Someone wrote a piece on Twitter, and suggested that a whole generation of fake-intellectuals have grown up in the US, and probably 10-percent of society wants to impress you with their fake intellectualism.
I've been pondering over this idea since I read this idea last week.
The idea is that these people went through high school in the past 25 years....most attempted to go through college....maybe a quarter of them dropped out by the end of the first year....still thinking they were 'gifted' and still tried to impress the public. The rest? They sharpen their chatter...wanting to get you bought into their BS.
I grew up in the rural south and we always had a couple of gentlemen in the area who read US News and World Report, National Geographic, the Nashville Banner, Argosy magazine, and Life. On their porch, they represented this weird form of intellectualism. These are guys who hadn't gone off to college, or read Plato, or studied Roman history, or could give you more than one paragraph on evolution (if they got onto this....was the Scoops Monkey trial).
These porch guys were generally 'IT'.....they were fake-intellectuals but you felt somewhat impressed by the chatter.
My problem with the current crowd....the ones who appear on NPR, Fox, CNN or MSNBC....is that you feel like they don't even measure up to the porch-guys. You get four minutes of 2-star BS.....there's no real convincing argument, and your finger is angling toward the MUTE-button constantly.
Yeah, I sorta miss the porch crowd. They at least read their material and could give you a decent 2-minute argument.
So this brings me to the population problem.....that we have around 30-million intellectuals in America....of which....probably 90-percent are fake-intellectuals and just wasting your time on their chatter. You'd like to hit mute, but sometimes it's your neighbor, or your co-worker, etc.
It's an odd problem....but it's not worth getting all stressed out about. On the fortunate side? Well....there's just one Elon.....not 10-million Elons.