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December 2nd, 2008 · No Comments Yet
Intellectuals now expect to be the most highly valued people in a society, those with the most prestige and power, those with the greatest rewards. Intellectuals feel entitled to this. But, by and large, a capitalist society does not honor its intellectuals.
Intellectuals feel they are the most valuable people, the ones with the highest merit, and that society should reward people in accordance with their value and merit. But a capitalist society does not satisfy the principle of distribution “to each according to his merit or value” …the market distributes to those who satisfy the perceived market-expressed demands of others, and how much it so distributes depends on how much is demanded and how great the alternative supply is. Unsuccessful businessmen and workers do not have the same animus against the capitalist system as do the wordsmith intellectuals. Only the sense of unrecognized superiority, of entitlement betrayed, produces that animus. [emphasis added]
Robert Nozick, “Why do intellectuals oppose capitalism?”
Now, look. Like much that comes out of the Cato Institute, this twenty-two-year-old essay contains its fair share of gleeful left-baiting. But this is a salient point. Bloggers, journalists and authors declares the intellectual* the new aristocrat, with over-educated millennials able to work the way they want, in fascinating fields, achieve social status and wealth, and still have time left over for surfing. But is this borne out by the evidence, or is it - as I suspect - mostly clever kids’ wish-fulfilment?
The brilliant PhD candidate who struggles to get funding; the intelligent, thoughtful young journalist who chafes at the tabloid leanings of his paper; the idealistic young lawyer who rails against his profession’s less ethical habits, or its disinterest in work/life balance. All the stuff of alientated twentysomething cliche. Can’t all of this be summed up, quite neatly, in the realisation Nozick describes above?
*Also known by the handy new phrase “knowledge worker,” which is essentially an attempt to replace “intellectual” with something that doesn’t scare off employers.
Filed under: Clippings, Culture & Media
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