A lot of anti-intellectualism in modern society isn't even anti-intellectualism. It's more so an ideology of anti-wonder, anti-curiosity, or just anti-intuition that's kind of brought upon by modern society's efficiency fetishism. You know?

I’ve been thinking that a lot of what we call “anti-intellectualism” in modern society isn’t actually anti-intellectualism, at least not in the traditional sense.

It feels more like anti-wonder. Anti-curiosity. Anti-intuition.

Because intelligence itself is obviously still valued. We love people who can solve problems, optimize systems, invent things, make money, engineer shit, analyze data, etc. What seems to bother modern society is intellectual activity that doesn’t immediately go somewhere.

If you’re thinking about something, there has to be an output. If you’re learning something, it should lead to a skill. If you’re studying something, it should lead to a career. If you’re asking philosophical questions, people want to know what practical problem you’re solving.

And I think that gets at something deeper than simple anti-intellectualism.

Modern society has developed this almost compulsive need to justify things through their utility.

“What does it do?”

“What does it produce?”

“What problem does it solve?”

“How does this benefit me?”

And if you can’t answer those questions, suddenly the activity itself becomes suspect.

That’s what I mean by the proxy-to-justification problem. We take usefulness and use it as a proxy for value. Instead of asking whether something is meaningful, interesting, beautiful, intellectually stimulating, or capable of expanding our conception of the world, we ask whether it can be justified through some measurable practical outcome.

And once you start doing that enough, you eventually stop needing anyone to explicitly tell you what you're allowed to be curious about. You start filtering your own curiosity.

You don't ask the weird question because you already know it's “not productive.”

You don't explore the strange idea because you don't know where it's going to lead.

You don't sit around thinking about something just because it fascinates you because somewhere in the back of your head there's this little voice going, okay, but what's the point?

That's where I think the problem gets really fucking deep.

Because modern society is artificially accelerated in a way that makes introspection itself feel almost irresponsible. We're constantly being pushed toward the next task, the next purchase, the next achievement, the next deadline, the next thing that needs optimizing.

So actually stopping and asking why am I doing any of this? What do I actually value? Why do I believe what I believe? Why am I attracted to certain things? What kind of life do I actually want? can feel like you're somehow falling behind.

And obviously this isn't something capitalism invented by itself. There are much older intellectual traditions behind it. Taylorism, behaviorism, industrialization, American pragmatism, bureaucratic rationality, the general Western fascination with quantification and efficiency — all of these pushed us toward thinking about human activity in increasingly instrumental terms.

There's also a historical class dimension to this.

For a very long time, philosophy and intellectual inquiry were associated with people who had the luxury to engage in them. If you're working twelve hours in a factory just to keep yourself and your family alive, you're obviously going to have less time to sit around debating metaphysics or contemplating the nature of consciousness.

But something strange happened as that logic became culturally generalized.

The question stopped being “do I have the time to think about this?”

It became “why would anyone think about this if it doesn't accomplish anything?”

And those are two very different questions.

That's why I don't think “anti-intellectualism” completely captures what's happening.

We're not necessarily becoming hostile to intelligence.

We're becoming hostile to intellectual activity that can't immediately demonstrate its usefulness.

And ironically, I think that can eventually become hostile to the very creativity and eccentricity that made Western civilization so culturally powerful in the first place.

Because a lot of the things that eventually became incredibly useful started out as curiosity with no obvious purpose.

People experimented because they were fascinated.

People made art because they wanted to see what would happen.

People explored ideas because they couldn't stop wondering about them.

People built weird shit simply because they could.

You can't always know beforehand which curiosity is going to become useful.

That's kind of the whole point of curiosity.

And I think a civilization that becomes incapable of tolerating things that have no immediately obvious purpose eventually starts suffocating its own imagination.

The irony is that the West became incredibly powerful partly because it was so fucking good at experimentation, eccentricity, abstraction, speculation, and turning weird ideas into reality.

But now we've gotten so obsessed with asking “what is this good for?” that I sometimes wonder if we're slowly losing the ability to ask the much more primitive question that came before it:

“What if?”