We needed uncomfortable intellectuals. Instead, we got ad-engaged influencers
As we leave Spring behind, some of us already miss a few of the intellectual and spiritual heavyweights that left us in a moment when we don’t have public role models to spare.
T.S. Eliot started The Waste Land with the following:
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
I’d keep the mood for our times, 103 years after he wrote his fragmentary poem about the open wounds of the Great War, and switch “April” for “May,” saying that May was this time the cruelest month, propelling to the news the petty, high-maintenance leaders seeking attention, while stepping stones of old-school humanism (the first Latin American pope, Uruguayan ex-president José Mujica, and Brazillian photographer Sebastião Salgado), all died within weeks.
As the circus reached levels of absurdist plays and we learned one thing or two about insider trading at the top, I just thought about Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet:
“Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems. Yet even this child sometimes weeps.”
Invincible summers
While things at the epicenter of what we call the Western world move with an in-your-face lack of decorum, the three mentioned Latin American giants left us stoically, with the class of those who never had to fake it when talking about aspirational individual and collective bliss. Like ancient philosophers, they were among the few who not only believed but lived what they preached.
It’s been a May worthy of Ecclesiastes’ mood and gravitas: “To everything, there is a season… A time to be born, and a time to die,” the old text says. May is behind us, fortunately, although many of the public casualties will be missed. Turning Albert Camus’ words around, we’d imagine him saying this time, apropos of the lack of clear voices to tell people what they don’t want to hear:
“In the midst of May, I found there was, within me, an invincible winter.”
(Original says, “deep within winter, an invincible summer.”)
Hence, it isn't surprising that the Nazi book burning in 1933 took place in May. Ah, the month of May.
The importance of thoughtful public conversations
This little parody of a gloomy beginning of an article came to me as I replied to one of the lengthy and always interesting comments that a longtime reader from Argentina leaves on my articles on the site *faircompanies, occasionally.
He commented on a recent article about collapse and its (possible) grassroots antagonists, which involves self-organization. It was a topic that hit close to home as I discussed the TV series adaptation of The Eternaut, a classic Argentine comic series written by Héctor Germán Oesterheld, who was later disappeared, along with his entire family, by the Argentine dictatorship.
In the comment, he confessed to liking to see how outsiders view his country.
He also appreciated my admiration for the kind of Latin American figures we’ve recently lost—thinkers like Pope Francis, Pepe Mujica, and the photographer Sebastião Salgado.
I replied, in Spanish, from a place of shared nostalgia:
“We live in a world that misses the old kind of intellectuals, from a time before media was so atomized, when thinkers still said what needed to be said—especially when it wasn’t what the public wanted to hear. People who ventured into difficult terrain because it was necessary, not because it was profitable.”
To prove my point, I mentioned the type of old-school public intellectual who understood that their raison d'être was to call foul when nobody did, especially when risking their own fortune, reputation, life, or even posterity. By contrast—I said—today, we seem to have bred the type of public persona that we deserve: the influencer, always ready to say what appeals to the audience or brings economic utility to all (platform, brands, influencers themselves), always ready to sugarcoat reality and go around any important thing we need to hear, especially those things we don’t want to.
I mentioned Victor Hugo, Émile Zola, and Albert Camus—giants who didn’t chase popularity but pursued clarity and truth, even when it meant exile, mockery, or personal loss. Hugo denounced the death penalty and Napoléon III’s authoritarianism. Zola risked imprisonment to defend Dreyfus. Camus, amidst the Algerian War, stood by his mother rather than endorse terrorism, earning him scorn from Sartre and other fashionable ideologues of the Left.
From the shoulders of giants to those of midgets
These were not “influencers.” Their loyalty was not to audience engagement, brand deals, or viral growth. It was to conscience.
Let’s face it: we’re not in times of actual intellectuals; the species went extinct. Picture the figures of today’s so-called manosphere and try to weigh in on their actual contribution to the welfare of our society, or the intellectual merit of their points.
Our public square is populated by content creators who have the reach but rarely the risk. We have platforms, but few principles. Social media rewards safety, ambiguity, and trend alignment. The algorithm punishes those who speak plainly when the truth is inconvenient. Even journalists and intellectuals feel the pressure to please, to perform, to avoid “losing the crowd.”
The cost of moral courage in the digital marketplace is too high. So we adapt. We grow silent. And we forget what it looks like when someone speaks up not to be applauded but because the moment demands it.
We are living, again, in such a moment. And what we need to hear from people we admire for their values and principles, we won’t.
In such divided times, we could reach an easy consensus: almost every one of us has the feeling that a new age is coming but isn’t here yet, and transitory moments feel shaky and lack referents. Read Antonio Gramsci and feel that many of his points are as fresh as ever.
We lack public figures to admire, and instead of being on the shoulders of giants, we feel we’re being run (in the economic, corporate, and public realms) by petty-minded midgets. With all due respect to midgets and other creatures we call freaks, as if today’s public sociopaths were the living image of human excellence according to the Greek, Roman, or Victorian era canons.
