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#intellectualism
sunnysam-my · 1 month
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Dark Academia is a subculture and it isn't problematic, just misunderstood.
I am so tired of people that aren't a part of this community shitting on dark academia literally any time it gains popularity again, claiming that it's pretentious, elitist and racist. It's not problematic, at least not in a way most people criticise it for.
What all of those people don't seems to understand is that there's the dark academia aesthetic and there is the dark academia the subculture. Even when they do understand they still put people who are only interested in the fashion and overall vibe together with people who are dark academia.
Why is dark academia a subculture?
First let's start with what even subculture is?
It's a cultural group within a larger culture, often sharing a collection of values, beliefs, rituals and traditions. Despite what many believes, it doesn't have to have any connection to music, like Star Trek and Star Wars fans, but there's no need for having a shared fandom at all, like the gays, bikers and youth.
Participation in the dark academia subculture is not limited to following a specific set of fashion. It suggest preferred activities, hobbies, philosophies and lifestyles. The focus is on reading and expanding one’s horizons, on becaming the best version of oneself no matter the cost, especially by engaging in classical literature, history, foreign languages, mythology, art and philosophy. On top of that DA is actually connected to certain music (classical and neoclassical) and fandoms.
The (incorrect) criticisms:
1. One of the more common criticisms of dark academia is that of its superficiality and pretentiousness – that it is more a fetishisation of intellectual life than real intellectual life. "Instead of being a reading society, it's a Dead Poets Society cosplay." This is just simply untrue. Yes, there are people who are purely here for the aesthetic and vibes, but they aren't part of the subculture. People who are genuinely part of this community do read all those books, write poetry, journal e.t.c regularly and try to be well educated.
2. The money issue. Now this is where it gets funny. Dark academia is often called classist and racist because of it's "idealised vision of the academic lifestyle in which the money is simply there". Obviously in places where higher education is strictly financially driven studying is a bitch. Nowadays there are even a lot of doctors who are homeless, especially in US. But DA is mainly a European thing, and in a lot of EU countries studying isn't that expensive, it's not cheap either (books costs a lot and not working doesn't help), but you don't need to pay for a good education, you need to study hard and compete with others to get good education.
This however is not a dark academia problem. It's a harsh reality. One that we need to fight with. Getting higher education shouldn't make you get into a debt. It shouldn't make you sacrifice social life for studying all your life only to end on the streets.
3. "Eurocentric obsession". This is so dumb I don't even know to say. How can you possibly call people, mostly from Europe, problematic for being fascinated by Europe's history, it's past culture, Greek mythology, mostly European philosophers (but American too), Latin that is still fucking taught at many schools here, etc. All of things are taught in schools here. There is nothing wrong with you being obsessed with Asian royalty and making it part of your personality, but God forbid, you, a white person, are obsessed with the best parts of your history and culture 🙄.
4. Another criticism of dark academia is that it encourages unhealthy behaviour, both physically (caffeine overconsumption, smoking, drugs) and mentally (perfectionist, constant competition). The pursuit of perfection comes at a price. The entire idea of DA is to study as hard as possible so you can reach enlighten. It's workaholism, except it's school, not work. Now this is why I think dark academia isn't problematic in a way people think, but is misunderstood.
A melancholic comforting dream
It's easy to understand why people think DA is unhealthy or fake. Nights spent studying, writing essays for hours on end, drowning in books and writing excessive notes. For many this sounds like a nightmare, but dark academia romanticise it. It see it as the true joy of university life. At the same time there's taking joy in reflecting on what is irretrievably lost, pessimistic and melancholic.
In reality most people in this community are overworked neurodivergent, usually twice exceptional, youth who struggles mentally. So many people are twice exceptional and it's very obvious. The hyperfixetions, the love for linguistics and humanities, the hate of math.
For many Dark Academia is a coping method.
Staples of dark academia fiction explore intellectualism, classic literature and self-discovery, but also the struggle of fighting for your identity, the way humans are shaped by their trauma, the way they destroy themselves to be better. The word "dark" in Dark Academia is primarily about those dark sides of the human nature, not just the dark colours of the DA aesthetic.
