Anyway, All The Dogs Are Howling a POSSIBLE FUTURES Podcast Exploration 1: Basics Conversation 7: Intellectualisation More on this POSSIBLE FUTURES podcast at https://decolonise.possiblefutures.earth/anyway Samantha Suppiah: Hi, this is Samantha Suppiah, and you are a fly on the wall here amongst the POSSIBLE FUTURES Collective. [dogs howling intro] You know that feeling, while you're spectating or even participating in a conversation where there is simply too much senseless and groundless egotistical moral philosophising and too little actual contextual cold hard reality? The feeling that makes your eyes glaze over and your ears tune out? I'm there all the time. It bores me. All I'm thinking about in those moments is how to get out of the entire situation. Do I just pick up my things, stand up without a word and exit stage left? Do I smile, say agree to disagree, and change the subject? Do I act dumb and just keep asking questions to get them stuck further in their own bullshit quicksand? Do I pull out my intellectual bazooka and let 'em have it? I mean, I have many options here. If I'm in a social situation, let's just say I've already decided the party is shit and either the conversation has enough in it for me to play like a killer whale playing with its seal prey, or I'm excusing myself within the next 30 seconds and heading for somewhere more interesting, like a sticky-floor dive bar in a back-alley basement with bisongrass vodka collecting dust in a glass cabinet lit with harsh fluorescent lighting. If there's one thing I can't stand about coloniality's liberal hegemony, it's the constant, pretentious, and empty intellectualisation. This is not just a modern Western civilisation thing. Every civilisation has this massive societal ego complex around folk who have climbed the academic or political ladder, and those who want to be like them. Within modern Western civilisation however, there is a liberal morality attached to this narcissism. You get to also claim some sort of moral overlord status on account of this intellectual achievement, which has nothing to do with actual intellect or actual morals. Even if you don't have this academic achievement, you can still build your entire personality around intellectualisation, to look smart and claim social points regardless of your personal integrity around how you actually live your life. To be clear, I am talking about plain old hypocrisy. I don't think you should get to talk about anything unless you back it up with real action and/or lifestyle choice. But this is what Western morality and ethics is all about: One World, one set of values, apply to everything, to gain social, political and even financial capital from intellectualisation without requiring any actual skin in the game. Why do we celebrate vacuous, insincere, and hypocritical intellectualisation? When is something being over-intellectualised, and when is it not? How do you centre real lived experience, whether it's intellectualised or not? What gives privileged folk the right to take up so much space with their hyper-intellectualisation? And, what makes intellectualisation dangerous, and in what context? — Anna Denardin: I unfortunately know that feeling very well. The suffocating atmosphere of privileged intellectual circles living in their own wonderland. Welcome to the Intellectual Masturbation Industrial Complex, the ivory tower echo chambers where critical thinking goes to die a slow, pretentious death, replaced by over-intellectualization weaponised into a full-contact sport of ego wrestling. Their entire identity revolves around one pathetic mission: being the smartest person in every room they stumble into. It's intellectual peacocking at its most grotesque, watching them compete in real-time to deploy the most obscure terminology per sentence, burying you under such an avalanche of poetical gibberish that you will surrender just to escape the verbal assault. One big brain to rule them all. Intellectual narcissists obsessed with crafting the ultimate argument that will make all other minds submit to their supreme wisdom. All hail the Dark Lord, where humility, actual wisdom's prerequisite, is completely extinct. Every sentence has to prove not just what you know, but that you know more than whoever spoke before you. The tragic part is that they're completely oblivious to their own cognitive prison. They keep feeding each other's intellectual black holes until critical thinking gets consumed entirely, leaving nothing but the event horizon of their own arrogance. Real originality and authenticity are born from the messy, uncomfortable process of taking ideas into the world and letting reality demolish your assumptions. It's about getting your hands dirty, failing spectacularly, and having your beautiful theories shattered by facts. Genuine insight comes from the friction between what you know and what actually happens when you test it, not from the frictionless echo chambers where everyone already agrees with you. — Samantha Suppiah: Ooh, one big brain to rule them all. That kind of reminds me of the Wizard of Oz, a dictatorial leader who built and operated this machine with a gigantic floating brain, or I guess some kind of artificial intelligence, totally disembodied, dislocated and disconnected from on-the-ground reality. And yet the place he ruled over was filled with toxic positivity that scuttled away all unsightly or unpleasant things. And I mean, that was the brand, that's what made the place an aspiration to everywhere else. And it was totally