So, you want to be an intellectual...

 

Lets make this clear, I am not an intellectual, when I listen to the William tell overture, I do automatically think of the Lone Ranger and I do get excited like a child again and sing along! I am if anything, Bohemian, I have both artistic and intellectual tendencies, but am not by any stretch an intellectual, no matter what the enemies I have crushed in intellectual discourse may say about me ;)

 

Out of curiosity, because I am that way inclined, I did a search for how to become more intellectual. It came up with dross and dirge by people that obviously are not intellectuals about how to become intellectuals; read books, watch educational T.V. programmes, listen to classical music &c.

 

I'm going to bullet point this for you in the simplest fashion I can so you can at least make a start:

• Writers
• Philosophers
• Social Scientists

They are your intellectual groups, if you don't fit in that category I'm sorry but you're not a proper, classified intellectual.

 

Now you might site Richard Dawkins as an intellectual, many have, but he was a physical scientist, Biologist and a good one at that. Intellectual? No way! Look at the mess he made of the atheist movement with 'The God delusion' and going on channel 4 with his half cocked diatribes against religion, he didn't have a clue what he was talking about!

 

Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Adam Smith, Marx, et al; true intellectuals that fit the above categories who's ideas have influenced the shaping of world events and stood the tests of time. Sure they all have their flaws in parts, but that's the beauty of being an intellectual, no matter if down the line ideas are over turned and changed, you still felt their impact and all political Philosophy is a mere footnote to Plato's 'Republic'.

 

You want to be more intellectual? Swallow some Philosophy or a branch of the Social Sciences, get a degree in Politics, Philosophy and economics if you like and then write those ideas down and change the world!