For ordinary people, seeing is believing but for intellectuals believing is seeing

There are two kinds of people in the world: normal human beings and intellectuals. The critical difference between the two is that while for normal people seeing is believing, for intellectuals it is the other way around. This difference makes intellectuals different from ordinary people.

It is palpable at any gathering of

intellectuals, whether it is a Not-In-My-Name protest or a meeting to denounce the Narendra Modi government over some issue or another. The look, the feel, the atmospherics—everything about an

intellectuals’ meet is surreal. Having

attended quite a few such meetings in recent times, I can make a few observations about them.

First the look. Normal people wear, or want to wear, good clothes. Men go for Raymond, Reid & Taylor, J. Hamstead, Arrow, Louise Phillippe, Van Huesen; women love Nalli, Satyapaul, Manish Malhotra. Intellectuals, however, prefer khadi and Fabindia. The duller the color, the coarser the fabric, the more depressing the look, the better.

When a normal couple is alone, they make love; when an intellectual couple is alone, they discuss ‘sexual politics.’

When normal people attend a marriage party, they rejoice in good tidings. Intellectuals, on the contrary, don’t approve of any marriage unless both partners are of the same sex. The normal marriage they view with suspicion, often as a fodder for the perpetuation of patriarchy and hetero-normativity.

If you ask normal people, who are their favorite film actors and actresses, they would say Dev Anand, Dilip Kumar, Rajesh Khanna, Dharmendra, Shah Rukh Khan, Madhubala, Suraiya, Hema Malini, Madhuri Dixit, Kangana Ranaut, and so on. If you ask an intellectual the same question, the answer would be Balraj Sahni, Smita Patil, et al.

Now Sahni and Patil were great actors, but I wonder what kind of man would

like to take his girlfriend to watch Do Bigha Zameen.

This brings us to the question: What makes intellectuals so different? A quick Google search will give you delectable quotes: “an intellectual is a person who’s found one thing that’s more interesting than sex” (Aldous Huxley); “an intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows” (Dwight D. Eisenhower).

Instead of defining intellectuals, however, I would describe them in the following way: If Karl Marx tells a normal man, ‘Look, that dog has bitten off your ear,’ he would touch his own ear to find out if his ear is missing. But if Marx says the same thing to an intellectual, the latter would begin chasing the dog without bothering to check the veracity of the claim.

As mentioned earlier, the distinguishing feature of intellectuals is: believing is

seeing. We perceive phenomena and then come to some conclusion; mostly, experience guides us. But intellectuals know the Truth; they are convinced that they are divinely-ordained or dialectically-blessed to know the Truth. So what they do is just cherry-pick facts to embellish it.

In schools and colleges, they are taught that capitalism is bad and socialism and communism are good. These are the tendentious teachings of pinkish professors and theoreticians; they wrote textbooks and dominated Indian academics after Independence—the teachings which got accepted as gospel truth by our thought leaders.

Rarely, if ever, the ideas of anti-communist thinkers like Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, and Fredrick Hayek were introduced to Indian students at any level.

Intellectuals claim to be liberal in their outlook, open to all ideas, and critical of received wisdom. But, in reality, they are most illiberal when it comes to anything conflicting with their own dogmas—and socialism and communism are just dogmas, and dangerous ones at that.

For them, socialism and communism are good, period. Dogmatically, they are most unwilling to discard this belief that was formed when they were in schools and colleges. Like the first love, they cherish it all their lives, notwithstanding the mountain of evidence suggesting the opposite.

The truth is that over 100 million people perished under socialist and communist regimes? For decades, intellectuals all over the world disputed that, rubbishing it as Western or bourgeois propaganda. We, the people of India, escaped the worst depredations of socialism and communism—primarily because the British had built robust institutions and also because there were a number of leaders (e.g., former prime minister Charan Singh) to resist complete descent into collectivisation and other horrors. But socialism did hurt us badly; it is still a bane, as evident from the fact that we are still a poor country, with per capita income is below $2,300.

The mendacity of Leftist intellectuals and liberals was unbounded. Paul Johnson wrote in The Modern Times: “The famine of 1932, the worst in Russian history, was virtually unreported. At the height of it, the visiting biologist Julian Huxley found ‘a level of physique and general health rather above that to be seen in England.’ Shaw threw his food supplies out of the train window just before crossing the Russian frontier ‘convinced that there were no shortages in Russia’…”

Further, Johnson wrote, “Self-delusion was obviously the biggest single factor in the presentation of an unsuccessful despotism as a Utopia in the making [in Russia]. But there was also conscious

deception by men and women who thought of themselves as idealists and who, at the time, honestly believed they were serving a higher human purpose by systematic misrepresentation and lying... The Thirties was the age of the heroic lie. Saintly mendacity became its more prized virtue. Stalin’s tortured Russia was the prime beneficiary of this sanctified falsification.”

Saintly mendacity and heroic lies are the warp and woof of the narrative that intellectuals peddle all the time. They claimed to be the champions of individual liberty and privacy, thus opposing, for instance, the Modi government’s efforts to link Aadhaar with welfare measures, administrative mechanisms, and money movement. But it was many of these people, big state enthusiasts as they are, conjured up targeted welfarism; this is how Aadhaar got conceived in the first place. This happened when Sonia Gandhi ruled the country by proxy and had filled her National Advisory Council with all manner of intellectuals.

Anything wrong in the economy is because of liberalisation. In their scheme of things, what they perceive and conceptualise is knowledge; the opposite is a malevolent construct of ‘false consciousness.’ Intellectuals claim that they are the champions of human rights and civil liberties; and they sometimes practically act as the over-ground activists of Maoists, the sworn enemies of not just human rights and civil liberties but all that is good and glorious in human civilization.

Intellectuals claim that they want the uplift of the poor, yet the economic philosophy that they favor, socialism, has been discredited all over the world (If the Modi regime is troubled today, it is primarily because it has been unwilling or incapable of dispensing with the vestiges of socialist structures, but that’s another story). No intellectual wishes to acknowledge the reality that socialism perpetuates poverty.

Indian intellectuals are comfortable in their own cocoons and echo chambers. They are blind to and they fear to see the reality as it is. They rarely, to use Irving Krystal’s phraseology, get “mugged by reality.”