Is there a reason why most authors, philosophers and intellectuals are left wing? I'm not saying that's good or bad...

Is there a reason why most authors, philosophers and intellectuals are left wing? I'm not saying that's good or bad, I'm mainly just curious as to why it is this way. Is there something about being more well-read, or critically analyzing the world, that leads to left wing conclusions?

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You are limiting your scope to just modern authors so you can make a generalizing statement in support of your world view

this

Because they work at publicly funded universities and therefore vote for collectivist, liberal, politicians who promise to keep funding them.

What are you talking about lol

But as time goes on, we get more knowledgeable and educated about the world and can draw on all of history. So does it not make sense to look at mostly modern authors?

Most authors throughout history were generally progressive in one form of another. Shakespare and Cervantes were straight up SJWs by /pol/ standards

>we get more knowledgeable and educated about the world
wrong. In the beginning, anything was possible. Now, it is all dogma.

Source?

In Cervantes case I note particularly his description in Don Quixote about the tragedy of the ghost towns left behind by the exiled Andalusian Muslims. He even references at the start of his work his indebtedness to the writers of their culture that influenced him but are themselves now lost.
Shakeaspeare I could go on for days between the Merchant of Venice and Othello alone

Most authors, philosophers, and intellectuals have a job teaching at a university.

That is how you make a living as an intellectual. Authors usually teach creative writing to get by.

WRONG. THEY HATED NIGGERS & WOMEN.

>Most authors, philosophers, and intellectuals have a job teaching at a university.

Most philosophers in recent times maybe, most authors certainly did not

If you like new ideas, and for old standards and ways of thinking to be replaced by new youre going to be more liberal, more interested in seeing what happens when progressive policy is realized.

Its all just about openness to new ideas.

Even celebrity philosophers like Foucault or Zizek or Chomsky still keep their jobs as professors, even Pynchon himself has applied for (or taught, I don't know) mathematics classes at Berkeley

Simply, the right and conservatism lend itself to the status-quo. Not complicated, it's harder to write anything interesting if you have nothing contentious to say.

Youre basically saying intellectuals wouldnt exist under free market economics.

empathetic people are better thinkers and better writers.

The left is not empathetic, the left is degrading and condescending.

I imagine they do so because they genuinely enjoy the role of teaching not because they need the money
I mean Zizek basically lives a NEET lifestyle and the most he spends money on is oversized t-shirts

Shut up you retarded bigot

Sure, it's not like popular right figures shun the liberal arts and sociology or anything.

Progressive != Left Wing

Yeah, people write about how fucked up their society is when they think their society is fucked up that doesn't mean Hobbes would ever be a Marxist.

I am pretty sure when it comes to important figures, most aren't leftwing. The modern intellectuals have actually abused capitalism so they could build an economy around their activities that is self-perpetuating, That's why most current intellecuals are left-wing(majority of them, which includes the low-end ones), because they need that to participate in the economy and industry of academia.

I actually legitimately think Hobbes was an essential precursor to the establishment of Marxist theory. He was one of the first major thinkers to describe in detail how all activity in society was materially reducible and his description of the meaning of the state as an organizing principle to mediate the ultimately oppressive and destructive reality of competition is not so oppositional to Marxism at all.

The fact he was opposed to the proto-bourgeois puritans conception of parliamentarism is not so different from Marx's own opinion of Capitalist Democracy.

>Pynchon taught math at Berkeley

lol seriously?

you really shouldn't compare them based on our current political dogmas and standards, it's anachronistic, like saying Plato was a fascist or whatever because of The Republic. It's not just a matter of semantics, it's a completely different world-view from that of ours.
Racism as we know it didn't really exist in 16th century Europe, so it doesn't makes much sense to use Othello as an example of Shakespeare being quasi-SJW.

as for them being progressives, it's, again, a completely different political, social, historical setting. Often, political stances occupied different places in the spectrum as time changed, and often the political spectrum was wholly unlike ours(unrelated to any of the authors mentioned, but for example, Nationalism was exclusively a Liberal issue when it first came about). Of course there were plenty who were progressives in all senses of the word, this is not at question.

I can't elaborate on this more, too drunk and too tired, but putting the lens of modern political dogmas on writers who are completely removed from it is a very pernicious thing to do.

>Racism as we know it didn't really exist in 16th century Europe

you are being a facetious memester but it really didn't, no matter what sycophants today say. what we call racism is almost exclusively born out of colonial identities and those were still in larval at the time of Shakespeare. "Race" didn't really became a concern to European until later.

