The intellectual heritage of the West is our greatest achievement and most treasured possession. The insights that our great thinkers have had into the nature of reality are what has led to life here becoming so good. Unfortunately, the coming of Clown World means that everything is now shittier than it needs to be. In few ways is this more evident than in the decline of our intellectual culture.
In Clown World, popular culture has regressed to the lowest common denominator in every aspect. People are less physically healthy than ever, less mentally healthy than ever and less spiritually healthy than ever. This manifests physically as a lack of interest in outdoors activities and sports, and it manifests mentally and spiritually as a lack of interest in intellectual culture of any kind.
In Clown World, people don’t give a shit any more. The spiritual demoralisation that is at the core of our problems has led to a lack of interest in all metaphysical subjects. The only important thing is where the next sedative is coming from, and it doesn’t matter if that sedative is television, alcohol, Oxycontin, social media, porn or psychiatric medications.
The last thing anyone wants is to know any more about this terrible place. Intellectual curiosity is seen as a defect and not a virtue. Better to know as little as possible, and just plod onwards until death.
Because this attitude has become widespread, it has not been necessary to enslave anyone with chains of iron or the threat of execution by riflefire. The general spiritual and existential malaise is severe enough that people are satisfied to merely be granted distractions. As long as those distractions keep coming, we are sufficiently grateful to be complacent.
Intellectual culture has withered from all these distractions. Because the mass media directs its appeal to the lowest common denominator, intellectual culture has all but vanished from television and is being pushed from the Internet. In its place we get celebrity gossip and racial hysteria, the low-frequency soundtrack to the Muttening.
These phenomena were anticipated by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World. In this novel, Huxley suggested that the totalitarianism of the future didn’t need to brutalise people into submission. It could, instead, use sophisticated modern psychology to manipulate people into wanting to submit. Instead of soma, we are bombarded from all sides by the mass media.
The ultimate effect – of distracting us from discontent so that the ruling class can tyrannise without opposition – is much the same. The last thing the rulers of Clown World want is philosophers like John Locke arguing that revolution is a duty when the rulers become too corrupt, or like Thomas Jefferson arguing that the tree of liberty needs to be refreshed with the blood of tyrants.
The nadir of intellectual culture in Clown World may have been reached with the Slavoj Zizek vs. Jordan Peterson debate, which took place in Toronto on April 19, 2019. This debate encapsulated intellectual culture in Clown World. It pit two highly unbalanced men against each other, whereupon they promptly embarrassed themselves and taught the audience little.
Peterson represented an excess of order. His voice was strained, neurotic, as if he was afraid to let it out. He critiqued Marxism and The Communist Manifesto on the grounds that it promoted identity politics, which in his view led to authoritarianism. This was to hold closely to the official title of the debate, which was ‘Happiness: Capitalism vs. Marxism’.
Zizek represented an excess of chaos. The man was incoherent, a dribbling mess: the psychosis to Peterson’s neurosis. Anyone who didn’t know that he was a highly esteemed philosopher could be forgiven for thinking he was a crazy person. Anyone who did know that he was a highly esteemed philosopher could be forgiven for thinking he was on hard drugs.
Supposedly Zizek was to mount a defence of Marxism. Instead he ranted and raved, launching a searing attack against phantasms in his own head. After this barrage of nonsense, Peterson’s will to engage collapsed, and the two men seemed to enter an unspoken agreement to wrap things up with as little further mutual humiliation as possible.
The overall impression was abortionate. Neither man could conduct a coherent attack of their opponent’s position, or even describe meaningfully what it was. Neither man could even explain his own position. Apart from Peterson’s initial salvo against The Communist Manifesto, which he attacked as if it were the holy text of an enemy religion, it wasn’t clear what either of them wanted to achieve from the spectacle.
Intellectual culture in Clown World isn’t just shit, it’s also absurd. One element making it so is the televisionisation of popular culture. Thanks to this phenomenon, people now imagine that television entities like “The Science Guy” Bill Nye are legitimate scientific authorities, and that “Bill Nye said X” is a wise argument that leads to truth.
The height of absurdity was reached when Clown World realised that Swedish actor Dolph Lundgren was a higher scientific authority than Nye, on account of that Lundgren has a Master’s degree in Chemical Engineering while Nye only has a Bachelor’s degree. Very few have ever argued “Dolph Lundgren says X” by way of settling an intellectual argument – but it would unironically be a better argument than appealing to what The Science Guy says.
Despite all the mainstream crapness, there are places where intellectual culture flourishes. In fact, the mainstream crapness has encouraged those of a more discerning taste to search far and wide for intellectual forums on the Internet. Many of these places are like Wild West saloons, where anything goes. Others are like cybersanctuaries that are not easy to find.
Because of the role that universities have played in encouraging Internet access, many of the residents of such places are highly educated young people. This has made these far-flung Internet spaces the true hotbeds of today’s intellectual culture. The anonymity makes it possible to discuss ideas that one doesn’t want associated with oneself in meatspace, something very difficult to achieve at a university.
Encouragingly, the shittier mainstream intellectual culture becomes, the more people get driven to these cyberbackwaters. Many of them are now full of the world’s most intelligent and most free-thinking people, liberated from the strictures of political correctness that have destroyed intellectual culture at universities.
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This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book about the insanity of life in the post-Industrial West. This is being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in January 2021.
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If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.
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