Comfort Food for the Thinking Class: The Great Intellectual Stagnation
Wander into any bookstore (I dare you.) The non-fiction table will be all but dominated by the usual suspects: Malcolm Gladwell’s latest exploration of how some counterintuitive thing is actually the opposite of what you’d expect, a David Brooks meditation on character and virtue, something by Michael Lewis about how
Source: READ
December 31, 2025 @ 8:43 am
From the article:
“Why doesn’t something come along to tear all this down? That’s what I keep asking myself. Historically, intellectual establishments get overthrown by new movements that point out the emperor has no clothes. The Enlightenment displaced scholasticism. Romanticism rebelled against Enlightenment rationalism. Modernism rejected Victorian conventions. There’s usually some group of young thinkers somewhere who see through the pretensions of their elders and build something new. Where are those people now?”
The answer is those who escaped the conformist programming of Empire Academia’s Kingdom of Education are, as will most persecuted minorities, be hiding in plain sight. Many have joined John Galt’s strike of the mind without ever having read the book. I am an elder of that movement, I mentor several.
You want your thinkers back? Accept the fact that a comfortable mind has no motive to be a productive creative mind, purge the shrinks from the education process (and most particularly their influence on the lower elementary grades where they’ve done the most damage) and let the situation stew for about a generation and a half, say thirty years ballpark guess. By 2055 or so you should have some genuine radical thinkers ready to mix it up with the Architect and Agent Smith.