Psychology
How to Siege a Citadel: 4 Approaches
Four people want to conquer a walled city.
Three are successful.
One is not.
The choleric sets up his battering ram and hammers away day and night.
The sanguine woos his way into the city with conversation, confetti and concert music.
The melancholy loses a year of sleep engineering a tunnel underneath the city.
And the phlegmatic lingers along the wall feeling for a soft spot.
And if he doesn’t find one…
he takes a nap.
I’m the phlegmatic. You?
101 Reasons Why It Doesn’t Pay to Be an Intellectual Snob
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Self-Portrait, Yawn | Ducreux
Admit it: you’re a snob. An intellectual snob.
Just like me.
Do you curl your lip at Harry Potter books? Does American Idol make your stomach churn?
Do you tend to spend your time on ideas and projects devoid of practical value. . .but replete with entertaining possibilities?
If so, then yes. . .you are an intellectual snob.
It’s okay. We still love you.
What Is an Intellectual Snob?
An intellectual snob is not defined by income, class, or sex. An intellectual snob is defined by superior thoughts, words and deeds.
Relish it. [I do.]
But although flaunting and mocking, this raunchy upper-crust sensibility does have it’s drawbacks.
101 to be exact. Possibly more. That’s where you come in.
After you’ve scanned this list, leave your own example of the pain asserting your ascendancy over your friends and family’s caused you.
Trust me: It’ll be cathartic.
Now. . .step up for big dividends in the giddy heights of snobbish mockery.
1. I make an easy target for low-brows.
2. Chokes on his own spit when offered a ride in a dualie.
3. Weakness for irrationality.
4. Can experience rage and jubilation over the same statement. Depending on who said. [See no. 100.]
5. Snobs aren’t easy to buy for. Especially clothes. [You'll see why in a minute.]
6. Reclining in the college library reading Baudelaire aloud labels you. Quickly.
7. Unexpected and protracted engagements in the search for a superior moral justification of intellectual snobbishness while in the bathroom.
8. People ask you boring questions like, “What were you doing in the bathroom for so long?”
9. People avoid you because you give rude answers.
10. I involuntarily sneer when someone says something stupid.
11. I involuntarily vomit when someone says, “There’s no such thing as a stupid question.”
12. I own the same set of clothes for the last six years.
13. I don’t care that I own the same set of clothes for the last six years.
14. I can have a set of clothing for everyday of the week. . .like a uniform.
15. I read everything. Especially when people are talking to me.
16. I throw vicious fits when someone doesn’t understand what I say.
17. I throw vicious fits when someone criticisizes me for mumbling.
18. People misunderstand me all the time. For example, I cruise blogs and whip off comments that make me seem like a curmudgeon even though all I’m doing is making jest with a good heart. Get it?
19. I get all bent out of shape when someone says they read 100 books last year. Now, I have to read 101 this year.
20. I don’t have a lick of common sense.
21. Couldn’t balance a check book to save my life.
22. My wife wants to vomit every time I string the words “intellectual” and “snob” in the same sentence.
23. Intellectual snobbery makes for a bad love life. [See no. 22.]
24. Involuntarily shriek when I watch Oprah.
25. Didn’t realize how impolite it was to applaud when Jonathan Frazen rejected Oprah’s Book Club.
26. Name dropping Russell or Wittgenstein at a Kentucky cocktail party stops conversations cold.
27. Party-goers usually see my nose in a book during festivities as a vicious, personal attack on their character. [It's not. Entirely.]
28. Non-intellectual snobs don’t trust me.
29. Forget trying to find my car keys. . .where’s my car?
30. Unintentional, violent laughter when someone says they were reading Reader’s Digest. “Reading, really?”
31. I play chess by myself. All the time.
32. Hurt awfully bad when friends reject my overtures to play a round of sudoku.
33. Women giggle when I mention I want to be a member of Mensa.
34. I butcher the more prestigious words in the English language because pronunciation isn’t nearly as important as simply knowing a big word.
