How to Become an Intellectual Hunk, by Olavo de Carvalho

In his article “How to Become an Intellectual Hunk”, Olavo de Carvalho satirizes the practice of aligning with certain philosophical schools without a deep understanding of their tenets. He suggests that many people superficially adopt Marxism, Aristotelian-Thomism, or Enlightenment-materialist-scientific liberalism to attain a sense of intellectual superiority and a false solidity to their personal identities. Olavo criticizes these individuals for using these philosophical labels as a shield against intellectual engagement and for silencing dissenting opinions by categorizing them as ‘fascist’, ‘heretic’, ‘religious fanatic’, or ‘profane’.

How to Become an Intellectual Hunk

Diário do Comércio, March 24, 2011

The great social benefit of ready-made philosophies is that one only needs to adhere to one of them superficially, without even needing to know it, and instantly the citizen rises to the status of a critic of other people’s philosophies, with the right to judge them ex cathedra and then feel beautiful, wonderful, a perfect intellectual hunk.

Three schools of thought, due to being the most cited in the media —with the admirable brevity of journalistic writings—, and also because the class of university professors does not entirely ignore them, have been the most frequented in Brazil by those creatures, who find in them the comfort of a cultural prosthesis capable of giving, at a low cost, an appearance of solidity to their wavering personal identities, gnawed at the base by a neglectful father and an oppressive mother (or vice versa).

These schools are:

(a) Marxism, understood in its most flexible sense, which does not imply even a manual contact with the works of Karl Marx, most often being satisfied with the vague and delightful feeling of belonging to the most progressive and enlightened part of the human species, acquired through regular participation in student strikes and the daily attendance of guitar circles.

(b) Aristotelian-Thomism without Aristotle or Thomas, because no one is made of iron. To become an authority on the subject, go to the nearest parish, confess any sins (not the worst ones, of course) and start speaking ill of Protestants, Jews and weirdos like me. This is worth a Ph.D. in scholastic philosophy from the University of Navarra.

(c) Enlightenment-materialist-scientistic liberalism, in which one can acquire a complete education through Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary, a few selected chapters from The Open Society and Its Enemies by Sir Karl Popper, and one or two interviews with Dr. Richard Dawkins on youtube.

A fourth stream of ideas is that of the Guénonian, Evolian, and Duginian traditionalists. But it is much less popular than the other three, because its members practice the initiatory secret, which consists in hiding under the bed in fear of the Kali-Yuga and never being seen anywhere, which is precisely the entrance ritual to this elite community.

Anyone of average, inferior or null intelligence can join the ranks of one of these four militancies through a simple written, oral or mental statement and immediately transform into their most authorized spokesperson, starting to berate the real or unreal opponents of the aforementioned with words of fire launched, like deadly celestial petards, from the immortal summits of Orkut or Facebook.

The imprudent one who has not had the opportunity or desire to dissolve his thinking individuality into one of these reference groups, or who feels the natural human difficulty of reducing his experience of the world to the simplest and self-evident formulas that are cultivated in them under the name of “philosophy”, “theology”, “science” or “esoteric wisdom”, will inevitably be called a “fascist” by the first, a “heretic” by the second, a “religious fanatic” by the third, and a “profane” by the fourth.

Having done this, the members of each of these groups will congratulate each other enthusiastically, celebrating the victory of community solidarity over the intolerable individual pretension of investigating the concrete truth of the situation.