Those that have read my writings may have detected more than a tinge of cynicism directed at the intellectual class and the system that perpetuates it. I have not hidden my disdain for select members and groups within that class. I often proffer the advice that we would be better off as a society if we purged our institutions of such individuals and groups. My running joke, which has worn thin at this point, is to let them find their way elsewhere in socially redemptive roles behind the counter at Starbucks. However, my real wish is to have them picking potatoes in some remote region of China.
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And why would society be better off without them? Primarily, because they are a socially disruptive element. Let me give an example of one group of intellectuals that fit the profile: climate scientists. Firstly, it is galling that this group of charlatans has co-opted the name of science in their title. What they really practice is a form of voodoo, but this is not my point. My point is that they have managed to convince society to allocate massive economic resources toward solving a problem that is not real. They are destroying functioning systems so that they can present themselves as the solution to all the problems they themselves have caused. I am referring to their war on fossil fuel and quixotic quest for the holy grail of net zero.
Society’s overproduction of intellectuals has a subversive effect. The emergence recently of a communist renaissance within our midst with Zohran the Magnificent and Miss Titicaca (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), in the vanguard is a prime example. It is an indictment of our educational system that we have produced a bumper crop of them with downwardly mobile economic trajectories.
I am not the first to make this observation. Political economist Joseph Schumpeter asserted that a liberal capitalist society contains the seeds of its own downfall as it breeds a class of intellectuals hostile to both capitalism and liberalism.
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We see it play out today with legions of radicalized graduates pouring from college campuses with useless degrees, swelling the ranks of Commissar Mamdani’s supporters or those of mousy Wilson in Seattle and Miss Titicaca on the national stage. They are disillusioned members of middle and upper middle classes who were highly educated but underemployed and excluded from positions of power. Under the banner of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), they have found a home.
They share the same profiles as earlier generations of radicals, such as those responsible for the political violence of the 1970s, notably the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Weather Underground, the antecedent to the DSA.
Intellectuals by virtue of being coddled their whole existence by their middle- and upper-middle-class parents, face no consequences for their decisions. If in the process of overhauling the nation’s electricity generation, it starts to mirror a power grid in Africa, no matter. If in the process of taxing the rich, society’s most productive individuals take flight, so be it. Intellectuals will not reflect for one minute on the wreckage that they leave in their wake. Which is the whole point. They destroy functioning systems so that they can present themselves as the solution to all of the problems they themselves have caused.
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