Deception 2.0: Tailoring our perception of reality
The digital tools we use bring convenience and engagement but often fail to inform us of less comfortable or inconvenient realities, events, or chores that we should also be aware of from a non-partisan, non-tribal perspective. Yet, the tools we use do dig into our biases and fears, either pleasing us or evoking contempt.
Many of us thought the era of mass media was too compromised by its endogamic relationship with power and believed that the libertarian design of the internet could bring a healthy antidote to society, a breath of fresh air. Instead, we left the door open to fragmentation and algorithmic curation. It didn’t go well.
I recently came across some remnants of the techno-optimism associated with user-based services of the so-called Web 2.0. The best sound bite (or should we talk in memetic terms and call it a “meme,” as in the minimum viable unit of information?) came from a very young Mark Zuckerberg.
Like his parody from the movie The Social Network, he stated that society couldn’t lose with the digital era, for—he said convincingly—free access to more information could only lead to people making better decisions based on more information.
Right?
Many of us had fallen into such a fallacy early on, but it didn’t take long to realize that algorithms wouldn’t feed people what they needed to hear, but rather those things that kept them engaged and were best suited for advertising.
Like in Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, when humanity risks losing its memory of the universal, humanist stories we tell each other through literature, to the point that a few insurgents decide to remember each a masterpiece so it will be kept alive as long as they are, too, we live in times in which we risk losing memory of the times when people who knew what they said (not charlatans) spoke up not to be applauded, but because they felt it was their duty with society.
When intellectuals actually mattered
One can say many things about France, but after living there for many years, I came to relish and outright admire the sense of duty that its education system dedicates (even if somewhat superficially, like anything in contemporary society) to the intellectuals of yesteryear. Some of them are perceived as dusty figures, but it only takes one good teacher and one student who, in today’s terms, doesn’t behave like an NPC going through life like an automaton to feel inspired by such figures of the past.
Consider one of these giants, Victor Hugo. I’m not French, and I refuse to see him like an eternal white-bearded, good-hearted grandpa and I prefer to see the middle-aged, principled intellectual who would rather go to exile than conform to the power or to what the society of the time wanted to hear.
I ESPECIALLY picture him as a famous, prestigious, and wealthy writer who refused over and over to become a comfortable, predictable personality, just pandering to whichever popular leaders or opinions of his time. One who, instead of positioning himself sideways when Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte profited from the social chaos and wave of conservative mentality (law, order, repression if needed) to perform a coup, decided to write a long essay about the risks of a society in which the majority decide to remain silent in fear of retribution by militarized power.
Victor Hugo called this book The History of a Crime, and it reads like a non-fiction masterpiece of New Journalism, only written 100 years before Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. I love to read passages in which the writer himself, the old Victor Hugo, risks his own skin to call foul when needed.
Victor Hugo at 49
During the coup planned by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (Napoléon III), there’s a scene I keep returning to—a moment in which Hugo and his companions, faced with the silence of the people and the triumph of militarized power, decide to speak anyway.
Victor Hugo, along with other “citizens” as they call each other (for they know that being a citizen comes with rights, but also with duties, like protecting democracy from unscrupulous grabbers), is inside an omnibus (the horse-powered public transportation of the time). The writer starts speaking against the soldiers, and quickly other people inside the omnibus tell him to keep quiet, for they don’t want the attention of the insurrectionists.
What unfolds on a crowded Paris omnibus is a quiet allegory of our own age: fear, complicity, and the near-impossibility of resistance when everyone is watching and no one wants to move first.
And yet—someone must. I love that people like Victor Hugo or his character Jean Valjean have inspired and will inspire many others, even in a moment when many favor the TikTok brainrot opium over a read with substance.
Perhaps reading a whole essay by Victor Hugo on the risks and complicity of doing nothing when things deteriorate in front of us is excessive and off-point. I then searched for the passage I described and decided to partially reproduce it so you can enjoy it, too (the narration is in the first person, the voice of Victor Hugo himself). You can feel how he’s trying to read the situation as soldiers try to help Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte secure the coup:
Three miles separated Arnauld and myself from our houses. It was impossible to walk there through the middle of Paris, without being recognized at each step. Two passers-by extricated us from our difficulty. One of them said to the other, “The omnibuses are still running on the Boulevards.” We profited by this information, and went to look for a Bastille omnibus. All four of us got in. I entertained at heart, I repeat, wrongly or rightly, a bitter reproach for the opportunity lost during the morning. I said to myself that on critical days such moments come, but do not return. There are two theories of Revolution: to arouse the people, or to let them come of themselves. The first theory was mine, but, through force of discipline, I had obeyed the second. I reproached myself with this. I said to myself, “The People offered themselves, and we did not accept them. It is for us now not to offer ourselves, but to do more, to give ourselves.”
