The production of anti-intellectualism, or how the media govern the sayable

On the supposed affair of Chomsky and Epstein.
Or Woody Allen and his films, or Roman Polanski and his.
Or Heidegger's antisemitism and fascism and his philosophical writings.Or .....

The examples are endless, surely. And don't they all have much the same point and effect, since they are work in the same way?

The media is a political space that governs the distribution of possibly valid statements. This means what is and is not sayable.

It also frames discussions by promoting statements posed as questions. The dominant empiricist thinking in our culture (this is also widely true in some applied sciences or social technologies like medicine) does not permit questioning whether a question is rightly posed. This is also true of a courtroom lawyer’s question to a witness, or an interrogating police officer (or doctor’s) question to someone suspected (of a crime, criminal disposition, illness that amounts to that, or a will to be evasive due to a motive that is actually or potentially at odds with that of the questioner, which may be to find the ‘truth’ about the targeted person). In such interrogations, refusing to answer may be an option but disputing the question is not, because you are not in control, they are.

The does this according to a logic which is not that of scientific and scholarly work. It is a rhetorical logic of association that appeals to emotion in order to drive behaviors for the purpose of managing populations in order primarily to derive revenue, and secondarily to channel reactions in the ways most useful for those controlling the apparatus (as best they can) by positively and negatively sanctioning behaviors in accordance with the planned and programmed acceptability of statements.

The popular analogue is every school kid's recognition of what is and is not "cool." Some guardians of the people will legislate for us, differently if they are liberals or conservatives, what may or may not be said. It also may be revenue-worthy if this is subject to fashion.

This system favors ad hominem arguments that are based on the association of statements not with arguments (whose intelligibility depends on evaluating inferences based on, as in scientific fields and informally by juries and committees like them, recognized canons of evidence and reasons submitted for examination in the manner arguments are in various domains of study, and in the Anglosphere principally in legal suits and prosecutions) but with the persons, and where the rule about what can be said is anything goes, in the precise sense that the operative rules are not those of inference, as in any rigorous thought, but rules of attraction, which drive consumer attention and shareholder profits.

Accordingly, the most effective way in our political culture to criticize any idea or statement that can be attributed to persons is simply to delegitimate them. The most common method used by the media is scandal.

Scandal was used to transform the conversation over the Vietnam War to one about the justice of a neocolonial genocide to one about the possible corruption of a government official, who broke the rules of polite behavior between the government factions and was possibly mentally ill. (Which, as all Americans know, is also the true cause of the Holocaust since Hilter was that, a conclusion that enabled the war’s victors to validate a form of exclusion central to the German form of fascism).

If the boss is found to be a moral scoundrel, then, logically, he should be deposed and replaced with another boss. The ruler should treat his subjects with justice or at least kindness, and himself is subject to the law, since our sovereigns are subject to the people they theoretically represent. This is a conservative idea of the political.

Similarly, if a nonprofit organization whose mission is "political" judges that some policy is a bad one, they may want to contest it legally, in the event that using their financial power as lobbyists to influence politicians is not enough, or perhaps when the two tactics go well together. This reduces the political to the legal. This is also a conservative idea of the political.

Constantly this is done, and people who should know better are taken in. A particular thinker or artist who is a celebrity is accused of some real crime. It happens that they are also author of some oeuvre in which various statements are made, and validated in various ways, ideally (for those of us who would be the "friends" of serious efforts of understanding or making sense of any worldly matter) by looking at the details of their arguments, or artworks if they are presented that medium.

The dupe of this tactic take the possible question, what connection is their between this person's moral error and possible errors we can identify (or, which amounts to the same thing, things we may reject) in what they have written, etc. And if the duped person accepts the easy route demanded, he says, but of course, we don't need to ask, we know. The two things being present (the ensemble of statements or total fabric of the work, and the particular now revealed moral error in the field of social life), they must be connected somehow. We need not know how, or measure the extent. Perhaps it is minimal. Instead, we just conclude in effect that the connection is one of simple identity. This satisfies those who must have had no real curiosity about the ideas or the work in the first place. And perhaps that is the point. Indeed, this media charade has as one of its side effects the production of a deliberate ignorance of all the artefacts of artistic and intellectual life, at least once they are available in the media public eye.

The effect is to drive thought out of public life by carefully managing its controlled simulation. This is easy enough in a culture like America’s, where disagreement is regularly (and selectively) treated as assault, and disaffection as mental illness. Another arm of the same corporate state, the medical and therapeutic one, has everyone ‘diagnosed’. You are required to pay for this and encouraged, indeed expected, to want it. This and the attendant ‘spiritualities’, which are opportunities for a body to cultivate in cherished private autonomy its authentic imagined inner soul, substitute for education, whose object is not kinds of thinking so much as ways of working or being occupied, and which is no longer a right of citizens but a privilege of the few, according to the distribution of occupational opportunities, for which this system now serves to train people to labor, since labor must serve capital. If there were an alternative model of social organization, it might be one based on what would really be a qualitatively different form of life.