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Let’s not waste time.
There is something disturbingly parasitic happening in modern intellectual culture. The phenomenon is not new, but it has become increasingly pronounced in an era of podcasts, newsletters, and algorithmically curated echo chambers. We’re witnessing an alarming attachment—not just to ideas—but to the personalities behind them. Not just to arguments, but to the authority of the arguer.
Take Sam Harris. A man of precision, logic, and undeniable rhetorical skill. For years, Harris has positioned himself as a rationalist, an antidote to dogma, a lighthouse of clarity in stormy ideological seas. And for a time, he was exactly that. I found his early books bold. His critiques of religion and his defenses of secular morality brought a kind of mental rigor to public conversation that was sorely missing.
But something’s changed—or maybe, more accurately, something has revealed itself.
Harris today is no longer merely a thinker or provocateur. He has become a figurehead, a brand, a man whose very sentences are consumed like doctrine by a cadre of devout followers. Visit his Substack, tune into his podcast, or engage with his fans in any meaningful way and you’ll quickly find that critical engagement is not just unwelcome—it’s treated as heretical.
Challenge him, even politely, and a swarm of intellectual hyenas descend. Not to debate. Not to discuss. But to eviscerate, humiliate, and intellectually posture you into silence. Their loyalty to Harris is not based on ideas but on an identification with his perceived intellect—and worse, with what that intellect signals about their own.
Check out the rest of my essay titled "The Cult of the Credentialed: Sam Harris, Intellectual Snobbery, and the Death of Nuance"...
open.substack.com/pub/thetacitfr…
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