Intellectual Morons : How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas

Rating:
Summary: Anti-Free, Anti-Open, Anti-Liberal Bias on Colleges Campus.
Review: Daniel Flynn is to be commended for writing a great book. The colleges campuses have become exactly the opposite of what they are supposed to be.

Instead of a free, open, space dedicated to learning, scholarship, knowledge and search for the Truth, the colleges have become a bastion of ultra-leftists, anti-society, hate-filled, Orwellian bastions of intellectual idiocy.

Numerous ideas that would be laughed at in the general public are propagated at length in the colleges. It has been said the only place where Marxism survives is now at the universities.

Flynn cites MIT Linguistic Professor Noam Chomsky. Chomsky ideas are so far out, even normal leftists dismiss this once great intellect gone berserk. Professor Paul Erhlich, Ivory Tower Pinhead made predictions that are all wrong. Flynn goes into detail about those who are wrong but loved by the coffee-house leftists.

What is the cause for the decay of the once proud American academy? There are many reasons.

#1. THOSE CANNOT DO WILL TEACH.

People who cannot function in the real world of society where they will have to produce goods and services are attracted to a life of "theory" When was the last time you read an academic journal or discussed an academic "theory" with friends over a beer or football game.

The old saying goes "if you are so smart, why don't you do it" If these pinhead academics are so smart, why don't they run for President, play NFL football or start the next Microsoft or Intel.

#2. Natural Sciences versus Social Sciences, Humanities

Human knowledge in college can be broadly divided

a. Natural Sciences (Math, Physics, Chemistry, Engineering)

b. Social Studies (Economics, Politics, etc)

c. Humanities (Art, Music, Literature)

We learn in elementary school that there is a right answer to Math, Chemistry but however there will never be a right answer to politics or art. 2+2=4 is true. Who is the best president or who is the best artists. There are questions with no right answer. The humanities and social studies are basically studies. Hence, there is just a lot of "theory"

Politics is just politics, there will never be true, correct answer to any of it. Art is in the eye of the beholder. The humanities and social sciences are basically non-science, non-technical courses that does not require any brain power. Hence, you get lots of dummies attracted to these areas of study.


#3. Lifelong Tenure guarantees low quality.

THOSE CANNOT DO WILL TEACH.

THOSE CANNOT DO WILL WANT A LIFELONG JOB.

Colleges are last few places on Earth where jobs are guaranteed for life. It's lunatics running the asylum, giving a "blank check" to academics.

Daniel Flynn writes about the current state of college campuses. However, Peter Drucker has said the large university campuses will be obsolete in 30 years. What was Peter Drucker talking about.

Computer now cost $200 and the world will soon have a billion computers. MIT is posting 2000 courses, free, open to all. The computer hooked up to the Internet will give every person universal access to knowledge. Google can find knowledge for you in a split second. Colleges, academics, libraries, scribes have always had a monopoly on knowledge. Now is knowledge is available to all on a universal basis. The world will never be the same again.

The college days are numbered. Daniel Flynn book is a great expose on the fraud, sham, ignorance, perpetuated in the name of so-called "higher education" The U.S. Constitution guarantees free speech, free association. We should all exercise our constitutional right and learn about the sham going on at college campuses.

Rating:
Summary: Exposing the Intellectual Frauds of Our Time
Review: Daniel J. Flynn has done us a remarkable service by writing this book. Now, more than ever, "Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas" is pertinent beyond words. Anyone who's spent some time in academia knows (for me, it was eight years), the state of higher education in America is in dire straights. While reading this book I had to literally put down the book as my thoughts drifted over encounter after encounter I've personally had with "intellectual" morons, venerable ignoramuses, whose senses of self-worth and self-justification are so beyond the pale not even these harsh comments do them justice.

Flynn's "Intellectual Morons" will likely be for many at once a stroll down memory lane as well as an learned explanation behind why so many people fall for stupid ideas. One explaination revolves aroung the simple fact that it is just easier to follow the crowd rather than think for oneself. Why think for oneself when following the current ideological trend is just so darn easy? (And you get to hang with the "in" crowd, to boot!) Is it any small wonder so many "smart" folks became Nazis in Germany? And is it any small wonder why Hollywood, perhaps the most detached-from-reality, savagely undereducated, nevertheless extremely wealthy group of people on the planet, are so vulnerable to poltical ideology? And let us not forget about impressionable, idealistic 18-22 year old undergraduates.

