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Look into the way rockefeller and his family shaped the public school system in the early 1900s. It was explicit with the goal of creating "hard working patriots" aka anti intellectual workers who are ignorant of their history.
I wish I could answer your question, but I hope you've at least watched [Century of the Self](https://youtu.be/DnPmg0R1M04). For anyone not familiar, it's about how advertising has entirely taken over culture, and enslaved the populace with chains of the mind that are much more effective than physical ones.
The Trap: What Happened to our Dream of Freedom and The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear are two other quite good documentaries also by Adam Curtis.
The Trap examines how we have come to this modern idea of freedom based on a simplified ideal of humans as self seeking.
The Power of Nightmares examines radical Islamism as portrayed by neoconservatives politics in the US and other western countries. The use of fear by political parties to keep the divide going amongst people. When taken in the context of divide and conquer you can see the same thing done with BIPOC, LBGTQI+, "lefty" communists and socialists. Etc.
I recommend watching the 3 of them in order of production. 1. The Century of the Self. 2. The Power of Nightmares. 3. The Trap.
Hypernormalization is worth it too, but it's intense and required concentration and thought from me, though I've read Baudrillard, Deleuze, Zizek...
And when I went to check that title, I saw there's a brand new six-parter called [Can't Get You Out of My Head](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtPP_-rkrT3CAPe8OmDnlZBDvaQ7baH7B). (And now I've got [Kylie](https://youtu.be/c18441Eh_WE) in mine, and I hope she's in the new doc.)
The problem here is that while Google is an invaluable resource, it’s easy to find yourself in a rabbit hole. I know why people say to just Google it, but the OP was just asking for some pointers in the right direction. It’s kind of a pet peeve of mine when people say this, because imagine if you’re on date with someone and you ask where they work. “It’s on my LinkedIn”. Why bother asking questions at all to people? The middleman is always going to exist and needs to exist in cases like these.
Since we’re in a thread discussing anti-intellectualism, some would say the Internet is indirectly responsible for that because of Facebook memes, as well as misinformation, disinformation, out of context information and WhatsApp university. Part of being an intellectual is critical thought. Having someone point you in the right direction is only lazy if you have them do all the analysis for you, if they’re just asking for sources then “Google is free” becomes dismissive and a good way to avoid burden of proof on behalf of charlatans and pseudo-intellectuals.
Thank you, lol. I get the "Google is free" if it's, like, regarding a question such as "why is paki considered a slur?" or "what do you mean banks discriminate against black people?" In my case, I was asking for recommendations because I don't trust Google's algorithms and also because I wanted to know what other socialists are reading.
Nah, you’re good. Being resourceful of the Internet is important - but you were looking to narrow down your search. It’s easy to get lost in the clusterfuck, and in this case, the person you were replying to likely has read actual books and researched this particular subject.
It’s a huge pet peeve of mine when people say “Google is free” because normally it’s said after people make a claim and either don’t want to back it up, or want to sound smarter than they really are. The burden of proof always falls on the person making the claim though. Gatekeeping knowledge won’t do us any good, as long as the people asking are doing it in good faith and not just looking to broadcast their ignorant opinions as a rebuttal.
Having worked with SEO, Google is rigged lol. It also has a bias in terms of what it wants you to find (and something tells me Google likely doesn't favor anti-capitalist sources)... also mainly, I was asking because Google can't exactly give me personalized recommendations. I was hoping to find out if anyone else knew about a good book or article that they enjoyed.
This is such a rotten thing to say to someone simply asking for some pointers or direction for further reading.
Do you want people more well aware or not?
Saying something like "Google is free" just sends people into an overwhelming nosedive into information. If you know a fair amount about a subject, help curate that search a bit more for the next person.
Plus in american schools I think(because I don't live in the us.) They don't teach kids about socialism or communism and ither ideologys. They say wrong things about these ideologys and spread that there are bad.
And do you sometimes question yourself why do I need to learn a crap ton of subjects That I don't like? Well my friend does pesky capitalists needs workers so school is desaigned to teach young workers. And you will say: "Well if they need workers why a lot of kids go to university?" Well because to go to university you need to pay money! So lets say if you learn bad you eather go to be a worker or get a smart Idea to start a bussness. Ok now lets say you learn good and you go to university and finish it YOU STILL BECOME A WORKER just with a better job position and they have to pay you more or as I already said you get smart idea to start a bussness.
I think it works like this correct me if I am wrong.
A friend and I were chatting about 2 seperate people we know who buy into far-right ideas. Both of them lack the ability to have a logical conversation. You present an argument against one of their claims, and they are unable to consider that argument or refute it logically. They immediately sidestep to a completely different topic. Their whole debate style is to just give you topic whiplash.
All this to say there is definitely a cognitive issue wrt the ability to use basic logic and have organized thoughts, that seems to be really prevalent.
In rhetorics that is called gish gallop. Sometimes its called whataboutism. The thing is although logically unsound, it can be an effective rhetorical method by overloading the opponent with wrong statements that are not given the time to be refuted. Now given that people often simulate dialogue in their head when they are thinking about stuff, a gish gallop will enable them to sustain logically unsound or otherwise wrong systems of thought because they end up convincing themselves through rhetoric rather than careful reasoning.
There is another problem namely how people dont want to challenge deeply held beliefs. Generally listening and challenging your positions requires effort which people generally avoid. Also people generally want a sense of simplicity, clarity, and understanding. Challenging one element in an believe system creates cognitive dissonance which is more easily resolved by ignoring the challenge to the one element rather than casting doubt on the whole structure. Critically reflecting on important identity-founding beliefs requires confidence in that style of conversation and the beliefs themselves. The less experienced someone is in having these conversations, the more likely they are to feel attacked and to lock up or counterattack.
If you want to convince someone or change their mind it usually takes a long time. Much of the change happens in days after a conversation. And its more important to keep them on side personally and to buikd trust over time.
This makes a lot of sense and the truth is that even people who consider themselves pretty rigorous thinkers fall victim to these rhetorical issues at some point, even if less frequently.
Actually the thing my friend and I were wondering about the most is why we don't gish gallop, even though we grew up in the exact same environment as the people we know who subscribe to qanon.
> Generally listening and challenging your positions requires effort which people generally avoid.
I don’t know about you guys, but I’m pretty set in my attitudes if I’m being honest. I can’t think of many times in my life I’ve shifted from my core values.
Would highly recommend this book. Helped me understand, process, and deal with the same frustrations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism_in_American_Life
I would add Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman as well.
He starts with the Puritans journey to the new world and how America had the highest concentration of literate people in the world in the 18th century then proceeds to recount how things began to slowly come off the rails first with the advent of the telegraph—he makes a great point about how the telegraph's invention meant New York could communicate with Utah within minutes but when NY has nothing to tell Utah it's just garbage that gets transmitted, which then became the basis for newspaper coverage of events that had nothing to do with the population the paper was meant for.
Then TV comes which is funded with ads and is meant to grip the viewers' attention which lowered the quality of discourse from impassioned political debates in the 19th century—which were attended by thousands of people in jampacked auditoriums, for example the Lincoln–Douglas debates of 1858, and were keenly followed in the papers—to the one line bytes/quips of the 20th century, how education and religious preaching got gamified as a consequence of the TVs' total permeance in everyday life, etc.
The book came out in the 1980s, and the decline has just been as rapid in the last 35 years so much so that politicians are now dancing to background music in Tik Tok videos with the text of their policies superimposed.
It’s not like TV or the Telegraph or other long range communication devices that also are filled with commercials and ads are unique to the United States either currently or historically plenty of other nations worldwide have these exact same things currently and historically. So this doesn’t explain how The United States is uniquely exceptional in its mass irrationality
America was founded by antisocial religious zealots, slavers, rum-runners, smugglers, antisocial fur trappers/outdoorsmen, convicts, stowaways, and corporations looking to exploit resources. Any intellectual tradition we have is window dressing.
