Modernist intellectuals proclaimed that the masses needed extermination, death by plagues, aborting, and gassing. Why?
Author John Carey says it’s because of universal education that dragged almost everyone upwards toward the “higher classes”.
The intellectuals – Virginia Woolf, T.S.Eliot, Jose Ortega y Gasset, H.G.Wells, Aldous Huxley, and many others – felt a sudden need, prompted by Nietzsche’s philosophy of the “great man”, to put some breathing space between themselves and the “semi-educated” mass. They did this by openly advocating the “disappearing” of the common mob that common schools were commonly pumping out.
The intellectuals also distanced themselves from the proles by making their own writings and thought as difficult and obscure as they possibly could.
Ever wonder why you can’t read Proust?
It’s not because you’re stupid. It’s because modernist literature and philosophy is designed to be impenetrable. Postmodern – today’s stuff, especially the French thinkers – is even worse.
In other words, intellectuals are proud and vicious and take status and class differences very seriously. Just like HGTV tries to fend off the wrong kind of viewer with their jerky and nauseating camerawork, Adorno wants to drive you away with a migraine.
What was it about the mass of humanity – you, in other words – that the modernist individuals found ghastly?
Your love of canned foods, especially canned fish. Your love of crap food and cheese cheese cheese in general.
Your love of, eventually, radio and television and cable TV and streaming and tour groups and cruise ships full of viruses and bad bands.
Got NETFLIX? Of course you do, you moron!
They hate that you live in the suburbs, which were already booming at the turn of the 20th century. Your suburbs stole the wooded footpaths within close distance of cities that intellectuals enjoyed trodding upon as they contemplated and calculated how to fend you off.
They hate that you’ve been educated just enough to threaten their social status but not enough to read Proust, even though you – dangerously – have heard of Proust.
They hate organized, professional sports. Why? Because you like organized, professional sports. Because they envy the money pro athletes make that could be better diverted to intellectual research and second homes for intellectuals.
Mainly, they hate seeing you having fun.
All of this would be okay, I suppose, if, as the back cover of Carey’s book points out, some intellectuals hadn’t championed gas chambers and nuclear bombs for those who weren’t their fans.
I fear mentioning Hitler, but he thought of himself as an intellectual. And since eugenics and Darwin and Nietzsche were in the air at the time, he was in a position to give these things a shot in reality. Right down to exterminating whole classes of humanity and art and using German masses in a meatgrinder. Stalin, the Turks, and others worked this same soil.
Carey’s THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE MASSES is a classic and is eye-opening. Right down to tinned food as a way to mark those for extermination. Is Campbell’s Soup still a thing?
Quick, hide it.