If you think that Dead Poets Society romanticised suicide or Kill Your Darlings academicly motivated drug use then you're the crazy one here. People loved those movies, because of how relatable they were, even the suffering.
Studying is a bitch. If you make it fun then you are less depressed about the fact that you don't have the choice to not study all night. It's not just nostalgia for what you haven't experienced, but what you have to endure all your youth. Some people are forced to study to be the very best and sacrifice their (social) lives, because the system is so broken, but if you can make it into your own, comforting, time - it's better. Sure, the movies and books have lots of harmful copying mechanism, but irl (or in this case online) this community encourages healthy methods like reading, making art, journaling, acting etc.
I do think there's a lot of to talk about when it comes to, for example, sexism, and I do agree DA needs more diversity than just white cis man, but like I said, it's not problematic in a way most people criticise it for.
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oceancentury · 6 months
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I’m so touched starved and insane.
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theshadowsooc · 8 months
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decolonize-the-left · 2 years
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antimony-ore · 3 months
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We need to cool it with the "people have no media literacy" spiels for real. Surely you can tell people they are wrong in one instance without presuming it's representative of a larger problem with their behavior and reaction to media.
We all say stupid things some times, stop fundamentally attributing their behavior to a lack of intelligence and lumping them into categories.
It doesn't make you superior; it's actually pretty exhausting, lacks compassion, and demonstrates that you, yourself, are incapable of critical analysis without going to extremes.
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I feel like any time someone says that it is actually an important thing to engage with difficult media like classic literature, people get mad.
The thing is, thinking through complicated ideas is hard and takes practice. People are recommending classic lit, for example, because a lot of it has that level of depth and complexity that you need to practice to fully grasp. In turn this will help you with media literacy on all levels, from identifying propaganda to recognizing themes in your favorite piece of pop culture. Can you get this practice from contemporary media too? Yes, but you actively have to seek out pieces that are complicated and challenging. A lot of what is popular is fluff, which is fun and important in its own right! But if it isn't challenging you to think harder and deeper then you arent practicing those skills.
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somenteniki · 6 months
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I think if folks want to form a new and healthier intellectualism as a tide against a lot of the culture industries worst sins, we also have to freely share information. If you have access to an ebook, share it, if your professors have class readings spread them around, put your notes up online. Be free and willing to talk to people about questions they have, point to your sources, leave no barrier against learning intact. If we actually want to get people to think and look and listen we cant just "advocate" for change; we have to make it, too.
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lewy-d-11 · 1 month
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“You keep on learning and learning, and pretty soon you learn something no one else has learned before”
Richard Feynman
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belle-keys · 2 years
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a book blog: I am against anti-intellectualism and the way consumerism has overtaken modern literature
me: cool! me too! so-
the blog: yeah idk why these bougeois tiktokers who shop at BOOK STORES have the gall to not love BOOKS MADE FOR GROWN UPS instead of their stupid little romance and fantasy books like I'd rather read something that CHALLENGES MY BRAIN as leisure everyday instead of the homogenous mess that of consumable media like I may not be smart but I still read SHAKESPEARE for fun and so-
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Anonymous asked: You don’t hear much about leftist French intellectuals these days. In your considered opinion are they a spent force? Do you follow them?
Yes, I think you are correct. Not only are they a spent force but they are also intellectually and morally bankrupt. In many ways today’s french intellectuals are but a pale shadow of their past. Arguably, I think it’s a reflection in general of France’s relative decline (alongside other European countries) on the world stage as well.
But I should also say no, I think you are incorrect. Because bad ideas never die, they just get imported and recycled out of America. Unwittingly the woke are the heirs of these post-war French intellectuals. 
No, I don’t follow them per se. But I do try to follow their arguments. I think it’s a mark of my intellectual curiosity to want to grapple with their ideas and try and see where they are coming from. That way if and when I reject an argument I know why I’m doing so rather than dismissively paint a broad brush caricature without even honestly engaging with their ideas.
