" In short: where have the people gone who can help the public navigate the chaos of an increasingly burning world, who pose questions, unpack complexity and above all, take a stand?"
Beyond technical explanations, fundamentally, the public intellectual has been either bought off by the ruling class or "cancelled" by them. New public intellectuals do not appear in the west for fear of being cancelled and economically ruined by the ruling class, except here on Substack in my experience.
It was not Instagram, nor Twitter, nor Facebook that killed an independent intellectual class: it was capitalism, especially financial capitalism. And this is not a surprising result.
Marxists knew it all along. Even the Nazis knew it and used it as an argument against their critics: at the International Student Council of Geneva, in 1937, Franz Alfred Six held a presentation where he argued, among other issues, that the German press was actually freer than the press of England, listing all the problems of a financial system applied to the press.
On top of that, there is a clear problem with the quality of the "intellectuals" of today. There is not enough intellect in our contemporary society to give birth to intellectuals of some relevance. This is again a fault of financial capitalism, but only partly and secondarily. Supporters of Capitalism advocate for free markets and competition, as a tool of progress and advancement; however they do not apply that idea to politics. Today there is not competition in the sphere of politics: only slightly different flavours of (neo)liberalism are allowed. Such a poor political environment can only produce mediocre political thinkers.
That said, the lack of intellectual competition alone is not enough to explain this dire situation, as the USSR, even in its final days, had far better intellectuals than we have today. So the question is complex, but the result is clear: not only there is a lack of free, independent intellectuals, but there is also a lack of intellectuals, free or not.
And that shows. Roberto Saviano is a mixed bag to me: sometimes he is right, oftentimes he has nothing to say, but he says it anyway, sometimes he is quite wrong. Chiara Valerio can only be mentioned if you have to fill gender quotas. Compare that to Pier Paolo Pasolini, Dino Buzzati, Gianni Rodari, and then, Giovannino Guareschi, Oriana Fallaci (I have to fill gender quotas too... I kid, I kid), and so on and so forth, at a time when even Umberto Eco was just a secondary figure compared to those. Today, in Italy, the only intellectuals are relicts of a bygone era, like Giorgio Agamben, or minor figures, like Alessandro Barbero. Not even a journalist among them nowadays. The fact that we used to kill our journalists since Pasolini down to Mauro Rostagno, Ilaria Alpi and Miran Hrovatin did not help in that regard...
There is yet another explanation for the lack of the high-performance intellectuals and philosophical works. Mark Fisher explained this phenomenon very well. Capitalist Realism. David Graber also complained about it. Fisher examined this phenomenon in his own field, contemporary music. He showed that all the 21st century output is mostly a pastiche of the 1980s stuff. However, the Capitalist Realism exists in EVERY 21st century human endeavour. We seemed to have forgotten how to invent, how to be creative, how to think. And not only in this century. Look at what happened to music and painting since the WWI. I know, lots of people think that the abstract art or Picasso or the 12-tone/atonal music are the absolute pinnacle of human creation. But they are really just disgusting trash upheld by the corrupt capitalist market. But now, look at what happened to fashion; since the turn of this century the fashion stopped (tho they still found a way to make a huge profit). Now, physics. NOTHING, yes, nothing has happened in theoretical physics in the past 70 years (I would argue, in the past 120 years). Western medicine—oh, oh, they cant even cure a common cold; medico-pharmaceutical-industrial complex is arguably the worst thing that happened to humanity next only to the MIC. Graeber had complained that we still do not have the promised flying cars and many ppl point out that the glorified Internet is nothing but a combination of the Sears catalogue and a library.
I am planning to expand these ideas in my own Substack, though I have too much already written material to upload. The Capitalist Realism is fascinating, friends!!!
NB, while the theoretical physics is dead, engineers are plowing on without it. The most important modern invention is the THORIUM nuclear REACTOR. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN7TV4qpimA
Is that the Pasolini who, after a life of heroic but reckless brinkmanship, was murdered with appalling cruelty by far right extortionists ?
Whose final film (Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom) was a descent - influenced by two writers he much admired, Dante and de Sade - into a hell of sexual and other degradation.
What is this tragic figure's message, if any ?
It seems to be a weird blend of Marxism and libertinism, with no lessons for posterity.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, regularly writing for newspapers and news magazines, was an insightful and thought-provoking commentator of Italian politics and society.
He was constantly against all forms of conformism.
He was an early denouncer of the "strategy of tension", condemning the underground alliance between parts of the Italian institutions, foreign intelligence services (e.g. CIA), and mafia. Few intellectuals at the time dared to support such a conspiracy theory, fearing for their reputation. Pasolini was one of the few that led the way.
He was harshly (even though gently spoken) critical of feminism. He was critical of abortion (as the result of a conformist and consumerist society). He wrote extensively against the totalitarianism of the consumerist society.
Making the visuals dominate the mind disables it. People become infantilized. I remember growing up as a child, even a simplest alphabet book for a toddler had to be read. Now even books for university students are based on images. Language does not matter anymore. Many people cannot write, read comprehensibly or spell - and pride themselves on that, especially English-speakers. The death of language, maiming of it, is a sign of degradation of human consciousness. We remember how in Ray Bradbury novel, "A Sound of Thunder" the horrifying symptoms of a society's degradation into barbarism was misspelling of common words in the city's awnings and advertisement.
But you guys and luckily the whole world still have Giorgio Agamben to sound alarm about what the use of language means to human civilization.
Agamben, whom the brainless idiocratic society mocks and vilifies as "right wing conspiracy theorist".
The greatest philosopher alive.
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PEOPLES WHO HAVE LOST THEIR LANGUAGE
Translation of Giorgio Agamben’s “Popoli che hanno perduto la lingua”, October 11, 2024
WHAT HAS BECOME OF THE PEOPLES OF EUROPE TODAY?
What we cannot fail to see today is the spectacle of their getting lost and losing memory in the language in which they once found themselves. The ways of this process of loss varies for each people: the Anglo-Saxons have already gone the whole way toward a purely instrumental and objectifying language — the “Basic” English, in which one can only exchange messages more and more like algorithms — and the Germans seem to set themselves on the same path; the French, despite their cult of the national language and perhaps because of it, are lost in the almost rigid, regulated relationship between speaker and grammar; the Italians, cunningly settled in the bilingualism which was once their wealth but which is being transformed into mindless jargon, everywhere. And, if Jews are or at least were part of European culture, it is fitting to recall Scholem’s words in the face of Zionist secularization turning a sacred language into a national vernacular: “We live in our language like blind men walking on the edge of an abyss…This language is pregnant with catastrophe…the day will come when it will turn against those who speak it.”
