In “Coalition in the mind”, Intellectuals are described as people who decontextualize ideas that are meant to be true or significant apart from any locality, and apart from anyone concretely putting them into practice. I am curious to learn more about what type of ideas they target and how the ideas they have targeted have changed over time. How they decontextualize these ideas was also brought up as they tend to get together with other intellectuals and break down the ideas in a conference like setting. This is something that I really thought was interesting because the easiest way to come up with ideas, theories and opinions is to surround yourself with people who are like-minded and intelligent. People do not just become intelligent. They become it by who and what they are surrounded by so the idea of intellectuals working together to come up with their ideas is something I really enjoyed reading about and hope to learn even more about. Another thing that I found interesting was the idea of intellectual products having sacred status in comparison to other sacred objects. I want to learn more about why that is as it did not go in depth about that. I would like to learn more about microsociology as this is a term that I just got introduced to for the first time while reading this. It says that it analyzes the structures and dynamics of situations however, I would like to know what type of situations it analyzes. I assume that it analyzes similar situations that intellectuals would since it was brought up in a reading talking about intellectuals but, this is definitely something I would like to learn more about. It was also stated that the micro situation is not the individual, but it penetrates the individual, and its consequences extend outward through social networks to as macro a scale as one might wish. Is that related to microsociology? Does it mean that intellectuals try and analyze the minds of certain individuals to gather intel on what goes through the minds of certain people to help them understand certain things about societies. In “Coalition in the mind” it was also stated that all of human history is made up of situations and that no one has ever been outside of a local situation. I wonder what they are trying to get at as it is pretty obvious that history is made of situations. To me it seems like intellectuals do not get the credit they deserve as they are responsible for many things that have helped societies all over the world evolve for the better. Maybe a reason why they do not get the credit they deserve is because of how they are perceived by others. It is common that the perception of intellectuals is that they think too much of themselves and have a hard time interacting with “regular people” because they don’t think on the same levels which makes it hard to carry conversations. This could be perceived as cockyness when in reality, it could just be a case of two types of people with two different perceptions/interests.
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