Where anti-intellectualism festers, demagoguery thrives.

"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

By J. Basil Dannebohm

In his book, "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle," Chris Hedges writes:

"Today cinematic, political, and journalistic celebrities distract us with their personal foibles and scandals. They create our public mythology. Acting, politics, and sports have become, as they were in Nero's reign, interchangeable. In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we neither seek nor want honesty or reality ... The ability to amplify lies, to repeat them and have surrogates repeat them in endless loops of news cycles, gives lies and mythical narratives the aura of uncontested truth. We become trapped in the linguistic prison of incessant repetition."

Incessant repetition is key. Demagogues have leveraged it throughout history.

In 1869, author Isabella Jane Blagden penned a book entitled, "The Crown of a Life" wherein she wrote, "If a lie is only printed often enough, it becomes a quasi-truth, and if such a truth is repeated often enough, it becomes an article of belief, a dogma, and men will die for it."

Blagden’s theory became the school of thought behind Nazi propaganda peddled by Joseph Goebbels, who believed:

“Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth."

Among psychologists this is known as the "illusion of truth" effect.

In the 1960's, the KGB conducted "illusion of truth" psychological experiments. The Soviet State Police discovered that if you bombarded subjects with repetitious fear-inciting messages, in two months or less, most people were completely brainwashed to believe false messages – to the point that no amount of accurate information they were shown to the contrary would change their minds.

On October 15th, 1962, during a speech at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. observed, "Men often hate each other because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don't know each other; they don't know each other because they cannot communicate; they cannot communicate because they are separated."

Fear often stems from a lack of critical thinking, willful ignorance, or emotional manipulation, all of which are symptoms of a nation plagued by anti-intellectualism.

In 1964, during the height of the KGB’s experiments in the Soviet Union and the civil rights movement in the United States, Richard Hofstadter wrote his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.” In it, the author distinguished intelligence (clever adjustment to practical ends) from intellect (reflective, critical, self-questioning), noting that American life tends to prize the former and suspect the latter. That suspicion, he noted, spurred from McCarthy-era assaults on “eggheads," which convinced many Americans that intellect was a national danger.

Juvenal's "bread and circuses" theory and Orwell's dystopian novel “1984” come to mind.

Hofstadter suggested that the Evangelical movement contributed to the assault on intellectualism, noting that explosive church growth bred self-confidence and an anti-learned style among church leaders. He surmised that a pastor’s charisma and oratorical skills, rather than scholarly nuance, set the tone for the movement, glorifying inner feeling over learned theology.

He further suggested that institutes of higher education began placing a greater priority on athleticism than scholarship, thus contributing to anti-intellectualism.

Later in the book, Hofstadter observed that the Founding Fathers fused intellect and public office, but that Jacksonian egalitarianism recast leadership as “common sense,” rather than cultivated reason. Early leaders, he noted, were “sages, scientists, men of broad cultivation … who used their wide reading … to solve the exigent problems of their time.” Reformers and abolitionists were gradually caricatured as meddlesome elites, paving the way for populist distrust of experts.

Hofstadter likewise blamed commerce, which he said celebrated salesmanship but only tolerated research when economic uncertainty loomed. Likewise, he lamented that self-help literature baptized success with quasi-religious slogans, displacing disciplined study.

All these factors, he suggested, led to anti-intellectualism becoming synonymous with patriotism, a zeal for prohibition, and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, a movement which pitted “the unschooled average citizen … against the intellectually mongrelized ‘Liberals.’”

Each surge of anti-intellectual feeling — evangelical revivals, Jacksonian democracy, fundamentalist crusades, business golden ages, and attacks on educational systems — grew from legitimate democratic or moral impulses, then curdled when suspicion of “book learning” turned into hostility toward free thought itself.

The task ahead, Hofstadter suggested, was not to enthrone experts, but to keep both anti-intellectualism and sterile technocracy in check. He concluded that the assault on intellectualism was not composed of a linear decline but rather the result of pendulum swings. (I have spoken of such swings in previous commentaries.)

Since the dawn of the military industrial complex, there has been a simultaneous assault on intellect and repetitious fearmongering as a means by which to maintain control.

I'm reminded of a passage in Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark" wherein he writes, "One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back."

Nevertheless, Booker T. Washington’s words still stand: "A lie doesn't become truth, wrong doesn't become right, and evil doesn't become good, just because it's accepted by a majority."

I used to think communication was the key, until I realized comprehension is. You can communicate all you want with someone but if they don't understand you, or worse yet, refuse to, it's futile. Communicating with someone who lacks even the most rudimentary intellect, as Mark Twain observed, is a messy task.

Aldous Huxley said, "Unlike the masses, intellectuals have a taste for rationality and interest in facts. Their critical habit of mind makes them resistant to the kind of propaganda that works so well on the majority."

It also leaves them feeling pretty damn lonely.

As Dr. Richard Brisebois noted:

“Intellectual loneliness isn’t about wanting deep talks. It’s about noticing how few people can stay with complexity. You start to see that most conversations aren’t about understanding. They’re about securing a feeling of being right. You watch people build entire worldviews from headlines, vibes, and whatever their algorithm served that morning. You hear the silence that follows when you say something that doesn’t fit neatly into their script. It’s [intellectual loneliness] not arrogance. It’s fatigue, from constantly translating your real thoughts into something safer, smaller, more palatable. From knowing that nuance ends more conversations than it begins. No one tells you this part: once your mind stretches, it never contracts. The old forms of talk (habitual, performative, eager for certainty) stop feeling like connection. They start feeling like exile with company. You stop looking for the clever, the informed, the impressive. You start looking for those still capable of wonder. People who haven’t traded curiosity for coherence. Minds that don’t flinch when a thought refuses to resolve.”

Lonely though it is, as the quote often attributed to Marcus Aurelius says, “The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."