Anti Intellectualism Quotes

“The world of conspiracy theories is one where stupid people dismiss the expertise of highly qualified people, and attribute to these experts a wicked desire to lie to and gull the masses. In other words, they portray experts as sinister enemies of the people. Conspiracy theories reflect the increasingly prevalent notion that the average, uneducated person is always right – can always see the real truth of a situation – while the educated experts are always wrong because they are deliberately lying to the people to further a conspiracy by the elite against the people. It is increasingly being perceived as a “sin”, a crime, to be smart, to be an expert. Average people do not like smart people, do not trust them, and are happy to regard them as nefarious conspirators. They are constructing a fantasy world where the idiot is always right and honest, and anyone who opposes the idiot always wrong and dishonest. A global Confederacy of Dunces is being established, whose cretinous values are transmitted by bizarre memes that crisscross the internet at a dizzying speed, and which are always accepted uncritically as the finest nuggets of truth. Woe betide anyone who challenges the Confederacy. They will be immediately trolled.”
― Joe Dixon, Dumbocalypse Now: The First Dunning-Kruger President

“The first truly powerful and widespread impulse to anti-intellectualism in American politics was, in fact, given by the Jacksonian movement. Its distrust of expertise, its dislike for centralization, its desire to uproot the entrenched classes, and its doctrine that important functions were simple enough to be performed by anyone, amounted to a repudiation non only of the system of government by gentlemen which the nation had inherited from the eighteenth century, but also of the special value of the educated classes in civic life.”
― Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life

“While professional women and ‘middleclass’ women in general run the risk of becoming isolated from the needs, concerns, and consciousness of working-class and nonprofessional women, the latter run the risk of falling into an anti-intellectualism that contributes to their oppression because it stands in the way of their attaining a clear analysis of their situation. Pursuing endless theoretical refinements that are never translated into dialogue and practical action is as ineffective as engaging in endless talks about personal problems and feelings without ever looking at them as social problems. These problems are social, not only in the sense of being shared by many women, but more importantly because they are socially determined and are the product of concrete and historically specific class, legal, and political relations and forms of consciousness”
― Martha A. Gimenez, Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays

“Reason and logic are a force for unity. People can rally around the objective, absolute Truth. All of these are undermined by the Dunning-Kruger effect, by the rise of irrationalism. Today, the world is full of subjectivists and relativists who actively sneer at the Truth and proclaim that everyone has their own truth. When you start believing your own truth, your own propaganda, your own bullshit, you become a narcissist. You think you are a god, and that no one is allowed to contradict you. After all, who are they to challenge your truth?”
― Joe Dixon, Dumbocalypse Now: The First Dunning-Kruger President

“Anti-intellectualism is one of the greatest problems in the world today.”
― Wayne Gerard Trotman

“People do not care about right or wrong - they don't care about truth and reasoning - they are subconsciously driven by their instinct for survival, towards confidence, charm and charisma, just like moths are drawn towards a burning candle to face their inevitable demise.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Citizens of Peace: Beyond the Savagery of Sovereignty

“The biggest threats to humankind today are climate change, fake news, anti-intellectualism and Donald Trump.”
― Abhijit Naskar

“In a phrase, what I did derive from him was a precise definition of the perfection of life and manhood, personified in his eyebrows, his forehead, his eyes, his nose, his ears, his cheeks, his throat, his complexion, the color of his skin, his strength, his chest, his hands, and countless other of his attributes. … Because of him I cannot love an intellectual person. Because of him I am not attracted to a person who wears glasses. Because of him I began to love strength, an impression of overflowing blood, ignorance, rough gestures, careless speech, and the savage melancholy inherent in flesh not tainted in any way with intellect. …”
― Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask

“Who can doubt that this is Planet Dumb? Who can deny that this is the dumbest planet in the cosmos? It’s the planet that willfully chose to go Full Retard. Aren’t you sick of being a dumbo, one of the dim legions of dunces? Don’t you want to be on the smart side, the side of intelligent people? This could be a rational, logical world, if we had the will to make it so. Sadly, we seem to lack the desire for sanity and rationality. Humans are a Mythos species. They love their crazy stories. They reject Logos. Humanity will not live happily ever after. Its stupidity will kill it. Ignorance is fatal. Old Humanity chose to go Full Retard. New humanity – HyperHumanity – will go Full Smart.”
― Ranty McRanterson, Full Retard: The Dumbest Just Got Dumber

