Intellectuals, like everyone else, live and work in a marketplace. In order to get noticed they must say things which have not been said before, or at least say them in a different manner. No one is likely to obtain many plaudits for the rather obvious, indeed self-evident, thought that a street robber cannot commit street robberies while he is in prison. But an intellectual who first demonstrates that the cause of an increase in street robbery is the increase in the amount of property that law-abiding pedestrians have on them as they walk in the streets is likely to be hailed, at least until the next idea comes along. Thus, while there are no penalties for being foolish, there are severe penalties (at least in career terms) for being obvious.Then read this. Blurb:
No one is more sentimental than our intelligentsia, at the root of most of whose ideologies is a sentimental disregard of the most obvious realities, in favour of absurdities they would prefer to be true.So, yeah, we're all obfuscating ourselves to death.
RELATED POST: Intellectuals and the really, really bad ideas they often support. I should put the word intellectuals into scare quotes: "intellectuals."
No comments:
Post a Comment