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Obscurantism/obscurationism is the practice of deliberately presenting information in an imprecise, abstruse (i.e. difficult to grasp) manner designed to limit further inquiry and understanding. Obscurantism is fundamentally anti-democratic, anti-intellectualism, and elitist.
An obscurantist is any enemy of intellectual enlightenment and the diffusion of knowledge.
"The essential element in the black art of obscurantism is not that it wants to darken individual understanding, but that it wants to blacken our picture of the world, and darken our idea of existence."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
Obscurantism is common in academia, where the few "learned" folks intentionally or unintentionally exclude those less well-versed in their fields by presenting information in a way that is unintelligible to others not also involved in that field (typically by using complex language and jargon). It is an example of an "enlightened few" wishing to exclude others from joining their ranks without undergoing some indoctrination or trial process. It is also potentially a contributor to the contemporary anti-science movement.
It is also common in governments which seek to be opaque to the citizens which they are supposed to serve. It is a tactic used by rulers to keep the populace subdued and under their control.
In the 20th century, the American conservative political philosopher Leo Strauss, for whom philosophy and politics intertwined, and his neo-conservative adherents adopted the notion of government by the enlightened few as political strategy. He noted that intellectuals, dating from Plato, confronted the dilemma of either an informed populace "interfering" with government, or whether it were possible for good politicians to be truthful and still govern to maintain a stable society—hence the noble lie necessary in securing public acquiescence.
In the essay "Why I Am Not a Conservative" (1960), the economist Friedrich von Hayek said that political conservatism is ideologically unrealistic, because of the conservative person's inability to adapt to changing human realities and refusal to offer a positive political program that benefits everyone in a society. In that context, Hayek used the term obscurantism differently, to denote and describe the denial of the empirical truth of scientific theory, because of the disagreeable moral consequences that might arise from acceptance of fact.