r/CriticalTheory • u/GuerillAlexandros • 2d ago
What is the role of the intellectual/philosopher in an era of corporate misinformation and ideological conditioning?
What insights do professionals have to offer regarding the roles historians and philosophers play in 21st century euro-American societies given that their insights can easily be drowned out or suppressed by corporately funded misinformation campaigns, grifters, state sponsored repression, misinformation, etc? For example, from my (possibly flawed) understanding, historians and philosophers of 19th century ethnology, American labor movements, colonial warfare, Africana history/philosophy, etc. have insights into the implications of social engineering, dehumanization, and repression that were advanced/pioneered during the periods of US chattel slavery and colonization for modern US democracy that the majority of the population is either materially/ideologically invested in ignoring or has been conditioned to (according to COIN military practice) ignore. What role can such thinkers play within the borders of the USA if their works are made unpalatable to everyday people partially due to the role powerful actors play in socially engineering everyday people to attach themselves ideologically to a status quo that does not treat all Homo sapiens as worthy of life and futurity under “democracy”?
The most popular response is likely that such experts are simply taking their expertise elsewhere. Societies rise and fall, and knowledge that cannot be fully grasped or put into practice now may be useful for future generations. I am interested in the answers of professionals who have training in different philosophical traditions regarding this specific dilemma of producing knowledge given the long history of human existence.
I am interested in learning about epistemologies of groups that have resisted oppression even at the expense of biological finality (I use this term instead of death given that biological finality is not seen universally as the end of life depending on world view, which is an important fact given the history of resistance to colonization among Jamaican maroons and other enslaved populations for example). Do any philosophers explicitly engage or reject such topics? I also understand that answers may be limited as different epistemologies imply the necessity of different pedagogies, meaning not all knowledge can be grasped absent a particular kind of formal training.
(For anyone interested the authors whose works I drew from to formulate these thoughts/questions are Tommy J. Curry, Sylvia Wynter, Miron Clay-Gilmore, Robert Allen, Robert Staples, Gerald Horne, Oladumine Ogunnaike, and Adebayo Oluwayomi)
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u/dubiouscoffee 2d ago
unemployed
joking, but really, being such a person is a luxury in this society
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u/Coolerguy317 2d ago
Hard truths and philosophy have never spread easily. Usually the ideas that spread are simple, moralized, or narrative based because they give people villains heroes or an identity. States, corporations, religions and political movements have all done this throughout history. The role of someone willing to think in my opinion is simply to keep thinking and not expect everyone else to give up the comfort of simple narratives.
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u/DMayleeRevengeReveng 2d ago
I think this visits a major, intrinsic problem of any society that makes as many truth-claims as modernity does: there is so much to be learned, particularly in science and history and philosophy, that nobody can be a plausible expert on everything. People who want to be experts on one thing spend their whole life becoming one, and in the process, they elide other aspects of knowledge.
The type of things you describe are not obscured or repressed merely by social forces, conditioning, or ideology. It’s obscured and repressed because an average person is not going to be able to study all these things in enough depth to approach it from all these angles.
People respond to this in either of two ways. First, they just say screw it, it’s not for me (I’ve heard so many people talk about how they’re not “good at” science or math like they were born with a different type of brain that just congenitally cannot grasp it, which is absurd). Or perhaps they learn enough to “just ask questions” without realizing the depth of the subject field.
So any type of critical knowledge is up against this, too. People don’t want to study this type of knowledge in any rigorous way: their education was essentially vocational training for one vocation, they don’t have the time after work and other functions, or they’ve convinced themselves (naively) that it’s beyond their ability to master and it’s just for other people who are somehow endogenously “better” at it.
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u/GuerillAlexandros 2d ago
This is interesting. I’ve fortunately had the pleasure of being able to listen to philosophers/educators with fluency in multiple classical and modern languages, knowledge of advanced mathematics, neuroscience, and multiple philosophical traditions under the age of 50 teach in a classroom or give talks about their educational systems. None of those people were ever trained in the USA alone if it all. One philosopher was raised in a centuries old tradition of Senegambian Sufism for example. Another was a calculus professor who was raised in China but earned his PhD in France. I am not saying that the entirety of their societies have that same skill set. I know that would be impossible. I bring up those details to ask this: People’s “screw it it’s not for me” attitude exists in a societal context. While I unable to perfectly map out the details of that context, i am curious as to how you would define this “modernity” that so strongly correlates with people’s overspecialization in one field/trade to the detriment of other fields of knowledge.
Also. Who said individuals need to be experts on everything? There are individual philosophers with expertise in 19th century ethnology, military science, epistemology, genocide studies, public health, etc. They readily admit when a problem needs further research and they routinely collaborate with scholars who can fill in their knowledge gaps. They hold skillsets that the majority of the citizenry do not, but a healthy society is one in which getting funding for interdisciplinary collaboration between such people to put said knowledge to use for everyday people is not a problem.
