Following up on the phrase "to talk about but to not speak of" 1 as mentioned in the last piece, the Wikipedia page of the book 'Religion and Nothingness' is a fantastic case of it. There is some context to the subjects of the book, and much, much praise about the book, but there is basically nothing that tells you what it actually says, or any notable passage. We are supposed to believe that it's a "masterful synthesis of the West and the East" but at no point are you actually given any great passage, or interesting concept.
I don't blame the book for that obviously, since the person who wrote it and the people thereafter who comment on it are totally different. But this points to an experience we probably all had once, where a bunch of people in a room agree about how great a movie is, making references and adding much commentary to it, meanwhile they cannot give any specific example of that greatness, any notable passage, any scene or any specific aspect. They talk about the symbolism of the movie but not the movie itself, or the composition of a painting but not the painting itself, or someone's ideas and not their character, or the beliefs of a religion without talking about God.
It is not even a problem about looking at a part instead of the whole, this situation really has to do with opinions versus perception. It's possible to talk about a single scene from a movie in a beautiful way, such that you appreciate both the craftsmanship that went into it, all the little details that were done right by the production crew and the actors, but also the artfulness of it, the rightness of the moment, the significance of it, in other words, how true that scene was, in its reconciliation of fate on one hand, the truth of the characters and how their lives are one and could only be a certain way, and spontaneity on the other, the truth of the moment and its uniqueness.
But what most people do on the other hand is make a bunch of references so that they can get social approval. "Yes I also watched the same movie. Let me spout a hilarious line from it so that people around me can laugh about it" Intellectuals do a more sophisticated version of that same move, where they use complicated words to gatekeep regular people out of the conversation, or they simply use their wealth to create environments that only a select class of people can join in, but it's the same groupthink at the end of the day.
When they say that something is "deep", what they're saying is that it's reassuring to them and their audience (real or imaginary) but in a way that it is not too obvious to most people. So someone who builds their personality out of being "spiritual" sees words related to spirituality, such as 'mindfulness', 'consciousness', 'non-duality', 'unity' or 'truth', and thinks to themselves "yes, this is all very deep, the writer must be intelligent" (because they think like I do), without any care in the world of the actual content of what they are reading.
Have you ever seen old people go listen to classical music? Most of them are not actually listening to it, they are acting out the type of person who listens to classical music, who is more refined than the pleb, and who is oh so intelligent my dear. They are just their personality, with no character behind it, because only character is present, personalities are too obsessed thinking about their appearance to do that.
Intellectuals in particular love to talk about concepts privy to their narrow interests, which makes them essentially live in another world. To speak of obscurantism to describe this tendency is offensive to obscurity and darkness I find, because they are natural experiences and can be very beautiful given the right context. What those people do could instead be described as linguistic encryption, a process of keeping regular people out of the conversation through artificial language, of which you do not have the key to unlock. Or put in another way, it's like finding yourself in a circlejerk, surrounded by people who love to masturbate over how intelligent they are, and who have found a way to do it with others.
The reason why people talk about without speaking of is that fundamentally, meaningful conversations are built on top of character and vivid experiences. Intellectuals are keen on abstractions not because those are inherently better than Reality as it presents to us, because being is more fundamental than knowing, but because all they have are ideas. It's an act of concealment that they engage in, not an act of revelation.
The average person has nothing interesting to say about love, beauty, freedom, courage, death, or any of the big questions in life, which is why they sidestep the entire issue altogether and talk about trivial things ad nauseum, hence teevee, sports and food. Not that every conversation needs to be "deep", there is a kind of beauty that can emerge from small talk, the art of impro in regular life, but without the ground of life, conscious experience filtered through one's character, everything becomes trivial, mundane, and people end up focusing on secondary things instead to distract themselves and others.
Genius then doesn't manifest as someone who talks about eccentric things that we have never heard of, it manifests as someone talking about what everyone considers to be normal and believes they understand, but in a way that is totally fresh, making us see the underbelly of life we haven't attended to, but which deep down we know is right. As a result, the discernment of the genius is often dismissed as trivialty, because people believe they know what is being spoken of when they really don't, whereas they become dazzled by the complicated ideas of the "expert", because as Schopenhauer tells us again and again, it is not virtue which is rewarded in our world, but the display of it.
1 Taken from Darren Allen's quote of "Everyone talks about, no one speaks of", which can be found on this Substack note or more plainly on this one.
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2026-03-12