In any case, what has happened is the loss of the poetic relationship with language and its replacement by an instrumental relationship where the one who believes that he is using language is instead being used himself without realizing it. And since language is the very form of anthropogenesis, of the living homo becoming human, it is the very humanity of man that appears to be threatened today.
What is crucial, however, is that the more people become lost in their language, which becomes somehow either foreign or too trivial to them, the less it is possible to think in that language. That is why we see today the governments of European peoples, having become incapable of thinking, imprisoning themselves in lies they cannot come to terms with. A lie of which the liar is unaware is in reality simply an inability to think, the inability to interrupt at least for a moment the purely pragmatic relationship with one’s own word. And if humans can no longer think in their own language, one should not be surprised if they feel compelled to transfer thinking to artificial intelligence.
It goes without saying that this process of peoples losing their language that was once their vital abode has first and foremost a political significance. Europe will not emerge from the dead end in which it is locking itself if it does not first regain a poetic and thinking relationship with its words. Only at this price will a European politics — which does not exist today — eventually become possible.
Giovanni Sartori, another true intellectual, wrote against the use of visuals in our modern media in his "Homo Videns", published in 2000: "the television produces images and erases concepts; that away it erodes our capacity to make abstractions and, with that, all capacity to understand".
Stefano, I had a piano student, a 12-year-old girl, and someone asked her why she liked reading more than watching movies. She said - "because I can imagine everything myself and in movies they just show me and I have no choice".
Gunther Anders explained why the visuals will eventually kill human mind in his book "The obsolescence of Man".
I like your comment but I strongly disagree with visuals been detrimental to the human mind. 90% of our sensory perception comes from vision. The vision does not allow us a direct link to Reality (which ever one defines it), to the outside material world. Our sense of smell is like that; it directly puts us in touch with the world outsaid out bodies. The vision is exceedingly complex. The images get manipulated by the structures of the eye and the various parts of the brain, they are being filtered, passed around, mirrored, stored, compared to storage, etc.—most of these processes we do not even understand. Both, the sense of smell and the vision are directly influenced by the emotions. They are a parge part of our memory too. The fact that the present-day late stage capitalist society found a new highly efficient way to manipulate and oppress us through visual communication doesn’t mean that the visual imagery is bad for our brains or our minds. We have to learn to resist. To organise to resist!
I agree, Lena. Still, it may not be the thing that killed our kids’ brains. I have two grown children who were ruthlessly molded in the jaws of the Canadian university system to become what I dare not even mention. They were so deeply, extensively brainwashed that they horrify me. They became conformist intellectuals; my daughter has became a neoliberal 'feminist.' She covidvaxxed her very young children, as she does all her patients. Молодые Комсомольцы, you know. Some homeopathic doctors, btw, believe that smoking weed make the youngsters very compliant and conforming. Mine smoked a lot. Like everyone. So, we can’t blame one phenomenon, everything came together for the final crash.
Komsomol was based on heroism, chivalry, people's brotherhood, altruism, highest morals and sanctity of friendship. I am afraid you might believe that USSR was "totalitarian". I was raised as a Kolsomolec and a communist. By the example of my grandparents who fought hard against Nazism and saved the world when no one wanted to raise a finger against Hitler and everyone bowed down to him. Yet the Westerners repeat the lies of Hearst and Conquest and Snyder, about "Stalin agreement with Hitler" and "USSR invaded Poland"... The most horrifying thing that I saw in the West and Anglosphere in particular (not so in Germany or Italy) is the disappearance of conscience and moral relativism. They will not stand for what is right because there is no such thing as "right" for them. Passionate partiality that Gramsci was speaking about, is seen as "extremism" and "hate".
Digesting what you have wrote here: Yesss, the USSR WAS totalitarian. A working class man was not even allowed into the Communist Party, they had a severe quota. Stalin murdered my grandfather because he was a Polish immigrant, an enemy of the state. We got a ‘postmortal rehabilitation’ paper. Brezhnev’s scum arrested my other grandfather because he demanded to read a Jewish book at the Central Lenin’s library which was printed before 1945 while he had no ‘permit’ for it. They threw him into a mental asylum. In his 70s! As for the "Komsomol was based on heroism, chivalry, people's brotherhood, altruism, highest morals and sanctity of friendship" -- WOW! I lived there for 24 years, went to university, both my parents were Party members, NEVER ever have I heard anyone say anything bonkers like that, nor met anyone believing this. My friends and classmates would consider such a person a nuthouse escapee. We were ALL forced into Komsomol at the age of 14. No one was allowed to refuse. When I applied to emigrate, I was expelled from the Komsomol in a horrifyingly staged ordeal. When did you emigrate? Who were your parents? A high-placed party apparatchiks?
Лена, I выросла в Москве и тоже была комсомолкой. Выражение «молодой комсомолец» использовалось нами для насмешек над карьеристами, работавшими на партию. Они были жалкими мерзавцами.
I also grew up in Moscow and have never been a Sorosite liberal. I have been a Komsomol member and I opposed the wrong and defended the right. I am sure if you and your buddies saw me, you would call me names too. Liberals destroyed the country from within. The 5th column. I would expect that you would compare the brainwashed youth to Hitlerjugend, Ukraine Nazi Youth camps, Jabotinsky's Betar - but you believe that Communism is to blame... typical.
When a civilization nears its end, as far as history is concerned—people do not lose their language, they lose their literate elites. There is so much work out there where the authors attempt to show that the invention of writing dealt a sever blow to humanity (or to humanity's mind.) Let us also not forget how many times it was pronounced that cinematography killed the theatre. Theatre will exist forever, even when our own blood-soaked civilization will have forgotten how to read and write. We will still tell stories. And paint pictures.
none of it will be possible in a degraded society. You'd be surprised but none of the art, no matter which, visual or audio, is possible without a developed language. Foregoing and rising beyond something is far not the same as being ignorant and dim-witted about it. Bradbury was right.
Writing comes from thinking. Learning how to physically write the letters is secondary. Speaking does not necessarily come from thinking, however, lol. Today even writing does not come from thinking anymore. More and more often I come across infantile and/or manichaean attitude: "all or no one", "good or bad", "if you say X, you mean ALL X and at all times", "hate or love", "opposing means hating", "argument means aggression and attack", "you don't know me", etc. It started especially since English became a language one-size-fits-all. Do you know about a project of bastardizing English in order to transform people's thinking and spread it globally, in which Orwell took such an active part? It came to pass. Here, a very useful paper: Orwell and Empire: Anti-Communism and the Globalization of Literature. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27929796
Indeed, speaking does not come from thinking, I never said that. Thinking is a process of mental computation that rests on the language. We think in words, there is no other way (check out Chomsky). We have been doing this for the past 200K years. Writing is a very recent invention; it comes and goes.