35. My wife vomits when I mention I butcher a prestigious word in the English language.
36. Generally ignored at dinner parties. [And by Mensa. Which hurts. Bad.]
37. No one to share my obsession for the encyclopedia with.
38. Most people don’t consider knowing who the last 8 Nobel Prize in Literature winners important.
39. Been accused of wanting to be a transvestite because I want to join Mensa.
40. Saying Hieronomyous Bosch was the best Flemish painter who ever lived at a Nascar event usually gets me killed.
41. Regarding madness as a virtue sours my relationships with my psychiatrists. All 37 of them.
42. Name dropping Michel Foucault or John Frame can quiet the crowd at any Christian coffee shop and put their eyes on you.
43. Simple tasks become enormous mind jobs because I’m incapable of seeing at that level. [The practical level, that is.]
44. My worst nightmare is that someone will call me stupid. I couldn’t bear it. At all.
45. Saying you’re “in a state” after drinking a bottle of porter isn’t funny to anyone. Including your wife.
46. Said wife vomits when I make these bad jokes.
47. Considers the use of the word “verbage” an impeachable offense.
48. Madly in love with reversible, monogrammed, stripe-motif smoking jackets when everyone else isn’t.
49. Often confuses the doctrine of predestination and it’s baggage to mean that I’m chosen to be smarter than most people.
50. I go nuts when I meet people even marginally smarter than me.
51. Am the only one who finds unending comfort in correcting lax theology, vulgar spirituality and crass emotions.
52. Am alone. A lot.
53. Constantly tweaking my list of “top 10 books every child should read before bedtime” during dinner ruins lots of potentially beautiful moments.
54. Bewildered by fashion creeds like “socks must match your pants.”
55. Doesn’t understand his wife’s resistance to giving Dante’s Inferno to his 7-year-old daughter.
56. Tormented by my secret love for Enid Blyton books.
57. Can’t sleep at night when I discover that someone with brains doing the unthinkable: watching Big Brother.
58. I unexpectedly insult family when I comment about their slide into stupidity.
59. Flesh ripples in a good way when someone calls me a condescending snit.
60. Has to be constantly reminded that “white trash” is a bad word.
61. I’m poor.
62. I’m accused of being a socialist or communist all the time. [I believe in capitalism. I just can't figure out the profit-making part.]
63. Rickety and tempermental relationship with money: I hate it when I got it. I hate it when I don’t.
64. My wife vomits when I say, “I hate money.”
65. Easily embarrassed by Bette Midler and Barbra Steisand.
66. Easily embarrassed by MTV videos of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?“
67. Carelessly lumped in with the likes of Hillary Clinton and Lizzie Grubman.
68. I didn’t realize people would get up in arms over a little book burning.
69. The Shack? Really.
70. Can’t shake the view that heaven is an endless library. . .and hell a tiny library full of endless airbags.
71. Capable of carrying around the same $100’s cause I’m afraid to spend it.
72. Seized with anxiety when standing in front of a pair of $14 jeans.
73. Buyer’s remorse looms for days on small purchases. Lasts weeks on larger purchases. . .like a microwave.
74. Look! My jeans are fine. They do their job–covering my legs. Who cares that their faded and paper-thin?
75. Thinks re-working the same seveteen lines of a poem forty times a legitimate way to relax.
76. Partial to words like “abrogate,” “derogate” and “abdicate.”
77. Gets a sick, enslaving kick out of watching the mental gymnastics necessary for people to comprehend abrogate, derogate and abdicate.
78. Heavy reliance on phrases like “without a brain.”
79. Dates with my beloved are punctuated with moments where I suddenly put down my knife and fork, gasp, strike my head with my head, lean forward and say, “Angie, I think I’ve just had an afflatus!”
80. Fond of near-crippling psychological disorders. In other people.
81. Find it impossible to enjoy a good weepie like Australia. My beloved finds me impossible.
82. Finds a movie like Wall-E unrealistic and absurd and impossible to believe. Yet, funny.
83. Doesn’t get a lot support in my theory that sports are merely an outlet for intellegent people to behave like brainless people. [See no. 78]
84. Supports the idea that the habit of getting excited and screaming for no good reason creates a momentary bubble of ignorance.
85. Shocked to learn that non-intellectuals don’t actually sleep with their sisters.
86. Once caught in a bikers’ rally wearing a bow tie. [All I did was walk out of the St. Louis Art museum. Just kidding.]
87. Habit of weeping in non-sentimental environments like the barber’s.
88. Will support universal health care only if it involves free haircuts.
89. Hyper interested in learning words I’ve never heard of and using them in ways that will gorgonize my friends beyond measure.
