this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2023
453 points (91.4% liked)

Asklemmy

43816 readers
787 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

One of the most aggravating things to me in this world has to be the absolutely rampant anti-intellectualism that dominates so many conversations and debates, and its influence just seems to be expanding. Do you think there will ever actually be a time when this ends? I'd hope so once people become more educated and cultural changes eventually happen, but as of now it honestly infuriates me like few things ever have.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That may be the case but it doesn't change the strong current of anti-intellectualism in modern societies.

It's useful to those in power, for example.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No disagreement there, but simply declaring that “those who don’t see things my way are anti-intellectual” is a drastic over-simplification of how things got this way. Declaring it into Lemmy, which an echo chamber of progressives and communists (including myself) means we all know who he’s talking about, which means it’s just a progressive dog-whistle for the “them” that we want to be mad at.

There are a lot of intelligent people who hold what I’m sure OP would consider anti-intellectual stances. I live around them, work with them, play games with them, etc. it’s much more valuable to understand who they are and how they got to their beliefs than it is to simply vilify them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I haven't seen the argument "disagreement is anti-intellectual" being used here, though I'm sure people act that way. It's hard to be disagreed with: people tend to entrench rather than change.

It's still worth noting that anti-intellectualism is pushed as a tool of division and control though. Sure it occurs naturally but weaponized at a systemic level it is much more of a threat to society.