Academics, scholars, and thinkers.

Further thoughts on "Academics" on a beautiful sunlit Friday in late March 2010.

I can't help myself. Thoughts arrive like a cascade over a chasm and I have to let them fall. Disjointed thoughts. This is not an essay. You have to participate and connect the dots.

The term "academic" usually has a negative, pejorative connotation. It is often used to describe a person associated with an undistinguished teaching position at a university. A scholar has a somewhat better reputation than an academic. It means the dude knows in depth a subject in which he specializes. A thinker does not usually carry with him the baggage of a possibility of having an undistinguished teaching career as an academic does. He does not have to be a scholar or university-trained, though that doesn't hurt. All he needs to demonstrate is the ability to think critically and with originality and flair and attracts a following. In other words, he must create a splash, gets noticed, and is taken seriously by other thinkers. If you stay with me thus far, I think you get my drift that none of the so-called Vietnamese "academics" associated with the sideshow of NGS has achieved a status of "thinker". I don't even think they merit the appellation "scholar" since they are not well known or widely respected by their peers. Any Dick, Tom, and Harry with a PH.D., with some due diligence, can obtain a teaching position at a college. But that does not mean he is a Norm Chomsky nor does he attain the stature of the cosmologist whose family name is Trinh and who recently won some prestigious award, if memory serves.

Only thinkers command my respect. Academics get involved in sideshows and crave for recognition through the under-handed efforts of underlings get nothing from me but contempt.

Somebody did make me feel better about myself. Just when I thought I had him figured out, he stumped me and reminded me that I am a green horn in the real world. All my life I have taken refuge in books and fantasies. I don't interact much with humans and I am indeed naive. I am curious about a person's academic training because I believe schooling has some bearing (not much) on one's views of the world.

I have no inferiority complex toward Ivy League academics or any academic since I have travelled in the world of thoughts all my life. A person, academic or not, would have to be original and contributive to the annals of human thought for him to impress me. Academics expect to be respected and admired simply because they are academics even if they possess no real talent or originality of thought. A really
good academic is the one who puts the field in which they specialize on fire, revolutionizes the way it is practiced, and gets widespread respect from their peers. Some are so good they even become known by the public.

France, despite its relatively small population has produced a lot of thinkers whose thoughts have influenced those who really want to know the human reality, and jot just the physical reality. Recently somebody posted a disparaging remark about the paucity of France's contribution to the annals of human thought in the 20th Century. I almost laughed out loud when I read that stupid "opinion". Apparently the person didn't hear about Sartre, Camus, Derrida, Foucault, Ricoeur, Lacan, Lévi-Strauss, and Barthes. And those are the only ones that are on the top of my head. I am sure there are others I can't think off hand and others I have not heard of. Educated people in the hard sciences who don't bother to enrich themselves with knowledge in the humanities tend to become just mere technicians and robots and are easily duped and misled by those whose passions are into understanding what drive men to act the way they do.

I like thinkers because I fancy I am a thinker myself. I know I am not a deep one or anything like that. But I enjoy thinking, especially after I came across a saying from Buddha who uttered these immortal words: " All of what we are is the result of what we think". I only have one original thought and it is so banal that almost everybody else can think of it. Thus, it is not really original at all, but it helps me to navigate through the maze of human diversity.

I want to know what I live for, who I am, if I am smart, if there is a God and life after death (reincarnation) and what love really is. I also think of the nature of human relationships. Is it based on power or on love or the combination of the two or just a naked competition for food, sex, and power and status (maybe the efforts of Ho Tue Linh to undermine me and others in a public way had something to do with a drive for power and status)? I want to know if all of us carry a tension between a public persona and a private self or if there are some individuals who are so comfortable with themselves that what we see is what they are.

People with clichés and platitudes bore me. Those who are into poses and posturings make me laugh. I like real, authentic people and especially those with a heart.