Thinking Out Loud
January 15th, 2008 by Wyatt
I’m a huge fan of blogs and, in particular, I’ve become addicted to political blogs. My favorites include PowerLine, Michelle Malkin, Hugh Hewitt, Instapundit, Polipundit, and the oddly-named Little Green Footballs. Lately, William Katz has been writing for PowerLine and giving opinion based on a varied background that ranges from the CIA to Hollywood. Happily, Mr. Katz has started his own blog called Urgent Agenda.
He has started asking an open question to get responses from his readers. He prints those responses and I was among them here (about a third of the way down). I responded to this question, “Why is it that intellectuals often support the worst causes?”. I responded thusly:
As to your current question, I think the answer lies in something that sounds mundane: human nature. The fact that we call them intellectuals implies that we have singled them out as being better students of whatever they study and generally more intelligent. The fact that they accept the title of intellectual means they believe those implications to be true. So, right out of the box, we have created an aura of I-know-better-than-you and I’m-better-informed-than-you around these folks. This plays into the human ego in a big way. And, I would argue, once someone has inflated your ego, you will do anything to keep it that way.
Now, when you’re riding the ego train, the last thing you want to be seen doing is agreeing with the masses. Too much of that will diminish your standing as an intellectual. After all, if you admitted you agreed with the masses often enough, how are you any different?
Herein lies the trap. The intellectual needs to vocally advocate a minority position in order to stand out from the crowd. His ego will drive him to believe and support sketchy ideas merely because he KNOWS he’s smarter than everyone else. His ego will also drive him to believe that the masses cannot be right, therefore something other than the majority opinion must be the way to go. His job is to simply justify it with his superior intellect, even if that means hurling academic gibberish at the layman in an effort to force agreement via fear of the superior intellect.
So, again, I believe so-called intellectuals support some really awful causes primarily because of a lack of humility. The real intellectuals are those who analyze ideas purely on their merits and back them up by actual facts and not opinions or convenient theories. A real intellectual isn’t afraid to admit that the masses may be right.
It makes me wish I had more time write my thoughts. I love it!