The Fallacy of the Intellectual and the Limit Experience

The Fallacy of the Intellectual and the Limit Experience

By: Erreh Svaia

Caprine Dispersion

“Knowledge doesn't really form part of human nature. Conflict, combat, the outcome of the combat, and, consequently, risk and chance are what gives rise to knowledge. Knowledge is not instinctive; it is counter instinctive, just as it is not natural but counter natural."

Michel Foucault

American political scientist Mark Lilla explained on his book The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals into Politics, about Greek philosopher Plato in Syracuse trying to turn a dictator interested in philosophy, into his own vision of the Philosopher King, a virtuous ruler whose crave for wisdom would help himself transcend the role of a despotic ruler, not inebriated with power looking for the well-being of his people, he also touched familiar issued already explored by another French thinker, and a favorite of mine, Raymond Aron writer of the timeless book The Opium of the Intellectuals, about the role of the philo-tyrannical intellectual, intellectuals whose vision gets blinded by their own ideals and end up serving (as Vladimir Lenin used to call them “useful idiots”) a dictatorship, just the way it happened in the now defunct USSR, Mao's China or Ho Chi Minh's Vietnam; Lilla touches on his book one more sensible spot when talking about the life of another remarkable French intellectual named Michel Foucault, known for his reverence towards Nietzsche and Freud, and his desire to take "experiences to the limit " was another guy whose bad informed instincts took him into supporting the May of 68 riots in Paris, the political insurrection in Algeria and the Iranian fundamentalist revolution without a truly intellectual rationalization but more a desire to take things too close to the edge, let´s not forget intellectuals behind the rise of people like Lenin or Stalin who later where executed during the purges, or Heidegger and Carl Schmidt who were part of the ideologues of Nazism, Jean Paul Sartre and his love of the Che Guevara and Marxism, Pablo Neruda and his love for Joseph Stalin, Gabriel Garcia Marquez devotion towards Fidel Castro, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein and Joseph Stiglitz love for Hugo Chavez and his Bolivarian Revolution that drowned Venezuela into the dark waters of desperation, or Paul Krugman infatuation with Alexis Tsipras during the “Grexit” crisis, or Aleksandr Dugin current fascination with Putin, intellectuals are not infallible, and a lot of times they get into really terrible judgements.

Two main concepts that I see have taken us to where we are now in the present time, a bunch of guys in several countries seeing Russian neo Czar (dictator) Vladimir Putin as the rise of a wise ruler who is taking the Russian people on the road to salvation, Putin, close to the Russian Orthodox Church is seen as a guardian and defender of traditional Christian moral values against the depravity of the Western world, Putin also seen by many as the savior of Russia from liberal politics, western style democracy, and as a defense line from "Zionism" and the dark menace of the New World Order lead by everybody favorite "boogeyman" George Soros, there are tenths of videos on the internet with fake translations on how Putin is “fighting” against corruption, against the global financial institutions and against USA 's imperialism, yes, Putin (the grey bureaucrat) was the main figure in the fall of an old oligarchy that took Russian democratic path into a truly economic chaos, ending in another type of oligarchy this time with Putin as its head, staying in power for almost two decades, eroding whatever it remained of democracy and launching a global campaign in order to discredit democracy and to promote separatism (disguised these days as nationalism) in the Western world, by doing this, Putin, his allies and their propaganda machine are igniting a plan in order to divide the Western world just like the old Soviet world was divided, discrediting democracy just like KGB agents did in Eastern Europe after World War Two in order to make easier to get control over those countries and create the so called Iron Curtain, you don’t believe? Read Polish historian Anne Applebaum´s Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe.

By creating a global sense of discredit against democracy and supported by a global crisis, these architects of rage have used populism as a new tool for their guerrilla war, the internet and the spreading of fake news have also been pivotal for the chaos slowly growing in the Western world, people getting pushed by disinformation into a state of desperation steadily driven towards that "experience to the limit ", to a state of blind desperation and irrational rage in order to think that things couldn't be worse, making a "jump thru the window " as the only option left, we have seen it in Greece during the so called “Grexit” that didn't happen despite it being so close, and next the “Brexit” referendum that hit the European Union right in its financially center, the blind desire to take things to the limit also hit deep in the heart of Austria, France and Germany where previously unseen since the days before World War Two far right, nationalist and xenophobic political parties started to become popular, with Putin as its main instigator, becoming almost a patron saint, a "Che Guevara" for the Far Right National Populist world movement, nationalist and xenophobic Far Right for developed countries in the North and nationalist populist "Socialismo del Siglo XXI" (21st Century Socialism) for the developing countries, as we have seen the Kremlin also close to the radical left the in Greece France and Spain, in the end these extremes meet behind our backs as we have seen radical left candidates like Jean Luc Mélenchon and National Front leader Marine Le Pen almost tacitly working against the traditional political parties, and Spanish Podemos radical left wing party expressing its support for the Catalonia separatist-nationalist movement.

In the USA also we saw the rise of far right tendencies, democratic discredit and the will of certain sectors of the civilian society in order to take the experience to the limit, as favorite candidate Hillary Clinton was surpassed and defeated by the populist xenophobic campaign by Donald Trump, a man with zero political experience, hatred towards Mexico and other countries and devotion towards Putin, with many more people suspecting again about the Kremlin involvement in USA 's election by propaganda use within popular internet networks like Google, Facebook and Twitter, precipitating a so called "Withdrawal Doctrine" parallel to the Brexit, with Trump declaring the USA withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, the TPP, the UNESCO and NAFTA, and even a mad desire to build a wall in the Mexico-USA border, in what can be seen as a dismemberment of the whole Western world, people blindly following a mad desire of taking things to the limit, and one that should makes us considered how Foucault ended up as victim of this self-destructive desire, and to realize that his, was close to a suicidal obsession, we should understand that without a critical way of thinking is easy to fall into a trap created by a big flow of disinformation in order to create a state of despair, making us easy victims of desperation and leading is to believe that the only way out if this is taking things to the extreme and leading to the suicidal will within our society, democratic institutions and political systems, in our times walls are starting to be built just like the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain, but we must remember that walls are not exactly build to keep others out, but to preventing us from escaping.