Astral Codex Ten

intelligentsia

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intelligentsia

Article

intelligentsia is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between March 05, 2021 and December 01, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “the concept of intelligentsia - a class materially poor but mentally rich”; “I’d never really understood the idea of “intelligentsia” before. I knew it meant the class of smart people”. It most often appears alongside Bobos In Paradise, David Brooks, Elon Musk.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: March 05, 2021
  • Last seen: December 01, 2022

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Highlights From The Comments On Class
March 05, 2021 · Original source
Perhaps the most important thing that separates Eastern bloc culture from e.g. British culture is the concept of intelligentsia - a class materially poor but mentally rich, the artists and writers and academics. There is a strong implicit understanding that such a class is the heart of society, responsible for its "spirit" and the safekeeping of its values. Between WW2 and the subsequent Soviet occupation, this class has been essentially gutted, to a large extent physically (see e.g. Katyn massacre). In parallel, the communist effort to separate kulaks from both their holdings and the mortal coil has been successful, and there are no pre-war fortunes whatsoever. Communism falls, and now we have a tabula rasa society.
The lower class works basically as described in the book. The middle class is stuck in a curious position. Do we aim to be the new intelligentsia, perhaps inspired by our own grandfathers? Do we enthusiastically jump in the rat race and attempt to out-earn and out-Instagram everybody else (cf. the lower middle class of the book)? Do we ostentatiously drop both status ladders and do our own thing? The middle class is fractured and occupied by sneering at everybody climbing a different ladder than themselves.
Book Review: First Sixth Of Bobos In Paradise
December 01, 2022 · Original source
The meritocrats didn’t exactly have a culture of their own to bring to the fight. They were a haphazard faction thrown together by 1950s college admissions policies. But their links to academia let them lift the pre-existing culture of the intelligentsia and bohemians.
I’d never really understood the idea of “intelligentsia” before. I knew it meant the class of smart people, but eg English professors never seemed like a substantially different class than anyone else. Brooks says this isn’t a coincidence; the modern upper class copied and absorbed the intelligentsia, ending their existence as a separate group.
These groups had evolved alongside and in opposition to the aristocracy. Their values were anti-capitalist - sometimes in the sense of being outright Marxists, but always in the sense of contempt for the boorish pursuit of money or status. To the intelligentsia and bohemians, the suburban white-picket-fence two-point-five-children lifestyle was infinitely contemptible compared to a passionate commitment to suffer for art or politics or erudition or whatever; they had spent the past two hundred years harping on this theme in approximately every novel ever written. The new meritocrats adopted these ideas as rallying cries for their cultural crusade against the bourgeois WASPs.