Snobbishness

There are different types of snobs - intellectual snobs and materialists. Both sides like to feel themselves as superior and have some measure of contempt for the other.

There are high-powered CEOs who, due to their lack of knowledge on a topic, are routinely humiliated by intellectuals. There are plain-clothed intellectuals that are ignored, ridiculed or pitied by the wealthy. There are trendy, beautiful people in successful careers who are enraged and humbled by their complete irrelevancy in matters political or scientific. There are trendy intellectuals who are unfairly labelled as materialists, and shallow, materialistic geniuses who are ashamed to be called know-it-alls and who recoil at the possibility of being ostracised due to a perceived intellectual elitism. The intellectual elites are derided as bullshit artists, the materialists as uneducated.

It can be very difficult to reconcile these ways of living. Where one tries merely to gain as many posessions as possible, one must compromise, to some degree, ones love of gaining as much knowledge as possible. Of course, knowledge may sustain wealth, and wealth may help you obtain or transfer knowledge, but ego and identity depend on which category we choose for our own self-evaluation. Too often, people of different tastes judge the other on criteria they did not submit to. Two people with a commitment to knowing all about cosmic rays may compete fairly, as might two people who just want to be billionaires. When the cosmologist judges the aspiring billionaire or vice-versa, is where things get very strange.