Meanwhile the omnibus had started. It was full. I had taken my place at the bottom on the left Arnauld (de l’Ariege) sat next to me, Carini opposite, Montanelli next to Arnauld. We did not speak; Arnauld and myself silently exchanged that pressure of hands which is a means of exchanging thoughts. As the omnibus proceeded towards the centre of Paris the crowd became denser on the Boulevard. As the omnibus entered into the cutting of the Porte St. Martin a regiment of heavy cavalry arrived in the opposite direction. In a few seconds this regiment passed by the side of us. They were cuirassiers. They filed by at a sharp trot and with drawn swords. The people leaned over from the height of the pavements to see them pass. Not a single cry. On the one side the people dejected, on the other the soldiers triumphant. All this stirred me.
And here’s Victor Hugo, risking his prestige and perhaps physical safety, in the middle of people:
Suddenly the regiment halted. I do not know what obstruction momentarily impeded its advance in this narrow cutting of the Boulevard in which we were hemmed in. By its halt it stopped the omnibus. There were the soldiers. We had them under our eyes, before us, at two paces distance, their horses touching the horses of our vehicle, these Frenchmen who had become Mamelukes, these citizen soldiers of the Great Republic transformed into supporters of the degraded Empire. From the place where I sat I almost touched them; I could no longer restrain myself. I lowered the window of the omnibus. I put out my head, and, looking fixedly at the dense line of soldiers which faced me, I called out, “Down with Louis Bonaparte. Those who serve traitors are traitors!”
Those nearest to meturned their heads towards meand looked at me with a tipsy air; the others did not stir, and remained at “shoulder arms,” the peaks of their helmets over their eyes, their eyes fixed upon the ears of their horses. In great affairs there is the immobility of statues in; petty mean affairs there is the immobility of puppets. At the shout which I raised Arnauld turned sharply round. He also had lowered his window, and he was leaning half out of the omnibus, with his arms extended towards the soldiers, and he shouted, “Down with the
traitors!”To see him thus with his dauntless gesture, his handsome head, pale and calm, his fervent expression, his beard and his long chestnut hair, one seemed to behold the radiant and fulminating face of an angry Christ. The example was contagious and electrical.
“Down with the traitors!” shouted Carini and Montanelli.
“Down with the Dictator! Down with the traitors!” repeated a gallant young man with whom we were not acquainted and who was sitting next to Carini. With the exception of this young man, the whole omnibus seemed seized with terror!
But people preferred to act passively and let it go:
“Hold your tongues!” exclaimed these poor frightened people; you will cause us all to be massacred.” One, still more terrified, lowered the window, and began to shout to the soldiers, “Long live Prince Napoléon! Long live the Emperor!” There were five of us, and we overpowered this cry by our persistent protest, “Down with Louis Bonaparte! Down with the traitors!”
The soldiers listened in gloomy silence. A corporal turned with a threatening air towards us, and shook his sword. The crowd looked on in bewilderment. What passed within me at that moment? I cannot tell! I was in a whirlwind. I had at the same time yielded to a calculation, finding the opportunity good, and to a burst of rage, finding the encounter insolent. A woman cried out to us from the pavement, “You will get yourselves cut to pieces.” I vaguely imagined that some collision was about to ensue, and that, either from the crowd or from the Army, the spark would fly out. I hoped for a sword-cut from the soldiers or a shout of anger from the people. In short I had obeyed rather an instinct than an idea. But nothing came of it, neither the sword-cut nor the shout of anger. The soldiers did not bestir themselves and the people maintained silence. Was it too late? Was it too soon?
The mysterious man of the Elysee had not foreseen the event of an insult to his name being thrown in the very face of the soldiers. The soldiers had no orders. They received them that evening. This was seen on the morrow.
Building and destroying
In an age of media fragmentation and algorithmic echo chambers, the public intellectual—the figure capable of shaping opinion by confronting uncomfortable truths—has nearly vanished. Once, a handful of principled voices helped societies navigate their moral crossroads. They did not flatter the crowd or pander to consensus. They risked everything to say what needed to be said.
These were not influencers. They were not building brands. They were not selling personal products in the attention economy. They were thinkers—and, more importantly, citizens—who used their platforms to challenge rather than placate.
Today, the cultural space once occupied by such figures has been outsourced to “creators” whose incentives are entirely different. Popularity, virality, and follower count now determine the value of speech. Even those who call themselves journalists or activists often avoid positions that might alienate their audience, disturb a lucrative brand partnership, or generate the kind of backlash that algorithms punish. The cost of moral clarity in a digital marketplace is too high. Silence, or vague gestures of discontent, are safer investments.
But society is poorer for it. We lack those voices who would rather lose status than abandon their principles. We need public intellectuals who do not perform courage but practice it. Who resist both mass indifference and populist rage. Who say: This is wrong, even when no one wants to hear it.
Great read! Loved your breakdown of this concept. Reminds me how public figures, even if they have things to say that I disagree with, can still be held to a valuable reputation if their intentions and hearts are good. I'll be revisiting your writing in the future.