What you are talking about is what I also addressed in my response to Thomas Fazi’s post (I like him very much, btw and am a subscriber). Suddenly, the common people, the ‘proles,’ who, in America, are barely literate and extremely miseducated, are given access to world platforms which, until recently, had only been available to the elites. They have a lot to be angry about as the Empire disintegrates in a burst of horrific violence. We are all headed toward the Gaza Holocaust; we are all the future Palestinians—it’s the latest Capital’s experiment in ‘crowd control.’ So, yeah, the working class people who populate the social media are enraged but they have no idea how to express themselves, they have never held a book in their hands, they lack words. The American educational system created them like that on purpose. And I sometimes get provoked by them too, but it is useless and pointless to argue with them.
You also didn’t understand what I said about my kids being brainwashed by the neoliberal (fascist, really) propaganda. They even took my son to Hong Kong after he graduated from journalism, to set his head right in he anti-China direction and Russophobia. And it worked.
As I said to Thomas, we should just write for ourselves, for each other, and disregard the Instagram noise.
I'm going to check this out about the Orwell, sounds like a conspiracy theory. haha. I'll check it out.
Not just social media, but the death of the universities — which are now mere vehicles for managing huge capital endowments — and the atrocious barriers on working-class entry to higher education (alongside a paradoxical decline in actual academic standards) has been fatal to intellectual life.
"Queen, one of the most important bands in music history"
"Music history" (sic)? Are you shitting me or what? Queen might have stood a notch above the primitive attempts of musical dilettantes on the pop music scene, but most important whatever in music history? How much about music history do you know?
Names like Bach (the guy who laid the foundations of tonal music), Beethoven, Wagner, Stravinsky, Debussy, and countless others ring a bell? How about Zyryab who singlehandedly brought musical sophistication to the Occident from Mesopotamia?
The shit spewed through such conduits as radio and video is NOT art. It's entertainment produced with the intent to appeal to the listener and to sell. That's in sharp contrast with art, which doesn't aspire to appeal to anyone - it serves as food for thought, often in provocative ways, AND it is created and delivered through masterful command of the art form in question. Van Gogh's paintings are fucking art. Queen's songs are (good) entertainment.
It's somewhat paradoxical to be whining about the disappearance of the intellectual, while putting on a pedestal primitive chants concocted by dilletantes who know fuck all about the art form they're butchering in the process of trying to achieve fame.
IIn my opinion, your are hitting on the right thene, although I would say some points might not be quite right.
First of all ibs not really about instagram - this has been a clear trebd since the age of television: a reduction in our thinking and a cancerius growth of interest in shallow emoting abd reactions.
The age of cable TV is closer to the moment we went off the cliff.
And I would argue we DO have public intellectuals. They have been here for decades, radio and TV talk show hosts,, and "personal development" gurus abd "life coaches" like Tony Robbins and the swarm of copies of him.Intellectual midgets most of them...but those have for decadrs now been the public intellectuals of our tine.
And now the stresm of money chasing coackris hes called "influencers" are the public intellectuals of the newt generation. God help us all.
It's true that it's not the same thing, but in ancient Rome there were the Tribunes of the Plebs, who were a political counterweight from below to aristocratic and oligarchic power. It's no coincidence that the struggles of the Gracchi are cited by Marx as one of the first examples of class struggle.
What decision-making body can now pit "the people" against the excessive power of corporations, Black Rock, and a Parliament that increasingly bases its decisions on the interests of financial capital? All the politicians who have come to power in the last 30 years have been passive executors of neoliberal dogma.
In 2019, the WEF's giant corporations allied themselves with the UN to ensure the implementation of the 2030 Agenda. Virtually the same giant corporations that brought the world to the brink of ecological collapse now claim to guarantee the zero-carbon transition, and they are taken seriously, and no ordinary person has a say in all this, not only that, no ordinary person was informed about it and became aware of it!
Even the epochal shift towards the Fourth Industrial Revolution (we are fully in it, (AI, 5G and 6G are changing the face of the world and the way states are governed and the dynamics of wars, which are managed and imposed entirely from above).
Artificial intelligence falls like a new axe on the heads of the earth's peoples, transforming and emptying democracies, and completely depriving the people of their say. And all this has happened in a relatively short time, nullifying national governments and making democracies obsolete. Now is the age of Technate run like companies. All this is decided by a minority of the super-rich, politically and democratically illiterate.
Regarding AI, which is replacing humans and democracies, no one in the media dares remind these powerful figures who gather in Davos and the Bilderberg Group to decide the fate of the world - that it must be the people who control AI, democratically, just as the information and resources of the earth, must not be in the hands of greedy, unelected elites who use AI to control the majority of peoples and wage economic wars of conquest and extermination... The real question is: who controls these new technologies today? Who controls information and history? The rich are not gods who dictate history, as Harari tries to convince us, when he presents us with our destiny as hackable animals, as a fate we cannot oppose. History is built through class struggles, but without access to new technologies, there is no class struggle; we've already lost.
At least Spartacus and his rebellious slaves had the weapons to rebel; we are completely enslaved by these powerful technologies, controlled from above; we are defenseless. We are like animals to be slaughtered. These new weapons are entirely in the hands of 1% of humanity, perhaps less. It's totally absurd; we cannot accept it. We will never be able organize ourselves and fight for our rights, in this way, and that's what they want.
On the other hand, I would argue that you are operating here on a wrong premise. No offence. By this I mean your assumption that in the previous centuries, intellectuals had direct access to the sophisticated public while, today, their voices are being lost in the background racket of the unruly ignorant crowds with extremely short attention span. I beg to differ.
The first time I thought about this when reading one man’s description of Vladimir Horowitz's 1987 concert he attended in Vienna; the recital which Horowitz had given after a very long break. The author of this article described the audience. When performance was suddenly announced, people from all over the world came to Vienna to see and hear the old Master. The author, himself, wept during the performance. The second time this idea popped into my head when I attended the concert given by the bella donna, Cecilia Bartoli. Close to the end of her performance, Cecilia mischievously asked the audience to sing with her. The audience obliged. I heard my friend gasp when the entire hall started singing some intricate operatic piece. In perfect harmony, like a professional choir.
In both examples, the concert halls were mostly filled with either professional or lay musicians. When Horowitz's unexpectedly announced his recital, music lovers from all over the world rushed to hear him, he was already quite old but still marvellous.
