Well, being a musician, I often think about the former intellectual leaders of the world, because they were themselves musicians. Bob Dylan, Niel Young, David Bowie, Savage Rose here in Denmark and so on.
What is it really that has changed from the rule of the musicians to now?
First of all, the media has changed. Before it was music, that was radio, festivals, young people listening to their favourite band in their teenage dystopia.
Now it is blogs, blogs, blogs. Breibart, Afpixlat, Uriasposten, Milo Yannopoulis, my blog.
That is; written words. The best blogs out there, to my mind, are the outcasts of the society. The people that never really made it in the mainstream because they were too rebellious, too different, to ethical.
What drives a blog is not money or fame. Neither is usually the product of your vast labour. But a sincere and true urge,or rather fire, to do good.
A pure ethical rage.
What makes a blog succeed, especially a political blog, is depth, sincerity, ability to write and then just the gruesome work of feeding your blog, day after day, after day.
So the few people who actually succeed in the blogosphere are usually a certain rare hippie kind of type, who are willing to sacrifice all for the sake of humanity.
The idealist.
So we come from a world, where the intellectual leaders of it had tons of money, a lot of easy attention, and well… a rock star status. To a world where the intellectual leaders are suffocation from all kinds of persecution and ridicule, live a life of misery and makes absolutely no money.
This is a huge change, because the kind of persons who are attracted to the blogosphere are different from the persons who are attracted to the music world.
The nerds are ruling again.
Before the second world war, that is before all of the world went into ashes. The world was moved forward by writers. Not journalists, but, true book producing writers. Marx, Voltaire, Kierkegaard, Hegel, Göethe, Newton and so on.
These people were much more altruistic than the bloggers, and deeper.
So we have come to a kind of middle ground between the musicians and philosophers of before the industrial revolution.
I do strive to be like my ideals, but I also admit, that I am not. I could be, if I was able to write books again. But my living conditions simply do not allow me to do so. I have to make money for my family, and at the same time write here on Rubicon.
But I suppose, that is just how the world is today. No time for writing books as an intellectual, and only time for blogging.
It is off cause better than what it used to be, but I still long back to the times where the world was driven even more by very, very deep thought.
G-d bless the will to understand the world and make it better.