manufactured. Both on the ground, manufactured, and the dictator himself, manufactured. A character whom, behind the curtain, is a frightened, weak and insecure manipulator, constantly defending against being exposed as a sham. He gained that position by impressing people or I suppose winning arguments with his scientific knowledge, his moral philosophising, his intellectualisation, supposedly in order to survive. Is it a prison of intellectual narcissism? Or is it a palace? I guess there are two ways to see it. It really depends if you are concerned about whether something is best for the individual's comfort within a fantasy world, or for collective betterment in alignment with the rest of the universe. This is not too different from the nice-versus-kind logic of what's better for whom, which is a theme within the Wizard of Oz itself as well. In sustainability it's the greenwashing vs. structural change conversation that conveniently ignores power dynamics. In regeneration it's the romanticised saviourism vs. decolonial justice and sovereignty that are at loggerheads with one other. One makes you dream of simply covering everything up in rose petals and filling the sky with cotton candy clouds, while the other makes you dread taking apart the machine and completely re-engineering it while covered in muck, engine oil, and someone else's sweat. As an engineer, obviously I would prefer the latter. That's the kind of collaborative effort I enjoy being part of. It's challenging and fulfilling, but at the end of the day, we would all benefit and reap indivisible rewards together. I am also well aware that a world in which this is possible might be very far away. Would the Wizard of Oz call his palace a prison protecting his weak and frail body and his fragile sense of self? While his munchkins celebrate and worship his every minute publicly-pronounced thought? I don't think so, I think he would call it a palace. And he literally writes the rules on that, so... What's crazy is how we are trained to reward those who over-intellectualise, even if in their daily lives and career choices, they are participating in and profiting from harmful colonial systems that keep the rest of the world enslaved. — Anna Denardin: The example you brought of The Wizard of Oz is such a good one to explain the toxic effects of over-intellectualisation and how this relates to social positioning. Throughout history, detachment from physical labour and practical concerns has been a marker of aristocratic status. This “aristocratic allergy to labour” has deep roots in Western history, and it connects directly to coloniality. Already by classical antiquity, physical labor was considered degrading. Aristotle literally wrote that some people were “natural slaves” so that others could be free for higher pursuits. Colonialism exported and weaponised this divide the world over, embedding it into the very DNA of Western education systems and academia where this behavior is endemic. Incomprehensible jargon about ontological frameworks? Pure intellectual aristocracy. This brings us to the point of discerning when something is being over-intellectualised, and when it’s not. Well, you can easily spot when over-intellectualisation has turned toxic. Paradoxically, the most "intellectual" discourse often involves the least actual thinking. It's like intellectual bulimia, consuming vast quantities of trendy ideas only to regurgitate them unchanged. They speak in over-philosophical, ontological, spiritual contexts that are very hard to follow and understand because they have no grounding in reality. And the crazy thing is that through some fucked-up process of cognitive dissonance, they genuinely believe that through reading some words on a screen, they have a sort of missionary complex to feel entitled to teach or enlighten others based on secondhand knowledge. I’ll never forget some years ago when I was really immersed in the regeneration networks and communities. And every place I went, it was the same two quotes. Everyone was using that Einstein quote about problems not being solved from the same paradigm that created them, and that line about how “another world is not only possible, but on a quiet day, we can hear her breathing.” Or something like that. The same rhizome and mycelium metaphors, and people were using those quotes as if they were delivering some profound, original insight. It’s always the same borrowed metaphors, the same pseudo-mystical phraseology. What the hell is that? Intellectualisation is healthy when it’s backed not only by critical thinking, but also by critical feeling, critical being, and critical practice. But what we have instead is a crisis of intellectual authenticity, where it’s all performance, posture, and social signaling. — Samantha Suppiah: Societal hierarchies are basic structural logics of human governance within what we call "civilisation". ironic, because the least civilised people have always tended to live in civilisations or cities. In urban geography, the governance concept of civilisation is built upon farming and agricultural technology that is able to produce excess food, such that society can actually support people who don't participate at all in farming. This gives rise to a class of people who do not farm. Some of them are warriors or defenders who, in exchange for food, protect the society from invaders, thieves, etc. as the society gets bigger, this system is managed by some form of writing or recording, and so you have your first accountants or administrators. This is not yet