As for anti intellectualism. My own is rooted in how I see the education system. So it's more about the establishment than actual intellectualism.. How segregated it is. Tiered to maintain power structures. How it works to propagate 'the Agenda.' Which is simply about power, and maintaining those power structures. Ever since I read The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto, which should really have the American removed from the title, (because while the system was developed in the 20th c. by the most powerful men in America (Rockefeller, Carnegie etc.) It was globally exported, adopted and remains predominant all over the world) after reading that, all my paranoias and suspicions, starting back when I was at school, were confirmed. You really have zero need for conspiracies when you read that shit. eg. School and education (and figures who represent those things) are purposely made to feel boring. Especially to the lower rungs of society. It takes a strong mind to break out of that programming and become auto didactic. Dissensus folk don't suffer that problem but at least 75% of the rest of the world's population do. We need to educate ourselves and each other. People making people feel bad because they're not on their level makes them part of the problem, imo. Not knowing something can be easily remedied. This competitive side of intellectualism is also planned, encouraged and ramped up by the system. And I'm not asking for people to put in major time. But if you see someone getting a bit wayward, drop an authors name, a link, throw them a bone, man. Whatever. Making people feel stupid or wrong doesn't help in the end. It just feeds the ego and increases the divide.
The top levels of schooling are just as planned and manufactured as the lower. Ivy league schools for one, get huge chunks of their funding from the military. Its a business. Not thinking I'm blowing any minds with this. I just feel it's key to understanding why people develop skepticism. The education system is the root of the mind programming arm of power. What better than to take a growing mind away from its nurturing environment for its most important developmental years and fill it at random intervals full of info it will maybe use 20% of. Conspiracy thinking, right? In Chris Hedges Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, the first chapter goes at great lengths to cover all of this and more, and I'd say is compulsory reading for anyone who wants to really get into the nitty gritty. Hedges is probably my main guy for all things power related. Him and Cornel West are good friends and have lots of great talks covering all of this on YouTube. All in simple jargon free language that anyone can understand. And they do it from the heart, 100% cheese free. The two books I mentioned above alone, are enough for anyone to understand why the established school system is ultimately a net negative for society. But we're stuck with it for now. And I know it's not all bad, and there are exceptions, like Finland for eg and alternative school systems out there, but ultimately its up to us. Jargon, obscure references, critical theory, they muddy the water. They're there to keep the proles out. They help with certain things, but I'd really like to ask those of you well versed in them, did they really improve your life to the point where you would say it's crucial to understand them? Genuine naive question. And to follow on from that, do they make you happy?
I think the auto didactic thing comes down to this: reading and getting outside and living a life. Having experiences. If you're lucky, you grow up around wise, inspiring people. Or you had that one teacher who loved their job. Or you discovered the library. You developed an appetite.
Aaanyway it's late so I'll just wrap it up with this, I'm not anti school/education/intellectualism at all. It's just important to learn how it really works. How it changes you. What it tries to take away from you and how to resist that. Self educating is where its at. Obviously for the really technical stuff it's hard to beat university. But there are people in the 3rd world who figured out how to engineer wind powered generators to feed pumps to irrigate their fields from watching YouTube tutorials. Just saying. Although I'd probably be a bit wary of a heart surgeon who did the same. Anyway that's my lack of sleep fuelled pov.