Michael Mitchell: Archive

An intellectual isn't necessarily smart or wise. It's not merely someone who's intelligent in any capacity. You have to make a distinction between a wise old man or some annoying political activist co-worker or the star programmer at Google and a professional.

It's the difference between Jordan Peterson, the teacher, and Jordan Peterson, the author. As an author, he's selling his ideas. That's an intellectual, and all you have to do is walk down the self-help aisle at your favorite bookstore to see that most of them are opportunistic idiots.

Some people have amazing brains capable of processing loads of information very quickly, and that can't be taught, but anyone can understand abstract ideas. If you think you're special because of it, then you can't really understand abstract ideas. They're actually disconnected from reality and you're just parroting some shit you heard or read in a book. Of course, you can't connect with laymen and you don't really care to.

Intellectual superiority -- not moral superiority, which is a contradiction in terms, although people really do believe and feel it -- is always deception. If you really know what you know, you can easily communicate it to others because you understand where they are in the conceptual context and hierarchy. You don't need to compare your mind to theirs, so you won't emotionally respond with frustration or despair or disdain or whatever.

The fact that most "intelligent" people lose track of the fundamentals is a tragedy of an educational system not based on a rational philosophy, one that literally attacks the ability to think by not teaching the fundamentals. Most professional intellectuals today learned from that system, and they learned more from the system itself, the way it "works" socially, than what they were "taught". The ideas they sell are "floating", and the more intelligent they are the more they understand that, but their subsistence depends on you buying their bullshit.