2025-12-15, Anxious intellectuals with an audience

I think it’s gross when wealthy, credentialed people use polished academic English to tell everyone else what something “really is,” especially when the concrete claims they’re making are wrong. What bothers me is the performance of authority. A relatively small class of highly educated, well-paid commentators adopts the tone of explanation to instruct an audience that often does not have the time, money, or access to study these topics themselves. The language sounds like knowledge, and that sound frequently substitutes for substance.

I do not think most of these people are lying intentionally. I think they are displacing their own fear and uncertainty. When faced with systems that are complex, technical, and politically charged… artificial intelligence, energy infrastructure, public health, political organizing… they reach for narratives that feel explanatory and stabilizing. Physics metaphors, inevitability arguments, and appeals to deep laws provide emotional closure, while academic language confers legitimacy on that closure.

The problem is that this does not only soothe the speaker, it also instructs the listener. Wrapping a claim in the rhetoric of science or theory is not merely expressing an opinion, it asserts that the question is settled. Because academic fluency and leisure are unevenly distributed, many people cannot realistically verify these claims without substantial unpaid effort. Authority ends up doing the work that evidence should be doing.

This pattern appears across domains. People confidently explain why artificial intelligence must inevitably lie “because entropy,” while misunderstanding entropy itself. People speak authoritatively about energy transitions without knowing that some widely cited targets originate in fossil fuel public relations rather than engineering feasibility. People offer guidance on political organizing while rejecting basic epidemiology. In each case, the structure is the same… confident explanation, borrowed technical language, and a narrative that converts complexity into fate.

What is offensive about this is not the presence of fear. Fear is understandable in the face of genuinely difficult systems. What is offensive is the use of elite rhetorical tools to offload that fear onto an audience as certainty. This is pedagogy as displacement, where incomplete understanding is transformed into final-sounding explanation. The speaker gains relief, the listener gains confidence, and the truth is distorted in the process.

If someone is going to teach others how to think about the world, the minimum obligation is accuracy and intellectual humility. Without those, eloquence does not function as insight. It functions as a mechanism for laundering uncertainty into authority.