Intellectual

There are various communities of identity and preoccupation for persons that must be understood in the complexities of life if mankind is to be managed well, make laws fair for individual rights, accept multi-cultures, provide for citizens and live in peace.  Even then, in favorable environments, it is difficult and some believe is impossible in the long view.  Management becomes even more difficult in modernization where diversity dilutes and may stall majority rule.  Further, we need to remember that truth is not based on majority conclusions, but on the facts that lead to understanding.  Understanding leads to wisdom, and from that wisdom we find action (conduct) that serves societies if wise proposals are activated. The individual alone (the one) is different than the individual (the one) in a context with other individuals (the many).  A fresh apple consumed as a fruit only, is different from a fresh apple baked in a pie.  Each serves a purpose, but the value depends upon what a person may need or want.  I am told by persons who know about such factors that the apple alone is enough to ward off doctors, and too much pie invites them.

Virtually everything that visits our lives has a negative and affirmative meaning.  Those meanings are largely determined by the persons choosing and practicing them.  To invest in the securities offered by Wall Street is good if well chosen for the purpose of retirement and building family security in a society that is not sustained by traditional families in agriculture.  To invest with a motive of greed (known or unknown) there is likely going to be some evil.  The market is attended with good that cannot be possible without Wall Street or a stimulus form like it.  The presence of the middle class, so necessary to economic development in a technological society would not exist without it, or government substitute for it.  Communism attempts to accomplish what capitalism accomplishes by making the state the form of capital.  Communities of wealth are needed, but the temptations of wealth may make fools, even lawbreakers of us.

There are intellectual communities in educational institutions, foundations, libraries, business and other groupings.  I have been a part of the collegiate community all of my adult life so have high opinion in what we believe to be the cerebral life – living by the evidence related to interpretation of what is best for both the individual alone and the individual in the mass.  The ugliness of the intellectual drive is most severe in learnings that build weapons to destroy cities of persons, or find some truth that managed can overpower others without weapons or understanding, and violate, perhaps for personal benefit, what learnings are supposed to offer to all society.  Intellectuals may function outside the experience of persons tied to daily life influenced by so many community group influences that there is no way they can perceive how to use the fruit of intellectual production.  The common person respects the intellectual effort, but is put off by the tension, pride, omissions that often neutralize the effort.  Most problems are not met by the intellect alone. Nebuchadnezzar ordered his administrators to choose persons to serve the nation that was becoming a great power of control.  He had the right idea.  Find those persons who can lead – knowing about life (in its variant meanings), making good presentation (appealing to the people), intelligent (listening and learning, reading and assimilating, and finding ways of applying), and all this for service to the people and so to the king.  Daniel qualified, as did his friends.  (They came from those captives so recently taken from Israel – but they qualified partly to the chagrin of the Babylonian members of the cabinet who set out to get them.)   Daniel and friends immediately went to work starting with interest in health – a balanced diet rather than dainties for the king’s counselors.  They won the point in their own models.  They survived, and their enemies suffered loss.  The story can be repeated in variance with Joseph and his brothers in Egypt with Pharaoh – with Ezra and Nehemiah, Esther and Mordecai, and others.  These used their intelligence in planning in the light of what was available, but also recognized values as a vital part of their activity.