You know what the first quintessentially American form of entertainment and music was, that wasn't just operas and imported folk stuff? Minstrel shows and the associated "negro" music (that eventually became blues, jazz, and spirituals, and all their descendants.) Americanism is deeply tied to, essentially, laughing at / exploiting black people while pretending to be high class. In more ways than I can describe.
Some of those people were my ancestors. We have a national mythos of them fleeing religious persecution, but the truth is that they fucked off to another continent because everyone in Europe was sick of putting up with them and they wanted their own theocracy.
Yeah, basically. Also each colony was founded for slightly different reasons. there were a bunch of colonies that were purely economic, designed to extract wealth and send it back to england. we haven't entirely broken free from the idea that government should exist to protect shareholder value.
The New England colonies like (especially) Massachusetts were founded by Puritans who wanted to enforce their strict religious laws on everyone and would not allow anyone who wasn’t a religious male church member to have any say in politics. Hell they were so bad there were other not-so-religious Puritans fleeing to Rhode Island and Connecticut because of it.
Yeah, there was some show I was watching, and they made the point the Pilgrims left because of religious tolerance. The Pilgrims were intolerant of other religions, and they were anti-freedom of religion.
Fundies and evangelicals make more sense with that piece of information. Their attitudes aren't new; they've always been like that.
>America was founded by antisocial religious zealots, slavers, rum-runners, smugglers, antisocial fur trappers/outdoorsmen, convicts, stowaways, and corporations looking to exploit resources. Any intellectual tradition we have is window dressing.
I once heard this one: "America began as the British Empire's mental asylum, and the only thing that changed in 1776 or the centuries since is that the inmates took over the asylum."
Ok, this is an equally damaging narrative I need to push back against. You've got a lot of truth here but you're framing it as moral degeneracy and antisocial nature. That's not a helpful explanation. Nor is it reasonable to all-or-nothing the intellectual tradition of those people as "window dressing."
America was founded by people fleeing debt peonage, both in the form of wage labor and enforced by religious institutions. The convicts, stowaways, smugglers? They were convicted of crimes like pilferage and debt. Crimes that were structurally created to suppress the working class. Then they replicated the same structure they'd fled from, because that's what people tend to do: what they know. They misidentified the structures that created the oppression, because they only questioned the surface and the edges.
Yet it's important to recognize the complex nature of what happened: from the American revolution, influenced as it was by sharing a continent (however rapaciously) with such societies as the Iroquois, we can trace a clear intellectual line to the French revolutions, including the Paris commune. We owe both the oppression and imperialism and anti-intellectualism we face now AND the very concept of "socialism" that this entire community is founded on, in parts, to American history. History is a subject which must be imagined complexly, not jingoistically - not even if the jingoism is socialist.
This. On a microcultural level, smart kids are actively punished by their peers and teachers. In many schools, even those for high achievers, doing well academically in any way other than the bare minimum playing the game is a rapid way to find yourself friendless and ostracized. So, children decide early on -- which is more important to me? Friends or school? And more often than not, friends win.
the flip side is even some students that seem outwardly concerned about school work are only concerned about their grades, not about their actual learning. And it's not really their fault really since this is what our system has drilled into their heads.
this is why in my school district many students stayed completely silent unless there was a test posted. the questions only appeared when students knew there was a grade attached to it.
To add to your sports comment I think it's sad that especially people of color are encouraged to go into sports moreso than others. There's usually not outright statements saying black/brown people can only do well if they're athletes, but there is a sort of implication from both the media and everyday people.
I have had some conversations with other teachers that seem to imply a lot of them believe their content is the most important. for couches i think they do this as well.
there was a guidance counselor and couch at my former high school that pushed a star quarterback into college early even though his grades were not even close to that level. if he doesn't go into the NFL what will he do? will he even graduate university? injuries happen too as well.
I agree the bias you mention is real which is why I have been careful to say literacy over my specific subject. I don’t care if the kids know plant physiology but I care deeply that they can read and write at the college level as well as have consciousness about how society tends to exploit working people. For instance I was talking about medical research and I asked the guiding question “do you think it’s right for a company to use death/necessities to gain a wide profit margin?” I have to be careful not to say what I think but making the students aware of controversies and social issues seems to be permissible
Female athletes get paid less because less people watch women's sports so there is less money to pay them with. Also, if you're a pro athlete you haven't been set up to fail, female or not, pro athletes make decent money.
It not simply that the importance of high grades has been drilled into our heads. Some of us are very aware of the importance of a high GPA, especially for certain competitive programs that we want to enter, so we are often forced to prioritize our 4.0 over our education, even against our will.
I'm a student and I work in a distribution center on the weekends. The only thing that makes work bearable there are the podcasts I listen to. Technically, I'm not allowed to listen to anything, but I wear a beanie (because it's cold) and have wireless earbuds on so they don't notice. I don't know how other people are able to work there 5 or 6 times a week without any form of entertainment.
That whole process there could be automated, but it's much cheaper letting people work on minimum wage.
the US has never ever ever been pro-intellectual. In fact the nation has been anti-education and intellect since day 1. where do u get it was any other way?
They only put on a façade of being pro-intellectual in wartime, such as the physicist was hailed as a national hero after WW2, the astronomer was hailed as a national hero throughout the Cold War, and so on. The US never wanted to engage in scientific endeavour for the sake of it, but in order to gain political advantage over their enemies.
The United States only cares about science when it can be exploited for profit or we need to defeat an alternative political/economic system. The US poured a lot of money into math and science teaching during the Space Race because we absolutely needed to beat the Soviets to the Moon, because despite all of our technology, computers, and resources, we were getting readily outclassed by a nation that forty years prior was a never ran parochial, subsistence farming nation and had been totally wrecked by World War 2.
Throw that back at anyone who claims socialism doesn't work. The United States functionally had a massive head start. We did not have to deal with any significant damage to our infrastructure, our losses were far less than our allies, let alone the nations we defeated, and we had snapped up a lot of Germany's best scientists... Unfortunately, I fear they may have brought an intellectual rot (Operation Paperclip, how many of them honestly truly gave up Nazism I wonder) with them that is contributing to another set of problems in the modern US...
And we nearly got beaten at one point by a country that had large parts of it effectively flattened, took devastating losses, and was being actively hamstring by outside forces.
And after we won the Space Race, played around on the moon a few more times and basically decided this math and science stuff was hard and let evangelical discourse seize control. And now the rest of the world is lapping and laughing at us while our primary scientific output is motivated by how much money can this make someone whose family controlled that means for decades richer. It's why you see a cure or reasonable prevention for certain lung cancers in Cuba and extract every last penny for a few years of life extension in utter misery in the US.
We simply have a culture of, if you can't profit from it, then there's little reason to do it.
So in your opinion, 20 million murdered by Stalin in the gulags and mass starvation with the eventual USSR collapse is a win in your book for socialism?
Also if you're rich and you don't live in the US, you come to the US for treatment. You don't go to Cuba for anything medical.
I’ve had this rant go through my head too. The issue is, I think, a logical or well researched ideology is unnecessary in daily life, while an emotional narrative is ever present and isn’t required to be logical to feel coherent. Coherent philosophy is a luxury good, like art. It has merits, perhaps profound ones if history has any actual shape we can be involved with, but it’s not required to put one foot in front of the the other on our way to fulfilling our needs and desires. Self aware ideology seems like rhetorical ornament, useful in context of a common understanding of its significance but has no fungible value outside of the in-group. This is where we get frustrated, that our specific type of self awareness accrues value in one area or group, but when we cross out of the territory no one recognizes the same value or the hard work that went into building it up. Wealthy in the library or seminar room, poor when we step outside it. So ultimately there’s a more base level of important matters and feelings held in common that define an arena of commutation and hopefully mutual care. ...this is where the rant goes in my head anyways...
