WHEN A SOCIETY GOES CRAZY, IT’S IN RESPONSE TO THE INSECURITIES AND PREDILECTIONS OF ITS INTELLIGENTSIA:
During this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abbatoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.
We Americans are the only ones who didn’t get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and values systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals.
Indeed we have. And not by accident. And given that intellectuals demonstrably play a role in spreading totalitarianism — a much bigger one than, say, bars play in spreading Covid-19 — perhaps we need to consider some sort of precautions.