ONE - THE RISE OF ALTERNATIVE MEDIA AND THE 21ST CENTURY DISSIDENT INTELLECTUAL!

Firstly I must define intellectualism.

Before I begin this essay on The Unstoppable Rise of 21 st Century Intellectualism I first want to define intellectualism.

In this essay Im using the word intellectualism in the sense of Exercise or application of the intellect.

21st Century Western Dissident Intellectualism as a Response to Globalism

The 21 st Century dissident intellectualism movement can be seen as a response to the gradual closing down of thought by Western governmental authorities and the dumbing down of society, by both the mainstream media and the education system. Driven by the people and the forces behind Globalism, these processes have continued, slowly, almost imperceptibly, decade by decade eating away at the very fabric of Western society, until it is now being transformed in some extremely dysfunctional ways. The result is that in every national institution traditional values, thousands of years in the making, have now been supplanted by universal Globalist ones based on consumerism, narcissism and self-hate.

Populations were never asked to vote on these policies of radical social change, nor did the authorities even formerly acknowledge that they were happening to them.

For more than a generation intellectuals in the West had felt profoundly let down by Western mainstream media. The programs on the television by and large were not aimed at them, nor were newspapers, cinema films or magazines. It was almost as if the mainstream media and the forces controlling society wished to severely curtail and limit the level of thought and debate, especially in the public forum.

With the advent of the internet all of that has changed. Talented individuals have been able to make thought-provoking and entertaining programs of their own, questioning the Globalist narrative. People from all over the Western world have started YouTube channels, where they present challenging and well thought out ideas; sometimes expressed in monologues, other times in debate with others or in the form of an interview. The best and most popular of these channels have gained very large online audiences: such as Sargon of Akkad, Dave Cullen and Paul Joseph Watson in Europe; Dave Rubin, Mark Dice, Steven Crowder in the USA, Stefan Molyneux and Prof Jordan B. Peterson in Canada.

Comments sections allow the audience to participate, increasing their sense of involvement. On the originally free internet every shade of thought has at times been represented, making it a free marketplace of ideas.

The Free Marketplace of Ideas

The rising 21 st Century intellectualism movement makes full use of the internet to both present and fully debate ideas. This is a unique opportunity created by modern technology for the entire human race and allows anybody anywhere in the world to contribute ideas, even if it is only by way of a comment on social media.

The free marketplace of ideas refers to the belief that the test of the truth or acceptance of ideas depends on their competition with one another and not on the opinion of a censor, whether one provided by the government or by some other authority in a position of power and privilege, such as a Big-Tech Social Media company.

This concept draws on an analogy to the economic marketplace, where, through economic competition - all other things being equal, superior products sell better than others. Thus, the economic marketplace uses competition to determine winners and losers, driving technology forwards, just as the marketplace of ideas uses competition to judge truth, fineness, fitness and acceptability to help develop better ideas. The theory of The Free Marketplace of Ideas thus condemns all censorship, as it depends upon the free flow of ideas to function.

John Stuart Mill

Historically the free marketplace of ideas echoes ideas expressed during the European Enlightenment of the 18 th and 19 th Century, in particular by John Stuart Mill in his 1859 publication On Liberty ; where he asserted that the free competition of ideas is the best way to separate falsehoods from fact.

In fact in many ways the rise of 21 st century intellectualism parallels the rise in the 17 th and 18 th centuries. It also is serving to define programs of reform, in which influential literati and internet intellectuals, inspired by a common faith in the possibility of a better world, have outlined specific targets for criticism, such as Cultural Marxism and proposals for action such as its removal from academic institutions.