Eric Beck wrote:
> Is there any demonstrable correlation between analytical and critical
> thinking (or educational attainment) on one hand and political
> radicalness and rebellion on the other?
This.
"Analytical and critical thinking" sounds like the virtues advocated by secondary school political science teachers, along with "reading a daily newspaper" and "voting in elections".
I don't understand this elevation of a sort of habitus of intellectual process above concrete substance of positions.
But maybe that's because today I was in the bookstore browsing the memoir of Christopher Hitchens, "Hitch 22", and realized that all the sophistication of his Oxford Trotskyist education is fairly hollow considering what a reactionary shitbag he turns out as, whereas at the same time I am reading John Tilbury's biography of Cornelius Cardew, and realize that while Cardew's (and guitarist Keith Rowe's) Maoist politics were really stupid, the commitment exhibited by spitting in the face of the bourgeois avant-garde music world is worth a thousand "critical thinkers".