Pissing on the avant garde

I hang around with a lot of smart people. You know who you are, even if you won't admit to it. People who hold to a certain standard of intellect, creativity and personality. I also have encountered many people who believe they are of such a grade. People who must be in the top tenth percentile, because they read all the right books, quote all the right philosophers. Often, they're reading the exact same thing you're reading, listening to the same music.

Then you ask them what it means, and they give you an elaborate answer that you recall reading in a magazine or online somewhere. And you can see them casting their eyes upward as people often do when reciting something from memory. That's how you identify the fakers, the ones just along for the ride so long as being smart is trendy.

These people need to stop. It's obvious that they must have some intellect, they can at least read, they can memorize soundbites. They are at LEAST on the level of a parrot, or a trained monkey. They should be able to actually better themselves and provide themselves some intellectual wealth, rather than this fool's gold they're using to jerk off their academic egoes.

So long as you are using intelligence as an image, you are cheapening it. And you are cheapening your own experience by devouring every scrap of pseudo-educated nonsense that appears avant-garde enough to develop a following of sychopants just like you, thus skyrocketing the intellectual equivalents of pre-fab popstars into prominence and burying the truly great minds under greed-motivated bullshit.

Anyone who's looking can see it. It is as in all aspects of modern culture. Simulated greatness, fueled by commerce. Trading on the human mind and reducing what was once a great culture of thinkers into just another Pepsi generation.