Beyond Decliamists and Intellectuals

I thought that maybe ’intellectuals’ is not the best word to describe them, there is an old Arabic word “Al Mutakalimin المتكلمين” that might be better for such a demonstration. Mutkalmin means, idiomatically, the people who -probably Muslims- talked about the qualities of god (e.g. Can he smell or speak just like his creature?), however, the word “Mutkalim” in Arabic has nothing to do with the attributes of god the but it means “the people who talk”, I think the best translation for it is the “declaimists”, as Sa’adeldin Al Taftazani said once: Al Mutkalim were named after their statements that were starting with “Al Kalam on *some topic.” Kalam on something means a statement on it. .

There is a common ground between the meaning of a ’declaimist’ and a non-intellectual that you see on daily basis especially in average social media site, I don’t want to single out a live example but let’s take \(x\) and \(let\) \(x\) be right-wing social media intellectual who has more than 100k loyal follower of his medieval instructions about miscarriage or the sexual orientations, if one day \(x\) figured out, or even less revolutionary, let’s say he’d found that some of his beliefs are either wrong or obsolete, what would he do? I can tell the answer is cognitive dissonance tends to be ended by denial of facts, trying to stick to what he already believes (just like Chatelier’s principle object), he is not only required to comprehend whatever he believes in, but his loyal fellows also are waiting for his directive, he won’t let them down. It’s getting worse in cases in which x has already a lot of bestselling publications which in he insures his points. Of course, within time numerous intellectuals are getting a cognitive flexibility enables them to change their thoughts smoothly, however, the majority won’t.

That’s why I don’t like either to have that little audience that adapts what I think because I seem like a smart guy to them or to get into a discussion with anyone of such a kind because I know he will use all the fallacies he can use before he rethinks about any argument. Wise man once side:

Also read this. (broken link. stupid old post.)