Flynn's "Intellectual Morons" takes the reader on a point-by-point highlight tour of some of the most influential intellectual morons of our time - many of whom are still being covered for by sympathizers today. Although most of the "morons" exposed are left-leaning, I was pleasantly surprised to see that a couple "intellectuals" of the right hardly fare better when their walk - rather than just their talk - are placed under Flynn's microscope (e.g., Ayn Rand is savaged). (Being a student of philosophy, I particularly enjoyed the exposure of Marcuse, Foucualt, Derrida, Rand, Singer, and Chomsky.)

The following quote pretty well sums up the main argument of the book:

"'Faith is a wondrous thing,' Aruther Koesler noted; 'it is not only capable of moving mountains, but also of making you believe that a herring is a race horse.' For some, faith transforms science fiction into science fact. For intellectual morons, faith transforms socialist hellholes into Eden, man-hating animal-rights activists in humanitarians, and censorship into tolerance.

Bad ideas, politically inspired falsehoods, one-size-fits-all systems, and other products of the intellectual morons are unfortunate constants in the world of ideas. As long as there are ideologies, there will be fantasies who delude themselves and others, believe the ends justify the means, and smother adversarial ideas....

When you refuse to think, someone else will determine your thoughts for you. Joiners [(i.e., followers)] look for their ideas from gurus and the systems that they lay won. Rather than brining them closer to the truth, ad joiners seem to believe, gurus systems act as an intellectual ball and chain. They stifle the thought of many otherwise brilliant people. The intellectual moron is the one who is gifted but who squanders his talent by relying on ideology to assign him his beliefs." (Citation Omitted.)

Rating:
Summary: Great Stories, Well Worth Reading
Review: I remember one time when a woman was lecturing me on health research. "Things like breast cancer would be solved if the Government just spent as much money on research into women's health as they do to men's."

I didn't have the knowledge then to counter the argument, but after a few minutes on the web I found: "85% of the research budget goes for non-gender based research (things like heart problems - and heart problems kill more women than breast cancer). Of the remaining 15%, 10% goes for female issues (breast/ovarian cancer, etc.), and 5% for male problems (testicular cancer, etc.). I told her this at a subsequent party. She refused to believe me, and later I heard her telling her same theory to someone else. Oh well, she liked her story.

This book is filled with such stories. This author tends to concentrate on the beliefs of the liberals, with only a few stories listing the faults of the conservative side.

Then again today I read that Michael Moore's bodyguard was arrested for carrying a gun in New York. If he is so against guns as 'Columbine' would have you believe, why aren't his bodyguards following the law and going unarmed.

Rating:
Summary: Enlightening and entertaining
Review: I'd never read this author until I saw this book and, intrigued by the title (honestly!), I decided to browse. Several hours later, I was on chapter 4 and cloud 9: this guy can write, and it makes sense! The style is approachable and the points are (almost) un-impeachable: ideology will lead you down the wrong path everytime and I daresay there's not much I can find wrong with his assertions.

He describes ideologues as falling into several categories, with Joiners being the largest: those poor souls who heedlessly and unthinkingly swallow then regurgitate (usually in the form of bumper stickers and protest signs accompanied by the Banshee screams of the self-righteous) whatever their trend of choice is, from Abortion Rights to Hyper-environmentalism, take your pick.

Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Huh?
Review: In this winner, Daniel Flynn, who prides himself on having been kicked out of lecture halls for his views, tries to knock down a few folks who have committed the ultimate American crime: thinking.

The problem with the book is obvious right away. If smart people fall for bad ideas because of ideology, then how does the author explain his own obvious and unconcealed bias? Is he smart? Is he falling for ideology?

This is the sort of thing that happens when people disregard facts and can't actually answer arguments. Apparently, the environmental movement is not totally legit because of the people who helped advance it years ago. People are blinded by 'leftist' ideology, so they're to be discredited.

The targets are familiar, the charges very old, and very tired, and very refuted. Noam Chomsky here is still a Holocaust denier, a supporter of the Khymer Rouge, a predicter of genocide (he didn't 'predict' genocide, but quoted common sources), etc, etc.

I can't wait for the sequel to this log, where the author analyses himself, lauding his ejection from lecture halls for his amazing ideas.

Rating:
Summary: A few valid points, but undermines his own argument
Review: The Achilles' heal of this book is the author's refusal to address or acknowledge his own ideological bent. He comes into the game with his own ideological baggage, yet he tries to present himself as a pure rationalist who is only interested in the "truth", unvarnished by ideology. If that were the case, why doesn't he address religious ideology? In fact, the only mention he makes of it is that some people are so full of themselves and their ideology that there's no room in them for "God". This begs the question: if one is so concerned with logic, facts and reason, how does one justify the belief in an invisible, supernatural diety in the absence of empirical evidence? What is religious faith, but an aherence to an ideology? This, tellingly, the author doesn't discuss at all.

