Photo credit: Patient Care Technician

Lacan, Badiou, Žižek, Foucault, and Deleuze might have all been called charlatans by Noam Chomsky, but what he missed is that these are our philosophers and thinkers in the age of larger-than-life media buffoons. To get paid and find the ability to ask questions in the realm of knowledge, they had to become glamorous elites themselves so the wealthy people they could rub shoulders with would support their coded endeavors. Within this cadre of privileged artists, musicians, poets, writers, and thinkers, celebrity politicians and business magnates could demonstrate their embrace by surrounding themselves with rarified examples of personas too complex for the average person. This buffering of their defenses by surrounding themselves with obscurantists added layers to their unapproachability by convincing those on the outside that they do not have the intellectual capacity to comprehend such complexities. Alas, this was all part of a charade to disenfranchise the masses.

To make the complex simple, we listen to Beethoven or join Ishmael on the deck of the Pequod as he battles tyranny and danger in the quest to capture the prize. Look at Mona Lisa and wonder what is the intrigue of the face of an unknown woman that nonetheless pulls us in. How did da Vinci channel the complexity of finding light and character to create a piece of art that has enchanted us for over 500 years now? Beethoven was in love with the ancient pre-language state of hominids, where the song was our means of transmitting information. Melville was in love with the sea, especially the fragile relationship of man with the constant threat of the abyss, the monster, and the monster of the abyss that lies within our souls. Maybe what the Mona Lisa belies in its simplicity is that she is secretly in love with Leonardo, but he didn’t know it while he painted.

Barriers that isolate and segregate need constant reworking and refinement. Their bulwarks are society’s defensive sculpture, but they are not impenetrable: they can be chipped away at and reshaped. Knowledge is the chisel that does that work, but for too long, it has been kept in rarified institutions and made expensive to maintain cultural and racist order. When we talk in terms of fear of what artificial intelligence can bring, we do so in order to alienate a class of people from its benefit. Swayed to hold deeply negative opinions they will not be able to take advantage of A.I. when it becomes more and more apparent in our daily lives. While formal education is everywhere, there is still a large body of the population that holds a negative view of it, believing that it will remove them from the real and the important.

The pedestal of who gets to stand on the shoulders of great minds is intentionally kept small for the purpose of allocating privilege and allowing a small cadre of elites to better demonstrate their greatness while standing with and supporting genius. This is archaic and broken and excludes the common persons who simultaneously take pride in distancing themselves from those they can’t identify with due to groupthink that says that kind of power is corrupt.

We need creators, artists, and thinkers to do some heavy lifting during times of cultural convulsions, and this is the beginning of one of those eras. Being smart is not a tarnish on legitimacy, nor is it a guarantee of participation, but ignorance and the inability of people to adequately participate with the foundations of building a healthy society is a recipe for more chaos. Out of the tumult of the late ’50s through the ’60s, philosophy, education, civil society, human rights, and cultural expression all went through a profound upheaval, and here we are once again at the beginning of one of those moments. Embrace education and self-expression, everyone; clean out the cobwebs that were scattered in your minds from the past 50 years of breeding stupid consumers, and try to understand how your minds and bodies are both victims of the injustice brought by the war on individuality.