Being an intellectual

These are funny words actually, I mean being an ‘intellectual’ has almost nothing to do with working with your mind; these are two different things. My suspicion is that plenty of people in the crafts, auto mechanics and so on, probably do as much or more intellectual work as people in the universities. There are plenty of areas in academia where what’s called ‘scholarly’ work is just clerical work, and I don’t think clerical work’s more challenging than fixing an automobile engine—in fact, I think the opposite….

Noam Chomsky, 2002. Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, New York, The New Press