considered a civilisation, which is also requiring a centralised education system, belief system, cultural practices, art and architecture, essentially a central governance system that is run by a ruling class. These different forms of societal contracts are what define civilisation. You can imagine the first civilisational narcissist who stands up and says, "I am valuable to society because, you know, I write poems, I create art, I preach religion, I make you feel things, and you value that. and so, that not only entitles me to collect food that i did not farm, or to protection services that i don't ever expect to provide myself, or to administration that i do not contribute or donate to. All of this makes me better than you, because I don't have to do those things, and so you are the ones who really labour for me." You can see how this logic is totally upside down to begin with, detached from the reality that the farmer is the one who has the power to withhold food or to abandon civilisation entirely without risk to their own survival. Then comes the technological development narrative, preaching a belief that if we make use of and become reliant on agricultural technologies that can increase our yield, agricultural technologies that are designed by the ruling classes and imposed upon us through different debt structures, then we would all have to "work less" and we can "enjoy life more". Sound familiar? Instead of suddenly finding time to nurture their creative talents, farmers become dependent upon and locked into that technology, on those machines, and become trapped in debt structures that are associated with using them. Demand soars as more and more people fancy themselves as non-farmers, also wanting to "contribute to society" and "generate value" in other ways that are more comfortable. The only way the "intellectual" can be sustained within civilised society is fundamentally through some sort of belief system that maintains enslavement of farmers, and other workers who provide for their needs and wants, not fair or equal trade. Intellectuals use their intellect to manipulate civilisational value systems into something that is then seen as holy or divine. Now we're talking real power: religious clout. We're also talking about the co-optation of spirituality. If you want to know more on this, I highly recommend that you watch the documentary film Christspiracy. Modern Western civilisation's religion is STEM, so there you go. A fanatic religion that acts as though it's not a death cult causing extinction of not only the human race, but literally the Sixth Mass Extinction on planet Earth. There are modes of civilisations in which farmers are celebrated, or at least treated fairly. Modern Western civilisation is not one of them, even if you are a white farmer in the Global North. — Anna Denardin: So when you ask what gives intellectuals the right to take up so much space, the answer is that they've simply seized that space through institutional capture and ideological dominance. Their authority is entirely artificial and maintained through gatekeeping mechanisms that should be more widely questioned. Even though over intellectualisation seems to be a pre-requisite in the way we understand science, due to modern western civilisation, that is not the case. Consider the Andean ayllu system in pre-colonial South America where farmers adapted crops like quinoa and potatoes over millennia through experimentation across radically different altitudes and microclimates. Their science was embedded in reciprocal relationships with the land, structured by ethical obligations to community and earth. That’s why around Cuzco and the Sacred Valley you see the terraces climbing up mountainsides, each one a different microclimate. With this system the Incas were able to domesticate and improve over 4,000 potato varieties in the Andes, each adapted to specific soil, altitude, and water conditions. That's science: knowledge generation that's accountable to the communities it serves, rooted in direct experience with the phenomena being studied, and validated through practical application. Compare that to the modern academic version of “science”. The academic system deliberately destroys those relationships of accountability. Professors aren't responsible for how their students use what they learn. Researchers aren't accountable to the communities affected by their work. Theorists aren't obligated to test their ideas against real-world outcomes. The knowledge becomes divorced from its ethical and practical contexts. It becomes abstract property that can be owned, sold, and weaponised without regard for consequences. That's why divestment from intellectualisation is about rebuilding our capacity for direct experimentation and embodied learning. This is how humans actually learned everything worth knowing for most of our history: through apprenticeship, trial and error, community experimentation, and intergenerational knowledge sharing. Not through sitting in lecture halls memorising other people's interpretations of other people's experiences. That's how you reinstate agency, by curating an environment within which folk can rehabilitate themselves and their communities in contextually-appropriate ways. — Samantha Suppiah: A colonial world order is interested in intellectualisation without grounded, healthy learning in alignment with natural cycles. It is interested in intellectualisation that extracts whatever it can extract in order to generate profits for the ruling classes. We can easily see how in