I just started reading S&R and I keep coming across the concept of “philistine/philistinism.” I looked up what that meant bc I had a lackluster education and don’t know words good, and Google came up with something like a “lack of appreciation for the arts,” which didn’t really fit but I kept digging and ended up seeing that he could’ve meant something like “unacademic.”
So just to confirm (at risk of being reductive), to put it into Layman’s terms, is he talking about grillpillers? Or just common folk who don’t wanna “get political” about anything? Or instead, is he talking about the Tucker types, or the sector of the bourgeois who purposely peddle misinformation or anti-intellectualism and populism under the guise of “thinking for the common people” or whateverthefuck? Or is he talking about something entirely different that I’m missing?
If it’s the former, I propose we adopt the term “grillistine” :grillman:
Edit: apologies if this is a dumb question or it’s been asked before please don’t hurt me
Jordan Peterson “debating” ZeizekSlavoj Žižek, where the only reading he had done about Communism was the pamphlet by Marx, “The Communist Manifesto.”
Would be an example.
He’s basically calling people :LIB:s.
The modern philistines are the anti-intellectuals and anti-education crowd of educated people. In essence, the fools that write as if they’re an authority on topics while being intensely unwilling to learn anything and having no real intellectual curiosity.
:funny-clown-hammer: is a phillistine for example, as are all the liberals that want to debate you but don’t actually want to learn because they’ve decided that they either already know everything or that learning is for chumps.
I hate that high school conception of debate as competition. My stock response has become that I’m happy to discuss [x] if everyone is prepared to reconsider their positions in good faith in order to arrive at a better understanding of one another, but not if anyone just wants to score points so they can think they’ve won. Since I started making that stipulation, I’ve had far fewer challenges from certain individuals. I guess insistence on a certain level of effort puts some folk off.
Looks like you got your answer, but always love to suggest the podcast Red Menace (co-hosted by Breht from RevLeft) as a good companion to the works they cover. I have had a hard time with reading theory but they do an excellent job of providing context and unpacking a lot of the necessary background information that usually goes over my head