I disagree entirely, speaking about the fact Shakespeare was sympathetic to the oppression of the Jews in a nation in which they were expelled is not Anarchronistic and comparisons between the propositions and missions of ideologies today and historical relations to their own cultures and institutions of power are very possible.
Its not like I'm trying to cite Shakespeare's view on the minimum wage or abortion, its a far deeper and trascendental relationship to how we constitute our relationship towards the Other and the existing organizing principles of our society.

>I actually legitimately think Hobbes was an essential precursor to the establishment of Marxist theory


There is not a single philosopher that is not a precursor to Marxism or Hegel(as in his own opinion of himself). You are grasping at straws here. I might as well say that marxism is just a footnote to post-modernism in which marxism is a failed paradigm.

Silly argument.
If you need me to contextualize my description I can say that ironically Rousseau infact was far more antithetical to Marxist theory than Hobbes was contrary to their stereotyped identities.
Its actually quite a struggle for me to find a historical political thinker before the 19th century that parrelels with Marx more than Hobbes, they are extremely compatible.

This is exactly why it's easier to compare and come to conclusions, it's a period which has come and gone. it's further removed from any societal pressures of that time period, and can be viewed a bit more objectively, and through a wider lens.

>"Race" didn't really became a concern to European until later.

Except that the English for instance considered Scots, the Welsh, and Irishmen to be mongrel races for the better part of eight hundred years.

"Race" as you define it wasn't a concern because everyone in society was white. That doesn't mean there wasn't animosity between ethnic groups.

First of all Hobbes was not a monist unlike Marx and Hegel(who appropriated from Spinoza). If want a true ancestor to marx, that would be Hollbach, or whatever his name is in English. Disgusting modern liberals(not leftists) actually like to appropriate Hobbes to the cause of the first constitutionalist and I think they are right.

This is true - the higher up I moved in college, the more I realized all my professors were trying to brainwash me. And in a condiscending way too, like they would make the whole class gang up on me.
Mind you, this was at university of texas where I had to constantly fight the validity of my identity as a gay conservative

>First of all Hobbes was not a monist

Hard to say honestly, he was certainly religious as most everyone was then but he even contemplated whether God could be thought of as materially reducible. If he was not a monist proper he certainly expanded the scope of Material reductionism considerably

>my identity as a gay conservative

The same reason most medieval scholars were Catholic.

is dis bait?

kek

No - I'm a gay conservative, ask me about my self hate

I'm asking about your self-hate.

Liberal arts is almost always bad.

Sociology and all sciences are always bad.

It started at a young age, but now I kinda love myself. That's how I know my views are rational

Your views are rational because you love yourself?

Smart people never love themselves

No, my views are rational because they encompass the most people and not some whiny minority

I said kinda

Self-hatred is the most plebeian thing ever.

t. not a smart person

vineland.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Chapter_11#Page_206

Give me 5 proeminent intellectuals not teaching and I'll give you 20 that are.

Also, Zizek spends money on vidya and glamorous vacations with his kids (srsly)

>implying one case means the same for all cases

I doubt it. Pynchon knows his maths but it's not like he is publishing proofs or something. What's he going to teach like a Calc II class? That would actually be pretty damn funny heh.

He worked as an engineer at Boeing I believe, but that was back in the early sixties I believe.

I simply think that to be a subject and to have a sophisticated awareness of your desires the natural reaction can be at best ambivalence.
Justified self-esteem in my view can only be legitimately derived from actions towards escaping your subjectivity not totalizing self assessment

Him: an interesting point substantiated by a concrete description of Hobbes views, both politically and philosophically

You: a sweeping generalization posited as a straw an for his argument, avoiding the content of the argument entirely.

I don't think loving yourself has to mean being critical of yourself - it's an emotional thing that has nothing to do with logic or thinking or whatever honestly - like opposite sides of the brain

>Hegel appropriated from Spinoza

Read something other than Wikipedia and you'll find that the relation to Spinoza was much more complex. He praises Spinoza for perceiving the wholeness of the absolute but criticizes his subsumption of the particular. To call this an "appropriation" is to be ignorant of how philosophy works in the same way that is preventing you from understanding the argument being made about Hobbes and forcing you to throw up buzzwords you don't really know how to use.

Is your premise even true?

There would definitely be a lot fewer of them.

user please. You've never read a marxist interpretation of Hobbes in your life. To print Hobbes during soviet times, they basically had to find someone to bullshit an introduction out of his ass that incorporated Hobbes with marx. Same goes for every empiricist that had political opinions(Locke, Bacon). You westerners are swimming in ideology, your own one.