There is no question French intellectual life conjures up potent imagery in the naive imaginations of some Anglo-Saxons, especially those on university campuses in both the US and Britain. The smell of Gauloises cigarettes and crowded Parisian cafés as well as pretty girls hanging on every word of the gnomic philosophe as he feels up their skirts and earnest bourgeois young men agitating for the next social revolution in turtle necks and Burberry scarves.
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Philosophy really matters in France - and that actually is a good thing in experience. It has a central part in public life. It is taught to all schoolchildren. Anglophones know about René Descartes, the ‘Father of Modern Philosophy’ with his flowing locks and his cogito (“I think, therefore I am”). They know about Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus and the stylish literary existentialism they created on the Left Bank in the years after the War. But they know precious little else. The ideas seem opaque and the writing incoherent but no one wants to say so for fear of being cast out of the herd.
Writing shortly after the end of the second world war, the French historian André Siegfried claimed (with a characteristic touch of Gallic aplomb) that French thought had been the driving force behind all the major advances of human civilisation, before concluding that “wherever she goes, France introduces clarity, intellectual ease, curiosity, and ... a subtle and necessary form of wisdom”. This ideal of a global French rayonnement (a combination of expansive impact and benevolent radiance) is now a distant and nostalgic memory.
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French thought is in the doldrums. French philosophy, which taught the world to reason with sweeping and bold systems such as rationalism, republicanism, feminism, positivism, existentialism and structuralism, has had conspicuously little to offer in recent decades. Saint-Germain-des-Prés, once the engine room of the Parisian Left Bank’s intellectual creativity, has become a haven of high-fashion boutiques, with fading memories of its past artistic and literary glory. As a disillusioned writer from the neighbourhood noted grimly: “The time will soon come when we will be reduced to selling little statues of Sartre made in China.”
To understand this lament one has to understand the particular place of French intellectualism have carved within cultural and political discourse in every day French society. Intellectuals in France are not just experts in their particular fields, such as literature, art, philosophy and history. They also speak in universal terms, and are expected to provide moral guidance about general social and political issues. Indeed, the most eminent French intellectuals are almost sacred figures, who became global symbols of the causes they championed - thus Voltaire’s powerful denunciation of religious intolerance, Rousseau’s rousing defence of republican freedom, Victor Hugo’s eloquent tirade against Napoleonic despotism, Émile Zola’s passionate plea for justice during the Dreyfus Affair, and Simone de Beauvoir’s bold advocacy of women’s emancipation.
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Above all, intellectuals have provided the French with a comforting sense of national pride. As the progressive thinker Edgar Quinet put it, with a big dollop of Gallic self-satisfaction: “France’s vocation is to consume herself for the glory of the world, for others as much as for herself, for an ideal which is yet to be attained of humanity and world civilisation.”
This French intellectualism has also manifested itself in a dazzling array of theories about knowledge, liberty, and the human condition. Successive generations of modern intellectuals - most of them schooled at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris - have hotly debated the meaning of life in books, newspaper articles, petitions, reviews and journals, in the process coining abstruse philosophical systems such as rationalism, eclecticism, spiritualism, republicanism, socialism, positivism, and existentialism.
This feverish theoretical activity came to a head in the decades after World War Two in the emergence of structuralism, a grand philosophy which underscored the importance of myths and the unconscious in human understanding. Its leading exponents were the philosopher of power and knowledge Michel Foucault and the ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, both professors at the Collège de France. Because he shared the name of the famous brand of American garments, Lévi-Strauss received letters throughout his life asking for supplies of blue jeans.
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The ultimate symbol of the Left Bank intellectual was the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who took the role of the public intellectual to its highest prominence. The intellectuel engagé had a duty to dedicate himself to revolutionary activity, to question established orthodoxies, and to champion the interests of all oppressed groups. Integral to Sartre’s appeal was the sheer glamour he gave to French intellectualism - with his utopian promise of a radiant future; his sweeping, polemical tone, and his celebration of the purifying effects of conflict; his bohemian and insouciant lifestyle, which deliberately spurned the conventions of bourgeois life; and his undisguised contempt for the established institutions of his time - be they the republican State, the Communist party, the French colonial regime in Algeria, or the university system.