mainstream academia this is very much the case. Western intellectualisation is singularly interested in advancing lucrative propagandised narratives, also known and sold by the global ruling classes as "facts". Speaking of stealing knowledge and then turning around to teach others about it and then profitting off of stolen knowledge, which is otherwise known as epistemic colonisation, this happens to us at POSSIBLE FUTURES frequently. Our work on colonial sustainability for example has been and continues to be stolen by white Anglo-Saxxons who continue in earnest the European colonial project under the guise of "sustainability" or "regeneration", claiming that they are promoting our work, while completely ignoring our calls to stop using our work. We have never given them consent for them to use our work in this manner, and have always asked them to stop using our work at all, to stop associating themselves with us through even referencing our work. Yet they continue to do so, and to market themselves as enlightened and educated. Social media algorithms favour white men in the Global North, and suppress brown women in the Global South, and so you'll more often see and hear these Anglo-Saxxons talking about imperialism, colonialism -- and even decolonisation -- and not the original authors who write from their own lived experience, such as ourselves who first created the content. They have literally stolen that knowledge specifically to profit from it. and yet the onus is on then us to enforce our own boundaries, when that requires copyright lawyers, international lawsuits, etc. We call this phenomenon "recolonisation". This is colonial intellectualisation at its most disgusting. Then we have some next-level intellectualisation around "praxis". To this day I judge so hard people who use this word, as folk who do not in fact actually involve themselves in any meaningful practice. They hold like, I don't know, a one-hour event with five people, and then they write an entire book about it, eh, or like a bunch of articles, and then, somehow they actually get published in academic journals? And then they get invited to speak at conferences? It's unreal. There are many ladders to climb through academic intellectualisation within modern Western civilisation. But if you actually seek to use intellectualisation to demolish colonial hierarchies with sledgehammers, you'll find only snakes. — Anna Denardin: Oh my god, this is the favorite pastime of Substack-propped pseudo-intellectuals… stealing knowledge and lived experiences per the example you shared, profiting off them while gaining status and moral leverage under the banner of “virtue”. All hidden behind a convenient narrative of “spreading the word,” “amplifying voices,” or, the worst of all, “empowering” marginalized voices. I always absolutely despised this entitlement of centering oneself and one's worldview so much that you would assume that anyone outside the Western system is some pitiful, voiceless creature waiting to be uplifted into the very structures that cause harm to them. As if assimilation into colonial systems is the ultimate prize. Newsflash: people already have power outside Western frameworks. The only reason you can’t see it is because your tunnel vision is calibrated by white supremacy culture and colonial logics. This is the performative culture of narcissism we talk so much about. And that’s why, when you step into POSSIBLE FUTURES literal homepage, our boundaries are stitched right into the welcome mat. We first considered just writing “fuck off”, but decided it might be too blunt. But still, the spirit kind of stands: if you’re here to exploit or extract, do us all a favor and fuck off. If you are curious to explore decolonial perspectives with humility and accountability, then sure. Take your shoes off as a gesture of respect, openness, and willingness to encounter other ways of knowing and being, and come in. If you are just coming to our home to steal things and spread your dirt all over, the door is right there. For us, compassion follows accountability, allyship, and proven commitment to decolonisation. Otherwise, it collapses into the usual empty intellectualisation that sustains recolonisation, as you mentioned. We offer perspectives from outside the academic-industrial complex because that overintellectualised discourse has failed repeatedly to drive any real change. And if you think “meeting people where they are” has been any faster at shifting systems, spoiler alert: it hasn’t. — Samantha Suppiah: Who gets to intellectualise, and who does not? From where I sit, participating in a modern Western civilisation that has been wholly successful at destroying the entire planet, perhaps we can make sense of this as an evolutionary failure. I would say that you can call a species an evolutionary failure when it causes planetary extinction events that lead to runaway climate change, wouldn't you? There are not too many species in the world who would qualify under that kind of description. I would say there are two species, and the previous culprit was a single-celled organism with zero opposable thumbs, who took about a billion years to do what we did in seven decades. Human evolution is a failed experiment because of harmful and runaway mechanisms like narcissistic ego that gave rise to, amongst other things, modern Western civilisation's structures promoting moral intellectualisation over planetary realities. — POSSIBLE FUTURES Crew: This is Samantha Suppiah. This is Anna Denardin. Anyway, all the dogs are howling.