The Irrelevance of Pseudo-Intellectualism

How many times have you been in the presence of someone who just won’t shut up about an obscure and completely unimportant subject? Yet no one will shut the (usually) man up for fear of looking like they have no idea what he is talking about. Indeed if "Brevity is the soul of wit"** then he is witless.

Welcome to the pseudo-intellectual.

In a world where fortunes are made by taking complex ideas, principles and consumables and making them easier to consume (ie. Apple computers, motor vehicles, DVD players and television news), pseudo-intellectualism is not the new black, but the new fluorescent pink with orange spots that rub off on your hands in warm weather.

Blogging is a safe haven for the PI. There he has a relative Kingdom to himself and can prattle on with his moderate opinions not of his own but of those who have most likely died and in a little code that only other PI Furby’s can understand. I make this assumption as this Furbyesque quality of the PI must surely be the only way they can ever score chicks. They sure as hell don't for their well-developed senses of humour and all-round personalities.



It’s rather like reading Rich Irvine’s Sportsreview I imagine if you don’t understand or love sport enough to understand its language. Or Aaron Bhatnagar’s blog if you have no interest in Auckland local body politics. Or this blog if you are asexual. There’s not much point really. Thing is with Rich, Aaron and myself, we can write about other stuff. PI’s can’t.

PI’s can rant on for hours with never-ending arguments to do with philosophy, Marxist theory, religion, “antidisestablishmentarianism” and how others are uneducated or extremists for wishing to talk about sex, sports and what they did at the weekend that usually involved alcohol. They dismiss others actual opinions as extremist but then turn around and wish for the rest of us to be more tolerant of their strange behaviour. When you take the time to strip back what they are saying it is stuttered garbage of the highest order. Some of it completely incorrect yet no one else bothers listening enough to correct what is dribbling from their mouth.

It’s hard to spot a PI at University other than their wide-eyed excitement to be somewhere where they never thought they would end up in their scholastic averageness, however from the day of graduation it is very simple. He’s the one who still refers to University or a time when he ruled his domain more fondly than his life at present. Recanting the good days when fees were lower, his "classical liberal arts" background, when Professors had “time” to talk to their students and “feeding the mind”. Problem is that in the midst of learning how to learn, he never learned the most important thing –

How to gracefully leave University behind you.

Interestingly not many lawyers qualify as PI’s. Commercialism sees to that, and the requirement to actually be able to communicate with people of obviously lesser brain power or interest in the complex field of legal matters to get your professional fees. Academic lawyers stay at University or move into research at a firm never to meet an actual client. Not many accountants, bankers, economists, businessmen or anyone really who produces a product or service in return for a wad of cash are PI’s either. Generally pseudo-intellectualism litters the public sector, a few in journalism, art galleries, librarians, aspiring government sponsored authors and the younger breed as waitresses and café workers. Most will wallow in fiscal mediocrity unable to convert any intellect they actually have to something useful. For "Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play"*. Remembering that a true intellectual will not spread his intellectualism on those lesser than him for fear of a) being beaten up or b) sharing intellectual property.

The PI will write like every blog post or column is a history or political studies essay and everyone reading it will melt in his natural supremacist glow. He will footnote and recant every “experts” opinion on the topic as though it is his own. As "Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another"*.

He will read 3,000 words and have nothing to contribute but to correct grammar at page 22 line 17 and find your use of the word "fuck" to be distasteful. He will misappropriate opinions of others because they don’t have a basis of someone more famous having said it before. He will be excited to the point of orgasm when he finds someone he can talk to about the ten points he has recalled on Keats, Shakespeare (quoted above **), Michael Lebowitz, John Stuart Mill, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon or Immanuel Kant (quoted above*). Who? See how easy it is to sound like a complete and utter K**t.

In other words a PI is about as welcome, interesting and original company as dogshit.

The PI will mock the New Zealand media for pandering to the lowest common denominator, yet most of that lowest common denominator have more practical use in the country than the PI. The PI will never find a television channel “smart” enough for him in the world as he does not view the television as a form of entertainment or even infotainment. Many PI’s will claim not to own a television at all. While PI’s bemoan gossip pages, the sneaky little bastards will stand in Starmart wearing tweed browsing Women’s Weekly and read New Idea in the Doctor’s clinic. They are true hypocrites of the highest order.

They will listen to National Radio and then jam on their downtime with CD’s of heavy classical music. Not because they necessarily enjoy it as a true enthusiast, but because they think it makes them look smarter than those of us who listen to Kanye West, Eminem or Amy Winehouse. It doesn’t if they don’t actually like it, all it does is make them look like a complete tool. They prefer villas to apartments and will let their villa run to rack and ruin to give it “character”, when we all know they don’t have the money to fix the damn run down shed of wood. Many PI’s drink wine. Not expensive wine as their lack of commerciality prevents it, but wine that is as uncommercial as they are. They will then discuss it. I know pure wine experts/snobs, it’s never funnier than when one meets a wine PI and drowns them in a vat of red stains. Ditto a real art expert/snob. For some reason the faux art and wine experts get the worst pounding when they meet their match.

The difference between a PI and being genuinely useful in society is that anyone who is well educated can explain subjects in a manner more complicated than they should be. That educated person can confuse the living hell out of the 99% of the world intellectually inferior to him about a subject.

The path to true supremacy over others is to take a very complicated idea and make it simple so they can understand it….then get them to pay you money for it.

That’s the stuff of million and billionaires.

I won’t go over pinkos/greenies who blog like this or where the largest pod of pseudo-intellectuals are found discoursing in sub-intellectual ultra-unopinionated group wankery in left-wing organisations or the Centre for Independent Studies that attracts these moths to a flame blatting on about von Mises, Hayek and Rand but the closest we have in the New Zealand centre-right blogosphere is Not PC Peter Cresswell.

Fortunately Peter saves himself from the tag of PI by being extremely articulate and capable of explaining himself in simpler terms for a wider readership. Peter actually is very bright in real life and commercial with it and he likes sports. He eats BBQ food and knows how to pitch a tent, pump his own gas and where to turn the power off at the mains. He knows that to earn a crust he has to turn complex ideas that no one else may understand in a room, and term them so others can get it.

And be a bloody good bloke that people wish to talk to.