My point here is that although it may appear that artists, printers, and intellectuals create for a broad public, it is a completely misguided notion. They write, paint, sculp, compose, think for a small selective audience of the people who are either themselves professionals or truly devoted connoisseurs of their particular art. We look at the 16th-18th century musicians and painters and assume that, while they struggled to please their particular aristocratic or bourgeois patrons, they spent their lives creating for a large public. That Mozart or Shakespear or Dostoevsky moulded their masterpieces for the grand audiences, that they directly communicated to the ‘masses’ (as much as I hate this Bolshevik term, haha). Yes, many of them needed to make a living. But the creatives sang, painted, and composed strictly for the audience of their peers; they only care about what their friends and colleagues would think. They passionately hated the professional critics, the editors, and the censors, the art collectors because those were not capable of deep appreciation.
Thomas, the background noise notwithstanding, it will be us who appreciate your writing and your ideas, who will be reading. Keep on writing, please. . .
Perhaps, we can investigate this phenomenon further. What changes in our society—besides the social media—have sent the ‘masses’ into this wide-spread loquacious fit. Does this ‘freedom of expression’ represent a positive development for them, for our society? Are we being vainglorious and condescending like the Bolsheviks (and most of the Left) who, deep down inside, actually detest the ‘proles’?
And, was the intellectual authority actually a positive thing? I am not at all sure about that.
Cancel culture killed the public intellectual. Christopher Hitchens explained things simply, would have enjoyed Twitter, and would have been wholesale cancelled uttering a single word about women.
I don’t know much about him and what I did read hasn’t made me wish to study more.
But just curious, what was Pasolini’s objection to feminism? Was it a well-researched theoretical critique from the Marxist perspective or was it more of a gay male distaste toward the uppity females or a critique fueled by his Italian Catholicism?
I'd say that Pasolini's critique of feminism shared many themes and similarities with the Marxist position. On one side, Pasolini was very sympathetic to women's struggle for more representation and recognition in politics, culture etc. On the other side, he thought that this struggle, as it was, accelerated and facilitated the strengthening of the new totalitarian regime over a fragmented consumeristic society: feminism, in his opinion, was setting the premise for the dissolution of the traditional family, a welcome outcome for the ruling class; then individuals, no longer parts of a local community or a family, could be directly targeted by advertisement and propaganda. Children education would be delegated (as a result of dysfunctional families) to television and other mass media, controlled by the ruling class, erasing diversity (a proto-anti-globalisation idea) and reducing dissent. Women would be empowered and freer than before, but in a worse society, in an uglier world. Also, he contended with feminists that female body liberation would have paved the way for a total commodification of women's body by the consumeristic society.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart for this comprehensive reply, comrade. I asked because I struggle a lot with many questions about feminism, its fate, and its future struggles. I think, the most typical of a Marxist reply would have been that feminist must acquiesce their ‘problems’ to be answered within the Class Struggle not without (probably true). As for the rest of Pasolini’s views and opinions, all I can see is they are viewed from the perspective of Patriarchy—which he probably does not perceive as many of us cannot comprehend the larger social structures without proper education (as we cannot see imperialism or class war, etc). This is why I value Marx’s reliance of the Dialectical analysis which allowed him to examine the deeper and larger structures as well as the granular, up-close ones. Bertell Ollman does a superb examinations of the dialectical techniques Marx uses.
Besides seemingly sanctioning the oppressive structures of Patriarchy, Pasolini (as you show here) is also sanctioning the oppressive structures of a State, as if there were no other option for a society to organize itself. Within this oppressive Patriarchal State, one can agree that possibly once women free themselves (god only knows how) from the clutches of their communities, their children’s well-being, their education/care might suffer. One can, then, argue: is the former really such a bad thing? Being excluded from the abusive Patriarchal family and village? No one can be free until they create a society where women can have FREE access to their community’s resources so they can feed their children without prostituting themselves. It used to be like that before Patriarchy was born. So, Pasolini essentially argues that, while women, individually, can set themselves ‘free,’ their children and loved ones will suffer. Well, this is a totally bogus, even a misogynous proposition. The same as that ‘freer’ women’s bodies will basically be prostituted. Ugggh, no comment here. Won’t be studying this particular intellectual.
I, personally, do not consider myself a feminist because I disagree with their basic principle that females and males are ‘equal.’ How can a creature who is being gifted the ability to create humans inside her own body and, subsequently, nurture them out of her body as well—how can she be equal to a creature who is not being given such a gift. Another idea I do not share with some feminists—I believe it is wrong to hold men accountable for the crimes and oppression of the systemic Patriarchy. Men suffer as much as we do, if not even more at times. It is their bodies and lives that is being used by the ruling patriarchs as expendable in military conflicts—millennium after millennium.
The characters in my novel ponder a lot of these questions. Thank you for your help, Stefano.
“Forms of Intense Intelligence—a Marxian Fantasy Novel”
I'm sympathetic to much of what is being argued here. However, I find it difficult to lament the loss of concepts such as 'intellectual authority' and 'the mass public'. The opportunity for people to inform themselves and think for themselves has been greatly expanded, which must be a good thing overall, despite the amount of dross which inevitably pollutes the flow of such an open discourse.
<<Social news influencers and commentators are obsessed with “explaining things simply”. Complex political, social or international issues are spoon-fed to the public like baby food.>>
I don’t know what a "social news influencer" is, but if the author is implying that the likes of Alexander Mercouris, Daniel Davis and Larry Johnson (popular alternative news "personalities") are dumbing things down, then the author has never listened to their analysis. CNN, FOX and all mainstream news outlets are sacks of lies used to cover up elite looting of public money. I hope the author isn't bemoaning public distrust of mainstream media, because that is one thing that gives me hope!
To gain a hearing from the general public, intellectual authority is not enough. An intellectual must also have moral authority.
And however virtuous and enlightened someone's opinions may be, moral authority demands personal goodness.
Which the general public know to be even rarer among intellectuals than among the multitude.
In fact, personal goodness is in danger of outright extinction. For while the Right (apart from some extremist crackpots) has embraced Capitalism (which worships greed and selfishness), the Left has an especial hatred for Christianity.
" In short: where have the people gone who can help the public navigate the chaos of an increasingly burning world, who pose questions, unpack complexity and above all, take a stand?"
Beyond technical explanations, fundamentally, the public intellectual has been either bought off by the ruling class or "cancelled" by them. New public intellectuals do not appear in the west for fear of being cancelled and economically ruined by the ruling class, except here on Substack in my experience.
It was not Instagram, nor Twitter, nor Facebook that killed an independent intellectual class: it was capitalism, especially financial capitalism. And this is not a surprising result.