As he put it, he was always a “traitor” - and this contrarian spirit was central to the aura which surrounded modern French intellectuals. And even though he detested nationalism, Sartre unwittingly contributed to the French sense of greatness through his embodiment of cultural and intellectual eminence, and his effortless superiority. Indeed, Sartre was undoubtedly one of the most famous French figures of the 20th century, and his writings and polemics were ardently followed by cultural elites across the globe, from Buenos Aires to Beirut.
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But Sartre’s star dimmed once the truth came out. He looked either woefully naive or just in love with being close to power (depending on who you believe). It’s clear Jean-Paul Sartre’s political commitments were perverse and even imbecilic - this talented philosophe and littérateur defended the most vile tyrannies as long as they were left-wing. He saw authenticity and emancipation at work in Stalin’s murderous despotism, Castro’s brutal Caribbean tyranny and Mao’s terroristic assault on human freedom and the life of the mind. Most perversely of all, in the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), he provided a “philosophical” defence of “fraternity terror” as a means of overcoming inauthenticity and bourgeois individualism. The radical existentialist could only find fleeting moments of hope in the bloodlust of revolutionary terror. Roger Scruton rightly calls Sartre’s political choices and judgments “degraded”, owing as much to Robespierre as Marx.
Even his detractors can admit that Sartre was a writer of talent and a keen, if one-sided, observer of the human condition when he was not deformed by ideology. The same cannot be said of others like Althusser who degraded both political judgment and the very possibility of a thoughtful encounter with our humanity. “Structuralist” Marxism, à la Althusser, was not even particularly faithful to the Marxism of Marx.
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The Paris “nonsense machine”, as the late Roger Scruton bitingly called it, was committed to a reckless assault on common sense, moderation and decency. In addition, it displayed fierce hostility to even a residual conception of a (normative) human nature. To be sure, Michel Foucault had his moments of genius. But he shared, and radicalised, his generation’s obsession with sex and power relations, seeing domination everywhere, except in Tehran (in 1979) and in Mao’s China, where he perversely discerned avatars of liberation.
Today’s Left Bank is but a pale shadow of this past. Fashion outlets have replaced high theoretical endeavor in Saint-Germain-des-Près. In fact, with very rare exceptions, such as Thomas Piketty’s book on capitalism, Paris has ceased to be a major centre of innovation in the humanities and social sciences.
The dominant characteristics of contemporary French intellectual production are its superficial, derivative qualities (typified by figures such as Bernard-Henri Lévy) and its starkly pessimistic state of mind. The pamphlets which top the best-selling non-fiction charts in France nowadays are not works offering the promise of a new dawn, but nostalgic appeals to lost traditions of heroism, such as Stéphane Hessel’s “Indignez Vous!” (2010), and anti-immigration and self-pitying tirades echoing the message of Marine Le Pen’s Front National about the destruction of French identity.
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Two recent examples are Alain Finkielkraut’s “L’Identité Malheureuse” (2013) and Eric Zemmour’s “Le Suicide Français” (2014), both suffused with images of degeneration and death. A more recent work in this vein had been Michel Houellebecq’s “Soumission” (2015), a dystopic novel which features the election of an Islamist to the French presidency, against the backdrop of a general disintegration of Enlightenment values in French society.
How is France’s loss of its bearings to be explained? Changes in the wider cultural landscape have had a major impact on Gallic self-confidence. The disintegration of Marxism in the late 20th century left a void which was filled only by postmodernism.
But the writings of the likes of Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard if anything compounded the problem with their deliberate opaqueness, their fetish for trivial word-play and their denial of the possibility of objective meaning. The hollowness of postmodernism was brilliantly satirised in Laurent Binet’s biting novel, “La septième fonction du langage,” a murder mystery framed around the death of the philosopher Roland Barthes in 1980.
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But French reality is itself far from comforting. The overcrowded and underfunded French higher education system is fraying, as shown by the relatively low global rankings of French universities in the Shanghai league table. The system has become both less meritocratic and more technocratic, producing an elite which is markedly less sophisticated and intellectually creative than its 19th and 20th century forebears: The contrast in this respect between Sarkozy and Hollande, who could barely speak grammatical French, and their eloquent and cerebral presidential predecessors was striking. Macron was an improvement as he was strongly influenced by Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy. But not much of an improvement, critics on both left and right would say.
