Douglas Sirk, a German film director, said that "Intellectualism came very late to America. That's why Americans are so proud of it. I found very few real intellectuals in America. But there are so many pseudo-intellectuals." Which can turn out to be very true, though the quote may have its faults and certain personal prejudices. With Generation Z now embarking onto adulthood and having grown up so closely tied to the very real effects of social media, it's very common to find "fakes": People who are pretentious or snobby with everything that they say or do. The very idea of being a pseudo intellectual comes from the fear of being perceived as "less than" or "dumb". Those people will hide underneath the mask of classic books and uncommon hyper fixations on random "intellectual" subjects. It becomes very annoying when suddenly their undeveloped opinion - that they most definitely plagiarized - becomes their entire personality. Suddenly they are off discussing the impact of Anna Karenina on the world today when it is simply just a regurgitated, superficial, condescending chunder they fished out of some random Reddit page or TikTok post. But, as social media takes a stronger grip, it becomes nearly impossible to find a piece of media that is impartial or without opinion. And sometimes, people would forget that they took an opinion they didn't know very much on. It makes sense, it would take too much effort to spend hours researching a topic to be able to even form an opinion, especially if it is a subject that shows a large popularity of an opinion or a side that just seems to be inherently "correct". It just wouldn't be worth it to spend so much effort and time to something that doesn't need to be proven. Which can make us all somewhat pseudo intellectuals. The bottom line then becomes: Don't be a snob.
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