The Intellectual Strata Of Society

As inauguration day approaches, I read my daily Facebook feed with a mixture of bafflement and amusement. Fulminations over Trump are a daily (even hourly) occurrence. These people honestly believe that Trump is a mortal threat to American life, ignoring the longstanding and obscene excesses of a federal government that has been running renegade beyond the boundaries of the Constitution for at least three generations. To review:

• Presidents unilaterally embroil America in ruinous and costly wars, a blatant seizure of Congress's sole power to declare war, which Congress hasn't exercised since World War II. In more recent times, Presidents claim unilateral power to spy on and assassinate American citizens without due process of law.

• Congress has utterly cast off its restraints of enumerated powers and operates as a national legislature rather than a federal one. It legislates on all matters great and small, thereby destroying freedom, interstate competition, and creativity. It also spends vast sums of money on anything it likes without regard to enumerated powers, dispensing political favors, bribing states and individuals into even greater servitude, and bankrupting us. Contrast all this to the words of James Madison -- the "father of the Constitution" -- who vetoed a modest public works bill on the basis that it was beyond Congress's enumerated powers and was therefore illegal.

• Federal courts -- when not rubber-stamping federal excesses -- routinely interfere in affairs that are reserved to the states and the people under the Tenth Amendment. They do this under the guise of the Fourteenth Amendment and "civil rights," despite breaking faith with the framers of that Amendment and making all rights hostage to secret Star Chambers.

• And let us not forgot federal agencies, who crank out rules and regulations with the force of law in blatant violation of the Constitution's designation of Congress as sole bearer of the legislative power

I've been writing and speaking about these issues for over a decade to a deaf audience, who frets only now that it faces a president-elect whom it personally dislikes. To go into paroxysms over Trump resembles an Ebola patient who lies quietly in a hospital bed until, quite suddenly, he discovers a hangnail and screams with worry. It's mind-boggling, at least until one considers the intellectual strata of society.

The vast majority of people -- perhaps 70% to 80% -- do not think for themselves as to any of the big issues that control or threaten their lives. These people live day-to-day. Their historical memory is confined to personal experience. They have a confirmation bias that interprets current reality as normal and any contrary thoughts, words, or deeds as abnormal. And, most important of all, they adopt and parrot the worldview of professional "intellectuals," who peddle a facile (and thoroughly false) narrative through the various news and entertainment media. The common man looks up to those who wield impressive-sounding degrees and official titles, eager to be on their side of any public debate rather than risk falling out of step. So the common man plasters a fabricated, bumper-sticker philosophy on his Facebook page or his car to advertise just how intellectually hip he his. In short, the common man is a sheep.

The professional "intellectuals" constitute perhaps 15% to 20% of people. Such people are not intellectuals in the true sense, which means caring about ideas for their own sake and exploring them to their conclusion regardless of consequences. Quite to the contrary, a professional "intellectual" is fixated entirely on consequences. Ideas are merely means to an end, namely power and/or wealth. Such people are not even very intelligent, and they engage in precious little that might be classified as rigorous intellectual work. But they are tenacious and fully devoted to manipulating words and ideas, which the common man will reflexively latch onto without bothering to analyze.

The remainder of the people are the small minority of us who are true intellectuals. We care about the truth, explore it, and speak it even though this infuriates pretty much everyone else, who vastly outnumber us. Our forebears are men such as Socrates, Epictetus, Christ, Thomas More, and many others who spoke truth but were persecuted for it. This blog and my books, for example, are clearly an intellectual exercise. They bring me no material gain whatsoever, but I keep at them because I care about truth and believe it's worth proclaiming, even if few are listening (and perhaps even especially then).

But getting back to my original point, the truth of the matter is that America is seriously compromised politically, financially, culturally, and morally. Trump is not the problem, which is far bigger and likely won't be resolved anytime soon, if ever. I predict that at the first sign of the trouble that has been brewing for a long time, everyone will blame Trump. That's when it will become REALLY invigorating to be an intellectual contrarian.