutions – or, to be more precise, because of their talent in presenting the solutions thought up by their sponsors and advisers. The problem is not that Obama lacks solutions, but that the solutions he and the rest of the elite come up with are not to our liking.