“The late author Philip K. Dick once said that America isn't intellectual, it's anti-intellectual. Initially, I thought that was a harsh statement. But when you see intelligent people routinely branded 'nerds" and hear about the endless school shootings in the United States, it's hard not to think he had a point.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Science may be, and has been, misused, but the proper cure for that is not to replace science by non-science and sense by nonsense - but to replace science-misused by science well-used.”
― Isaac Asimov, The stars in their courses

“Mindfulness” is the purest mindlessness. It is the great and perverse desire to annihilate consciousness and exist in an eternal now of unthinking perception of nothing at all. It is the most nihilistic vision there has ever been. It is “nirvana” – absolute nothingness, the state of infinite anti-consciousness.”
― Jack Tanner, Zarathustra's Out-of-Body Experience: How Humans Become Angels

“If you reject Absolute Truth, as Discordians do, you are thereby claiming that any doxa (opinion, belief ) is as valid as any other doxa, and thus we enter the absurdist world of non-knowledge, of “all truths” = “all lies”. There is neither truth nor falsehood, just what people arbitrarily choose to call truth or falsehood at any instant, according to their shifting beliefs, opinions and speculations. This is exactly what the Discordians subscribe to in their demented war against knowledge and truth. Discordians are ignoramuses who oppose and sneer at reason and logic. They are those who burn down the Tree of Knowledge , without ever having eaten from it. Instead, they have devoured the fruit of the Tree of Ignorance.”
― Brother Cato, Illuminism Contra Discordianism

“The great rationalist Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am.” The religious mystic the Buddha said, “I think, therefore I am not.” Why is the Buddha much more popular than Descartes? Because the average person barely thinks at all.”
― Thomas Stark, The Sheldrake Shift: A Critical Evaluation of Morphic Resonance

“Twitter Is Twitter the ultimate Mythos medium? Writing too hard for you? Analysis too hard for you? No need to worry. Now you can say it all in 140 characters, roughly reflecting the size of your vocabulary, knowledge and brain. Twitter is successful because 140 characters corresponds to the typical size of a meme: a single idea that can shoot off into the Darwinian meme pool and be naturally selected by all the jostling Mythos meme machines (Twitterati, or Twits, to you and me). Don’t you just love it? This is dumbing down with go-faster stripes and turbo engines. Maybe we can reach the ultimate Tweet: zero characters and a complete flatline of human mental activity.”
― Joe Dixon, Dumbocalypse Now: The First Dunning-Kruger President

“Having the data is not the same as having the expertise to look through the data - if it were, everybody with a smartphone would be a doctor or a scientist.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Mucize Insan: When The World is Family

“Science may appear to have no connection with political freedom…. Scientists are too busy with positive measures, such as productive research and the dissemination of the results of the search for truth, to take time out to refute every crackpot notion that gets into print…. If the democratic process were applied ideally, and if enough people were to accept the claims in the article as truth, then publicly supported schools and universities could be depopulated of competent faculties, whose places could be taken by quacks and political appointees. Granted that the chance of this is very small, nevertheless the imagined situation has a modern precedent. Something very similar did happen (on purely political grounds) in a European country during several years preceding the second world war. It has happened in other countries since the end of that war.”
― Dean B. McLaughlin, The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe

“Entertainers are seen by people from all walks of life as some sort of allknowing prophet - if they say, a certain health drink is good, the masses would most naively embrace that health drink in their life - if they say, a certain watch or perfume or handbag is the symbol of elegance, the masses would most blindly run after it - and if they run for office, the masses would most stupidly vote for them, without actually knowing their psychological capacity to run a people and maintain peace.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Citizens of Peace: Beyond the Savagery of Sovereignty