Arguably the most important reason for the French loss of intellectual dynamism is the growing sense that there has been a major retreat of French power on the global stage, both in its material, “hard” terms and in its cultural “soft” dimensions. In a world dominated politically by the United States, culturally by the dastardly ‘Anglo-Saxons,” and in Europe by the economic might of Germany, the French have struggled to reinvent themselves.
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Few of France’s contemporary writers - with the notable exception of Houellebecq - are well known internationally, not even recent Nobel-prize winners such as Le Clézio and Patrick Modiano. The ideal of Francophonia is nothing but an empty shell, and behind its lofty rhetoric the organisation has little real resonance among French-speaking communities across the world.
This explains why French intellectuals appear so gloomy about their nation’s future, and have become both more inward-looking, and increasingly turned to their national past: As the French historian Pierre Nora put it even more bluntly, France is suffering from “national provincialism.” It is worth noting, in this context, that neither the collapse of communism in the former Soviet bloc nor the Arab spring were inspired by French thought - in stark contrast with the philosophy of national liberation which underpinned the struggle against European colonialism, which was decisively shaped by the writings of Sartre and Fanon.
My view of French intellectuals - those on the left anyway - is not charitable at all as much I appreciate french culture. Like the Russian nihilists of old, the representatives of cultural repudiation set out to destroy the remnants of the natural moral law and all authoritative institutions necessary to free and civilised life.
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Today, Alain Badiou is their self-parodic heir. This French “philosopher” combines secular messianic effusions about “the Event”, an eruption of revolutionary bliss and destruction, with apologies for Stalin and Mao. In the Chinese tyrant’s violent discourses during the murderous Cultural Revolution, Badiou finds the voice of philosophy at the service of the world-transforming Event.
As a British conservative it does intrigue me that French intellectual life has tended to adopt the ways and manners of the Jacobins. This is also true of right wing or conservative intellectuals down the ages. Even the exceptions – Chateaubriand, de Maistre, de Tocqueville, Maurras – have focused their attention on the standard of revolution, hoping to glimpse some strategy that would fortify their restorationist designs. And every movement away from the left – Ultramontanism, Action Franacise, Nouvelle Droite – has felt called upon to match the theoretical absolutism of its opponents. It has taken up the socialist challenge to present a rival system, a rival intellectual machine, with which to generate answers to all the problems of modern man.
No doubt this desire for ‘system’, and for universalist answers, shares some of the character of Roman Catholicism. But that is a discussion for another time. 
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For many in the Western intellectual world, these iconic intellectual figures on the left - Sartre, Beauvoir, Delueze, Althusser, Foucault, Derrida etc - are the only intellectual France they know. Sophisticated nihilism is lauded by academics and literati throughout the world. Their legacy unwittingly has been taken on by the children of woke today. I’m pretty sure both Foucault and Derrida would have loved today’s social media because they embody the idea of the self as a performance.
The roots of being woke then lie with these French intellectuals. It was their ideas American leftists in academia gleefully took up as a mark of intellectual sophistication to hide their intellectual inferiority complex. They then proceeded to either misunderstand or misuse or take it the nth degree those very ideas to create their own toxic ideologies that plague Western culture today. Ironically they have gained little currency in France who across both the left and the right of the political spectrum have mercifully rejected wokeism as a purely American cultural import. If it’s American the knee jerk default position of the French (as a society) is to reject it. But time will tell how long the French can hold the barbarians at the gate.
There is much to admire about the French intellectual tradition and there are many intellectual and thinkers I would happily sit in a café and read (but never in the Left bank). But they tend to be classical thinkers whose wisdom is timeless such as Montaigne, Voltaire, de Tocqueville, or de Maistre.
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I have a soft spot for Albert Camus too. Catherine Camus, the daughter of Camus put her finger on it when she said, “French intellectuals could never address themselves to the working classes. They don't know what it means, and that gives them a bad conscience about it. Albert Camus has a greater proximity to those in poverty.” The post-war French intellectuals on the left were very much the educated bourgeois whether they cared to acknowledge it or not, just like the woke today.