Marxists knew it all along. Even the Nazis knew it and used it as an argument against their critics: at the International Student Council of Geneva, in 1937, Franz Alfred Six held a presentation where he argued, among other issues, that the German press was actually freer than the press of England, listing all the problems of a financial system applied to the press.
On top of that, there is a clear problem with the quality of the "intellectuals" of today. There is not enough intellect in our contemporary society to give birth to intellectuals of some relevance. This is again a fault of financial capitalism, but only partly and secondarily. Supporters of Capitalism advocate for free markets and competition, as a tool of progress and advancement; however they do not apply that idea to politics. Today there is not competition in the sphere of politics: only slightly different flavours of (neo)liberalism are allowed. Such a poor political environment can only produce mediocre political thinkers.
That said, the lack of intellectual competition alone is not enough to explain this dire situation, as the USSR, even in its final days, had far better intellectuals than we have today. So the question is complex, but the result is clear: not only there is a lack of free, independent intellectuals, but there is also a lack of intellectuals, free or not.
And that shows. Roberto Saviano is a mixed bag to me: sometimes he is right, oftentimes he has nothing to say, but he says it anyway, sometimes he is quite wrong. Chiara Valerio can only be mentioned if you have to fill gender quotas. Compare that to Pier Paolo Pasolini, Dino Buzzati, Gianni Rodari, and then, Giovannino Guareschi, Oriana Fallaci (I have to fill gender quotas too... I kid, I kid), and so on and so forth, at a time when even Umberto Eco was just a secondary figure compared to those. Today, in Italy, the only intellectuals are relicts of a bygone era, like Giorgio Agamben, or minor figures, like Alessandro Barbero. Not even a journalist among them nowadays. The fact that we used to kill our journalists since Pasolini down to Mauro Rostagno, Ilaria Alpi and Miran Hrovatin did not help in that regard...
There is yet another explanation for the lack of the high-performance intellectuals and philosophical works. Mark Fisher explained this phenomenon very well. Capitalist Realism. David Graber also complained about it. Fisher examined this phenomenon in his own field, contemporary music. He showed that all the 21st century output is mostly a pastiche of the 1980s stuff. However, the Capitalist Realism exists in EVERY 21st century human endeavour. We seemed to have forgotten how to invent, how to be creative, how to think. And not only in this century. Look at what happened to music and painting since the WWI. I know, lots of people think that the abstract art or Picasso or the 12-tone/atonal music are the absolute pinnacle of human creation. But they are really just disgusting trash upheld by the corrupt capitalist market. But now, look at what happened to fashion; since the turn of this century the fashion stopped (tho they still found a way to make a huge profit). Now, physics. NOTHING, yes, nothing has happened in theoretical physics in the past 70 years (I would argue, in the past 120 years). Western medicine—oh, oh, they cant even cure a common cold; medico-pharmaceutical-industrial complex is arguably the worst thing that happened to humanity next only to the MIC. Graeber had complained that we still do not have the promised flying cars and many ppl point out that the glorified Internet is nothing but a combination of the Sears catalogue and a library.
I am planning to expand these ideas in my own Substack, though I have too much already written material to upload. The Capitalist Realism is fascinating, friends!!!
NB, while the theoretical physics is dead, engineers are plowing on without it. The most important modern invention is the THORIUM nuclear REACTOR. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN7TV4qpimA
Is that the Pasolini who, after a life of heroic but reckless brinkmanship, was murdered with appalling cruelty by far right extortionists ?
Whose final film (Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom) was a descent - influenced by two writers he much admired, Dante and de Sade - into a hell of sexual and other degradation.
What is this tragic figure's message, if any ?
It seems to be a weird blend of Marxism and libertinism, with no lessons for posterity.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, regularly writing for newspapers and news magazines, was an insightful and thought-provoking commentator of Italian politics and society.
He was constantly against all forms of conformism.
He was an early denouncer of the "strategy of tension", condemning the underground alliance between parts of the Italian institutions, foreign intelligence services (e.g. CIA), and mafia. Few intellectuals at the time dared to support such a conspiracy theory, fearing for their reputation. Pasolini was one of the few that led the way.
He was harshly (even though gently spoken) critical of feminism. He was critical of abortion (as the result of a conformist and consumerist society). He wrote extensively against the totalitarianism of the consumerist society.
He was a very courageous man, but also a very divided and reckless one.
Making the visuals dominate the mind disables it. People become infantilized. I remember growing up as a child, even a simplest alphabet book for a toddler had to be read. Now even books for university students are based on images. Language does not matter anymore. Many people cannot write, read comprehensibly or spell - and pride themselves on that, especially English-speakers. The death of language, maiming of it, is a sign of degradation of human consciousness. We remember how in Ray Bradbury novel, "A Sound of Thunder" the horrifying symptoms of a society's degradation into barbarism was misspelling of common words in the city's awnings and advertisement.
But you guys and luckily the whole world still have Giorgio Agamben to sound alarm about what the use of language means to human civilization.
Agamben, whom the brainless idiocratic society mocks and vilifies as "right wing conspiracy theorist".
The greatest philosopher alive.
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PEOPLES WHO HAVE LOST THEIR LANGUAGE
Translation of Giorgio Agamben’s “Popoli che hanno perduto la lingua”, October 11, 2024
WHAT HAS BECOME OF THE PEOPLES OF EUROPE TODAY?
What we cannot fail to see today is the spectacle of their getting lost and losing memory in the language in which they once found themselves. The ways of this process of loss varies for each people: the Anglo-Saxons have already gone the whole way toward a purely instrumental and objectifying language — the “Basic” English, in which one can only exchange messages more and more like algorithms — and the Germans seem to set themselves on the same path; the French, despite their cult of the national language and perhaps because of it, are lost in the almost rigid, regulated relationship between speaker and grammar; the Italians, cunningly settled in the bilingualism which was once their wealth but which is being transformed into mindless jargon, everywhere. And, if Jews are or at least were part of European culture, it is fitting to recall Scholem’s words in the face of Zionist secularization turning a sacred language into a national vernacular: “We live in our language like blind men walking on the edge of an abyss…This language is pregnant with catastrophe…the day will come when it will turn against those who speak it.”
In any case, what has happened is the loss of the poetic relationship with language and its replacement by an instrumental relationship where the one who believes that he is using language is instead being used himself without realizing it. And since language is the very form of anthropogenesis, of the living homo becoming human, it is the very humanity of man that appears to be threatened today.
What is crucial, however, is that the more people become lost in their language, which becomes somehow either foreign or too trivial to them, the less it is possible to think in that language. That is why we see today the governments of European peoples, having become incapable of thinking, imprisoning themselves in lies they cannot come to terms with. A lie of which the liar is unaware is in reality simply an inability to think, the inability to interrupt at least for a moment the purely pragmatic relationship with one’s own word. And if humans can no longer think in their own language, one should not be surprised if they feel compelled to transfer thinking to artificial intelligence.