90. One day tried to teach a vulture how to sing “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” [How do you think I come up with my big ideas, eh?]
91. Knew this intellectual snobbery thing wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be when I spent half a night at a party talking to Nurse Bob about the unbearable lightness of being.
92. Encourages his children to use obscure. . .sometimes preposterous. . .words for no other purpose than to confuse their peers.
93. Visibly appalled at linguistic deformities like “breffus” and “lassitive.”
94. Had a bleaker understanding of human nature and fewer friends after reading Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.
95. Wonders why more people don’t consider watching small-minded people trapped inside a retail store entertainment.
96. Still doesn’t know why Nick Hornsby got so excited when I offered to come along for the ride. The ride being the travail that is Nick taking his autistic son to the park.
97. Makes enemies faster than he makes friends. [See no. 94. Or 95. Or 98.]
98. Not encouraged–at all–in his dreams to engineer a situation in which he could call someone an “impotent, conceited, obscene, hairy-buttocked toad.”
99. Has a murdeously uphill battle convincing people that there isn’t much difference between visiting a morgue and some Methodist churches.
100. Mildly amused when someone calls me a repellant, smarmy, wooden-headed contrarian. Contrarian being the operative word.
101. Am alone. A lot.
Your Turn
Don’t be shy. I know that humility is nothing more than a disguise for an enormous ego bristling to demonstrate its superiority.
Flaunt away. I did.
What Camus and Frankl Can Teach You about the Meaning of Life
Albert Camus
Is it possible to find meaning in life without God? Albert Camus and Victor Frankl think so.
Both agree that the most fundamental question a person can ask himself is “What is the meaning of my life?”
All other questions are secondary.
Camus on the Meaning of Life
Both men were atheists. This means neither thought God had to be part of the equation of meaning.
What they recognized was if a person didn’t have a purpose in his life then depression and suicide would be there fate.
Camus said that suicide is the philosophers biggest challenge: Why should I live if my life has no purpose? In his mind God was dead, so…God wouldn’t do.
Frankl on the Meaning of Life
In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl describes how he found that a man in a concentration camp was more likely to survive when he had a son or a wife or a cause to return to when released.
Furthermore, Viktor discovered in clinical studies that a man could conquer depression if he trained his mind on a child or a dream.
In other words, something outside himself.
Is Meaning without God Possible?
In his book Can Man Live Without God? Ravi Zacherias cites a story in Life magazine about a man named Raymond Samulyson.
In the article, Samulyson argues that life can be meaningful even for those who don’t believe in God.
His argument: If a man adores a grove of plum and cherry blossoms and find lots of meaning tending them…he’s found meaning outside of God.
But Samulyson misses the point.
What Camus and Frankl Don’t Teach You
The point Samulyson misses is this: life without God implies life without moral, social and political boundaries.
What Camus, Frankl and Co. don’t teach you is that a man who finds meaning in his life from his cherry and plum blossoms is given little shelter from another man who finds lots of meaning in mowing down cherry and plum blossoms with a bulldozer.
Or, better yet, imagine if you had a 10-year-old daughter you adored. You found lots of meaning raising her. However, the meaning you found through raising your daughter could do little to shelter her from a gang of men bent on rape and murder.
What does it matter so long as everyone is happy?
Absolute Versus Relative Values
Camus, Frankl and Co. miss the larger point: Without a large, objective meaning involved in life that draws social, moral and political boundaries, the world will eventually descend into a race of men running about recklessly pursuing their passions at the expense of other men.
Granted, some men build societies to protect their families. But what is its prevailing social, moral and political code? Is it in absolute truths like justice and purity? Or is it anything goes as long as nobody is hurt?
Someone has to decide. And it’s best to use an objective standard.
My Point
Camus, Frankl and Co. seem to ignore the implications of living in a meaningless universe…a universe where somehow a man’s passion is going to overcome the larger emptiness.
The emptiness that will consume you when your passion fails you.
Listen: you must have meaning in life…but that meaning must be grounded in something like God.
And then you need clarity about who that God is. Uncertainty only invites confusion, fear and chaos. In your life and the world around you.
What Do You Think?
So, what is the meaning of your life? Do you live a safe, ordered and healthy life without God? Am I missing anything? I look forward to hearing from you.
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