Minima Moralia Reflections from the damaged life by Theodor Adorno

7
They, the people. [in English in original] – The circumstance that intellectuals mostly
deal with other intellectuals should not mislead them into thinking they are worse than
the rest of humanity. For they encounter one another primarily in the most embarrassing
and degrading situation of all, that of competing supplicants, and are thereby nearly
always compelled to show their worst side to each other. Other people, especially the
simple folk whose virtues intellectuals are wont to praise, usually meet them in the role
of someone trying to sell them something, who doesnʼt have to worry about the
customer horning in on their turf. It is easy for the auto mechanic and the sales-girl at
the liquor store to remain free of impudence: friendliness is in any case mandated from
above. If on the other hand illiterates come to intellectuals in order to have letters
written, these latter may indeed make a reasonably good impression. But the moment
simple folk have to brawl for their share of the social product, they surpass anything in
the canon of envy and hatefulness displayed by literati or musical directors. The
glorification of the splendid underdogs [in English in original] ends up in glorifying the
splendid system which made them so. The justifiable feelings of guilt of those exempted
from physical labor ought not become an excuse for rural idiocy [famous phrase used
by Marx to describe the stagnation of peasant life]. Intellectuals who write solely about
intellectuals and give them their bad name in the name of that which is authentic
[Echtheit] only strengthen the lie. A large part of the prevailing anti-intellectualism and
irrationalism, all the way to Huxley, is set in motion by the fact that writers complain
about the mechanism of competition without themselves being able to see through the
latter, and so fall victim to such. In the field most their own, they have shut out the
consciousness of tat twam asi [“Thou art this”, quote from Upanishads]. That is why they
then rush into Indian temples.

This translation © 2005 Dennis Redmond. The original German text is available from
Suhrkamp Verlag as: Theodor W. Adorno. Collected Works. Suhrkamp Verlag, Volume
4. Part one of the translation begins below