It goes without saying that this process of peoples losing their language that was once their vital abode has first and foremost a political significance. Europe will not emerge from the dead end in which it is locking itself if it does not first regain a poetic and thinking relationship with its words. Only at this price will a European politics — which does not exist today — eventually become possible.
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https://lenabloch.medium.com/peoples-who-have-lost-language-2d770f964422
Very good, insightful comment, Lena.
Giovanni Sartori, another true intellectual, wrote against the use of visuals in our modern media in his "Homo Videns", published in 2000: "the television produces images and erases concepts; that away it erodes our capacity to make abstractions and, with that, all capacity to understand".
Stefano, I had a piano student, a 12-year-old girl, and someone asked her why she liked reading more than watching movies. She said - "because I can imagine everything myself and in movies they just show me and I have no choice".
Gunther Anders explained why the visuals will eventually kill human mind in his book "The obsolescence of Man".
I like your comment but I strongly disagree with visuals been detrimental to the human mind. 90% of our sensory perception comes from vision. The vision does not allow us a direct link to Reality (which ever one defines it), to the outside material world. Our sense of smell is like that; it directly puts us in touch with the world outsaid out bodies. The vision is exceedingly complex. The images get manipulated by the structures of the eye and the various parts of the brain, they are being filtered, passed around, mirrored, stored, compared to storage, etc.—most of these processes we do not even understand. Both, the sense of smell and the vision are directly influenced by the emotions. They are a parge part of our memory too. The fact that the present-day late stage capitalist society found a new highly efficient way to manipulate and oppress us through visual communication doesn’t mean that the visual imagery is bad for our brains or our minds. We have to learn to resist. To organise to resist!
It is not the function of vision itself. It is a PASSIVITY of it, CONSUMPTION of it. "Watching".
I agree, Lena. Still, it may not be the thing that killed our kids’ brains. I have two grown children who were ruthlessly molded in the jaws of the Canadian university system to become what I dare not even mention. They were so deeply, extensively brainwashed that they horrify me. They became conformist intellectuals; my daughter has became a neoliberal 'feminist.' She covidvaxxed her very young children, as she does all her patients. Молодые Комсомольцы, you know. Some homeopathic doctors, btw, believe that smoking weed make the youngsters very compliant and conforming. Mine smoked a lot. Like everyone. So, we can’t blame one phenomenon, everything came together for the final crash.
Komsomol was based on heroism, chivalry, people's brotherhood, altruism, highest morals and sanctity of friendship. I am afraid you might believe that USSR was "totalitarian". I was raised as a Kolsomolec and a communist. By the example of my grandparents who fought hard against Nazism and saved the world when no one wanted to raise a finger against Hitler and everyone bowed down to him. Yet the Westerners repeat the lies of Hearst and Conquest and Snyder, about "Stalin agreement with Hitler" and "USSR invaded Poland"... The most horrifying thing that I saw in the West and Anglosphere in particular (not so in Germany or Italy) is the disappearance of conscience and moral relativism. They will not stand for what is right because there is no such thing as "right" for them. Passionate partiality that Gramsci was speaking about, is seen as "extremism" and "hate".
Digesting what you have wrote here: Yesss, the USSR WAS totalitarian. A working class man was not even allowed into the Communist Party, they had a severe quota. Stalin murdered my grandfather because he was a Polish immigrant, an enemy of the state. We got a ‘postmortal rehabilitation’ paper. Brezhnev’s scum arrested my other grandfather because he demanded to read a Jewish book at the Central Lenin’s library which was printed before 1945 while he had no ‘permit’ for it. They threw him into a mental asylum. In his 70s! As for the "Komsomol was based on heroism, chivalry, people's brotherhood, altruism, highest morals and sanctity of friendship" -- WOW! I lived there for 24 years, went to university, both my parents were Party members, NEVER ever have I heard anyone say anything bonkers like that, nor met anyone believing this. My friends and classmates would consider such a person a nuthouse escapee. We were ALL forced into Komsomol at the age of 14. No one was allowed to refuse. When I applied to emigrate, I was expelled from the Komsomol in a horrifyingly staged ordeal. When did you emigrate? Who were your parents? A high-placed party apparatchiks?
Лена, I выросла в Москве и тоже была комсомолкой. Выражение «молодой комсомолец» использовалось нами для насмешек над карьеристами, работавшими на партию. Они были жалкими мерзавцами.
I also grew up in Moscow and have never been a Sorosite liberal. I have been a Komsomol member and I opposed the wrong and defended the right. I am sure if you and your buddies saw me, you would call me names too. Liberals destroyed the country from within. The 5th column. I would expect that you would compare the brainwashed youth to Hitlerjugend, Ukraine Nazi Youth camps, Jabotinsky's Betar - but you believe that Communism is to blame... typical.
When a civilization nears its end, as far as history is concerned—people do not lose their language, they lose their literate elites. There is so much work out there where the authors attempt to show that the invention of writing dealt a sever blow to humanity (or to humanity's mind.) Let us also not forget how many times it was pronounced that cinematography killed the theatre. Theatre will exist forever, even when our own blood-soaked civilization will have forgotten how to read and write. We will still tell stories. And paint pictures.
none of it will be possible in a degraded society. You'd be surprised but none of the art, no matter which, visual or audio, is possible without a developed language. Foregoing and rising beyond something is far not the same as being ignorant and dim-witted about it. Bradbury was right.
I was talking about writing not speaking. Humans will always have language, this is how we think.
Writing comes from thinking. Learning how to physically write the letters is secondary. Speaking does not necessarily come from thinking, however, lol. Today even writing does not come from thinking anymore. More and more often I come across infantile and/or manichaean attitude: "all or no one", "good or bad", "if you say X, you mean ALL X and at all times", "hate or love", "opposing means hating", "argument means aggression and attack", "you don't know me", etc. It started especially since English became a language one-size-fits-all. Do you know about a project of bastardizing English in order to transform people's thinking and spread it globally, in which Orwell took such an active part? It came to pass. Here, a very useful paper: Orwell and Empire: Anti-Communism and the Globalization of Literature. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27929796
Indeed, speaking does not come from thinking, I never said that. Thinking is a process of mental computation that rests on the language. We think in words, there is no other way (check out Chomsky). We have been doing this for the past 200K years. Writing is a very recent invention; it comes and goes.
