The Price of Intellectualism

There’s something remarkably impressive about the notional, theoretical compulsions which drive people to accept that other people’s money, the product of their labor, even a not-so-modest fraction of their own, ought to finance a near-infinite space of institutions, of near-infinite cost, which academically purport to advance select idealistic notions of the famed, mislabeled, and ill-defined public good while pragmatically and historically failing to ever sustainably achieve these ends, only to expend exorbitant sums of wealth in the pursuit of this great masquerade and other interests completely remote from those of the published and implied official mission. It is, of course, easy to accept the costs, as they are collectivized and distributed so as to appear negligible; thus, the costs are largely inapparent and invisible to the layman whose personal interests stretch only so far as his visible profile and reputation, his own pocketbook and his theoretical convictions and dispositions. The public sphere, as far as he is concerned, operates not from any regard to finite capacity but rather from the otherwise limitless abstractions of demand spawning from heartwarming intellectualism and executive control, the popular synthesis of which is enabled through the illusion of democratic, that is unit-based instead of merit-based, participation. 

The pitfall of unit-based calculus over merit-based process is the former’s insensitivity to retained, personalized risk and its circumvention of palpable, replicable exposure to the circumstances and costs attending the whimsical ambitions punctuated by the moment’s swipe of a pen. Within the institutions of a democratic republic, there exists this unfounded vestige of virtue which stands only to further the expectation that one's ignorance ought to be just a powerful as one's knowledge. As evidenced by the largesse of debt spanning the United States, the thresholds of one’s wishful demands often outstrip the capacity of his budget. This is only exacerbated in that space which seems ever-prepared to finance itself into oblivion.