He gives plenty of lip service to the "pro-choice" movement, much of it deserved, but has nothing to say about some of the more extreme examples of the "pro-life" movement. What about stem cell research? Silence. What about radical elements in the NRA, or right-wing militia groups? How about some of the extreme racist ideologies that still exist in this country today? Not a peep.

He mentions in the opening how various minds have been held sway by "-isms" such as communism, postmodernism, feminism, etc., but he fails to include capitalism or fundamentalism in his list of "isms". Why the ommission? Simple--his book isn't an attack on ideology. It's an attack on ideologies he finds offensive.

He makes many valid points about the excesses of ideology, mostly on the left, and with a few token examples on the right as well. But ultimately, the author is just pretending to be a rational objectivist, and the book itself is a self-serving attempt to rationalize the author's beliefs. He lacks the candor and courage to examine his own assumptions, sidestepping again and again anything that might require him to reveal his own ideological underpinnings or that might in some way challenge or offend the right-wing audience for which his book is intended.


Rating:
Summary: Could have been a contender...
Review: The premise is a great one. The exploration of how people are so committed to a mindset that anything which takes a contrary position to that ideology is immediately, blindly, discarded. What's unfortunate is that Daniel Flynn is crippled by this very same problem, he lets his staunch conservativism distort his methods.

If this book did not have such a political axe to grind, in this case it is Flynn tailoring his structure and subjects to cast the left in as bad a light as possible, this could have been a truly great and important book. Flynn is at his best when he is not talking about his subjects but rather when he is discussing his conclusions and personal observations on how ideologies affect people and the dangers of submission to this mindset. His beginning and conclusion are first-rate because it captures the best of his offerings in a completely non-partial (or partisan), way. Although he is most certainly a strong right-wing conservative, Flynn is not a party-line regurgitating, hack Republican mouthpiece, like say, Sean Hannity. He is surprisingly scathing in his critique of the current situation in Iraq and extremist neo-conservative policy as a whole. In the chapter, "A Truth That Lesser Mortals Failed To Grasp," he sounds like he's making the liberal case for opposing Bush and Iraq, and he really means it.

Despite these positives, the overwhelming negatives showcase themselves again and again. His biggest sin in my opinion is that he has come to the conclusion that the trait of letting ideology blind people into buying stupid ideas has somehow become a partisan issue, namely that it is the trait of the left-wing liberals. The book takes certain people as case studies and basically tears them down, and 14 out of the 16 people profiled are leftists. If the book were called "Intellectual Morons of the Left", then this might not matter, but the author has put on an appearance of being objective, and I believe he fails miserably at that. Also, the two that are not stated leftists, are not really right-wing either, it just so happened that their PHILOSOPHIES could be and were interpreted in support of capitalism and the individual, though they themselves are not aligned with a conservative cause. So Flynn has not put his own side under the microscope at all (and there are volumes of conservatives who have committed this same sin of blind devotion, believe me), which sort of contradicts his whole premise. And by the way, he doesn't even label one of his targets, Noam Chomsky, correctly. He states repeatedly that Chomsky is a leftist, presumbly for his defense of communist regimes from time to time. But Chomsky is really a radical libertarian by his own admission, and that is actually an extreme faction of the RIGHT, not left. He's the closest thing that we have to a mainstream anarchist. So I guess that means that we now have only 13 of 16 profiled being leftists.

Examples abound. He tears into Alfred Kinsey for profiling a highly selective group of people to compile his data on sex in America, to, as Flynn believes, slant the evidence to support his opinions, rather than be objective and select random people to make the experiments more believeable. Sort of like writing a book where nearly 90% of your subjects are of the same political standing (which, by the way, opposes yours) and then announcing that in your "balanced" study, you've come to the conclusion that political standing (leftists) are the biggest purportrators of this crime. Consistency is not his strong point. He has some good points about Kinsey, but he attacks him mainly for the crime that he himself commits repeatedly, so he is fair game as well. When he discusses environmentalist Paul Ehrlich, he basically concludes that he is a moron because most of his predictions were wrong. Problem is, most sceintific theories in the history of mankind were wrong as well. New technology and breakthroughs at many points in history have discredited way more theories than they have upheld. Just because we now know that most early formal studies of physics were incorrect and have been discredited, does that mean that the scientists who once developed those theories without everything we have now are totally useless? That they made no contributions at all and are by Flynn's definition, morons? Flynn does not acknowledge the possiblity that Ehrlich's research, any experiments he performed, his dedication, and his championing of certain causes could have any merit. Nope, it's all about the bottom line, Ehrlich was proven wrong and therefore, nothing else matters about him. He's just a statistic on the wrong side.

