The thinking man is the man who engages with the world around him and prides himself on being well-read, present in various movements and capable of making independently formed opinions. The establishment of that character as the outlier, the lone champion of true critical thought, in a world of faceless followers is something we might need to believe in. Most likely, the case will be that we want to believe it about ourselves, that we are the man in the mirror. That we are capable of looking introspectively at our values and projecting those values competently onto the world around us in an attempt to map our truest beliefs about the world onto our varying realities. However, simply wanting to believe that that person in the mirror, that person who reads all the thought pieces on the Atlantic, the person who ruthlessly rips apart other people’s arguments, opinions, and characterizations, the person who reads Kant and Marx because they’ve heard that’s what other smart people do, has some significance does not necessarily make it so.

It’s almost too easy to get caught up in ideas of one’s own intellect, honing it, building it up, and jealously guarding it against criticism which might show us the fragility of our intellect. Intellect has become more ornamental than it’s ever been. The thinking man has the right credentials to discuss anything you would like to discuss, but to what extent does he--do you--internalize that information? To what extent is it yours? In this day and age, with access to unprecedented levels of information and where others have unprecedented access to our own intellect, intelligence is simply decorative. Likes, statuses, and following give us new tools through which to monitor our fellow humans and new tools through which we are also monitored. Everyone is now the thinking man like they have always been, but now there’s an audience. Before, where the thinking man may have been somewhat predicable, he is now completely scripted. If you “like” something, you know others will see it, and so you must “like” the right things. If you read something, how will others know you have read it unless you share? And then of course, again, you must read the right things.

The thinking man, once a myth of a man, one so rarely seen, is now “seen” everywhere. And the irony is that we are faster about calling them out. Pseudo intellectuals are called out by pseudo intellectuals and each thinks that the other is the liar. We select our authorities based on whose truth most closely aligns with our ideas of the world and consider ourselves thinking men. We consider ourselves more educated than our counterparts because we have aligned ourselves with someone whose philosophy is our own and we consider others unintelligent when their critical thought doesn’t lead them to our conclusions. We run ourselves ragged trying to pull people to our side, convinced that, being the thinking men that we are, salvation lies with us, with our way of living and thinking which is crucial to something larger than us and something that is crucial to society as whole, little realizing that we are holding things that have been handed to us. The ideas that we think will redeem society has been handcrafted and specially packaged for us by products of that same society, and thus—while we congratulate ourselves for being outside the system—the system uses us to sustain itself.

-- JinduObiofuma - 19 Feb 2016

We need to start over here.

First, what is the idea of the essay? It isn't about Arnold's thinking man, because it has no relation to the idea he expresses, so that's just a borrowed phrase. The three paragraphs you seem to have meant (I inserted the blank lines between paragraphs for you) don't develop an idea: they ramble. One can tell that you have some strong feelings, but not what they are about, or how they are related to some idea we can get from you. Apparently you don't think much of the Atlantic, which doesn't mean much to me, or to any reader who doesn't think of magazines as a unit, but rather as containers of ideas that may or may not be productive for them. A distaste for Kant and Marx is communicated, but neither a reason for the distaste nor a basis for confidence that you've read them. In the conclusion, we are told there is a "system" handcrafting and packaging ideas "for us," (I'm not sure how it is packaging Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Plato for me, let alone Newton, Maxwell and Einstein or Marshall, Taney and Holmes), which is either a big idea needing explanation or no idea at all.

Let's start by putting in one sentence, as the theme of the essay, the idea you want the reader to take from you. The first paragraph in addition to expressing the short, lucid expression of your idea, should give the reader some attractive reasons to keep reading. Subsequent paragraphs should develop the idea, showing where you got its components from, how you put them together, what the likeliest objections or questions are, and how you answer them. A conclusion can then sum up what you have taught, and provide the reader with one or two consequent ideas she could explore on her own using the idea you've provided as a starting point.

I won't say this can't be done in 575 words, if you take great care to formulate everything as clearly and succinctly as possible. But in general it will be difficult to do in fewer than 600 words what is assigned to do in 1,000. Brevity is easier to achieve by editing what is good but too long than by starting with a slipshod draft that doesn't capture your meaning clearly at whatever length.