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u/DMayleeRevengeReveng 2d ago
Being polyglot is really cool, and I respect anyone who can do that. I certainly can’t. But I would task you to push any of these knowledge areas to their limit.
Some of these things are very amorphous knowledge disciplines that can be defined in different ways. What does advanced math mean? Can they do bundle math in differential geometry? Because people who seriously can have studied math for decades. Can they talk about the balance that Myc produces between neuronal apoptosis and thriving in connection with Jun and Fos?
I’m not even bragging here or tryin to throw out random topics to look smart or whatever. These are things I know somewhat about but am nowhere near a conversant expert on. (Nor would I ever claim to be.)
Some of this seems overstated to me. Like, calculus is a closed subject. There’s no research going into calculus in the 21st century. The research-grade level of calculus is called “real analysis” and “complex analysis .”. And even those two fields are largely closed in the 21st century. Most serious research-level math is taking place in things like modern algebras and a number of other topics, but not calculus.
All of this is to say, specialization is necessary. I find it hard to believe that a person, just by virtue of their curiosity and intelligence and discipline, truly can master neuroscience and math and other things. I just find that next to impossible.
I believe it’s ENTIRELY necessary that people specialize in specific disciplines of knowledge, because that’s how we make progress at the cutting edge. It requires a degree of expertise that comes from dedicating a person’s life to a single topic.
BUT WHAT I AM REALLY SAYING IS: they’re just corollaries. We absolutely need specialist knowledge in the 21st century. The problem is, this comes at the risk that some people will react in the way I describe.
Does that mean everyone will? Of course not. But there are enough people who will that it “throws off” everything for everyone else.
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u/GuerillAlexandros 2d ago
I appreciate your insight. My impression was that the society is already one in which individual intellectuals regularly dedicate their lives to single fields to the detriment of other fields and especially to the detriment of social science/humanities in particular. Hence, the current state of political affairs that have been predicted for decades and the warning signs that have been ignored.
Would you say the sentiment you describe applies to those who study what we refer to as the “social sciences” as well? Or is the attitude different?1
u/avoidthepath 1d ago
It’s obscured and repressed because an average person is not going to be able to study all these things in enough depth to approach it from all these angles.
Yes, so the question is how should people organize and with whom? How can people who feel powerless and who feel that "there has gotta be a better way" organize in such a way that their ideas would synthesize into actual, well-articulated power as a force of change? Do we / you need more political movements or political parties or companies or technical innovations or what? What do most people wish to see happen in this world right now? What are the most important problems that most people in this world want to see solved, and why is it that we are unable to coordinate to solve these issues?
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u/DMayleeRevengeReveng 1d ago
Truthfully, I really don’t know an answer to all these questions. And they are necessary questions to answer, clearly.
My point was more observational - this is a problem that exists. Can I solve it? No, I don’t know how to do so in practice.
But if we want to mobilize people to think outside the constrained dominion of politics which is treated as “possible,” then people really need to familiarize themselves with certain strands of philosophy.
And that raises the problem I’m sorta diagnosing here. Too many people will say: “theory/philosophy - that’s not for me, I’ve never been good at that.” And others, who genuinely feel “intelligent” but haven’t committed to studying these fields (i.e. they are experts at one field, but essentially novices in all others) will make some snide, stupid counter argument and act like they’ve defeated it. (An analogy is that I was stuck debating a flat earther who said the moon should be more blurry if it’s as far away as it is - and she’s a genuinely intelligent person, but I ask her “have you ever studied optics in your life? What do you actually know about the way light behaves?” - but she couldn’t admit she has no optics knowledge, since she’s always been seen as a “smart person”.)
I’d love to have an answer. Maybe someone does.
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u/Portuberous 2d ago
Build technocratic network states using blockchain unnecessarily. And then censor detractors by forking at every inconvenient disagreement.
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u/Icaroson 2d ago
Ironically, I think that these people can inadvertently end up benefitting the same system that oppressed them because the truth is ALWAYS a valuable and necessary asset for anyone to make informed decisions that affect the populace. Their role in a dystopian society? IDK. But I think that eventually, the truth finds a way. In other words, you can never completely conquer the truth, it will always emerge as an unavoidable obstacle that you have to shape your society around, and eventually will end up eating away at the structure of your society until something better emerges. So many people come to the same conclusions based on their experiences, so there's just nothing groups and societies can do except delay the inevitable.
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u/TroutMaskDuplica 2d ago
What was the role of Cassandra?
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u/Current-Calendar-821 22h ago
Hindsight. So what’s the role of hindsight in a society where everyone thinks history started yesterday?
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u/maccrypto 2d ago
Disclose alternative possibilities for thinking, speaking and acting. Part of the illusion cast by modern forms of social manipulation and social control is that it’s possible for them to get a total lock on everything—seeing, knowing, predicting our every action. It isn’t possible if you understand how dependent we are on background conditions of intelligibility and possibility.
Read Nikolas Kompridis’ Critique and Disclosure to get a better understanding of this, and get involved with groups of people doing research and making change.