(Intellectual) history repeats itself

These days, we like to pride ourselves on our ability to understand things more clearly than people of past generations. Removing sexism and racism from our literature and academia is certainly no small feat, but many issues seem to keep recurring as if no one had taken them seriously before.

The example I was thinking of is popular culture and its adverse effects on intellectuals. Thinking people, it seems, have always felt like a minority struggling against the blissfully ignorant stupid people. Robert Anton Wilson said that "the strongest conspiracy on the planet is the conspiracy of the stupid," and the truth behind that is almost hilarious when you think about it. All the talk about government conspiracies is made up of three parts: (1)the real conspiracy, which in my opinion is neither as powerful as some claim nor is it non-existent, (2)the joke conspiracy, which lampoons reality and reminds us to think twice before we believe what we're told, and (3)the conspiracy which is not an organized group that rules the world, but rather the sum total of human ignorance.

Believing that the majority of problems in the world is caused by general ignorance and stupidity is not a new one. Henry David Thoreau wrote "The whole ground of human life seems to have been gone over by their predecessors, both the heights and valleys, and all things to have been cared for." Way back in the 1850's, people already knew that we were repeating ourselves. Thoreau talks about the Classical Greek writers and their seemingly incredible wisdom, and even more incredibly the fact that most people live in profound ignorance of them.

What the intellectuals want more than anything else, I think, is for everyone to be as smart as they are. They have wanted this for a long time, probably ever since being a reclusive scholar in an ivory tower ceased to be cool. Of course, they gathered in those ivory towers in the first place because they wanted to be with like-minded people, but that's beside the point.

The point is, if you've had any truly revolutionary ideas or thoughts, from yourself or from someone else, you should be proud of them, but also remember that someone else has probably thought of them already. Don't shirk history and old writings because they're old; accept the fact that those old books and ideas have persisted for a very good reason. Intellectuals of the past knew that they could not change the world around them in their own lifetimes, so they wrote down what they had learned in the hopes that others would use them to accelerate their own mental growth. We have, knowingly or not, inherited a legacy of fabulous intellectual wealth, and this "Information Age" we live in gives us the power to access as much of it as we choose. There is no shame in standing on the shoulders of giants, since it would be an insult to those same giants if we say "No thanks, I'll reach enlightenment and save the world on my own, if you don't mind."