Intellectuals

Intellectuals rule the world. Intelligent, educated, philosophical ones dominate almost everything and everyone. Those who are practical successes, who make their ideas and themselves relatively well-known, are the commanders of the earth.

Unfortunately, they and their ideas don’t have to be factually true, morally good, or spiritually elevated. Historically, most of them aren’t. Today especially, most of them aren’t. Intellectuals generally evade, deceive, and mislead. This is particularly so in our current, irrational, illiberal, post-modernist, regressive, nihilist, early 21^st century Dark Age.

But good is somewhat stronger than evil, as even the first Zarathustrans observed. And truth is somewhat stronger than ignorance and lies. So humans naturally ascend.

But good-guy intellectuals still have to work hard and smart to defeat the bad ones. And they even have to be fairly clever and slick – because their formidable, bad-guy enemies usually are thus too.

One interesting, odd, sad, alarming truth is that the truth-telling intellectuals seem to need to be fairly popular and well-liked in order to rule. They evidently can’t just meekly and quietly discover and explain the truth. They evidently also have to pleasantly and persuasively reach out – to both their fellow intellectuals and even somewhat to the masses.

The good news, for mankind and the good people of the earth, is it seems like competent, honest, virtuous, and noble intellectuals only have to be partially popular and well-liked. They just have to have a certain Aristotelian practicality and not end up heavily hidden or hated.

The other good news is that if some heroic rebel and saintly revolutionary has been badly abused by his fellow man contemporaneously, or deems them very low and unworthy by nature, then he can take revenge on them by remaining mostly silent or obscure. Evil mankind won’t effectively hear or comprehend his insights and truths, and thus will continue to decline and suffer badly. Justice will triumph.