You're halfway through showing them where their logic collapses. Then they cut you off: "Stop using big words. Talk like a normal person!"

They didn't refute your argument. They attacked having arguments. Suddenly your preparation is arrogance. Your precision is exclusion. They didn't win the debate—they squashed it.

This is anti-intellectualism’s core trick: turn intellectual rigour into a liability:

Watch the playbook:

1) The Real-World Diktat: “Let’s bring it back to practical experience.” Forces you to abandon precise terms so their gut feeling competes with your expertise. Ambiguity becomes their weapon.

2) The Simplicity Demand: “Explain it like I’m five-year-old.” If you can’t, you’re ignorant. If you can, they mock the simplified version as simplistic. Heads they win, tails you lose.

3) The Vocabulary Dismissal: “Come on. That’s bullshit bingo.” No reasoning required. They perform contempt and call it an argument.

4) The Ad Hominem Attack: “You just want to show off.” True or not, irrelevant. Now you're defending your ego, not your evidence.

5) The Relativist Retreat: “We can agree to disagree.” Blocks the mdialectics that would expose their contradictions. Vagueness becomes protection.

In every case, the burden flips: your expertise becomes your problem; their ignorance becomes your failure to convince. Competence gets reframed as pretension; unexamined opinion gets rebranded as “common sense.”

Why This Matters

Anti-intellectualism isn’t just rudeness. It’s rhetorical sabotage with political consequences:

1) It prevents understanding: climate, markets, epidemics, inequality—none yield to hunches. “Just be practical” is how complexity gets hollowed out.

2) It imposes epistemic equality: your decades of study = someone’s weekend Google search. Expertise becomes “bias”; ignorance becomes “a valid viewpoint.”

3) It protects power: if “structural racism” must be reduced to “nasty individuals,” systems vanish. If critical analysis becomes “overthinking,” propaganda becomes invisible. What cannot be analysed cannot be held accountable.

So when someone polices your language, they're not defending democracy. They're using their own mediocrity as a weapon—to shame, to contradict, to remain immune to critique.

The Countermove

Anti-intellectualism wins by making analysis look illegitimate. The only response is to make analysis non-negotiable. When they attack the method, redirect to substance. “You’re critiquing HOW I argue because you can’t refute WHAT I’m arguing. Engage the substance or we'll both know why you won't.”

Anti-intellectualism isn’t pluralism or authenticity. It's how power imposes stupidity and calls it truth.

#leadership #transformation

For lots of interesting comments: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ottivogt_leadership-transformation-activity-7400096115783593988-CIMh?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAABm1WMBiwxFaUc1X66gje88odJOEyNAskc

Selective Q&A

Q- If you want to be understood - speak in a language that people understand. You can adjust your language and depth based on the audience. It’s unfair (and dare I say elitist!) to argue that your audience is to blame for not understanding your argument. If someone is not a believer, and after hearing your argument they are still not a believer because they don’t understand your message - maybe adjust your message?

A- That’s precisely the anti-intellectual reflex the post is critiquing. Empathy is a virtue, but it’s not a license for ignorance. Expertise isn’t inherently elitist, and comprehension isn’t a matter of “fairness.” The aim is sound judgment, not comforting messaging. People keep missing the core point: I can perhaps explain simply how an Airbus flies, but that doesn’t grant you the competence to pilot it, nor an opinion over its aerodynamic effectiveness. Nor should anyone be “entitled” to the control of the Airbus without having mastered the craft. The post doesn’t reject the demand for maximal clarity; it critiques the anti-intellectual maneuver that seeks to erode the very legitimacy of expertise as such.

Q- Well - let me try this. If you speak to me in French and I am English and do not understand French - who is to blame for my lack of understanding? Of course, my lack of understanding does not mean that your position - delivered in English - is incorrect. It can be 100% true and correct. But at the same time my lack of understanding does not infer ignorance and it is not my responsibility to understand. It is the messengers responsibility to ensure their point is clearly made.

A- Try to tell that your French teacher. ;-) The point I’m making is about the stupidity of insisting that expertise is irrelevant, not that people who aren’t pilots are stupid because they don’t understand the controls in the cockpit. I recently had a long conversation with an expert electrician about a defect in my washing machine. He used lots of technical terms and I asked lots of questions. At no point did it cross my mind that I was stupid for not knowing them, but equally it was very clear that I lacked his competence. And even though he patiently explained the possible causes of the motor imbalance, I can assure you that he was the right authority to handle the repairs, not me. Denying his authority, dismissing the relevance of his expertise, or loudly claiming unfairness wouldn’t have changed the point.

Q- To be fair to the proposition, human intellect does not exist in a vacuum. For a gregarious species, ideas mean nothing if they cannot be conveyed; this requires the cultural ability of reading a room. As such, being forced to use non-technical taxonomy does not need to be conflated into the binaries of intellectualism, or lack thereof. There are many instances, in on-the-ground reality, of professionals needing the skill sets to dumb down their understanding for the benefit of others, from primary education, to higher education, to corporate life. Conversely, one can weaponise higher registers of any language, including terminology. If the intent is to convey to those outside of the field, then one must be prepared to empathise beforehand; those who have better control of the metalanguage but lack the competence to find common ground with the less-endowed should not start pity parties ...

A- Of course, intellect does not exist in a vacuum—communication is a core human task, and translation across registers is a mark of genuine understanding. But it’s crucial to distinguish the pedagogical virtue of accessibility from the political vice of enforced anti-intellectualism.
The point is not that one should refuse to meet others as much as possible; it’s that we must resist a culture that equates clarity with arrogance, depth with exclusion, and complexity with illegitimacy. The real binary is not between jargon and “real people,” but between a public sphere where arguments are weighed on their merits and one where analysis is disqualified as elitism. Technical language can be used to obfuscate or intimidate—but far more insidious is the routine suspicion of all expertise, and the lack of commitment to master a discipline. This is not about intellectuals throwing a “pity party”; it’s about defending minimum conditions for reasoned disagreement in a democratic society. Translational empathy is a virtue, not an excuse for fostering ignorance. What’s at stake is not just style, but substance: if we let the logic of anti-intellectualism win, the only things left standing will be soundbites and slogans, not understanding.

Q- The main conflation is the expectation that the public space is tailored to a specific intellectual level. It is not; it will always depend on on-the-ground reality of the participants of the intellectual discourse. If one wants to pine for a higher-tiered iteration, then one is free to find them at other peer-filled spaces. These spaces would be those not referred to as public, thus negating the whole point of the Post ...

A- No, that sets up a completely false binary: public discourse must always remain at the “lowest common denominator,” while intellectually rigorous conversation is relegated to specialist or closed circles. This is an artificial divide. The post argues not for exclusive spaces, but for raising the standard of public reasoning itself—because democracy requires it. Invoking the “on-the-ground reality” of participants as a yardstick for public debate is epistemologically nonsensical and enshrines mediocrity. It flattens all conversation to whatever level prevails, rather than seeking collective elevation. The suggestion that calling for intellectual rigour is “pining for a higher-tiered iteration” misrepresents the post. The critique is not about elitist exclusion, but about the loss of meaningful standards—where genuine analysis is dismissed, not because it is inaccessible, but because anti-intellectualism makes engagement itself suspect. In fact, the whole point of the post is precisely to defend the necessity of public spaces that do not capitulate to anti-intellectual resentment. If the price of “inclusivity” is the abolition of analysis, then what’s left is not a public sphere, but a talking shop for soundbites.