Similar to “Greenwashing” and “Safetywashing”, I’ve been thinking about “Intellectual Washing.”
The pattern works as: “Find someone who seems like an intellectual who somewhat aligns with your position. Then claim you have strong intellectual (and by extension, logical) support for your views.”
This is easiest to see in sides that you disagree with.
For example, MAGA gets intellectual cred from “The dark enlightenment” / Curtis Yarvin / Peter Thiel / etc. But I’m sure Trump never listened to any of these people, and was likely barely influenced by them. [1]
Hitler famously claimed alignment with Nietzche, and had support from Heidegger. Note that Nietzche didn’t agree with this. And I’d expect Hitler engaged very little with Heidegger’s ideas.
There’s a structural risk for intellectuals: their work can be appropriated not as a nuanced set of ideas to be understood, but as legitimizing tokens for powerful interests.
The dynamics that enable this include: - The difficulty of making a living or gaining attention as a serious thinker - Public resource/interest constraints around complex topics - The ready opportunity to be used as a simple token of support for pre-existing agendas
Note: There’s a long list of types of “X-washing.” There’s an interesting discussion to the best terminology for this are, but I suspect most readers won’t find that particularly interesting. One related concept is that of “selling out”, sometimes where an artist with street cred would pair up with a large brand/label or similar.
[1] While JD Vance might represent some genuine intellectual influence, and Thiel may have achieved specific narrow technical implementations, these appear relatively minor in the broader context of policy influence.
Similar to “Greenwashing” and “Safetywashing”, I’ve been thinking about “Intellectual Washing.”
The pattern works as: “Find someone who seems like an intellectual who somewhat aligns with your position. Then claim you have strong intellectual (and by extension, logical) support for your views.”
This is easiest to see in sides that you disagree with.
For example, MAGA gets intellectual cred from “The dark enlightenment” / Curtis Yarvin / Peter Thiel / etc. But I’m sure Trump never listened to any of these people, and was likely barely influenced by them. [1]
Hitler famously claimed alignment with Nietzche, and had support from Heidegger. Note that Nietzche didn’t agree with this. And I’d expect Hitler engaged very little with Heidegger’s ideas.
There’s a structural risk for intellectuals: their work can be appropriated not as a nuanced set of ideas to be understood, but as legitimizing tokens for powerful interests.
The dynamics that enable this include:
- The difficulty of making a living or gaining attention as a serious thinker
- Public resource/interest constraints around complex topics
- The ready opportunity to be used as a simple token of support for pre-existing agendas
Note: There’s a long list of types of “X-washing.” There’s an interesting discussion to the best terminology for this are, but I suspect most readers won’t find that particularly interesting. One related concept is that of “selling out”, sometimes where an artist with street cred would pair up with a large brand/label or similar.
[1] While JD Vance might represent some genuine intellectual influence, and Thiel may have achieved specific narrow technical implementations, these appear relatively minor in the broader context of policy influence.