>while white people are limited to knowing other white ethnicities and at worst, other caucasoid races (arabs), for a limited time in the east (mongoloids) they don't align
>when white ethnicities go to new places in the world that have radically different races they began to confederate into a pan-identity that '''''coincidentally''''' grows from degrees of genetic relation between previously divided white ethnic groups
>throughout history and the world every race/ethnicity does this, from the amhara and tigray in ethiopia with their semitic-chauvinist 'red' race to the east asian high races
>it's all one giant capitalist plot

really makes u think

>You are limiting your scope to just modern authors
Well, that happens because people nowadays automatically discard systems such as empires and monarchies.

My take is that, given the contemporary possibilities, the left leaning ones are usually more ethical and moral, especially given our (nowadays implied, but imho still present) judeo-christian collective values.
It is easy to ignore homeless people when walking in NYC, it is harder to ignore them when you're tyring to design a new political system.

nice try /pol/

you can't be a philosopher while simultaneously placing on the political spectrum

You can when your place in the political spectrum is not represented in actual politics.
That's why we've got no serious major philosopher endorsing the DNC or the GOP, while libertarianism, communism and anarchism are raging in the academia.

this thread:

>why are most of the "intellectuals" made famous by this left wing society, discussed by left wing televions, quoted by left wing celebrities, and taught by left wing teachers hired by left wing governments, left wing?

arguably most of the intellectuals of all time were *extremely* right wing. it is just the faggotry since the french revolution that fucked up humanity

Because they are actually educated and have left Podunk, Nowhere, USA.

it would be impossible for a philosopher to endorse the DNC or GOP because american's cant be philosophers either (empirically)

But that doesn't happen either in Continental Europe (or at least, as far as I know, it has not happened in decades in Italy, France and Germany, the only European countries in which I've lived).

>arguably
how about you make the argument then?

>he fell for the Leftism means democracy meme

They are not. If you went 150 years into the past, the vast majority of intellectuals would be major shitlords by modern standards. Obviously, you being a product of a "progressive" system of education are familiar mostly with those thinkers who resonate well with modern Zeitgeist. Your average college grad is learning about Rousseau, not Carlyle, so if your education is limited by what you were assigned in school, you will obviously get the impression that everyone you read says kinda similar things.
Tl;dr academy is a circlejerk

The greatest philosopher who ever lived (Plato) was by modern standards "Right-wing" as fuck.

He literally argued for Communism and destruction of the family unit in the Republic

Most aren't. Economically, they're conservatists. Most 20th century French stuff is precisely that (Foucault, Deleuze, Althusser to name a few).

His elitism has nothing to do with the modern conception of elitism, which is based on power and wealth instead of widsom and knowledge.

It goes against egalitarian left-wing movements moderately, while going against any sort of right-wing movement radically.
Plato does not conform to modern left-wing schools of thought, but calling him ''right-wing as fuck'' is just ignorant.

Read him more.

>He literally argued for Communism
False. He argued for a communal life-style for the Guardian class.
>and destruction of the family unit
Yeah this was always silly, but I think his intentions were sound. (Ensure the citizen's loyalty to the nation). He just under-estimated how much the family unit actually strengthened the nation.

also
>reading the political theory in the Republic literally
It's a utopic mental exercise used to examine the soul primarily, not a treatise.

>His elitism has nothing to do with the modern conception of elitism, which is based on power and wealth instead of widsom and knowledge.

Your point being? I don't disagree with this.

>Your point being? I don't disagree with this.
That this is basically the only ''right-wing'' aspect of his political philosophy.

Also
>(Ensure the citizen's loyalty to the nation)
This is absolutely true, but since we're talking about modern politics you should point out the nature of the need for nationalism in 4th century b.C. Athene, which does apply to modern countries in very few occasions.

it's likely just the ones you know better or like better, or the ones the lists you trust like better.

the name for this is selection bias

>modern conception of elitism, which is based on power and wealth
>this is what marxists actually believed

>That this is basically the only ''right-wing'' aspect of his political philosophy.

I think we're operating under different definitions of "right-wing" but ok.

what used to be considered common sense up until the frenchrevolution would nowadays be considered extremely right wing. and that is what most intellectuals of those times used to think.

also I said arguably because I don't think no one ever measured how many right wing intellectuals there have been since the beginning of humanity

Well, maybe I haven't been specific enough. Of course it depends on where you live. I live in the US, and what I've said stands true for the system I'm living in.

Then expand on your opinion. In which aspects Plato was right wing as fuck?

Because the right wingers went and got real jobs