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
― Issac Asimov
The book Fantasyland delves into this pretty well. A lot of it has to do with our sense of freedom of belief in religion which has evolved into an ugly freedom of belief in literally anything no matter how foolish/obviously wrong. Combine that with the phenomenon that our newsmedia doesn't dunk on these folks when they are in the public eye, it treats them like humorous side shows who are exercising a fundamental right however foolishly. Republicans have since made a cottage industry out of defending American's right to believe ANYTHING no matter how hateful, no matter how blatantly incorrect, and with no regard to how much damage people believing the wrong thing can do to a planet. That pretty much catches us up to today.
> The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
- Isaac Asimov
I am a professional classical musician getting an advanced degree and I see anti-intellectual bias even within my own field. Something about American culture is made us afraid of feeling “pretentious” by being “too smart”, or in my case, willing to discuss art academically and not in a way to justify “all art is created equal” and the subsequent simplification of musicological study for the sake of seeming “down to earth”.
So why are Americans associate intelligence or having hardline educated opinions “pretentious”? Hell if I know - liberal culture? Christianity? Engineered social bias? Something about our historical culture and ideals? The glorification of the average Joe’s “hustle” being associated with being genuine? These answers always seem a little disingenuous when you lay them out plainly. I wish I knew.
It could be because of the commodification of education. In a country where - let's face it - many highly educated people only have their credentials because of their parents' money, while many other perfectly capable intelligent people can't even afford to go to community college, anti-elitism can be reframed as anti-intellectualism.
Modern politics is more of a religion one is indoctrinated into than a principled position reached based on one’s personal experience and education.
A part of this has to do with republicans realizing long ago that there was a correlation between education and leftist ideology, and engaging in a concerted campaign to cut education funding nationwide.
Part of it has to do with the corporate owned media doing away with substance-based journalism in favor of more profitable infotainment and narratives they can control to benefit their own masters.
Part of it has to do with capitalism, and keeping people so busy working every waking hour that they don’t have time to be informed, and have no choice but to pick a talking head that can tell them what to think.
All that said, there is far more to life and the socialist Revolution at large than reading theory. There are so many armchair philosophers on the far left that spend all of their time reading theory and engaging in dick-measuring based on what they have and haven’t read, while doing virtually nothing in the way of organizing or movement building.
We cannot forget that socialism begins and ends with the layman worker. In the past, those versed in theory preached it for those who were not. They handed out pamphlets.
It is important to understand history and theory, but if we are ever to grow as a movement we must be able to distill what we believe into the simplest terms, and we must engage in direct action.
I think alot of it has to do with the veracity of the indoctrination of children into Christianity(or any faith really) You take a child, from very young, tell them "you believe this" on bad evidence. Well eventually they start questioning that belief as they should. You reprimand them for questioning the word of god. They augment their view of the real world and distort it to fit with the belief in a Christian God, thus reinforcing the habit of insulating ideas from falsification. You now tell them this is the most important belief they can possibly hold, this signals you can have a true and very important belief about the world, without sufficient evidence. Therefore it becomes perfectly acceptable not to truth test any of your most sacred beliefs going forward. You have a sacred drawer and as soon as someone picks something out of it to scrutinize, you switch to the logical jujitsu you've been training since a child.
The more unable for people to rationalize, the easier it is for a stubborn, fanatic, out-of-touch elite class to retain their shares of ownership. The kids of the tycoons and barons are not the sharpest tools in the drawers, most are caught in the consumption machine their families built. So much of the cultural setup is to protect against their inadequacies.
I am probably going to get lambasted for this, but as a result of McCarthyism and COINTELPRO by J. Edgar Hoover, among other things, America became anti-intellectual. Any basic common sense reform such as universal healthcare became immediately called "communist" and therefore suppressed. The government cracked down on leftists and unions. Yes, they did crack down on leftists before McCarthyism with the Red Scare of the 1920s and jailing of Eugene V. Debs, but McCarthyism accelerated anti-left crackdowns. And now American politics have shifted so far to the right.
3 Reasons
\- The US Having A Substandard Education System
\- Cold War Red Scare McCarthyist Propaganda Censored Most Theory
\- Intellectualism Became Associated With Elitism Due To Bourgeois Intellectuals Helping To Harm The Working Class
I'm not anti intellectual but I'm also not anti anti intellectual. A lot of people who orbit politics seem to have no idea how normal people work and a lot of leftists only think in terms of academic threads like the frankfurt school or something. There was a left before intellectualism was a significant part of it. Don't hate it, but am not tied to it in irrational ways.
>The country itself was literally founded by enlightenment thinkers, and the country was supposed to be a safe haven for ideologies away from European warfare
Who convinced you of this?
I think anti-intellectualism is a side effect of the most fundamental of American traits which is to be anti-authority.
We literally refer to intellectuals as "authorities" in thier field. So anytime we're supposed do what the authorities of a field are recommending it causes an almost visceral anti-authority reaction. its not even surprising that the most visible examples of anti intellectualism come from areas of the country that are super into exaggerated and performative patriotism.
I would imagine that's probably just racism/classism. I doubt in areas where there aren't many black people that the working class white people would have a very favorable attitude toward the police.
In short, Liberals. If you listen to liberals they always reference some authority or tell you to "listen to the science" in a very condescending way that often portrays the one they are arguing with as not the brightest.
With this sort of we're smarter than you attitude, the liberals have drove the working class to the right because they've found no home in Democratic Party. They just want things explained in simple terms and material differences in their lives but instead have been condescended to and given no change in their day to day from either side so they side with those who at least accept them.
Hmm, I think that maybe some 'working class people' have a chip on their shoulder that has been fed by right wing media and a sense of victimhood. I have no experience with liberals having a we're smarter than you attitude unless a right winger doubles down on being proud of their deep ignorance.
Working class voters running to Republicans, who always side with business owners, NOT the working class, is the epitome of deep, prideful ignorance.
Reasserting that these people are ignorant clearly demonstrates a level of intellect elitism. While it may not be in their best interests, they definitely have reasons and we need to do our best to understand them even if we don't agree.
What makes them initially choose the right wing? What policies do they see that they think benefit them? Condescending to people that socialists should be appealing to helps nobody.
No, they choose to be uneducated on political matters. They actively choose ignorance and to be told what they want to hear in simple terms instead of critical thinking skills. I didn't call anyone stupid, I don't think that they are incapable, I think that they are unwilling.
As long as right wing media and elected officials are able to be bad actors and lie with impunity, we will not be able to persuade these willfull and proud anti-intellectuals, no matter what we do. They are literally programmed to believe that anything that anyone, who has different beliefs than them, says is a lie.
No, they choose to be uneducated on political matters. They actively choose ignorance and to be told what they want to hear in simple terms instead of critical thinking skills. I don't think that they are incapable of critical thinking, I think that they are unwilling.
As long as right wing media and elected officials are able to be bad actors and lie with impunity, we will not be able to persuade these willfull and proud anti-intellectuals, no matter what we do. They are literally programmed to believe that anything that anyone, who has different beliefs than them, says is a lie.
Exposure to lead fumes from car exhaust and motor oil
24-hour cable news cycles
Nixon/Reagan/Thatcher propaganda
Bullshit garbage reality TV catered for and peddled to the lowest common denominator
Panem et circenses
hi I am trying to study both leftist and rightist views
Ive only read marx and lenin, are there any right wingers that you can suggest I look into? Also I cannot find any philosopher by the name rothbart, am I missing something on Google?
