The Limitations of Intellectuals

In a world of scarcity and fear, almost no intellectuals escape them

I am in the midst of responding to somebody who seems to want to join my effort, while catching up from my power-and-Internet outages. Recent events and reading have brought me back to my journey’s primary lesson: personal integrity is the world’s scarcest, and most precious, commodity. I see it in all walks of life, but it constantly amazes me how intellectuals often lack that quality. That lack just seems less forgivable with them. Not all of them have that defect, for sure, and my pantheon is well-populated with intellectuals, who are/were beacons in the darkness. As I have stated for many years, so-called “intelligence” is near the bottom of the list of the qualities that I seek. The people I seek have to care, above all else, and have had an awakening experience, and I can’t help anybody attain those two qualities. I doubt that intellectuals have much more or less of those qualities that any other kind of human, but it is striking how often intellectuals fail to honestly and intelligently deal with situations that challenge their carefully constructed worldviews, especially scientists, as they laboriously protect their houses of cards. It was the first item on Brian O’Leary’s list of why new technologies and scientific ideas are suppressed. So-called “skeptics” can be the most obtuse of all, even though they pride themselves on their keen rational ability.

In Noam Chomsky’s political coming-out essay, he argued that intellectuals had a special responsibility to call out the deceits in mainstream culture. But much of his work, and that of his colleague Ed Herman, documented the failings of intellectuals, who not only did not challenge the deceptions, but they even concocted and defended them. Chomsky often argued that the Propaganda Model, which was primarily Herman’s invention, was only a special case of the constraints that all intellectuals in capitalist societies are subjected to. Chomsky noted that even the Old Testament showed the same dynamic, in which dissident intellectuals were punished, so that most toed the line. Herman and Chomsky stated that those failing intellectuals were more deluded than dishonest, but that does not absolve them of their responsibility, in my opinion.

Chomsky will likely go down in history as the USA’s greatest dissident intellectual, but even he was captured by the propaganda at times, such as when he suggested that people who failed to get the COVID vaccine should be locked up. His book that made the case that the CIA would not have been motivated to kill JFK was a badly misguided effort, in my opinion, because it was involved with JFK’s murder, and the former head of the CIA led the cover-up of the man whom he despised, and whom JFK fired over the Bay of Pigs disaster. If Chomsky could not entirely escape the propaganda, which American intellectuals could?

The USA has history’s most sophisticated brainwashing system, so maybe American intellectuals are history’s most deluded, but I wonder about that. This is another example of what a world of scarcity and fear looks like, and there is only one solution that I know of.