The I. B., the Intellectual Bully.

 

 

 The I.B.:

 

 

There's a new phenomenon, once common in remote scholastic ages, the "Age of Faith," completely discredited in the Renaissance, and in bad odor through the modern age, now back, and with a vengeance:  the intellectual bully. Billy Budd, by Herman Melville of all writers, was a prefiguration:

 

A foreshadowing, a foreshadowment.

 

It's remarkable because of how far it's gone. In an time when everything is in question, a hyper-Nietzschean caricaturization Zeitgeistsschaft-Schafe, it is ... flourishing.

 

A regular, normal guy, or woe to the gal who might be in the path of the first stone, cast by the intellectually spotless, the normal guy, holds a normal common sensical, self-evident "opinion" which is not an opinion at all but a commonplace simple observation of fact, is out of the blue (it's always, I am ashamed to admit, the blue), dropped on from the sky, like a rabbit sitting stock still by an Eagle.

 

And bullied into submission, or rage, or apoplexy, or at least red-in-the-facedness. 

 

Billy Budd vs Bully Budd. 

 

Notice:

 

Notice also this,  that I do not define (not in the sense of limit but of locate) the intellectual bully as one who "uses fancy words." 

 

What?

 

Yes! 

 

"Fancy" is a variant of "fantasy" and I guess an over-super-hyper-fluous imagination might be a tool, of a "fantastic bully" but this ain't it, this is not that, what it is, is the one who delights in taking what is clearly a matter, an observation of fact, and "interrogating" it. Postmodernism, but underhandedly.  Euclid's fifth postulate, to show what I mean, was (re)considered ashamedly (secretly) by the greatest mind of his generation, not long ago, just to show how far we've come: how low we've descended into a new demon-haunted superstition.

 

Albert Einstein was a heroic intellectual Hercules, a promethean quite literally. And almost one might say, a new archetype. 

 

A Debussy of doubt, not a Noise Metal of maliciousness. 

 

Mr. Descartes: surprised as if ...

 

Mr. Descartes  headed off at the pass any Scholastic Bombastic, with little fanfare, or no more than an anonymous  Aaron Copland of the Airshow steampunk acrobatic, and scholastic bombastic of the theoretic thermopylae, in sunny sums, and fatae morganae, into, and beyond the modern era.

 

Ironic that neo-Nietzsche ironed out the bumpy road to peace picknickingly professional sophistry, as who could doubt that lawyering, the legal profession, lone among non-pseudo-quack duck doctrinairity, rewards, if not welcomes the sleeping sophist now awakened. (not, please for Heaven's sake, hello, "woke.")

 

Sleep-walking sayers of monotone slogan and repetitious trance romance mantras walk this road now paved with brick suited legalisms.  And cheery orange tiles.

 

Awakened zombies, surprised as if in solipsism of the present moment acknowledged.