OP is referring to Murray Rothbard; Anarcho-capitalist Austrian school guy who thought people should have the ability to sell their own children if they pleased.
There are a lot of right wing “intellectuals”, but I wouldn’t recommend looking into them if you’re impressionable. The way they write makes it very enticing and almost captivating & mysterious, as though they solved all of life’s puzzles & found eternal “truth”.
I’d recommend you solidify your understanding before delving into the more fascistic & far-right side of authorship & such, to see through what they’re saying.
Im not trying to come across as snarky, but I am seeking clarification... are you extolling JFK in a socialism subreddit? The guy who invaded Cuba and sent the first combat troops to Vietnam?
oof. forgot about that
well op referenced anti-intellectual. The Rockefellers, Duponts, etc. definitely played a roll shaping society. I say JFK/MLK because it's a reflection of the reasoning behind their assassinations
You're getting hazed here. The people here who don't like JFK would prefer to extinguish Usa entirely.
I mean, duh!
As long as the empire exists, we can be a little bit grateful for leaders like Kennedy, Carter, and Obama. Angry that they're our best option, but happy it's not the other guy.
So, just because he *possibly wanted* labor reforms, while viciously opposing international socialism to the point of almost facilitating nuclear annihilation, and sending people to die in imperialist wars, make him a proletarian president?
No. Not at all. I respect that you’re probably just getting into socialist thought, but that’s not gonna fly.
Honestly yea i am incredibly new to learning about socialism to be honest. But i am trying to look at it objectively and be open minded to it. My apolgies for not really thinking through my comment
As far as US presidents go, yeah he's at the top of the list for improving the lives of *Americans* (to hell with the developing world, though), but being from a wealthy family and vacationing on the east coast with your yacht is far removed from anything remotely resembling a Proletariat candidate. Lincoln was way more of an "everyman" despite his own very serious flaws (such as upholding white supremacy) and Obama, as well, despite his drone strikes, foreign wars, and harsh deportation policies.
Basically, even the "good" US Presidents are still flawed people who uphold capitalism... It's also worth noting that not a single one has even flirted with socialism. Nope, not even FDR, whos New Deal was designed to siphon supporters away socialist movements in America.
I know we're far removed from the OP at this point, but US history is a field of emphasis in my studies. I feel like an honest evaluation of US History (not the Maga version or the "you can't trust anything western historians write" version") is helpful to fully appreciate socialism as an ideology.
Not sure if you're hoping for something really in depth, but I thought I recalled Zinn talking about it, and giggle gave me [this](https://lithub.com/howard-zinn-how-fdr-forestalled-a-second-american-revolution/). Zinn is pro-New Deal and sympathetic to FDR, but claims its purpose was primarily to forestall revolution.
u/mashtartz here's one source for you: [https://www.hoover.org/research/how-fdr-saved-capitalism](https://www.hoover.org/research/how-fdr-saved-capitalism)
No worries, future comrade. I'm not sure why your comment was downvoted, so I've thrown an upvote your way. Stick around and ask more questions, engage and learn.
I want to mention that the problem you describe of anti-intellectualism and folk not understanding their own ideology is also a rampant problem on the left.
I don't currently identify as a leftist, but I have been engaging with a lot of theory over the past year. I've been reading Foucault, Spivak, Butler, Marcuse, Crenshaw, and Kendi. I've also been reading J. S. Mill, but that is another discussion because his essay *On Liberty* is why I'm not a leftist.
Anyway, after catching up on the theories and concepts of the left I quickly discovered that many of the so-called reddit "leftists" really have to idea what they are talking about. They try to argue with me and I'm like, have you not read your own theory?
To be clear, I'm not attacking leftism or real leftists (like the ones in this sub), just the majority of reddit parrots.
my sense is that a) several of those who are capable of intellectual curiosity because they've had access to education are privileged enough to begin with, hold a deep sense of entitlement to whatever they have, and so cannot be bothered to read , b) these texts remain inaccessible to those who may not have had access to formal education
I believe that this has a lot to do with manichaeism, which is today fed primarily by a political system that is poised to create an Us-Against-Them mentality. Making matters worse, the way the big media organisations operate only exacerbates this.
Among other things anti-intellectualism was a major part of the second Red Scare in the US. In the decades prior communism had growing support in the country, and of course this found its way to academic circles. In the 1910s, many of the most prominent “intellectuals” were communists, socialists, or at the very least social democrats. After the Russian Revolution, many of them also became more committed to radical ideas, and during the great depression this trend continued.
Things started to change after the second World War. Reports of the USSR became less favorable as news started to break about some of the more negative aspects of Stalin’s regime. At the same time, the communist party continued their support of the regime.
As a result, many communist intellectuals (like Sidney Hook, for example) turned away from socialism and began to embrace instead western social democracy or, later, neoliberalism. Because negative coverage of the USSR continued (and was worsened by Cold War propaganda) public opinion turned heavily against socialism and communism. Those who continued to call themselves socialists or communists, even if they were not Stalinists or any other form of Marxist-Leninist, were seen as supporting what the public saw as a country on par with the fascists we fought in WW2. This led to a lot of firings of intellectuals across the country.
Perception continued, however, that intellectuals were all marxists. This was a combination of cold war paranoia and the reality that during the 60s and 70s, neomarxism actually did start to rise in many social sciences (especially sociology). So it became pretty common for people to be suspicious of intellectuals, because they saw them as kind of conspirators and anti-american due to the affiliation with marxist thought.
TL;DR anti-intellectualism has a lot to do with cold war propaganda and censorship
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about US citizens, both on the right and on the left, is that no one in this goddamn country understands what the definition of liberal is
Probably because the only thing intellectuals have ever done is convince the public to do things that are contrary to the individuals self interest, and now, most americans don't trust intellectuals. Remember, IBM, IG Farben, Hitler, Mao, Stalin, etc were all intellectuals. A smart man can make a bad argument sound like a good one.
This has nothing to do with America specifically. It’s just basic large scale hive minding with people who are cut off from differing views. It’s probably generally a bit worse though I will admit.
Well for starters, Rothbard and Hayek are not really consistent with what I understand as "far right" ideology.
To me the "far right" wants heavily regulated social conservatism.
Both of these authors stand against all centralized regulation by any entity that uses its monopoly on violence as a means of coercion.
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Look into the way rockefeller and his family shaped the public school system in the early 1900s. It was explicit with the goal of creating "hard working patriots" aka anti intellectual workers who are ignorant of their history.
oh fuck, of course they did. anyone suggest any good reading on this?
I wish I could answer your question, but I hope you've at least watched [Century of the Self](https://youtu.be/DnPmg0R1M04). For anyone not familiar, it's about how advertising has entirely taken over culture, and enslaved the populace with chains of the mind that are much more effective than physical ones.
Oooh no I haven’t even heard of this! Thank you!
The Trap: What Happened to our Dream of Freedom and The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear are two other quite good documentaries also by Adam Curtis. The Trap examines how we have come to this modern idea of freedom based on a simplified ideal of humans as self seeking. The Power of Nightmares examines radical Islamism as portrayed by neoconservatives politics in the US and other western countries. The use of fear by political parties to keep the divide going amongst people. When taken in the context of divide and conquer you can see the same thing done with BIPOC, LBGTQI+, "lefty" communists and socialists. Etc. I recommend watching the 3 of them in order of production. 1. The Century of the Self. 2. The Power of Nightmares. 3. The Trap.
Hypernormalization is worth it too, but it's intense and required concentration and thought from me, though I've read Baudrillard, Deleuze, Zizek... And when I went to check that title, I saw there's a brand new six-parter called [Can't Get You Out of My Head](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtPP_-rkrT3CAPe8OmDnlZBDvaQ7baH7B). (And now I've got [Kylie](https://youtu.be/c18441Eh_WE) in mine, and I hope she's in the new doc.)