But these are all pre-modern thinkers (with the exception of Camus of course). There are modern conservative thinkers like Alain de Benoist and others with the Nouvelle Droite. And as interesting as they are, I don’t think they are in the same league as their intellectual French forebears. 
Much of French conservative thought is alien to my English conservative way of thinking which is rooted in the ideas of Edmund Burke and Michael Oakeshott. But that is to be expected as conservativism by default seeks to conserve the traditions an customs of that specific society and can’t be transplanted abstractly onto another culture as say Marxism or Socialism can be (a sort of one size fits all).
Since the Dreyfus affair, the intellectual left reigned almost unchallenged in the life of ideas. This hegemony had become almost total after the war, following the discredit cast on conservative thought by the Vichy regime. Maurras is no longer necessary and Sartre crushes Camus. The great masters of thought were called Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault. Only the centrists François Mauriac, Raymond Aron and Jean-François Revel were tolerated on an ideological folding seat.
That is, mercifully, no longer the case as I’ve tried to show.
I, for one, do not weep at their passing.
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Thanks for your question.
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I'm a fukng failure
Why do I pretend that I'm actually good at something?
I can do nothing not even pass and exam. I'm not smart and I don't know how to study. I'm a failure I've always been. I'm good at nothing and instead of embracing it I act like I'm so much better than everyone. I'm not I'm a dumb ass bitch.I deserve to be erased from reality.
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notsafetycop · 8 months
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I'm just putting this out there in the internet void but trying to be smart about topics is way better than curtains are bluing it. like, you get to take thing thing made for you by hand or chance and add some of you into it. it's discussion, it's union, it's love! Be cringe! Post your paragraphs long on the blue curtains! Open your soul!
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chopins-funnybone · 1 year
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In Dark Academia’s overall Eurocentric obsession with the classics I think it’s an ironic shame that most people dabbling in classics via this subculture glaze right past the academic movements of the rest of the world, in particular the majesty of the Islamic Golden Age.
If your interest in literature is earnest and the bud was birthed from an internet aesthetic I cannot recommend strongly enough that you nurture it properly and venture outside of Europe for a little bit, the wisdom to be found from all cultures is overwhelming.
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lavender-jedi · 9 months
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Why do intellectual pursuits have to directly produce wealth in order to be seen as valuable?
We've all heard the jokes about people with philosophy degrees working retail and seen gender studies propped up as the epitome of frivolous majors within conservative discourse. But that perspective falls flat when you realize that these fields study the most foundational aspects of the human experience.
When you remove the assumption that academics are solely meant to win you the best paying job, there's no justification for the studies of ideas, society, etc., as frivolous. Why SHOULDN'T we study these things?
[Let's be real, we all know why the 1% doesn't want a workforce educated in those areas]
This is where I know I'm going to get heat, but THIS is why you should have to study subjects that aren't directly related to your career pursuits.
A nurse should study history so they are informed of the historical injustices in medical care.
An accountant should take gender studies so they recognize covert sexism in their workplace when it happens.
A plumber should have a working knowledge of philosophy so they are equipped to understand the underlying ideas behind political rhetoric.
A society filled with "gainfully" employed workers will go to shit if those workers are ill-equipped to understand how that society works.
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thygeep · 1 month
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Things that can be intellectual:
-Fanfiction
-Kpop lyrics
-Popular media
-Furries
-Blue collar workers
-Not understanding a topic (yet)
-Asking questions
-Video games
Things that can not be intellectual:
-That ‘blue curtain’ post
-Demanding art to have one reading only, and any other reading to be a moral failing
-Claiming non-purposeful ignorance as a moral failing
-Writing off the entirety of academia as a rich persons pleasure
-Refusing to acknowledge that official academia is hard for many people to achieve nonetheless, unless they are rich
-Regulating academia to college degrees
-Not allowing mistakes to happen
-‘you present your opinion as fact’ of course I do, I believe in it
-Shaming someone for how they consume academia
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