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Gods, I miss competence and knowledge. Yeah, this is going to be a rant, but know what? I earned it.
I really miss competence and knowing things as an ideal. The idea of setting a goal, taking measurable steps, and getting there. The competence that did big things like get us to the moon or electrify America. The everyday knowledge that lets doctors save lives and mechanics turn a pile of junk back to a working car. I feel America (and perhaps other cultures) don’t appreciate knowing stuff and doing things.
There’s a joke I’ve seen going around that today’s scientists don’t have time to invent robots or clone sheep because they’re too busy explaining the earth isn’t flat. A nice metaphor, but it’s more like they’re not only explaining the earth isn’t flat, but a Senator wants NASA investigated for concealing the flat earth. Oh, and people are selling Flat Earth Crystals that will protect you from COVID and 5G.
What’s worse is I’m trying to be sarcastic and I feel I haven’t been sarcastic enough.
I don’t get it. I grew up with science and education, in white-collar family from a hard-working and self-educated blue collar family. I knew people who worked their way up with a high school degree – who also had a huge personal library or ended up so knowledgeable they taught college. I grew up with educators and mechanics, people who knew how to get stuff done and were respected for it.
I grew up with people who got their damn vaccinations so they and their kids didn’t die. Yeah, sometimes there was smoking, drinking, and foods that were 50% lard, but that was sort of different – at least that’s what I tell myself. Also a lot of stuff was brown and green, that style where mid-century modern gets depressed, but that’s another story. Anyway we used science despite the lard and bad color scheme.
Of course America has always had an anti-intellectual streak, running through parts of its culture. Despite being very much an intellectual myself, I don’t like intellectualism, I don’t like pretentious putting on of airs and putting on a show of knowledge – because that often becomes a show only. I think that has been an issue in American – and other – history where people use the annoying pretension of some faux-intellectuals as a reason to hate knowing things in general.
It’s Ok to hate pretentious posturing, but people end up hating being intelligent period.
Most anti-intellectual activity I see appears to be resentful. How dare someone tell me what to do! How dare someone be smarter than me. How dare someone hurt my feelings by noting I may be wrong! There’s a weird entitlement in a lot of American anti-intellectual attitudes where people want to be treated as equals to people know something they don’t.
(Of course it seems said anti-intellectuals also hate any idea of treating OTHERS as equal. Bigotry goes hand-in-hand with being anti-intellectual).
What’s funny is that people who are anti-intellectual in America miss the value of hard work – which they usually want to praise otherwise (at lest for others). Being knowledgeable, skilled, and informative takes work. That doctor, that car mechanic, that person that knows something you don’t probably put in the work, so show some respect.
Ultimately I find the American anti-intellectual attitude is lazy and emotionally insecure. It’s an incompetent form of oppositional defiant disorder. It’s “you can’t tell me what to do” mixed with “I don’t wanna do the work.”
Which is why it’s easy to grift people. It’s easy to manipulate people with anti-intellectualism. Hell many anti-intellectual grifters – which are a huge amount of our political and media and Influencer class – are lazy in their own way. They don’t want to do work, they just want to lie and get their way. They’ll work very hard at not actually understanding stuff.
But know what’s weird? Watching anti-intellectuals dress themselves up as intellectual. Dare I say they’re a form of intellectualism, the posturing know-it-all attitude that they supposedly decry. The anti-intellectuals seem pretty damn intellectual sounding.
It’s the pretentious faux-Federalist papers rants by supposed Constitutional experts who read a meme. It’s the “just asking question” anti-vaxxers who throw terms around to sound smart while showing they don’t know anything. It’s the people who try to tweak science to justify flat Earth or whatever. All these people who supposedly hate “the intellectuals” are cosplaying as intellectuals, meaning they’re the intellectualism that supposedly annoy people.
It’s like those conspiracy theorists who decry the mainstream media while quoting from it extensively to justify their stories. Ultimately these kinds of people, the grifter anti-intellectual types, can’t avoid wanting validation. This makes them into what they supposedly hate and they still don’t know anything or if they do they don’t use it.
I’m ultimately an uncomplicated person. I like real learning, real results, and people who get stuff done. I like competence. The modern parade of anti-intellectuals putting on cosplay and decrying what they’re pretending to be is dangerous, exhausting, and unsustainable. I know it’s for political power, but these days I think a lot isn’t going to last.
You can’t outrun the changing climate, disease, and decaying systems. Real intellectuals know this.
Steven Savage