What you are talking about is what I also addressed in my response to Thomas Fazi’s post (I like him very much, btw and am a subscriber). Suddenly, the common people, the ‘proles,’ who, in America, are barely literate and extremely miseducated, are given access to world platforms which, until recently, had only been available to the elites. They have a lot to be angry about as the Empire disintegrates in a burst of horrific violence. We are all headed toward the Gaza Holocaust; we are all the future Palestinians—it’s the latest Capital’s experiment in ‘crowd control.’ So, yeah, the working class people who populate the social media are enraged but they have no idea how to express themselves, they have never held a book in their hands, they lack words. The American educational system created them like that on purpose. And I sometimes get provoked by them too, but it is useless and pointless to argue with them.
You also didn’t understand what I said about my kids being brainwashed by the neoliberal (fascist, really) propaganda. They even took my son to Hong Kong after he graduated from journalism, to set his head right in he anti-China direction and Russophobia. And it worked.
As I said to Thomas, we should just write for ourselves, for each other, and disregard the Instagram noise.
I'm going to check this out about the Orwell, sounds like a conspiracy theory. haha. I'll check it out.
Oh, that was superb! Many thanks for translating and sharing!
Not just social media, but the death of the universities — which are now mere vehicles for managing huge capital endowments — and the atrocious barriers on working-class entry to higher education (alongside a paradoxical decline in actual academic standards) has been fatal to intellectual life.
"Queen, one of the most important bands in music history"
"Music history" (sic)? Are you shitting me or what? Queen might have stood a notch above the primitive attempts of musical dilettantes on the pop music scene, but most important whatever in music history? How much about music history do you know?
Names like Bach (the guy who laid the foundations of tonal music), Beethoven, Wagner, Stravinsky, Debussy, and countless others ring a bell? How about Zyryab who singlehandedly brought musical sophistication to the Occident from Mesopotamia?
The shit spewed through such conduits as radio and video is NOT art. It's entertainment produced with the intent to appeal to the listener and to sell. That's in sharp contrast with art, which doesn't aspire to appeal to anyone - it serves as food for thought, often in provocative ways, AND it is created and delivered through masterful command of the art form in question. Van Gogh's paintings are fucking art. Queen's songs are (good) entertainment.
It's somewhat paradoxical to be whining about the disappearance of the intellectual, while putting on a pedestal primitive chants concocted by dilletantes who know fuck all about the art form they're butchering in the process of trying to achieve fame.
IIn my opinion, your are hitting on the right thene, although I would say some points might not be quite right.
First of all ibs not really about instagram - this has been a clear trebd since the age of television: a reduction in our thinking and a cancerius growth of interest in shallow emoting abd reactions.
The age of cable TV is closer to the moment we went off the cliff.
And I would argue we DO have public intellectuals. They have been here for decades, radio and TV talk show hosts,, and "personal development" gurus abd "life coaches" like Tony Robbins and the swarm of copies of him.Intellectual midgets most of them...but those have for decadrs now been the public intellectuals of our tine.
And now the stresm of money chasing coackris hes called "influencers" are the public intellectuals of the newt generation. God help us all.
It's true that it's not the same thing, but in ancient Rome there were the Tribunes of the Plebs, who were a political counterweight from below to aristocratic and oligarchic power. It's no coincidence that the struggles of the Gracchi are cited by Marx as one of the first examples of class struggle.
What decision-making body can now pit "the people" against the excessive power of corporations, Black Rock, and a Parliament that increasingly bases its decisions on the interests of financial capital? All the politicians who have come to power in the last 30 years have been passive executors of neoliberal dogma.
In 2019, the WEF's giant corporations allied themselves with the UN to ensure the implementation of the 2030 Agenda. Virtually the same giant corporations that brought the world to the brink of ecological collapse now claim to guarantee the zero-carbon transition, and they are taken seriously, and no ordinary person has a say in all this, not only that, no ordinary person was informed about it and became aware of it!
https://www.cognitoforms.com/MultistakeholderismActionGroup/CorporateCaptureOfGlobalGovernanceTheWorldEconomicForumWEFUNPartnershipAgreementIsADangerousThreatToUN?fbclid=IwY2xjawMJB8xleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETBpVWNmSm15M1NVaTRiNTV6AR61HQ_txx_DTvtP7zsaK5h98YDWBfoMKEl6ZqJSOsPdiTeDwal5mMWHwxX2cA_aem_IsxLYc2cXv1aN8XOkeNiSw
Even the epochal shift towards the Fourth Industrial Revolution (we are fully in it, (AI, 5G and 6G are changing the face of the world and the way states are governed and the dynamics of wars, which are managed and imposed entirely from above).
Artificial intelligence falls like a new axe on the heads of the earth's peoples, transforming and emptying democracies, and completely depriving the people of their say. And all this has happened in a relatively short time, nullifying national governments and making democracies obsolete. Now is the age of Technate run like companies. All this is decided by a minority of the super-rich, politically and democratically illiterate.
Regarding AI, which is replacing humans and democracies, no one in the media dares remind these powerful figures who gather in Davos and the Bilderberg Group to decide the fate of the world - that it must be the people who control AI, democratically, just as the information and resources of the earth, must not be in the hands of greedy, unelected elites who use AI to control the majority of peoples and wage economic wars of conquest and extermination... The real question is: who controls these new technologies today? Who controls information and history? The rich are not gods who dictate history, as Harari tries to convince us, when he presents us with our destiny as hackable animals, as a fate we cannot oppose. History is built through class struggles, but without access to new technologies, there is no class struggle; we've already lost.
At least Spartacus and his rebellious slaves had the weapons to rebel; we are completely enslaved by these powerful technologies, controlled from above; we are defenseless. We are like animals to be slaughtered. These new weapons are entirely in the hands of 1% of humanity, perhaps less. It's totally absurd; we cannot accept it. We will never be able organize ourselves and fight for our rights, in this way, and that's what they want.
https://thegrayzone.com/2025/07/31/israeli-spyware-surveillance-state/
Dear Thomas,
Please do continue writing. We need you.
On the other hand, I would argue that you are operating here on a wrong premise. No offence. By this I mean your assumption that in the previous centuries, intellectuals had direct access to the sophisticated public while, today, their voices are being lost in the background racket of the unruly ignorant crowds with extremely short attention span. I beg to differ.
The first time I thought about this when reading one man’s description of Vladimir Horowitz's 1987 concert he attended in Vienna; the recital which Horowitz had given after a very long break. The author of this article described the audience. When performance was suddenly announced, people from all over the world came to Vienna to see and hear the old Master. The author, himself, wept during the performance. The second time this idea popped into my head when I attended the concert given by the bella donna, Cecilia Bartoli. Close to the end of her performance, Cecilia mischievously asked the audience to sing with her. The audience obliged. I heard my friend gasp when the entire hall started singing some intricate operatic piece. In perfect harmony, like a professional choir.
