> your two examples are of men whose early adulthoods were shaped by large scale global conflicts, yet you totally dismiss the author's idea that the easy rewards of high status and pay in tech could lure young thinkers into a kind of permanent adolescent 'nerd culture'
Yes - the former are high-risk actions motivated (at least partially) by a collectivist urge to help other people. The latter is significantly lower risk, and generally individualistically motivated, which is what I think you're pointing towards. I used those examples specifically to highlight that people, especially 'intellectuals', can hold intellectual beliefs very strongly, often at significant risk to themselves, and that those beliefs are often partially sparked by geopolitical events.
The author's implied argument is that the soft gaze of the MCU might either avert beliefs of that strength, or render them impotent. Or indeed prevent the geopolitical events which partially formed those beliefs from being of interest, and of cultural importance (or happening at all, I suppose, like when Superman fights Hitler in the WW2-era DC stuff). This attributes a hell of a lot of power to contemporary "nerd culture" which I simply do not think it has. It's a relatively safe argument to dismiss because it is deeply silly.
Not least because if this imagined intellectual's positions were so flimsy that they'd go weak at the knees after a wink from Wonder Woman or Wolverine, I'd be skeptical of the person's intellectual capacity in the first place. To frame it as something akin to a lost generation of intellectual capacity is laughable - it's nothing at all like, for example, the intellectual work we lost to the AIDs epidemic. We're talking about literal baby movies.
Do you mean that you think "studying political economy, becoming a journalist, joining a political organization" was equivalent in that it was also guilt-motivated, at a time when you think these attributes were seen as of higher cultural virtue, and we have since culturally become more individualistic? I'm not sure I fully followed, but that would perhaps be a more tractable idea, I think.