🎭 The Intellectual as Ideological Beautician: Why Truth Is No Longer the Point

Philosophers, political scientists, and historians — the self-appointed stewards of "deep thought" — are, in many cases, simply trying to justify their continued relevance. Clinging to the idea that their insights matter in a world ruled by immediacy, utility, and spectacle, they stage a quiet drama of self-justification: “We still matter. Please believe we still matter.”

But here's the uncomfortable truth:
They don’t.
At least not in the way they want to.

🧠 The Masses Don’t Need Them

The modern public doesn’t crave insight. It craves instruction.

People don’t want context, nuance, or historical continuity — they want a villain to blame, a meme to share, and a 60-second video that tells them what side they’re on. If you offer complexity, you’re just annoying. If you offer truth, you’re just irrelevant.

Truth requires effort. Doubt. Slowness. That’s a hard sell when everything else is clickbait.

💼 The Elite Doesn’t Want Them Either

Let’s not romanticize power. The ruling class — today’s oligarchy of billionaires, bureaucrats, and techno-managers — has no use for actual truth. Truth, after all, is unstable. It questions profits. It undermines PR.

So what does the system want?
It wants intellectuals who lie well.

The ideal intellectual today isn’t a truth-seeker. It’s a myth-maker who can craft a palatable lie — something that flatters the audience, sanctifies the regime, and can be embedded in a PowerPoint.

📺 The Rise of the "Useful" Thinker

Enter the intellectual beautician.

Not a surgeon of thought. A stylist.
Someone who doesn’t operate on reality but touches up the narrative. Someone who can take a brutal, extractive, collapsing system and describe it in terms like “emergent multipolarity”, “distributed sovereignty” or “post-growth rebalancing.”

Modern philosophers have become consultants in existential marketing.
Political scientists are now stage magicians for power.
Historians provide antique legitimacy on demand.

Their job is no longer to think — but to frame.
And framing, as every propagandist knows, is everything.

🎩 Who Actually Needs Them?

Not the masses.
Not the elite.

But the middle intellectual class — the “last believers.”

These are journalists, analysts, mid-tier policy wonks, university panels, liberal commentators, and LinkedIn-thinkfluencers who still believe they’re part of a meaningful discourse. They need intellectuals not to challenge them — but to reassure them. To give them a sense of clarity, mission, and righteousness.

In this circle, the thinker is not a threat — but a therapist.
They’re paid not for truth — but for emotional utility.

💸 Loyalty Is the New Currency

You’re no longer rewarded for being right.
You’re rewarded for being aligned.

Genuine insight is risky.
But calibrated loyalty wrapped in intellectual language? That gets you published, promoted, and platformed.

Today’s star intellectual isn’t someone who reveals uncomfortable truths — it’s someone who provides sophisticated excuses. Excuses for power, for failure, for nothing changing.

🧩 The Death of Autonomous Thought

We used to think of intellectuals as dangerous — they threatened kings, toppled empires, exposed illusions. Now, the most dangerous thinkers are those who don’t think, but package.

They are not enemies of the system.
They are the system’s face mask.

When truth becomes toxic, the thinker becomes a beautician.
A touch of democracy, a dash of justice, a whisper of criticality — all gently applied over the corpse of meaning.