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You may say to yourself: 'How do I work this thing?'
Intellectuals encourage people who contribute nothing to the world to complain and even organize protests, because others are not doing enough for them.
They have rationalized the breaking of laws by those who choose to picture themselves as underdogs fighting an oppressive “system,” even when these are college students from affluent homes.
They have, both in America and in France, verbally turned military heroes who put their lives on the line for their country into victims of war, people whom one might pity but never want to emulate.
In schools and colleges, the intelligentsia have changed the role of education from equipping students with the knowledge and intellectual skills to weigh issues and make up their own minds into a process of indoctrination with the conclusions already reached by the anointed.
They have put the people whose work creates the goods and services that sustain a rising standard of living on the same plane as people who refuse to work, but who are depicted as nevertheless entitled to their “fair share” of what others have created – this entitlement being regardless of whether they observe even common decency on the streets or in the parks.
The intelligentsia have treated the conclusions of their vision as axioms to be followed, rather than hypotheses to be tested.
Some among the intelligentsia have treated reality itself as subjective or illusory, thereby putting current intellectual fashions and fads on the same plane as verified knowledge and the cultural wisdom distilled from generations of experience.
Intellectuals give people who have the handicap of poverty the further handicap of a sense of victimhood.
They have acted as if they are anointed to decide which segments of society to favor, who should be allowed to pick their own associates and who should not, which small risks people should be forbidden to take and which larger risks are all right.
They have romanticized cultures that have left people mired in poverty, violence, disease and chaos, while trashing cultures that have led the world in prosperity, medical advances and law and order. In doing so they have often disregarded, or even filtered out, the fact that masses of people were fleeing the societies intellectuals romanticized, to go to the societies they condemned.
The intelligentsia have been quick to find excuses for crime and equally quick to attribute wrong-doing to police, even when discussing things for which they have neither expertise nor experience, such as shootings.
They have encouraged the poor to believe that their poverty is caused by the rich – a message that may be a passing annoyance to the rich but a lasting handicap to the poor, who may see less need to make fundamental changes in their own lives that could lift themselves up, instead of focusing their efforts on tearing others down.
The intelligentsia have acted as if their ignorance of why some people earn unusually high incomes is a reason why those incomes are either suspect or ought not to be permitted.
The utterly un-self-critical attitude of many intellectuals has survived many demonstrably vast, and even grotesque, contrasts between their notions and the realities of the world. For example, many leading American intellectuals in 1932 were publicly calling for a vote for the Communist Party of the United States, and many other leading intellectuals in the Western democracies in general were throughout the 1930’s holding up the Soviet Union as a favorable contrast to American capitalism, at a time when people were literally starving to death by the millions in the Soviet Union and many others were being shipped off to slave labor camps.
The notion that disarmament and concessions were the way to avoid war has survived the reality that it was precisely these kinds of policies which led to the most catastrophic war of all time. The very same policies were resurrected by the intelligentsia during the first generation born after that war, and proclaimed with at least equal zeal, self-righteousness, and demonization of those who dared to think that a different approach was more likely to preserve peace. Nor was there much reconsideration when opposite policies led to the end of the Cold War.
Intellectuals have – on issues ranging across the spectrum from housing policies to laws governing organ transplants – sought to have decision-making discretion taken from those directly involved, who have personal knowledge and a personal stake, and transferred to third parties who have neither, and who pay no price for being wrong.
They have filtered information in the media, in the schools, and in academia to leave out things that threaten their vision of the world.
Above all, they exalt themselves by denigrating the society in which they live, and turning its members against each other.
Excerpted with permission from Thomas Sowell’s brilliant and scathing book, Intellectuals and Society, available HERE.
Watch Thomas Sowell interviewed on Uncommon Knowledge HERE.