“For perhaps these attacks on feminism can clearly be seen in a wider context of anti-intellectualism, and our era's prevailing disappointment with and rejection of the usefulness of ideology. While the only political ideology to truly thrive internationally over the last decade or so is that of the neo-conservative Right - in Australia, economic rationalism is its proudest achievement - the ideological regimes of the Left (communism, socialism) have faltered. As feminism has traditionally been associated with left-wing thinking and activism, its philosophical fall from grace could perhaps have been better anticipated.”
― Virginia Trioli, Generation F: Why we still struggle with sex and power

“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“When you allow society to be designed by irrational, unintelligent markets, and capitalists who will do anything to turn a profit, what do you expect? Fifty percent of teens feel addicted to mobile devices. They can’t put their smartphones down. Their devices are like an extra limb, or vital bodily organ. But smartphones are in truth dumbphones. They produce an inability to focus, to concentrate, to pay attention ... the prerequisites for intelligent, considered behavior. They are not social devices, they are anti-social. They generate a lack of empathy, lack of quality human relationships, an epidemic of snarling, disgusting trolls tormenting every victim they can find. Smartphones are transforming all aspects of human behavior, and not for the better. Who is doing anything about it? Who is empowered to do anything about it? No one at all. Anyone who tried would be branded a fascist. That’s why these things have to play out to the bitter end. The cataclysm inherent in them is sure to unfold since there is nothing to stop it.”
― Ranty McRanterson, Planet Stupid: How Earth Got Dumber and Dumber

“Then along came social media, the worst thing of all, the Cretin Unbound. Any moron could shout down Prometheus. The confederacy of dunces could descend like a pack and mock Apollo and Pythagoras. Now I’m putting an end to this circus. The clowns have performed long enough. The joke’s not funny anymore.”
― Mark Romel, The Mistletoe Murders: A Nietzschean Murder Mystery

“Is there anything worse than a pessimistic nihilist who believes in nothing apart from atheism and scientism, and the doctrine that our lives are meaningless, purposeless, and pointless, that we have no free will, that we are just strange biological robots suffering from a bizarre set of illusions, and that we are nothing but collections of mindless, lifeless things that have pointlessly come together for a while. When they inevitably go their separate ways, we will die and stay dead forever. There is no afterlife. There is no hope. This is it. Life is shit and then you die. Such beliefs constitute a serious mental disorder since they are an outright attack on the mind itself. A mind that rejects its own reality is by definition a diseased and defective mind.”
― Thomas Stark, The Book of Mind: Seeking Gnosis

“Mindfulness opposes judgment, conceptualization, words, language, reason, logic, knowledge, understanding, science, philosophy, mathematics, history, intellectualism, learning from the past and planning for the future. It reduces thoughtful humans to the state of thoughtless animals, prisoners of the ignorance of the moment, overwhelmed by primitive sense-certainty. And this is sold as a desirable state, something we should all aspire to!”
― Thomas Stark, The Stairway to Consciousness: The Birth of Self-Awareness from Unconscious Archetypes

“It is essential for the rulers’ rule not to be apparent, hence the elite’s ingenious use of “democracy” (dumbocracy), in which the sedated masses are led to believe that they choose how they are governed. Have the cattle ever gone more willingly to the abattoir?”
― Joe Dixon, Dumbocalypse Now: The First Dunning-Kruger President

“If you are able to learn with reason at hand and warmth in heart then you'll start to see the foulness of the primitive fantasies, such as nationalism, fundamentalism, elitism, intellectualism, anti-intellectualism and so on.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Generation Corazon: Nationalism is Terrorism

“The idea that objectivity is best reached only through rational thought is a specifically Western and masculine way of thinking--one that we will challenge throughout the book.”
― Margaret L. Andersen, Race, Class, & Gender: An Anthology

“Shred all chains to dust my friend, and advance as actual liberated beings, liberated not just from the primitive hogwash of magic and mysticism, but also from the modern hogwash of intellectual condescension.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Şehit Sevda Society: Even in Death I Shall Live

“Celebrities and influencers are not health experts, stop taking medical advice from halfwits of wellness.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Handcrafted Humanity: 100 Sonnets For A Blunderful World

“Stop being a two-bit doctor from ten minutes of googling.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Handcrafted Humanity: 100 Sonnets For A Blunderful World