Sam was Neologist-in-Chief during the War of the Words. His department was tasked with munitioning the Eggheads with newly minted vocabulary to combat the Fatheads, who were multiplying like a jammed hashtag key. All manners of possible letter associations and permutations were coined with Seussian valour. Alas, the Eggheads could not match the Fatheads’ rapid fire of textese and emojis.By 2026, far outnumbered and diminished to hurling dangling participles, diphthongs and derivations, the Eggheads were reduced to fighting nostalgia, longing for the days when they might have dropped big, fat word bombs from the sky, before dictionaries went digital.
Sam was last seen motoring down the hemingway to the peaceful hamlet of Sonnet Sound, where he lived out the rest of his life in a one-storey rambler on Patrick Lane by a lovely stream of consciousness.
Once upon a time, humans were unmeant to wear uneducated as a badge of honour. For many, a poor education was the byproduct of a lack of means and opportunity, not the absence of ambition and brains. Everyone went about building their lives with the skills and resources they could acquire, and no one aspired toward being stupid.
The belittlement of knowledge is nothing new, but never have we peppered it with such derision as we do now and attacked intellect with such wanton defiance while openly glorifying ignorance. We are normalizing dumbness. Worse, we won’t shut up about it!
Haven’t you heard? Willful stupidity is ballsy, a reactionary superpower, many say. Dumb is the new smart. To be unlettered is to be unencumbered with facts and consequences. Knowledge doesn’t free the mind and truth-seeking is a lie, whereas true freedom lies in cultivating the uncluttered mind, to grow a vast emptiness between the ears as far as the eye can see, the better to have it filled by those for whom knowledge threatens their hold on power. Intellectualism’s comeuppance is overdue, and it’s time thinkers, poets, artists, inventors of life-saving medicine, germinators of modern agriculture, progenitors of rights and laws, architects of bridges that unify and edifices that edify, boffins of commercial flight and space exploration, fomenters of free-market capitalism, free elections and gluten-free pasta, basically, all you radical dreamers and neoteric give-a-shitters, to kneel and atone for your ungodly human intellectual achievements.
Strange, this perverse cognitive reframing, curiosity alchemized into suspicion. The spirit of inquiry — what my father called “wanting to see what’s on the other side,” neither the exclusive purview of a formal education nor the product of a lucky spin of the genetic wheel of fortune, but rather a universal basic feature that comes standard at birth (activation is a personal choice) — become cautious mistrust, a necessary defence mechanism, no doubt, but which when left unchecked, can, especially among the so-called whole of the people, spiral into a discomfort with knowledge, its demonization as wonky and effete, and ultimately what Isaac Asimov presciently articulated as “the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”
Clouds are descending on the value we ascribe to knowledge. Might they repress us into a modern Dark Age, I wonder?
If allowed to, the cult of contempt for scientia potentia est (knowledge is power) driving the mercurial rise of I know what I believe (knowledge be damned) will fade the life of the mind to black.
Unless we turn the tide.
Otherwise, the battle will no longer centre around intellectualism versus anti-intellectualism, Eggheads versus Fatheads, but whether “we’re for or against intellect altogether.”1