Link to view the slides on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/p/C85kVgRyAwr/

Postscript:

The greatest error of the Abdolkarimis is that they hold a reductionist definition of the intellectual’s task, one moderated by the requirements of politics.

Political and security considerations are not the intellectual’s task. Nor is the intellectual’s task to dilute truth to accommodate the wishes and considerations of politics, whether those considerations have reasons behind them or not. The intellectual’s task is to fall into the trap of truth and to speak forcefully for truth and for what power does not want to hear.

The intellectual demands of politics; they do not petition it. Nor is their task to be the grease that keeps the wheels of society turning. They diagnose pain and cry out, although even treating that pain is not their task. Even if they must stand simultaneously against an angry society and despotic power in order to speak, they stand and say what must be said. Kierkegaard, in his own time, stood simultaneously against the church, Hegelian philosophy, the print media of his era and prevailing public beliefs. He was the loneliest person of his time and was attacked from all four directions. Philosophers, the powerful, the people and the media attacked him simultaneously, but he said and wrote what had to be said. It is precisely for this reason that he earned the right to have written on his gravestone: *The Individual* (one person).

A politics that has reached maturity and self-confidence tolerates intellectuals—these inconsiderate gadflies. A society that has reached cultural maturity likewise does not want the intellectual to be merely a salesperson carrying popular beliefs to power. Both understand that the intellectual is simultaneously the voice of the conscience of society and of politics, even if neither is able, or regards it as expedient, to listen to that voice.

Silencing this voice by politics leads either to blind and deaf despotism and crime, or to the senility and intellectual exhaustion of politics—and often to both. Suppressing this voice by society throws individuation, which is the key to the freedom and growth of every society, into the dark well of mass-oriented thought, from which nothing can be harvested except the reproduction of despotism.