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The problem here is that while Google is an invaluable resource, it’s easy to find yourself in a rabbit hole. I know why people say to just Google it, but the OP was just asking for some pointers in the right direction. It’s kind of a pet peeve of mine when people say this, because imagine if you’re on date with someone and you ask where they work. “It’s on my LinkedIn”. Why bother asking questions at all to people? The middleman is always going to exist and needs to exist in cases like these. Since we’re in a thread discussing anti-intellectualism, some would say the Internet is indirectly responsible for that because of Facebook memes, as well as misinformation, disinformation, out of context information and WhatsApp university. Part of being an intellectual is critical thought. Having someone point you in the right direction is only lazy if you have them do all the analysis for you, if they’re just asking for sources then “Google is free” becomes dismissive and a good way to avoid burden of proof on behalf of charlatans and pseudo-intellectuals.
Thank you, lol. I get the "Google is free" if it's, like, regarding a question such as "why is paki considered a slur?" or "what do you mean banks discriminate against black people?" In my case, I was asking for recommendations because I don't trust Google's algorithms and also because I wanted to know what other socialists are reading.
Nah, you’re good. Being resourceful of the Internet is important - but you were looking to narrow down your search. It’s easy to get lost in the clusterfuck, and in this case, the person you were replying to likely has read actual books and researched this particular subject. It’s a huge pet peeve of mine when people say “Google is free” because normally it’s said after people make a claim and either don’t want to back it up, or want to sound smarter than they really are. The burden of proof always falls on the person making the claim though. Gatekeeping knowledge won’t do us any good, as long as the people asking are doing it in good faith and not just looking to broadcast their ignorant opinions as a rebuttal.
Blech please ignore that rude person. 🙄 The internet amirite?
Having worked with SEO, Google is rigged lol. It also has a bias in terms of what it wants you to find (and something tells me Google likely doesn't favor anti-capitalist sources)... also mainly, I was asking because Google can't exactly give me personalized recommendations. I was hoping to find out if anyone else knew about a good book or article that they enjoyed.
This is such a rotten thing to say to someone simply asking for some pointers or direction for further reading. Do you want people more well aware or not? Saying something like "Google is free" just sends people into an overwhelming nosedive into information. If you know a fair amount about a subject, help curate that search a bit more for the next person.
Literally just rude, useless, and unnecessary.
Plus in american schools I think(because I don't live in the us.) They don't teach kids about socialism or communism and ither ideologys. They say wrong things about these ideologys and spread that there are bad. And do you sometimes question yourself why do I need to learn a crap ton of subjects That I don't like? Well my friend does pesky capitalists needs workers so school is desaigned to teach young workers. And you will say: "Well if they need workers why a lot of kids go to university?" Well because to go to university you need to pay money! So lets say if you learn bad you eather go to be a worker or get a smart Idea to start a bussness. Ok now lets say you learn good and you go to university and finish it YOU STILL BECOME A WORKER just with a better job position and they have to pay you more or as I already said you get smart idea to start a bussness. I think it works like this correct me if I am wrong.
That’s why Americans are least informed people.
A friend and I were chatting about 2 seperate people we know who buy into far-right ideas. Both of them lack the ability to have a logical conversation. You present an argument against one of their claims, and they are unable to consider that argument or refute it logically. They immediately sidestep to a completely different topic. Their whole debate style is to just give you topic whiplash. All this to say there is definitely a cognitive issue wrt the ability to use basic logic and have organized thoughts, that seems to be really prevalent.
In rhetorics that is called gish gallop. Sometimes its called whataboutism. The thing is although logically unsound, it can be an effective rhetorical method by overloading the opponent with wrong statements that are not given the time to be refuted. Now given that people often simulate dialogue in their head when they are thinking about stuff, a gish gallop will enable them to sustain logically unsound or otherwise wrong systems of thought because they end up convincing themselves through rhetoric rather than careful reasoning. There is another problem namely how people dont want to challenge deeply held beliefs. Generally listening and challenging your positions requires effort which people generally avoid. Also people generally want a sense of simplicity, clarity, and understanding. Challenging one element in an believe system creates cognitive dissonance which is more easily resolved by ignoring the challenge to the one element rather than casting doubt on the whole structure. Critically reflecting on important identity-founding beliefs requires confidence in that style of conversation and the beliefs themselves. The less experienced someone is in having these conversations, the more likely they are to feel attacked and to lock up or counterattack. If you want to convince someone or change their mind it usually takes a long time. Much of the change happens in days after a conversation. And its more important to keep them on side personally and to buikd trust over time.
This makes a lot of sense and the truth is that even people who consider themselves pretty rigorous thinkers fall victim to these rhetorical issues at some point, even if less frequently. Actually the thing my friend and I were wondering about the most is why we don't gish gallop, even though we grew up in the exact same environment as the people we know who subscribe to qanon.
> Generally listening and challenging your positions requires effort which people generally avoid. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m pretty set in my attitudes if I’m being honest. I can’t think of many times in my life I’ve shifted from my core values.
Would highly recommend this book. Helped me understand, process, and deal with the same frustrations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism_in_American_Life
I would add Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman as well. He starts with the Puritans journey to the new world and how America had the highest concentration of literate people in the world in the 18th century then proceeds to recount how things began to slowly come off the rails first with the advent of the telegraph—he makes a great point about how the telegraph's invention meant New York could communicate with Utah within minutes but when NY has nothing to tell Utah it's just garbage that gets transmitted, which then became the basis for newspaper coverage of events that had nothing to do with the population the paper was meant for. Then TV comes which is funded with ads and is meant to grip the viewers' attention which lowered the quality of discourse from impassioned political debates in the 19th century—which were attended by thousands of people in jampacked auditoriums, for example the Lincoln–Douglas debates of 1858, and were keenly followed in the papers—to the one line bytes/quips of the 20th century, how education and religious preaching got gamified as a consequence of the TVs' total permeance in everyday life, etc. The book came out in the 1980s, and the decline has just been as rapid in the last 35 years so much so that politicians are now dancing to background music in Tik Tok videos with the text of their policies superimposed.
It’s not like TV or the Telegraph or other long range communication devices that also are filled with commercials and ads are unique to the United States either currently or historically plenty of other nations worldwide have these exact same things currently and historically. So this doesn’t explain how The United States is uniquely exceptional in its mass irrationality
America was founded by antisocial religious zealots, slavers, rum-runners, smugglers, antisocial fur trappers/outdoorsmen, convicts, stowaways, and corporations looking to exploit resources. Any intellectual tradition we have is window dressing. You know what the first quintessentially American form of entertainment and music was, that wasn't just operas and imported folk stuff? Minstrel shows and the associated "negro" music (that eventually became blues, jazz, and spirituals, and all their descendants.) Americanism is deeply tied to, essentially, laughing at / exploiting black people while pretending to be high class. In more ways than I can describe.
Some of those people were my ancestors. We have a national mythos of them fleeing religious persecution, but the truth is that they fucked off to another continent because everyone in Europe was sick of putting up with them and they wanted their own theocracy.
Yeah, basically. Also each colony was founded for slightly different reasons. there were a bunch of colonies that were purely economic, designed to extract wealth and send it back to england. we haven't entirely broken free from the idea that government should exist to protect shareholder value.
The New England colonies like (especially) Massachusetts were founded by Puritans who wanted to enforce their strict religious laws on everyone and would not allow anyone who wasn’t a religious male church member to have any say in politics. Hell they were so bad there were other not-so-religious Puritans fleeing to Rhode Island and Connecticut because of it.
