Smack Down of the Day.

I just delivered a smack down on an anthropologist over at The Glen's Live Journal page:

Ms. Fell, your sneer is a clear indication that you may be part of the problem. Positive confirmation of this would of course require further observation and research for which I neither the time, patience, nor a research grant to perform. That would be a task that is ideally suited to an actual intellectual. As you may have noticed I did not condemn all intellectuals in my rant, I only condemned the false ones.

Intellectuals actually can be useful when they are honest or when they are actually paying attention to objective reality. The problem arises when someone assumes the position of authority in order to scam their way to survival and well being, or to further an adverse ideological agenda. But since there is only one reality, which is commonly perceived by all individuals, the fraud is ultimately discovered. But all too often the disclosure occurs after innocent lives are lost.

One of the obvious indications that one is a false intellectual is their apparent blindness to the distinction between the states of civilization and barbarism. The State of civilization is not only the collection of structures that people live and work in, and the tools that they use, it is also the moral condition that they live in. The foundation of the social order has a clear impact on the survival and well being of the the people who live in it.

In the state of civilization consent is the preferred basis of social, economic, and political relationships, and force is reserved as a response to the violent predatory behavior from such persons as common criminals and Communists. The barbaric social paradigm is dominated by those persons who, by tribal membership or by adherence to an ideology*, assume the role of a superior being that forcibly uses other people as a means to assure their own survival and well being.

Obviously not all civilizations are perfect, which is clearly demonstrated by the Self Appointed Superior Beings who forcibly imposed the Prohibition of alcohol on the United States in the earth Twentieth Century.

To be able to see the distinction between civilization and barbarism and act on it does have an impact on the survival and well being of a person, as in the individual case of Ayn Rand, and it thus is a moral necessity.

Anyone who cannot see, refuses to see, or who actively obliterates, the distinction between civilization and barbarism in their work is either not doing their job properly or is part of the problem, and in either case has absolutely zero claim to being an intellectual. Though that doesn't stop them from trying.

But I'm just an unemployed pizza delivery driver, what do I know?


* Or both in the case of the German National Socialist.
_