In both examples, the concert halls were mostly filled with either professional or lay musicians. When Horowitz's unexpectedly announced his recital, music lovers from all over the world rushed to hear him, he was already quite old but still marvellous.
My point here is that although it may appear that artists, printers, and intellectuals create for a broad public, it is a completely misguided notion. They write, paint, sculp, compose, think for a small selective audience of the people who are either themselves professionals or truly devoted connoisseurs of their particular art. We look at the 16th-18th century musicians and painters and assume that, while they struggled to please their particular aristocratic or bourgeois patrons, they spent their lives creating for a large public. That Mozart or Shakespear or Dostoevsky moulded their masterpieces for the grand audiences, that they directly communicated to the ‘masses’ (as much as I hate this Bolshevik term, haha). Yes, many of them needed to make a living. But the creatives sang, painted, and composed strictly for the audience of their peers; they only care about what their friends and colleagues would think. They passionately hated the professional critics, the editors, and the censors, the art collectors because those were not capable of deep appreciation.
Thomas, the background noise notwithstanding, it will be us who appreciate your writing and your ideas, who will be reading. Keep on writing, please. . .
Perhaps, we can investigate this phenomenon further. What changes in our society—besides the social media—have sent the ‘masses’ into this wide-spread loquacious fit. Does this ‘freedom of expression’ represent a positive development for them, for our society? Are we being vainglorious and condescending like the Bolsheviks (and most of the Left) who, deep down inside, actually detest the ‘proles’?
And, was the intellectual authority actually a positive thing? I am not at all sure about that.
Cancel culture killed the public intellectual. Christopher Hitchens explained things simply, would have enjoyed Twitter, and would have been wholesale cancelled uttering a single word about women.
I don’t know much about him and what I did read hasn’t made me wish to study more.
But just curious, what was Pasolini’s objection to feminism? Was it a well-researched theoretical critique from the Marxist perspective or was it more of a gay male distaste toward the uppity females or a critique fueled by his Italian Catholicism?
I'd say that Pasolini's critique of feminism shared many themes and similarities with the Marxist position. On one side, Pasolini was very sympathetic to women's struggle for more representation and recognition in politics, culture etc. On the other side, he thought that this struggle, as it was, accelerated and facilitated the strengthening of the new totalitarian regime over a fragmented consumeristic society: feminism, in his opinion, was setting the premise for the dissolution of the traditional family, a welcome outcome for the ruling class; then individuals, no longer parts of a local community or a family, could be directly targeted by advertisement and propaganda. Children education would be delegated (as a result of dysfunctional families) to television and other mass media, controlled by the ruling class, erasing diversity (a proto-anti-globalisation idea) and reducing dissent. Women would be empowered and freer than before, but in a worse society, in an uglier world. Also, he contended with feminists that female body liberation would have paved the way for a total commodification of women's body by the consumeristic society.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart for this comprehensive reply, comrade. I asked because I struggle a lot with many questions about feminism, its fate, and its future struggles. I think, the most typical of a Marxist reply would have been that feminist must acquiesce their ‘problems’ to be answered within the Class Struggle not without (probably true). As for the rest of Pasolini’s views and opinions, all I can see is they are viewed from the perspective of Patriarchy—which he probably does not perceive as many of us cannot comprehend the larger social structures without proper education (as we cannot see imperialism or class war, etc). This is why I value Marx’s reliance of the Dialectical analysis which allowed him to examine the deeper and larger structures as well as the granular, up-close ones. Bertell Ollman does a superb examinations of the dialectical techniques Marx uses.
Besides seemingly sanctioning the oppressive structures of Patriarchy, Pasolini (as you show here) is also sanctioning the oppressive structures of a State, as if there were no other option for a society to organize itself. Within this oppressive Patriarchal State, one can agree that possibly once women free themselves (god only knows how) from the clutches of their communities, their children’s well-being, their education/care might suffer. One can, then, argue: is the former really such a bad thing? Being excluded from the abusive Patriarchal family and village? No one can be free until they create a society where women can have FREE access to their community’s resources so they can feed their children without prostituting themselves. It used to be like that before Patriarchy was born. So, Pasolini essentially argues that, while women, individually, can set themselves ‘free,’ their children and loved ones will suffer. Well, this is a totally bogus, even a misogynous proposition. The same as that ‘freer’ women’s bodies will basically be prostituted. Ugggh, no comment here. Won’t be studying this particular intellectual.
I, personally, do not consider myself a feminist because I disagree with their basic principle that females and males are ‘equal.’ How can a creature who is being gifted the ability to create humans inside her own body and, subsequently, nurture them out of her body as well—how can she be equal to a creature who is not being given such a gift. Another idea I do not share with some feminists—I believe it is wrong to hold men accountable for the crimes and oppression of the systemic Patriarchy. Men suffer as much as we do, if not even more at times. It is their bodies and lives that is being used by the ruling patriarchs as expendable in military conflicts—millennium after millennium.
The characters in my novel ponder a lot of these questions. Thank you for your help, Stefano.
“Forms of Intense Intelligence—a Marxian Fantasy Novel”
I'm sympathetic to much of what is being argued here. However, I find it difficult to lament the loss of concepts such as 'intellectual authority' and 'the mass public'. The opportunity for people to inform themselves and think for themselves has been greatly expanded, which must be a good thing overall, despite the amount of dross which inevitably pollutes the flow of such an open discourse.
<<Social news influencers and commentators are obsessed with “explaining things simply”. Complex political, social or international issues are spoon-fed to the public like baby food.>>
I don’t know what a "social news influencer" is, but if the author is implying that the likes of Alexander Mercouris, Daniel Davis and Larry Johnson (popular alternative news "personalities") are dumbing things down, then the author has never listened to their analysis. CNN, FOX and all mainstream news outlets are sacks of lies used to cover up elite looting of public money. I hope the author isn't bemoaning public distrust of mainstream media, because that is one thing that gives me hope!
To gain a hearing from the general public, intellectual authority is not enough. An intellectual must also have moral authority.
And however virtuous and enlightened someone's opinions may be, moral authority demands personal goodness.
Which the general public know to be even rarer among intellectuals than among the multitude.
In fact, personal goodness is in danger of outright extinction. For while the Right (apart from some extremist crackpots) has embraced Capitalism (which worships greed and selfishness), the Left has an especial hatred for Christianity.
As a result, only vice and nihilism remain.
I guess we already know or knew all that you said.
However, it is great to see it all in one place, structured
Thank you for doing that.
Excellent