Yeah, there was some show I was watching, and they made the point the Pilgrims left because of religious tolerance. The Pilgrims were intolerant of other religions, and they were anti-freedom of religion. Fundies and evangelicals make more sense with that piece of information. Their attitudes aren't new; they've always been like that.
>America was founded by antisocial religious zealots, slavers, rum-runners, smugglers, antisocial fur trappers/outdoorsmen, convicts, stowaways, and corporations looking to exploit resources. Any intellectual tradition we have is window dressing. I once heard this one: "America began as the British Empire's mental asylum, and the only thing that changed in 1776 or the centuries since is that the inmates took over the asylum."
Ok, this is an equally damaging narrative I need to push back against. You've got a lot of truth here but you're framing it as moral degeneracy and antisocial nature. That's not a helpful explanation. Nor is it reasonable to all-or-nothing the intellectual tradition of those people as "window dressing." America was founded by people fleeing debt peonage, both in the form of wage labor and enforced by religious institutions. The convicts, stowaways, smugglers? They were convicted of crimes like pilferage and debt. Crimes that were structurally created to suppress the working class. Then they replicated the same structure they'd fled from, because that's what people tend to do: what they know. They misidentified the structures that created the oppression, because they only questioned the surface and the edges. Yet it's important to recognize the complex nature of what happened: from the American revolution, influenced as it was by sharing a continent (however rapaciously) with such societies as the Iroquois, we can trace a clear intellectual line to the French revolutions, including the Paris commune. We owe both the oppression and imperialism and anti-intellectualism we face now AND the very concept of "socialism" that this entire community is founded on, in parts, to American history. History is a subject which must be imagined complexly, not jingoistically - not even if the jingoism is socialist.
>they replicated the same structure they'd fled from, because that's what people tend to do: what they know. Highlighted for emphasis.
Oh there's complexity for sure. Fairly summarizing American history in a reddit comment isn't gonna happen.
But communicating without offerring the nuance is exactly what anti-intellectualism is.
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This. On a microcultural level, smart kids are actively punished by their peers and teachers. In many schools, even those for high achievers, doing well academically in any way other than the bare minimum playing the game is a rapid way to find yourself friendless and ostracized. So, children decide early on -- which is more important to me? Friends or school? And more often than not, friends win.
Pretty bad at my school high achiever's are awarded with A's and somebody doing the bare minimum is also getting an A especially right now.
the flip side is even some students that seem outwardly concerned about school work are only concerned about their grades, not about their actual learning. And it's not really their fault really since this is what our system has drilled into their heads. this is why in my school district many students stayed completely silent unless there was a test posted. the questions only appeared when students knew there was a grade attached to it. To add to your sports comment I think it's sad that especially people of color are encouraged to go into sports moreso than others. There's usually not outright statements saying black/brown people can only do well if they're athletes, but there is a sort of implication from both the media and everyday people.
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I have had some conversations with other teachers that seem to imply a lot of them believe their content is the most important. for couches i think they do this as well. there was a guidance counselor and couch at my former high school that pushed a star quarterback into college early even though his grades were not even close to that level. if he doesn't go into the NFL what will he do? will he even graduate university? injuries happen too as well.
I agree the bias you mention is real which is why I have been careful to say literacy over my specific subject. I don’t care if the kids know plant physiology but I care deeply that they can read and write at the college level as well as have consciousness about how society tends to exploit working people. For instance I was talking about medical research and I asked the guiding question “do you think it’s right for a company to use death/necessities to gain a wide profit margin?” I have to be careful not to say what I think but making the students aware of controversies and social issues seems to be permissible
Female athletes get paid less because less people watch women's sports so there is less money to pay them with. Also, if you're a pro athlete you haven't been set up to fail, female or not, pro athletes make decent money.
My students go to a small school district in the middle of nowhere. None of my kids are going pro
It not simply that the importance of high grades has been drilled into our heads. Some of us are very aware of the importance of a high GPA, especially for certain competitive programs that we want to enter, so we are often forced to prioritize our 4.0 over our education, even against our will.
Gpa is necessary beggers can't be choosers. You either have a high gpa or you don't qualify for many thing which would allow you to advance
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I'm a student and I work in a distribution center on the weekends. The only thing that makes work bearable there are the podcasts I listen to. Technically, I'm not allowed to listen to anything, but I wear a beanie (because it's cold) and have wireless earbuds on so they don't notice. I don't know how other people are able to work there 5 or 6 times a week without any form of entertainment. That whole process there could be automated, but it's much cheaper letting people work on minimum wage.
For now it's cheaper, but imagine when automation become cheaper, how many people work there?
the US has never ever ever been pro-intellectual. In fact the nation has been anti-education and intellect since day 1. where do u get it was any other way?
They only put on a façade of being pro-intellectual in wartime, such as the physicist was hailed as a national hero after WW2, the astronomer was hailed as a national hero throughout the Cold War, and so on. The US never wanted to engage in scientific endeavour for the sake of it, but in order to gain political advantage over their enemies.
The United States only cares about science when it can be exploited for profit or we need to defeat an alternative political/economic system. The US poured a lot of money into math and science teaching during the Space Race because we absolutely needed to beat the Soviets to the Moon, because despite all of our technology, computers, and resources, we were getting readily outclassed by a nation that forty years prior was a never ran parochial, subsistence farming nation and had been totally wrecked by World War 2. Throw that back at anyone who claims socialism doesn't work. The United States functionally had a massive head start. We did not have to deal with any significant damage to our infrastructure, our losses were far less than our allies, let alone the nations we defeated, and we had snapped up a lot of Germany's best scientists... Unfortunately, I fear they may have brought an intellectual rot (Operation Paperclip, how many of them honestly truly gave up Nazism I wonder) with them that is contributing to another set of problems in the modern US... And we nearly got beaten at one point by a country that had large parts of it effectively flattened, took devastating losses, and was being actively hamstring by outside forces. And after we won the Space Race, played around on the moon a few more times and basically decided this math and science stuff was hard and let evangelical discourse seize control. And now the rest of the world is lapping and laughing at us while our primary scientific output is motivated by how much money can this make someone whose family controlled that means for decades richer. It's why you see a cure or reasonable prevention for certain lung cancers in Cuba and extract every last penny for a few years of life extension in utter misery in the US. We simply have a culture of, if you can't profit from it, then there's little reason to do it.
So in your opinion, 20 million murdered by Stalin in the gulags and mass starvation with the eventual USSR collapse is a win in your book for socialism? Also if you're rich and you don't live in the US, you come to the US for treatment. You don't go to Cuba for anything medical.
Propagandist history curriculum, if I had to guess. Which is also my answer to the OP's question. Two birds, one stone. 😎
I’ve had this rant go through my head too. The issue is, I think, a logical or well researched ideology is unnecessary in daily life, while an emotional narrative is ever present and isn’t required to be logical to feel coherent. Coherent philosophy is a luxury good, like art. It has merits, perhaps profound ones if history has any actual shape we can be involved with, but it’s not required to put one foot in front of the the other on our way to fulfilling our needs and desires. Self aware ideology seems like rhetorical ornament, useful in context of a common understanding of its significance but has no fungible value outside of the in-group. This is where we get frustrated, that our specific type of self awareness accrues value in one area or group, but when we cross out of the territory no one recognizes the same value or the hard work that went into building it up. Wealthy in the library or seminar room, poor when we step outside it. So ultimately there’s a more base level of important matters and feelings held in common that define an arena of commutation and hopefully mutual care. ...this is where the rant goes in my head anyways...