One last major sin that he commits is that Flynn does not go after mainstream people at all. Some of their ideas may have gotten into the mainstream, but he attacks the fringe only. That seems like a heck of a crutch to me, it is pretty easy to attack the fringe. It's no wonder that his least effective attack is on Howard Zinn, who in my opinion is probably the least "radical" or "fringe" of those leftists profiled. Flynn says that Zinn is a communist who sees history as one big class struggle over money and power. Hmmmmm, that doesn't seem so far-fetched to me, but beyond that, his arguements are just dead wrong. Flynn contends the reason that Zinn says Columbus voyaged was to obtain wealth and riches. Well, yeah. Historically, that was the reason. Bring back gold and any information on new trade routes to get exotic goods from Asia. Likewise, he says Zinn is being a moron for thinking that during WWII, Roosevelt held meetings with business leaders to get the economy of the US "second to none" with war being the catalyst. Again, this is totally true. Business leaders like Forbes and Mellon were actively seeking to make money using wartime economic stimulation and held meetings with FDR's administration to try and serve this goal more effecively.

Flynn also subtley reinforces his conservative beliefs by slipping slights to leftists in many of the profiles. When he takes on Alger Hiss, for example, he mounts the evidence of communism against him. But he also refers to Hiss repeatedly as a "New Dealer," even when there is no connotation within the context to FDR's administration thereby subtley equating the New Deal with horrible communism. He also uses the proverbial, "some say" or "critics of this man have said" instead of just saying that these crticisms are his. Also in this book, logical fallacies abound, with even the title being an ad hominiem. Flynn rarely critiques the people's ideas at all, but rather attacks the person, dismissing their ideas as stupid without explanation, and I guess just assumes that the stuidity is obvious. In some cases it is, but to not ever provide analysis of the actual ideology, but rather just saying ideology is bad, is not the best way to prove your point.

I could go on, but I've done way more than enough to get the point across. Worth reading, but watch for the many ways that Flynn contradicts himself and becomes what he preaches against.

Rating:
Summary: Mantras for "Ditto Heads"
Review: This is a wonderful book. It is full of thoughful and well-reasoned thoughts which enlighten people and inspire people to think for themselves . . . NOT!

Rating:
Summary: Too much deception
Review: This is probably the most biased book I ever purchased. Shortly into the chapter on environmentalism, I began researching each of the author's points. I discovered he picks and chooses whatever pieces will get his own moronic ideology across, no matter how much of the truth he has to leave out.

I threw this book in the trash. I consider my time too valuable to waste on a hyped-up barroom pundit's half-truths.

Rating:
Summary: The Inhumanity of Ideology
Review: Unlike other "reviewers" I did read the book. Flynn, through several vignettes, tries to explain modern American culture through the prism of "intellectuals" whose ideas affected our society. The author makes 3 salient points that bear repeating: With the decline of religion, intellectuals increasingly turned to ideology for meaning, the core of ideology is political and, most importantly, ideology values ideas over people.

The first chapter brilliantly summarizes Marcuse and "Cultural" Marxism wherein every facet of human existence is politicized. His ideas permeated our culture - from "diversity" wherein the Left was supported and the Right silenced, to identify politics (gay/ethnic/gender group rights) to victimization to anti-Western bias to a redefinition of education. He had particular disdain for old-fashioned liberals like Hubert Humphrey. He was astute, though, in recognizing that the common worker would never accept his ideas and therefore must be "forced" to be free.

Elements of violence and authoritarianism are present in all these groups; the "truth" must prevail and violence is necessary for the greater good. This explains the perplexing notion of "liberals" praising despots whole first act would be silencing them or of commentators praising Arafat while condemning Israel. Each ideology seeks Utopia - from an (ir)rational Randian world to Strauss's American Empire to a primitive garden of Eden where humans live in peace with nature and its creatures and have sex without consequences or emotion.

The article on Chomsky and his continual excuses/espousing of various events (to this day he denies the Kymer Rouge killed millions of Cambodians) was another tour de force. He emphasizes that the mjority of those in non-academic studies (identity politics) drift into three major areas: Academia, politics and the media.