Let’s start where this actually began.

We are now seeing universities pressured to remove or restrict classical philosophical texts in order to secure funding. Institutions that should be defending inquiry are calculating political risk. Some are banning material outright. Others are quietly adjusting syllabi to ensure they remain “compliant.”

That should concern anyone who cares about intellectual integrity.

When foundational texts are treated as liabilities instead of intellectual pillars, that is not curriculum reform. That is fear management.

And this is not just about one philosopher or one ideology. When universities bend under political pressure, the message is clear: inquiry is conditional.

That is how anti-intellectualism moves from social media into institutions.

Now zoom out.

What we are watching online mirrors the same problem.

I am genuinely tired of hearing, “I asked ChatGPT.”

As if that ends the argument.
As if that is now a credential.
As if outsourcing your thinking replaces having a mind.

We are now at a point where people generate a response, post it, and present it as authority. There is no wrestling with the idea. No ownership of the reasoning. No sustained thought process. Just output.

Then outrage.

We are arguing with ourselves, feeding prompts into a machine, reposting the result, and calling it discourse.

This is not intellectual debate.

It is stimulation.

Most of what circulates on social media right now are bad faith arguments designed to trigger emotion. There is no intention to understand. There is no discipline behind it. It is clipped, dramatized, and reduced to ten second bursts so it can travel faster.

Sound bites are not scholarship.

Rage is not reasoning.

This is sophism at its finest.

If you want to understand what that means, go back to the source material.

Read Rhetoric by Aristotle. He outlines persuasion as a discipline. Structure. Logic. Responsibility. Rhetoric, when done properly, requires intellectual integrity.

Then read Gorgias by Plato. Plato dismantles sophism there. He draws a clear line between persuasion in service of truth and persuasion in service of ego.

And if you want the ethical layer, read Phaedrus. Plato explores what responsible rhetoric actually demands. It is not about manipulating audiences. It is about guiding them toward truth.

Sophism is persuasion stripped of integrity.

It sounds intelligent. It feels sharp. It generates applause. It is not anchored in truth. The goal is victory.

That is exactly what the algorithm rewards.

Add AI into that mix and it accelerates.

ChatGPT aims to please. That is its function. It learns your tone. It learns your patterns. It learns your political leanings. It mirrors you back to yourself in increasingly polished ways.

Unless you can catch it.

Unless you already have a thought process to begin with.

AI should enhance your intelligence. It should not create it.

If you cannot evaluate what it gives you, you will mistake fluency for truth. You will mistake articulation for accuracy. You will sound informed without doing the intellectual work.

And now everyone thinks they are pseudo scholars.

Copy. Paste. Post. Confidence.

Intellectual work requires friction. It requires defining terms. It requires reading full arguments. It requires defending your premises without a screen in front of you. It requires tolerating complexity.

Which brings me to something else.

Politics has turned many of us into die-hard sports fans.

It does not matter how reckless the player is.
It does not matter how many contradictions pile up.

You picked your team.

You are backing it.

If you question the team, you must secretly belong to the other side. If you criticize a policy, you must be aligned with an ideology. You can clarify yourself repeatedly. It does not matter. You have been categorized.

Once thinking becomes tribal, complexity disappears.

And when complexity disappears, sophism thrives.

People hijack the comment section of your opinion. They distort your premise. They attach labels you did not claim. They defeat a caricature version of your position. Then they curate contrary posts to reinforce their narrative.

That is not debate.

That is manipulation.

Sophists.

Plato wrote about them thousands of years ago. We just gave them Wi-Fi.

Now return to where we started.

If universities are pressured to remove classical philosophy to secure funding, while public discourse devolves into bad faith argumentation, we are looking at the same pattern at two different levels.

Institutional pressure.

Cultural degradation.

Both reward compliance over rigor.

Let me say something clearly.

A PhD does not make anyone smarter than anyone else.

It does not grant superiority. It does not make you infallible.

What it signals, and this is what my professor told me when he finally called me Doctor, is that you can go the distance.

You can sit with complexity.

You can sustain a question for years.

You can defend your work under scrutiny.

A doctorate is proof of endurance, not genius.

It means you understand what rigor looks like.

So when someone armed with a meme, a clipped video, and an AI paragraph wants to argue in bad faith, it is almost adorable.

Cute.

Because they mistake speed for depth. Volume for rigor. Performance for scholarship.

Intellectual endurance still matters.

Being able to incorporate new information and give credit where credit is due still matters.

Sophists cannot do that.

Their goal is not clarity.

Their goal is to be right.

We are not lacking information.

We are lacking discernment.

Until we stop confusing performance for scholarship, until we stop treating AI output as authority, until we stop treating politics like a team sport, and until institutions stop bending inquiry to secure funding, we will continue to erode the very thing universities were built to protect.

Plato would not be afraid of technology.

He would be afraid of a culture that no longer cares whether what it is saying is true.

That is the crisis.