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Thinking about not thinking as we thirst for thinking.

As our country is going through a phase where thinking about how to think of thought through solutions, the need to stop avoiding the task of thinking has now thrust itself to the centre of all matter of thinking. The importance of intellectualism to originate solutions and scenarios is the new foreground to any imagination of a different South Africa. This foregrounding happens, and unfortunately so, when our 'public power wielding' community increasingly views ignorance, particularly of public policy and its analysis, as a virtue. This can only be defined as anti-intellectualism.

Anti-intellectualism or shallow intellectualism is itself a means of short-circuiting (democracy) civilisation, because a (stable democracy) civilisation in any culture relies on the (public) civilised actually understanding the implications of its own choices.

There is a new, and growing phenomenon of laypeople suddenly feeling qualified to voice an opinion on any topic, in part because they might be oblivious of a truism that listing facts is not the same as true expertise. 

Over a while throwing tweets of opinions on social media has unfortunately been cultivating an illusion of instant expertise on any topic being as easy as intellectualism.

What this has done to an otherwise evidence fearing society, is to create cults that are now obsessed with the worship of their own ignorance, camouflaged in a vortex of misinterpreting 'diversity of opinion' as a condition of human co-existence.

As the importance of intellectualism wanes in our public discourse spaces, so is the threat of the of 'intellectual solipsism' as a new bulwark against 'progressive intellectualism'. 'Grade inflation', a condition where society measures it intellectual depth on the basis of the number of certificated individuals or the quantity of people that merely meet the requirements of being graduated, has had the unfortunate consequence of producing graduates with an exaggerated sense of their own intelligence and knowledge. 

It has now became difficult to educate these army of 'graduates' because they have mutated into a 'breed of humans' who when in doubt of facts, simply make up stuff, including creating a own universe that is in variance with the science of evidence. As a consequence human civilisation is left with a perpetual struggle of restoring a relationship between intellectualism and these 'new breeds of humans' as a new frontier to truncate the dysfunction of civilisation itself. 

🤷🏽‍♂️A ndzo tirhela borongo

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