Skinning the Intellectuals

How do we hold intellectuals responsible for their ideas? How do I hold myself responsible? (4 minute read).

A while ago I was talking about this Substack and what I hoped to achieve with it to a bunch of friends. More specifically about my political beliefs, of how I hoped that my ideas could make the world better. One friend then carried out one of the most important services a friend can do for another – he called BULLSHIT:

“I get so provoked. What do you know about this? These are just your opinions. I’m sure you’ve spent a lot of time thinking about these things, but how do you test your ideas? What price do you pay for being wrong? What makes you better than all the other intellectuals you criticize? Where is your skin in the game?”

He got me. I could not give him a straight answer, and I did not like being called an “intellectual”. I promised my friend that I would think about it. This text is the result.

Saint Bartholomew was no intellectual, which may be why he had skin in the game. Photo credit: Michaelangelo, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

First, I am in a safer position than most thinkers (“intellectuals…”) because I am a skeptic. This Substack is the Ignorance Substack. My work is not about finding the truth or deciding how society ought to be run. It is about finding out what the truth isn’t, and how society ought not to be run. I already know that I do not know. The purpose is defensive rather than offensive, about protecting society from other people’s ideas rather than pushing my own onto society. I call bullshit on others. Which may be why I was so unprepared when someone called bullshit on me.

Though this makes things a little bit better, the answer does not satisfy me.

Note that my friend asked for “skin in the game”, as per the great Nassim Nicholas Taleb – that I ought to suffer some consequence if I am wrong. Or as the (also great) Thomas Sowell put it: “”It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”

This is perhaps the greatest problem for serious thinkers throughout history. Behind just about every great disaster, from war to civil war to tyranny and totalitarianism, stands an intellectual. Usually far behind the disaster, safe from all consequences. Think of various theologians inciting holy war, or ideologues like Rousseau and Marx.

The single greatest example is the legion of intellectuals who supported Communism during the twentieth century. Many of them are still active today, celebrated and excused, while the millions of victims of the ideas they supported lie largely forgotten, lumped together as statistics. Even today, intellectuals tend to support dangerous or harmful things like mass immigration, lopping the genitals off children, and being perpetually paranoid about sexism, racism and fascism.

How do we hold intellectuals responsible? How do I hold myself responsible? How do we bring skin in the game to intellectuals?

One humble but important way of doing this is making sure the ideas are thoroughly tested. The failures can then be exposed for all the world to see.

But this isn’t always practical – ideas about how society ought to be run can only be tested by changing the entire society. Millions will die if it doesn’t work. The ease of testing ideas is the key difference between real sciences like physics and chemistry, as opposed to philosophy and speculation.

Still, there are examples of thinkers who enter the battlefield of politics, take real risks, and sometimes pay the ultimate price. But even then, they do not take ALL the risks. While it may be honorable for intellectuals to die for their beliefs, they are rarely the only ones to die, and even more rarely first in line. Think of Marat, Robespierre, Lenin, and Trotsky.

When Martin Luther was summoned before the Diet of Worms in 1521, he refused to recant his ideas despite the threat of being burnt as a heretic (and being forced to eat worms?). He is quoted as saying: “Here I stand. I can do no other.” Luther bravely followed his conscience, and risked his skin in the game. But let it not be forgotten that Martin Luther was in fact not burnt at the stake, and instead became a celebrated historical figure. Meanwhile, Europe tore itself apart in a religious civil war that still isn’t quite over 500 years later. It wasn’t Martin Luther who paid the price for his stubborn principles and sensitive conscience.

There is, however, one example of an intellectual with skin in the game that sticks out: Socrates. He bothered too many with his strange ideas, comparing himself to a gadfly, and was put on trial before the people of Athens. Socrates spoke the truth as he saw it, and refused to compromise. He acted alone, and not as a leader or politician. When the time came, he voluntarily drank the hemlock that ended his life. Thus, he died in obedience to the laws of his city and the will of the people – as a critic of those laws and that will, but not as an enemy.

Socrates was humble. He remembered that the goal of his “intellectualism” wasn’t his own glory or a lust for power. His ideas hurt no-one but himself.

Jakob Sjölander