"Intellectual comradeship requires that you think your thoughts through to the place where you can make the complex seem simple, the obscure quite clear"
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Real camaraderie, Seabury suggests, isn’t built on shared vibes or mutual flattery; it’s built on intellectual labor. “Intellectual comradeship” is an almost militant phrase, implying discipline, standards, and a bond forged by effort. The demand isn’t merely to have smart thoughts but to finish them-to push an idea past the pleasurable fog of cleverness until it can survive contact with another mind. That’s why the sentence turns on an ethical requirement: you owe your peers clarity.
The subtext is a quiet rebuke to two familiar types: the show-off and the mystifier. If you can’t “make the complex seem simple,” you might be hiding behind jargon, or you might not actually understand the thing you’re selling. Seabury, as a psychologist writing in an era when “scientific” authority was becoming a cultural currency, draws a line between expertise and performance. Clarity becomes both proof and courtesy. It’s not anti-intellectual; it’s anti-fog.
There’s also a democratic edge: translating complexity isn’t dumbing down, it’s making knowledge shareable. “Obscure quite clear” points to communication as the final test of thinking, not a decorative afterthought. The intent is to define a high standard for collaboration: the group advances only when each member does the private work of refining ideas into something another person can use.
In today’s attention economy-where complexity can be monetized as mystique-Seabury’s sentence reads like a character test: do you want to be understood, or merely admired?
The subtext is a quiet rebuke to two familiar types: the show-off and the mystifier. If you can’t “make the complex seem simple,” you might be hiding behind jargon, or you might not actually understand the thing you’re selling. Seabury, as a psychologist writing in an era when “scientific” authority was becoming a cultural currency, draws a line between expertise and performance. Clarity becomes both proof and courtesy. It’s not anti-intellectual; it’s anti-fog.
There’s also a democratic edge: translating complexity isn’t dumbing down, it’s making knowledge shareable. “Obscure quite clear” points to communication as the final test of thinking, not a decorative afterthought. The intent is to define a high standard for collaboration: the group advances only when each member does the private work of refining ideas into something another person can use.
In today’s attention economy-where complexity can be monetized as mystique-Seabury’s sentence reads like a character test: do you want to be understood, or merely admired?
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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