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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 1890831" data-attributes="member: 7240">At first, I looked at this title of this thread with trepidation... Are they talking about people like me? I wondered. But then I read the posts and was much relieved. It turns out that this wasn't a polemic against people who lord their slightly superior knowledge of history and myth over others, annoying though we are. Speaking as someone in graduate school who is considered by people around him to be fairly clever, I want to state an unequivocal "yes" in responding to this post. There is a real problem in a culture when the gap between its intellectual elite and the rest of the culture keeps growing. And that is certainly what I've been witnessing. It is a cultural warning sign when the self-appointed intellectual elite of a culture stop talking to the majority and focus in on talking to eachother. It's nearly killed the Left at various times and places. One of the the things that characterizes this is development of deliberately occult terminology and the requirement that for dialogue to proceed people must possess or feign an understanding of it. Another linked problem is a proprietary sensibility when it comes to terminology. Quite unfairly because I quite like him, I cannot help but recall my in-person meeting with one of the Forge contributors-- we got into an argument about postmodernism. (I mean what else is going to happen if you meet a Forge contributor and you're trying to make smalltalk? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />) It turned out that what we were really arguing about was where the meaning of the term was located. To me, postmodernism was the thing that people generally understand it to be. To him, postmodernism was the thing that Jacques Derrida defined it to be. If you go to the Forge, you can find that about 50% of the dialogue about the GNS model is Ron Edwards fighting with people over sole possession of his terms. This is, of course, a danger when one creates new occult, poorly accessible terms. Now of course I'm not saying that discourse should be limited to what Hong can understand. Obviously there are degrees of accessibility when it comes to terminology and language. But I think that we should, as a community, pay attention to the warning signs we are seeing.</blockquote>

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