The Sublime & Beautiful vs. Reality

This blog is a record of one man's struggle to search for scientific, philosophical, and religious truth in the face of the limitations imposed on him by economics, psychology, and social conditioning; it is the philosophical outworking of everyday life in contrast to ideals and how it could have been.


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The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God
and which He revealed to us in the language of mathematics.
--Johannes Kepler

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Monday, December 01, 2008

Social Philosophy: Intellectuals and Economics

Robert Nozick writes in his essay:

Wordsmith intellectuals fare well in capitalist society; there they have great freedom to formulate, encounter, and propagate new ideas, to read and discuss them. Their occupational skills are in demand, their income much above average.

Why then do they disproportionately oppose capitalism?


An attempt to answer this question and consider the ramifications of this factor in society is made in the above linked essay. I think the hypothesis is reasonable.

One possibility is the way that "wordsmith" intellectuals receive their education in the modern west, and that is through age-segregated schools where the ability to communicate via the written and spoken word is the most rewarded skill. As Robert Nozick writes:

Schools became the major institution outside of the family to shape the attitudes of young people, and almost all those who later became intellectuals went through schools. There they were successful. They were judged against others and deemed superior. They were praised and rewarded, the teacher's favorites. How could they fail to see themselves as superior? Daily, they experienced differences in facility with ideas, in quick-wittedness. The schools told them, and showed them, they were better.


All the more reason to homeschool your children to keep them from falling to the temptation to believe in something that is not in their own best interests.

The essay is a bit more comprehensive than what I have represented here, so be sure to read it.

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