The Four Horsemen of the Intellectual Apocalypse

HAROLD CAMPING
<Contributor>

We are in the end times of intellectualism. The Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that only 144,000 people will be raptured during the Christian end times. In this, the end times of intellectualism, far less will be saved. The rest will be burned and marginalized by the horde of human ignorance. The end times are here. I have seen the signs!

1. Populism (embodied by our far from fit mayor and the tea party in the US): This horseman represents the battle against intellectualism with anti-intellectualism. It wears a bridle of emotionally charged language and wears armour made of faith and hope. Its greatest weapon is the spear of simplicity which reduces all complex matters to semantically impoverished epigrams. It taps into human laziness by giving the lazy a reason to not research anything lest they become some know it all egghead.
2. Polarization (Liberals vs. Conservatives or Democrats vs. Republicans): This horseman determines the scope of debate and discourse. It presents us with false dichotomies and forces us to choose between one lie or semantically impoverished epigram or another. It has the head of an elephant and the body of an ass. It is coloured red and blue and denies the existence of all other colours.
3. Religious slave morality masquerading as moral truth (perhaps the horseman who has always been around): This horseman is heeled with conviction and all things it says are the truth according to God. It is all of the Gods at the same time and since everything it says comes from one of them, it is all truth. It tells us we cannot be moral without religion and it prescribes for us how we must live our lives. It tells us to stone a woman to death one day, and the next tells us to be kind to the same woman. It tells us to show kindness to the poor, but we must give all of our money to its tax-exempt temples. It makes us feel enriched with falsehoods and turns us against one another to create stronger bonds for each of its limbs (all legs of the same ass I might add). It makes us feel like we are part of something only because it creates an “other” out of everything else. We thus cannot be part of the form of humanity and the form of the religion simultaneously. Religion represents the rejection of humanism; the latter is necessary for the species to evolve, the former has laboured to ensure that it does not.
4. The extinguishing of the 4^th estate (bad mainstream journalism): This horseman is content with lies and advertising to feed its existence. It tells us nothing and gives us no real insight into anything. It is the proxy for the ignorant horde and the mouthpiece for our oppressors. It is shod with nothing because it never goes to work and thus does not need shoes. It marginalizes real journalism and ensures that such journalism is relegated to the garbage bin of “conspiracy theory” – the throw away zone for any idea which we are too lazy to investigate properly due to its complexity.

Semantic significance has become a relic in the pseudo-intellectual punditry of modern media and human interaction. When rhetoric and populism rule the day and Piggy’s glasses are smashed, the eschatologists of intellectualism quietly wimper on the deck of the ship, unshielded against the elements. The words we use to marginalize people’s opinions are becoming increasingly common in day to day rhetoric (sometimes between people who are supposed to be intelligent). Communist, Terrorist, Conspiracy Theorist, ivory tower egghead, fundamentalist etc. These words are used to ensure that our real social issues stay simple, within the scope of what is acceptable and engaged with a false sense of self-righteousness that does not require any real insight into the itinerant idea’s abject intellectual poverty.