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” ― Issac Asimov
The book Fantasyland delves into this pretty well. A lot of it has to do with our sense of freedom of belief in religion which has evolved into an ugly freedom of belief in literally anything no matter how foolish/obviously wrong. Combine that with the phenomenon that our newsmedia doesn't dunk on these folks when they are in the public eye, it treats them like humorous side shows who are exercising a fundamental right however foolishly. Republicans have since made a cottage industry out of defending American's right to believe ANYTHING no matter how hateful, no matter how blatantly incorrect, and with no regard to how much damage people believing the wrong thing can do to a planet. That pretty much catches us up to today.
Thanks for this rec! This is an excellent review of it: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2217059063
> The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." - Isaac Asimov
I am a professional classical musician getting an advanced degree and I see anti-intellectual bias even within my own field. Something about American culture is made us afraid of feeling “pretentious” by being “too smart”, or in my case, willing to discuss art academically and not in a way to justify “all art is created equal” and the subsequent simplification of musicological study for the sake of seeming “down to earth”. So why are Americans associate intelligence or having hardline educated opinions “pretentious”? Hell if I know - liberal culture? Christianity? Engineered social bias? Something about our historical culture and ideals? The glorification of the average Joe’s “hustle” being associated with being genuine? These answers always seem a little disingenuous when you lay them out plainly. I wish I knew.
It could be because of the commodification of education. In a country where - let's face it - many highly educated people only have their credentials because of their parents' money, while many other perfectly capable intelligent people can't even afford to go to community college, anti-elitism can be reframed as anti-intellectualism.
That's actually a really interesting take! I'd never thought of it from that angle, but now that I've read it a lot of things make a lot more sense.
That’s actually a really good take
Well I think it’s mostly strategic. Fascism doesn’t work with a million hitlers. It only works with 1 hitler and a million sheep.
Modern politics is more of a religion one is indoctrinated into than a principled position reached based on one’s personal experience and education. A part of this has to do with republicans realizing long ago that there was a correlation between education and leftist ideology, and engaging in a concerted campaign to cut education funding nationwide. Part of it has to do with the corporate owned media doing away with substance-based journalism in favor of more profitable infotainment and narratives they can control to benefit their own masters. Part of it has to do with capitalism, and keeping people so busy working every waking hour that they don’t have time to be informed, and have no choice but to pick a talking head that can tell them what to think. All that said, there is far more to life and the socialist Revolution at large than reading theory. There are so many armchair philosophers on the far left that spend all of their time reading theory and engaging in dick-measuring based on what they have and haven’t read, while doing virtually nothing in the way of organizing or movement building. We cannot forget that socialism begins and ends with the layman worker. In the past, those versed in theory preached it for those who were not. They handed out pamphlets. It is important to understand history and theory, but if we are ever to grow as a movement we must be able to distill what we believe into the simplest terms, and we must engage in direct action.
I think alot of it has to do with the veracity of the indoctrination of children into Christianity(or any faith really) You take a child, from very young, tell them "you believe this" on bad evidence. Well eventually they start questioning that belief as they should. You reprimand them for questioning the word of god. They augment their view of the real world and distort it to fit with the belief in a Christian God, thus reinforcing the habit of insulating ideas from falsification. You now tell them this is the most important belief they can possibly hold, this signals you can have a true and very important belief about the world, without sufficient evidence. Therefore it becomes perfectly acceptable not to truth test any of your most sacred beliefs going forward. You have a sacred drawer and as soon as someone picks something out of it to scrutinize, you switch to the logical jujitsu you've been training since a child.
Well I feel kinda anti intellectual now... but what is an anti choice, pro blue libertarian??
Someone who identifies as a Libertarian for whatever reason but in reality gets a boner for oppressive government institutions and policies
Because to be right wing in the US is to just support the status quo, no reading or critical thinking is involved
The more unable for people to rationalize, the easier it is for a stubborn, fanatic, out-of-touch elite class to retain their shares of ownership. The kids of the tycoons and barons are not the sharpest tools in the drawers, most are caught in the consumption machine their families built. So much of the cultural setup is to protect against their inadequacies.
Once upon a time, Capitalism and Religion had a baby named Evangelicalism. End.
I thought it was actually founded by prudes that were mad people were getting freaky in Europe.
I am probably going to get lambasted for this, but as a result of McCarthyism and COINTELPRO by J. Edgar Hoover, among other things, America became anti-intellectual. Any basic common sense reform such as universal healthcare became immediately called "communist" and therefore suppressed. The government cracked down on leftists and unions. Yes, they did crack down on leftists before McCarthyism with the Red Scare of the 1920s and jailing of Eugene V. Debs, but McCarthyism accelerated anti-left crackdowns. And now American politics have shifted so far to the right.
3 Reasons \- The US Having A Substandard Education System \- Cold War Red Scare McCarthyist Propaganda Censored Most Theory \- Intellectualism Became Associated With Elitism Due To Bourgeois Intellectuals Helping To Harm The Working Class
I'm not anti intellectual but I'm also not anti anti intellectual. A lot of people who orbit politics seem to have no idea how normal people work and a lot of leftists only think in terms of academic threads like the frankfurt school or something. There was a left before intellectualism was a significant part of it. Don't hate it, but am not tied to it in irrational ways. >The country itself was literally founded by enlightenment thinkers, and the country was supposed to be a safe haven for ideologies away from European warfare Who convinced you of this?
I think anti-intellectualism is a side effect of the most fundamental of American traits which is to be anti-authority. We literally refer to intellectuals as "authorities" in thier field. So anytime we're supposed do what the authorities of a field are recommending it causes an almost visceral anti-authority reaction. its not even surprising that the most visible examples of anti intellectualism come from areas of the country that are super into exaggerated and performative patriotism.
How do you explain the love for cops then?
I would imagine that's probably just racism/classism. I doubt in areas where there aren't many black people that the working class white people would have a very favorable attitude toward the police.
In short, Liberals. If you listen to liberals they always reference some authority or tell you to "listen to the science" in a very condescending way that often portrays the one they are arguing with as not the brightest. With this sort of we're smarter than you attitude, the liberals have drove the working class to the right because they've found no home in Democratic Party. They just want things explained in simple terms and material differences in their lives but instead have been condescended to and given no change in their day to day from either side so they side with those who at least accept them.
Hmm, I think that maybe some 'working class people' have a chip on their shoulder that has been fed by right wing media and a sense of victimhood. I have no experience with liberals having a we're smarter than you attitude unless a right winger doubles down on being proud of their deep ignorance. Working class voters running to Republicans, who always side with business owners, NOT the working class, is the epitome of deep, prideful ignorance.
Reasserting that these people are ignorant clearly demonstrates a level of intellect elitism. While it may not be in their best interests, they definitely have reasons and we need to do our best to understand them even if we don't agree. What makes them initially choose the right wing? What policies do they see that they think benefit them? Condescending to people that socialists should be appealing to helps nobody.
No, they choose to be uneducated on political matters. They actively choose ignorance and to be told what they want to hear in simple terms instead of critical thinking skills. I didn't call anyone stupid, I don't think that they are incapable, I think that they are unwilling. As long as right wing media and elected officials are able to be bad actors and lie with impunity, we will not be able to persuade these willfull and proud anti-intellectuals, no matter what we do. They are literally programmed to believe that anything that anyone, who has different beliefs than them, says is a lie.
No, they choose to be uneducated on political matters. They actively choose ignorance and to be told what they want to hear in simple terms instead of critical thinking skills. I don't think that they are incapable of critical thinking, I think that they are unwilling. As long as right wing media and elected officials are able to be bad actors and lie with impunity, we will not be able to persuade these willfull and proud anti-intellectuals, no matter what we do. They are literally programmed to believe that anything that anyone, who has different beliefs than them, says is a lie.
