Treason in a World of Infinite Monkeys

Yes, Virginia, a person can be a traitor to themselves.

The textbook definition of the word “traitor” is this:

“One who betrays one's country, a cause, or a trust, especially one who commits treason.”

I’ve been considering this definition for a long time, mostly since reading a post by Niall Ferguson he wrote back in December of 2023. Titled “The Treason of the Intellectuals”, it begins this way:

“In 1927 the French philosopher Julien Benda published La trahison des clercs—“The Treason of the Intellectuals”—which condemned the descent of European intellectuals into extreme nationalism and racism. By that point, although Benito Mussolini had been in power in Italy for five years, Adolf Hitler was still six years away from power in Germany and 13 years away from victory over France. But already Benda could see the pernicious role that many European academics were playing in politics. 

Those who were meant to pursue the life of the mind, he wrote, had ushered in “the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds.” And those hatreds were already moving from the realm of the ideas into the realm of violence—with results that would be catastrophic for all of Europe.”

That phrase, “the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds” was something that stuck with me as I thought about the overt rise of antisemitism at what we once considered our finest universities and colleges. Even given the severely jaded times in which we live, I was and remain shocked at the open expression of vitriol and hate toward Jews in general and Jewish students in particular – that was being vomited from those formerly hallowed halls.

Perhaps more shocking was the absolute lack of any expression of true contrition or shame from those leaders that such hatred was festering and gestating within the womb of their institutions, just waiting to be birthed into the world.

While Ferguson’s target was those who run academia, and I agree with his thesis because institutions consist of people – individuals with minds, hearts, virtues, and vices.

I began to ask myself how La trahison des clercs can exist without the individual first committing treason against themselves by betraying their own values and morality by breaking the natural, religious, and scientific laws that form the very basis of human intelligence.

I would go as far as to say a traitor can also be defined as someone who commits treason against themselves.

The least educated person in America knows that any combination of words one might choose can be use to form a sentence, a paragraph or even a book, and while that person might not be able to cite all the rules, they intuitively know that only certain kinds words, phrases, and terms, ordered in certain ways and in certain relationships, will yield anything close to coherent and comprehensible results. 

You have probably heard of the Infinite Monkey Theorem. The IMT proposes that an infinite number of monkeys pounding on typewriters will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. Well, until they do, what they produce will be incomprehensible and have no understandable value – it will be gibberish.

It is my opinion that intellectualism is now practiced as the Infinite Monkey Theorem, except for one thing: instead of rejecting the gibberish immediately, intellectuals demand it be considered scholarship.

I’ve read such academic papers (or tried to). These papers are difficult to impossible to read because they are filled with a language only fellow acolytes can understand. Not really that surprising, this is common within many of the "soft" sciences – alleged academicians often develop their own language and communication systems to both signal membership and maintain exclusivity of that membership, thereby preventing outsiders from checking in on them.

To sum it up, they don’t understand the gibberish either, but they can’t afford for you to know that. They would rather destroy you than admit they have no integrity, intellectual or otherwise.

Therein lies the act of treason.

By abandoning the very standards by which knowledge is discovered, each person who accepts such is betraying their own allegiance to intellectual integrity.

The cascade to intellectual treason begins with that one person.