Member-only story
Anti-intellectualism and Its Resultant Alienation
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.
