By The Way

There is something quietly terrifying about the way intelligence has fallen out of fashion. We have all seen it. Scroll through social media or tune into a primetime debate on any news channel, and you will likely run into someone proudly dismissing “experts,” mocking nuance, or declaring that their personal feelings should override facts. It’s not new, of course. This suspicion of thinkers has been around forever, but there is something particularly aggressive and oddly mainstream about it today. It is not merely scepticism anymore. It is disdain. Anti-intellectualism, at its core, is a hostility to complexity of thoughts. It flattens  the arguments, mocks the reflections, and replaces debate with the idea of ‘vibes.’ And it is not confined to one group or ideology. It creeps across the political spectrum, disguised in different clothes. Sometimes it looks like populism; other times like cynicism. But its effect is the same, that is, a quiet war on thinking. What makes it wor...