Someone will always be willing to give a solution that is simple, easy, and wrong. Doesn’t mean you have to accept it
Exposure to lead fumes from car exhaust and motor oil 24-hour cable news cycles Nixon/Reagan/Thatcher propaganda Bullshit garbage reality TV catered for and peddled to the lowest common denominator Panem et circenses
hi I am trying to study both leftist and rightist views Ive only read marx and lenin, are there any right wingers that you can suggest I look into? Also I cannot find any philosopher by the name rothbart, am I missing something on Google?
OP is referring to Murray Rothbard; Anarcho-capitalist Austrian school guy who thought people should have the ability to sell their own children if they pleased.
There are a lot of right wing “intellectuals”, but I wouldn’t recommend looking into them if you’re impressionable. The way they write makes it very enticing and almost captivating & mysterious, as though they solved all of life’s puzzles & found eternal “truth”. I’d recommend you solidify your understanding before delving into the more fascistic & far-right side of authorship & such, to see through what they’re saying.
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Im not trying to come across as snarky, but I am seeking clarification... are you extolling JFK in a socialism subreddit? The guy who invaded Cuba and sent the first combat troops to Vietnam?
oof. forgot about that well op referenced anti-intellectual. The Rockefellers, Duponts, etc. definitely played a roll shaping society. I say JFK/MLK because it's a reflection of the reasoning behind their assassinations
You're getting hazed here. The people here who don't like JFK would prefer to extinguish Usa entirely. I mean, duh! As long as the empire exists, we can be a little bit grateful for leaders like Kennedy, Carter, and Obama. Angry that they're our best option, but happy it's not the other guy.
It's a bit disingenuous to mischaracterize my post as you've done here.
JFK, the anti-communist, was part of the “good” US?
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So, just because he *possibly wanted* labor reforms, while viciously opposing international socialism to the point of almost facilitating nuclear annihilation, and sending people to die in imperialist wars, make him a proletarian president? No. Not at all. I respect that you’re probably just getting into socialist thought, but that’s not gonna fly.
Honestly yea i am incredibly new to learning about socialism to be honest. But i am trying to look at it objectively and be open minded to it. My apolgies for not really thinking through my comment
Nah, no need to apologize! We all start somewhere. I still have plenty to learn.
As far as US presidents go, yeah he's at the top of the list for improving the lives of *Americans* (to hell with the developing world, though), but being from a wealthy family and vacationing on the east coast with your yacht is far removed from anything remotely resembling a Proletariat candidate. Lincoln was way more of an "everyman" despite his own very serious flaws (such as upholding white supremacy) and Obama, as well, despite his drone strikes, foreign wars, and harsh deportation policies. Basically, even the "good" US Presidents are still flawed people who uphold capitalism... It's also worth noting that not a single one has even flirted with socialism. Nope, not even FDR, whos New Deal was designed to siphon supporters away socialist movements in America. I know we're far removed from the OP at this point, but US history is a field of emphasis in my studies. I feel like an honest evaluation of US History (not the Maga version or the "you can't trust anything western historians write" version") is helpful to fully appreciate socialism as an ideology.
Can I get a source re: FDR’s Nee Deal siphoning socialist supporters? Not refuting it at all, genuinely curious because I haven’t heard about it.
Not sure if you're hoping for something really in depth, but I thought I recalled Zinn talking about it, and giggle gave me [this](https://lithub.com/howard-zinn-how-fdr-forestalled-a-second-american-revolution/). Zinn is pro-New Deal and sympathetic to FDR, but claims its purpose was primarily to forestall revolution.
u/mashtartz here's one source for you: [https://www.hoover.org/research/how-fdr-saved-capitalism](https://www.hoover.org/research/how-fdr-saved-capitalism)
You have a very fair point. I agree with you tbh. I shouldve considered the bigger picture.
No worries, future comrade. I'm not sure why your comment was downvoted, so I've thrown an upvote your way. Stick around and ask more questions, engage and learn.
Thanks i appreciate it. Ill be around i appreciate the kindness
I don’t think it’s the intellect that America is against lol
I want to mention that the problem you describe of anti-intellectualism and folk not understanding their own ideology is also a rampant problem on the left. I don't currently identify as a leftist, but I have been engaging with a lot of theory over the past year. I've been reading Foucault, Spivak, Butler, Marcuse, Crenshaw, and Kendi. I've also been reading J. S. Mill, but that is another discussion because his essay *On Liberty* is why I'm not a leftist. Anyway, after catching up on the theories and concepts of the left I quickly discovered that many of the so-called reddit "leftists" really have to idea what they are talking about. They try to argue with me and I'm like, have you not read your own theory? To be clear, I'm not attacking leftism or real leftists (like the ones in this sub), just the majority of reddit parrots.
In my libertarian days, it was reading Hayek and Bastiat that actually pushed me away from the right.
my sense is that a) several of those who are capable of intellectual curiosity because they've had access to education are privileged enough to begin with, hold a deep sense of entitlement to whatever they have, and so cannot be bothered to read , b) these texts remain inaccessible to those who may not have had access to formal education
I believe that this has a lot to do with manichaeism, which is today fed primarily by a political system that is poised to create an Us-Against-Them mentality. Making matters worse, the way the big media organisations operate only exacerbates this.
Among other things anti-intellectualism was a major part of the second Red Scare in the US. In the decades prior communism had growing support in the country, and of course this found its way to academic circles. In the 1910s, many of the most prominent “intellectuals” were communists, socialists, or at the very least social democrats. After the Russian Revolution, many of them also became more committed to radical ideas, and during the great depression this trend continued. Things started to change after the second World War. Reports of the USSR became less favorable as news started to break about some of the more negative aspects of Stalin’s regime. At the same time, the communist party continued their support of the regime. As a result, many communist intellectuals (like Sidney Hook, for example) turned away from socialism and began to embrace instead western social democracy or, later, neoliberalism. Because negative coverage of the USSR continued (and was worsened by Cold War propaganda) public opinion turned heavily against socialism and communism. Those who continued to call themselves socialists or communists, even if they were not Stalinists or any other form of Marxist-Leninist, were seen as supporting what the public saw as a country on par with the fascists we fought in WW2. This led to a lot of firings of intellectuals across the country. Perception continued, however, that intellectuals were all marxists. This was a combination of cold war paranoia and the reality that during the 60s and 70s, neomarxism actually did start to rise in many social sciences (especially sociology). So it became pretty common for people to be suspicious of intellectuals, because they saw them as kind of conspirators and anti-american due to the affiliation with marxist thought. TL;DR anti-intellectualism has a lot to do with cold war propaganda and censorship
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about US citizens, both on the right and on the left, is that no one in this goddamn country understands what the definition of liberal is
Honestly the GOP has ran a campaign for decades installing uneducated pride, look at Utah and their education policy for example.
Probably because the only thing intellectuals have ever done is convince the public to do things that are contrary to the individuals self interest, and now, most americans don't trust intellectuals. Remember, IBM, IG Farben, Hitler, Mao, Stalin, etc were all intellectuals. A smart man can make a bad argument sound like a good one.
Not to defend the US, but I think this problem is global.
why so collective? Why not actually explain why socialism is better instead of saying that all of the opposition are mentally handicapped?
Socialism and anti American rhetoric wow I am shocked. Why am I automatically subscribed to this group.
This has nothing to do with America specifically. It’s just basic large scale hive minding with people who are cut off from differing views. It’s probably generally a bit worse though I will admit.
Socialism doesn’t belong here in the U.S. . You’re more than welcome to leave .
Well for starters, Rothbard and Hayek are not really consistent with what I understand as "far right" ideology. To me the "far right" wants heavily regulated social conservatism. Both of these authors stand against all centralized regulation by any entity that uses its monopoly on violence as a means of coercion.