The Heroic Myth of the Anti-Intellectual

Look at those filthy people over there. The people who drive trucks, those blue-collar-job-working-mouth-breathers who actually shoot animals with their guns for food. Gross. That’s why we call them flyover states. Am I right guys?

High-five!

You see, I’m nothing like those people. I shop at Whole Foods. I drive a Prius because gas mileage is a-MAY-zing~ and climate change is important to me. I listen to NPR (I have a huge man-crush on Ira Glass) and read The Atlantic (I have a subscription, anyway…). I even date people outside of my race. I’m learning Mandarin Chinese right now, because that’s where my girlfriend’s grandparents are from: China.

你好 ! 你叫什么名字?

That’s the difference between me and them: I care about being educated and open-minded. I’m an intellectual. My love for intellectualism is what allowed me to leave the podunk town I lived in and move to the big city, where I secretly love-to-hate paying 10x the rent for 1/10th the space. But it’s all worth it, because I’m constantly surrounded by people who want to innovate and change the world for the better.

I’m a person who has spent a lot of time reading books, thinking about what he’s read, and writing about those ideas. And I think anti-intellectualism is a major problem right now facing the world.

Think about it: those people probably didn’t even go to college. Except maybe to play football or something dumb like that. My alma mater, established in the early 19th century by endowment from some oil magnate — we don’t even have a football program. They spend so much money on athletics programs these days. We should end all college sports and funnel that money back into educational programs. It’s such a crime that our university teachers are so underpaid. Educators should be amongst the highest paid professions in the world! It’s wonderful that they are doing what we need most right now: education.

It’s worse than EVER right now. Read this tweet of someone’s photo of an Isaac Asimov quote. If you don’t understand this, it’s because you’re probably too dumb. And it’s just so, so, so sad.

It tears me apart that most people don’t even read a single book in a year. How can people care so little about being more informed and enlightened?It’s like, people want to be anti-intellectuals. It’s a well known fact that most of America is just ignorant. Not just ignorant — proudly, blissfully ignorant. It’s a point of pride for them that they didn’t go to college. They believe in an old bearded man who lives in the sky and watches everything they do. I mean, how stupid can you be to believe in stuff like that? It’s like they live in the past or something.

And it’s these same, backwards, redneck, anti-intellectuals that are going to put Donald Trump in the White House later this year. It’s frightening.

Everyone knows this guy is worse than Hitler. Actually, nevermind that. Comparing the two belittles Hitler. Trump is so much far worse. Not only that, but he has the majority of ignorant, uneducated, white people behind him. The kind of white person that’s never even heard of white guilt. That makes him so much worse. And if you don’t understand white guilt, you’re just as racist and guilty as a slave-owner ever was.

Anyway, this country’s love for anti-intellectualism is going to end in a nuclear war with Russia, with our environment in shambles, a chapter of the KKK in every city, and the end of globalization and free trade markets. Globalization is important. If illegal immigration is stopped, we can’t help our neighbors to the south by giving them jobs and citizenship. They’re gonna be pissed when I see them Cabo next summer and they find out I’m an American.

But mostly, I’m horrified. I’m frightened. But mostly, I’m saddened that people are so happy living their lives as anti-intellectuals.

“Ignorance is bliss” — Thomas Gray, Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College

Fuck stupid people. They’re going to run this country into the ground with their racist bigotry and closed-minded ways.

Don’t they know? I went to a good college. I make more than twice the national median income. I read books. I READ BOOKS. These sad, sad anti-intellectuals should let me and people like me make the decisions on what’s best for them. These people can barely feed their children because they never went to college. Why should we leave the fate of the country up to them?

I listen to NPR, goddammit!