At some point during the 2000’s nerds stopped being heroes. For most of the 80’s and 90’s intelligent people would outsmart the jocks and win the day. Children of the 80’s all believed that intelligence and knowledge were the keys to success. Movies like Revenge of the Nerds, Weird Science, The Goonies, WarGames and TV shows like MacGyver all portrayed the smart person as the underdog who overcomes adversity by using the power of their intellect. We even had sweets that venerated intelligence.
However, anti-intellectualism was always in the wings. A general discontent with intellectuals and science, brought to life by the idea that someone’s ignorant opinion is as valid as empirically acquired knowledge. And while the sentiment has been a persistent theme through most of the 20th Century, the movement behind anti-intellectualism came into its own in the 2000’s.
Promises were made
Thinkers, intellectuals and educated people have repeated a promise since the advent of philosophy 5,000 years ago. The promise is that they have the answers to alleviate our suffering. That they can and will make our lives better.
Throughout time different societies shared a common figure, the elder. This learned or wise individual whom commoners approached seeking insight and guidance to deal with their life’s travails.
This role evolved and religious and spiritual leaders were joined by thinkers, philosophers and academics. The thinkers rarely ruled, but rather played an advisory role. Instead, they spent their time apart from society, observing and questioning what was going on, making sense of life and guiding leaders and commoners on what course of action to take.
And these people became our religious leaders, our university professors, our philosophers, scientists and doctors. And these people we adjudged to have a clearer understanding of the world and life. As long as people adhered and listened to their insights, things would improve, get better.
People listened to economists, priests, politicians, psychologists, doctors and things were improving. Not for everyone, not all at once, but from the 1800’s through to the end of the 20th Century, everyone seemed to be doing better. Poverty declined, quality of life improved from one generation to the next and world leaders constantly managed to pull us back from the brink of self-destruction.
But the promise wasn’t for everyone
In the developed world, there were a large subset of people for whom the promise never eventuated. Their quality of life improved, but not at the same rate as for the people around them. And they did everything right. They were patriotic, they sent their children to die in horrendous wars, one after the other, they worked hard, and waited their turn.
However, their turn never arrived.
The people with knowledge, the experts, priests, doctors, economists and politicians did little for them. Instead, they were criticised, deemed inferior, and their voices were ignored. And the past two decades has seen this group grow ever more sceptical of those in authority. Dubious of the institutions of knowledge and government who promised so much and delivered them so little.
Promises were broken.
And as the educated looked down on the uneducated, as they put their thumbs on the scales to advantage themselves, so many lost faith in what the experts had to say and what science had to contribute.
As this was happening, the experts and their leaders started getting things wrong. The 20th Century, which had promised so much, delivered us unexpected acts of terrorism, a global financial crisis, unwinnable wars, greater financial inequality and a pandemic.
Institutions people looked to for guidance, for explanations seemed perplexed, unable to find solutions. The UN, the World Bank, the IMF, governments, the EU, universities, the WHO, NASA, they were all exposed. They didn’t have the answers. The world was as perplexing and confusing a place to the experts and the learned as it was to those people who believed these institutions had solutions.
Everybody knows & the rejection of knowledge
Look around. The wealthy are getting wealthier, the middle class is falling behind, and the poor are generations behind where they ought to be.
Everybody knows the system is broken, that the game is fixed. Corporations and governments have colluded to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else. And the experts have exposed themselves for what they are, toothless and indecisive. Corporations and governments use experts and scientists like propagandists.
Consider the tobacco industry which throughout the eighties used the credibility of scientists to convince people that smoking didn’t cause cancer. Or the economists who told us trickle down economics would benefit all of society. And the nutritional scientists who gave us the food pyramid. Or the global cooling theory of the 1970’s which formed a large part of the climate change denial argument used by the Exxon and the oil and gas industry.
While businesses push scientists and economists to erode the credibility of their disciplines, intellectuals sit on the side lines unwilling to get their hands dirty. And in the meantime, universities become luxury brands, reserved for a wealthy few.
The ignored masses have grown fed-up with it all. They’ve stopped listening to the experts and the leaders. They feel marginalised and lied to. Intelligent people can’t be trusted and the educated don’t care about their plight.
The plan
They are going it alone. The marginalised are here to disrupt the status quo, to be counted. Chaos is their preferred weapon. And they don’t care what the educated minority think anymore.
And our biggest problem is that our ability to communicate and reason with one another has evaporated with proliferation of social media and the 24-hour news cycle. We’ve stopped understanding one another.
We listen, but we don’t hear.
And there’s a stark absence of visionary leaders who can inspire us to come together.
But more than anything else we sorely lack a viable system that allows for the effective and fair redistribution of wealth (and dignity) from those that have, to those that don’t.